One indie developer has argued that selling games on Steam is worth the 30% revenue split because games can find bigger audiences on the platform "in the long run."
To recap, when you buy a game on platforms like Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo's eShop, those companies take a portion of the revenue - usually 30% - and leave the remainder for the publishers and/or developers. Walternate Realities, the indie developer behind acclaimed shipbuilder Cosmoteer, was recently asked about the split in a Steam forum post.
"Selling Steam keys is certainly much easier than making a whole non-Steam build of the game," Walternate Realties responds. "We may do that in the future, but there are a couple reasons I'm not currently doing that."
One reason is that maintaining additional store pages is too much of a time sink. "After doing all that, Steam will probably still outsell everything else combined by 100x, so honestly, it's just not worth the effort except for really huge games."
"Yes, Steam takes 30% of revenue," the developer continues, before pointing out that if someone buys a game on the platform, "Steam will generally reward that game with free advertising" on the platform that "makes up for the 30% cut." The bigger player base and higher visibility mean Walternate Realities would "prefer you buy [Cosmoteer] on Steam," even if you could find keys elsewhere, "because in the long run, I think I'll make more money that way."
