It's not insinuating anything like that. It's stating a simple fact that they got 6 Billion dollars for basically zero effort and resources. All of the things you've described are to allow people to buy more games. They cement valve simply as a store front and platform but not a game developer.

This is the point as to why Half life and most other games were basically dropped. Valve made 6 billion in passive income while trying to build a game selling and delivery platform. Even the best game in the world isn't going to make that kind of income and it's likely to take more effort than what they've done already.

Because until we see it, unedited, we don't really know the truth of what occurred.

Good to see people would rather be ignorant and make assumptions than understand what actually happened in an incident.

and valve got 30% of that.. for basically doing nothing more than hosting a store page. If you're wondering why we don't have Half-life 10 by now.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2830720/FreeInfantry/

Free Infantry. I wouldn't say I'm hooked, but it would be great if this really took off again. Was a great game back in the day. I've completely forgotten how to play it or do anything and mostly fumble around.

For the base game, which I think 30% is still more, I think it certainly makes sense. Because they're providing a complete solution.

For in-app purchases or unlock purchases, whether or not the purchase is in-app, the solution isn't complete, and not worth the 30% they charge on those transactions. It would be trivial for every transaction to have a custom field where you could store an array of what was purchased in in that purchase and have it returned when the transaction was checked. Boom, complete solution. Specifically for in-app purchases if they wanted to take 5% since all they're doing is the job of Stripe and nothing more, then I'd consider that fair.

They lowered the cut for people who didn't need it. Massive publishers selling tons of games. Arguably indie games that only sell a few copies need a larger cut than EA on their latest blockbuster.

There isn't much in the way of scale here. Their bandwidth isn't monitored on a per game basis, and if that was a factor in the cost they'd be basing the cut on the size of your game. Some 1 gb indie game pays the same cut or larger than a 100gb mammoth from EA. Valve is also way more strict with that indie game in getting itself published than they are with the EA game as well.

They do prevent you from linking to your own store within your Steam game though. Even though they don't provide a complete solution for things like microtransactions and DLC.

How it works on Steam:

1. User makes an in-app purchase using the steam wallet integration
2. Steam processes the payment taking 30% and gives you a reference number for that transaction
3. You query that transaction every time the player logs in to see if they've refunded it or not. That transaction doesn't actually contain any information about what they bought though.
4. You then maintain a separate purchasing server whose whole job it is is to keep a record of what the player purchased in reference to that transaction number.

For that Valve wants 30% of in-app/DLC purchases. At that point it's stripe and nothing more. Unlike standalone DLC Or expansions, these unlock purchases don't come with serving any additional content in the form of downloads.

If you make your own service to handle these transactions (with only a 3-4% transaction rate) Valve will prevent you from linking to it, or mentioning it anywhere on your page, forums or within the game itself. You need to direct players elsewhere and then mention it. Even for cross-platform games where having Steam maintain a transaction list for a portion of the users is just a needless additional layer.