Steam is anti consumer and only wishs to kill their competition by locking you in.
There is a 30% tax being exerted on all games by like three companies.
First of all, your two sentences in two comments conflict. If there are already other companies practicing the same prices as with Steam, Steam can’t be killing competition by pricing, but with other things like superior service, which is the only benefit sought from competition.
Second, although I agree in general that no private person or company should hoard massive wealth, in a lot of situations owning capital is the only way in current economic workings of the world to develop new things and not stagnate with the same old, years later outdated service. I mentioned very low profit Steam Deck, a push for VR with both hardware and an actual game rather than a tech demo, very low profit Linux gaming, completely unnecessary (profit-wise) indie game fests, that mean out-of-pocket expenses or development time that is not with utmost shareholder profit in mind. For defense of this point’s main premise of accumulating wealth beyond meeting regular interval maintenance work, I would ask that do you deride any taxes or extra price on products that go to government for funding undeveloped or harsh sectors like agriculture, medicine, better transportation ways, etc. that none of which you may utilize but pay a cut for? I’m not staying Valve is a public institute, but it also does research and development with consumers as main beneficiaries on its own scale.
Third, Valve making 10B through 30% cut means Valve held their responsibility and successfully finalized the sales of the games before they cut their share, not in advance of games being sold. This means that developers already got their 70% in their accounts. I’m not saying it is still a just amount of cut when the effort between developing a game and distributing it is compared, but Valve isn’t obligated to just take maintenance fees. They are a private company, like their competitors, and they also have a right to make profit, as their competitors do. Unlike most of their competitors, they actually provide wide variety of quality services and consumer-focused R&D. Sure I’d like to buy games for 10-20% cheaper with Valve going down on its cut, but it is for my best interest that I’m not limited to Windows, most-advertised games only are shoved down my brain but actually good but less advertised games are shown to me, I have very easy access to multiplayer and game related content easily through integrated utilities, etc., none of which their same-percentage-cut having competitors nor their lower-percentage-competitors do and seem to intend to do.
Fourth, Gaben is a weird choice of target for attacking personally for earning huge money through their company and service. I don’t know how many rich CEOs or shareholders you can count that have as little ego Gaben shown to have through his personal deliveries of Steam Deck packages, his constant highlight and emphasis on the team members who he worked with and reached success on many project by name basis and not as a general “as a last thought, I’d like to make random comment to thank my team” in all of his interviews, personally taking time to answer a huge amount of direct consumer emails.
If Valve took a lesser cut, could they achieve all these? Maybe. Would I, the customer, buy games for cheaper? Yes. Would I be deprived of the services that are better for my best interest? Maybe. Do their competitors with same cuts or lower cuts achieve or strive to achieve at least a closer level of what Valve provided to its customers and open internet? No indication of that at all for years now.