memes

This take always ignores the immense value of the Steamworks SDK.

Valve’s cut enables free: multiplayer, voice, chat, game notifications, in-game purchases, stats and achievements, rich presence, cloud saves, Steam Input to support any input device you could imagine including for accessibility, error reporting, persistent inventories and tradable items, game keys, leaderboards, matchmaking and lobbies, remote play, remote play together with a remote friend, screenshots, modding / workshop, authentication and ownership validation, anti-cheat and game bans, virtual/augmented reality, special/positional audio, multiple game builds and beta channels, global CDN, community discussion / forums / game guides, sales stats, playtesting, automated builds, developer streams direct to the store page, demos, DRM, automated compatibility tests, Linux support for Windows binaries via Proton, GoldSrc, Source, and Source 2 game engines, game cafe / licensing support, marketing and promotion tools, common runtime environments to target for Linux (and alleviate external dependencies), glmgr to translate DirectX to OpenGL for macOS, and much much much more.

That’s what the Valve cut covers. It’s an insane amount of functionality to put into your game and take a huge weight off your shoulders. It’s what enables one-man indie studios to be able to make a hugely popular multiplayer game that blows up overnight without needing to bare the burden of building all the required services yourself nor the cost of running them.

Epic etc take a smaller cut, but can’t offer anywhere near the amount support in return requiring end-users to have a subscription to cover the cost of the services.