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I've already said it before and I'll say it again to anyone who thinks or says otherwise. Valve absolutely deserves the 20 to 30 percent cut.

About Steam's cut, here's a few articles and videos that explains it

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/why-valve-actually-gets-less-than-30-percent-of-steam-game-sales/

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/v2/2019/05/07/why-steam-cant-meet-epics-price-challenge/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rWBM0y2DY0

Here's some developers take on it

https://twitter.com/RobotBrush/status/1112204567394086913

https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/c04zpc/im_an_indie_game_dev_and_steam_blew_my_mind_and/

Here's consumer's take on it

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/b9i4yd/to_everyone_complaining_about_steams_cut_please/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HVkRH6eEJQ

And here's my take on it. In short, Valve's 20 to 30 percent take is justified for the amount of features and services they provide. The whole debate about 20 to 30 percent cut from Steam vs 12 percent cut from Epic is a farce. Its a stunt pulled by Epic. Its not about the percentage cut. Its about Epic giving these greedy publishers a bag of cash to sign exclusivity deals on their platform and Epic lining their own pockets in the process. All the while trying to strong-arm customers to submit to this forced exclusivity and other anti-consumer practices while providing virtually nothing

If it was only about the cut then, these publishers would've moved to other platforms that has lower cut than Epic, who've been into digital distribution platform a lot longer than Epic. Platforms like Discord, which reduced their cut down to 10 percent after Epic store's announcement. Humble Widget through Humble Bundle, which asks for 5 percent of the cut. Itch.io, which asks for basically whatever percent of the cut you want to give them, which is lower than all the others combined. And yet a lot of developers and publishers choose Steam over any of them Why ? Because none of the other platform provides the massive visibility / discoverability of games that Steam provides and the subsequent big sales potential. Not to mentions Steam is the only platform that provides THE most features and services towards both developers and customers compared to any other storefronts in the world, PC or console.

https://blog.discordapp.com/why-not-90-10-3761ebef4eab

https://www.humblebundle.com/developer/widget

For the record, other major platforms like GOG, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Amazon, Google, Apple and a lot of others also take the industry standard 30 percent of the cut while providing significantly less features and services to both customers and developers in return. I wanna emphasize on Sony and Microsoft (Playstation and Xbox) who are the biggest gaming platforms next to PC, Who've been taking that 30 percent cut from developers and publishers for decades now while doing business with them. They don't provide nowhere as near as many features and services as Steam does. Who takes hefty licensing fee from developers / publishers spanning in millions of dollars to sell their games on Playstation and Xbox. Who used to charge devs / pubs money everything they wanted to patch / update their games on those consoles. Who locks certain essential features and services behind monthly subsciption fee against customers. And yet, developers / publishers happily put all their games on those consoles and make huge profits. Now with Epic, while they do take 12 percent cut, they also provide virtually nothing in terms of features and services for customers. Steam on the other hand provides numerous features and services for customers for their 20 to 30 percent cut.

To give you a rough idea of the amount of features and services Steam provides, take a look at the following chart. It lists all the major features of Steam compared to other platforms on PC. These are just some of the features and services that are public knowledge and / or have been revealed by Valve themselves. There's a whole host of other infrastructures that Valve operates and maintains on a daily basis. All of these combined costs a lot of upkeep on a day-to-day basis. At the same time, Valve regularly innovates, improves and expands on all of these features, services and infrastructures to give customers and developers a better gaming and business experience.

https://imgur.com/P6cIq1u

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks#announcements/detail/1697194621363928453

Valve lets all developers / publishers to generate free Steam keys on their platform and sell them anywhere else where the devs / pubs keep all the profit. What's interesting about that third party Steam key, is that on average more than 30 percent of any games purchased on Steam are bought from third party key sites. The rest 70 percent of purchases are straight from Steam itself. Meaning Valve doesn't get any revenue from the 30 percent of a games purchased from Steam. And yet, Valve itself enables and supports the free generation of third party keys for developers / publishers to sell them elsewhere, keep all the profit AND Valve themselves will bear the cost of those games being operated and maintained on Steam. The result is that developers / publishers gain more revenue and we customers get to buy games cheaper from third party sites selling Steam keys.

When you look at all these features and services that Valve / Steam provides and are continuing to provide at an even greater capacity every single year, it is clear that out of all the other platforms, only Steam gives back the most to both consumers and developers. Unlike other platforms, Steam earns their cut AND they're adding and improving new features and services every single year for no extra charge. Not only that. Valve has also reduced their 30 percent cut to 20 percent for those who meets certain sales milestone.

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks#announcements/detail/1697191267930157838

In conclusion, what Epic is doing is using the 12 percent to undercut others using money generated from Fortnite, then trying to get developers / publishers on board with cash incentive and subsequent forced third party exclusives, and then trying to strong-arm customers with said forced exclusive deals and other anti-consumer practices while providing us virtually nothing since they cannot compete with Steam on fair grounds or match Steam's level of features and services with that 12 percent cut. Its all about greedy developers / publishers getting paid by Epic for exclusive deals while shoving down all sorts of anti-consumer / anti-competitive policies on us customers. Epic does not care about customers as they've openly proved and stated it time and again. They only care about lining their own pockets.

Valve / Steam always has customers interest at heart followed by developers / publishers. Epic on the other hand, has only their own interests at heart, following by developers / publishers. We, the customers, will choose the platform to do business with that has our interests in mind. Because at the end of the day, we customers don't need their games to survive, its the developers / publishers who needs us, our business, to make their day-to-day living.

You really haven't grasped this. They already are offering a better deal. They are offering FAR more to developers than Epic.

What is Epic offering developers other than money? NOTHING. Maybe read this too while you're at it..

Also, I'd point out that Apple, Google, Amazon, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, GOG, GMG and so many more take a 30% cut. So Steam isn't this big bad evil company taking loads of money from developers. It's literally a fucking standard.

All Epic is trying to do is undercut the economy which will unbalance it and result in them eventually collapsing. Anytime you undercut the market, you're working on borrowed time.

The developers taking the money don't care about you. They aren't offering any to you and have no incentive to improve. Just because it looks like a better deal on paper, doesn't mean it isn't. They are fucking you in the ass as a consumer. And for the record, the staff get paid regardless of sales. So it's not like we need to be sympathetic here.