this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2024
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Because they don't pay any of their actual workforce: the game devs they steal 30% from for every game sold.
You mean the game devs they provide CDN at no additional costs, networking features a dev environment that is far more comfortable than any competitor and various additional revenue streams (such as trading cards and items)?
It's still stealing if the profit is this extremely high. Of course a successful business includes providing a useful product. But if you make so much more money per employee than any other company, that means the amount you're charging is disproportional. They could change Steam fees to 5% and still be extremely profitable. They choose not to because of greed.
This is not me condemning them by the way, I think their greed and what they do with the money available to them is still mostly better than what other people do, but it's still greed.
I define all excessive profit as stealing. In an ideal world everyone would be earning roughly the same. (Or no earning being necessary at all, but I don't want to go into every detail)
How much is the profit? 30% is revenue not profit.
Why is money per employee a useful metric? One would expect most costs of a store like steam to be in hardware and network not in labor.
Exactly. The question is how much is really necessary to operate that service. We as a species really need to stop thinking about constant growth and more and more wealth, and that includes growth and wealth that is "reasonable" compared to other extremely greedy people. Right now it looks like Steam is growing to infinity and making more and more money. They're the same like everyone else trying to make more and more money. Of course they're more ethical and they return value for that money, but they're still part of the same system of infinite growth that is not sustainable.
This infinite growth is happening because they extract more value than they require. If they extracted as much value as they require to sustain their business, they wouldn't grow. But of course constant growth is what everyone expects and thus no one sees a problem with it.
I see it as stealing.