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Just as a bit of a more in depth explanation to completely dispel @TimSweeneyEpic's allegation that developer's make less profit than Valve on a game sold on @steam_games. Bottom line: My educated guess is that Valve makes 8% profit on a game sold on Steam. Let's break this down
@TimSweeneyEpic @steam_games Valve charges 30% off the top of a game purchased directly through the Steam Store, which accounts to about 66% of all activations on Steam. Remove the 33% of Steam Key activations and you end up with 19.8% made off a game available on Steam. Moving on...
After that, you have Sweeney's own alleged 7% transaction cost per sale added to an estimated 30% OpEx cost off the top for personnel plus an additional 23% CapEx invested into R&D costs for the software itself. These are average annualized budget costs for any major company.
If you do the math, that's a 60% overhead on making an average 19.8% per available game on Steam. That's not counting infrastructure costs, which tend to be based on volume (Google CDN charges $0.0075 per 10K requests, for example). I can't estimate Steam's throughput for that.
That's also not accounting for bigger titles, which may have as low as a 80/20 revenue split per sale, something Sweeney always neglects to mention. Sweeney is a successful CEO, he knows these figures better than I, making his claims nothing more than deceptive propaganda.
In fact, based on the 8% figure I quoted on a 19.8% per-game revenue, it seems like Sweeney knew this very well when choosing 12% as the revenue cut for Epic. That's the highest percentage Epic can charge that Valve could not match without going into the red.
Then, claiming Steam's cut is excessive and based on a monopoly, Sweeney can justify bribing game publishers to exclusivity deals in order to hit Valve's bottom line. The vast majority of sales happen in the first six months, making these timed exclusives a coffin nail for Valve.
