Valve, which used to take a 30% cut of all revenue on Steam, says it will now take a 25% cut for games with $10M-$50M in sales and just 20% for games with $50M+
Thomas Wilde / GeekWire :
Context & Ripple Effects
Valve ran Steam on a flat 30% revenue share for years, and its only structural change to developer economics before this was the $100 recoupable Steam Direct publishing fee in 2017, which lowered the barrier to listing but left the split untouched. This announcement is the first time Valve has broken that flat rate, and it does so selectively: only games clearing $10M in sales see any relief.
That targeting matters because the beneficiaries are exactly the publishers big enough to shop their catalogs elsewhere — the same pressure that later pushed Microsoft to cut its PC store fee to 12% explicitly to compete with Steam, and led Google to offer new Stadia signees a 15% rate on early sales.
First-order effects
- Publishers with games past $10M in sales get an immediate margin lift — 25% instead of 30% in the $10M–$50M band, 20% above $50M — while the long tail of smaller Steam titles stays on the full 30%.
Second-order effects
- Rival storefronts are forced to compete on take rate rather than library size: Microsoft answers with a 12% PC games cut, and Google prices Stadia's 15% introductory rate to court newly signed titles.
Third-order effects
- If tiered rates become the norm, the flat 30% platform fee stops being an industry default and turns into a negotiating floor, with the largest publishers able to extract custom splits everywhere they ship.
The trend: Game distribution is moving from uniform 30% platform fees toward tiered and discounted take rates as storefronts bid for high-revenue publishers.