alt Hacker News1) This is a legit point although i don't see Valve as a big problem in that area. They invented lootboxes but refused to be as bad as others who followed them. Today with valve these things are restricted purely to cosmetics.
2) is weak. The 30% rate was set in 2003 when Steam had zero market power and was identical to the rate used by Apple, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo. Valve later added tiered reductions (25% above $10M, 20% above $50M), bringing the effective average to ~24%. The rate moved downward while the platform added massive infrastructure: free multiplayer matchmaking, cloud saves, Workshop, Proton, anti-cheat, global CDN, refunds, and community tools. The 30% buys far more today than it did two decades ago.
Developers can also generate unlimited(or i think now limited to some ratio of steam sales) Steam keys and sell them anywhere else with Valve taking 0% commission. If valve were extracting monopoly rents, this escape route would not exist.
The actual lawsuit targets the PMFN price parity clause not the commission itself. And on PC, which is an open platform where Epic's 12% store gained roughly 3% share in seven years despite hundreds of millions in investment, the monopoly framing falls apart. That 12% is also based on EPIC using lots of anti-competitor and anti-consumers tactics and using Fortnite money to prop up the store.
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30% was set when they were handpicking every title, a home internet line today was a $10,000+ a month DC connection, and they could legitimately replace a publisher taking 60%.
The fact they whittled away the value they provided time and time again until they became a market of slop and had the audacity to keep a 30% cut is insane.
It's funny that gamers villainize Sweeny for being the person that they think Newell is. It turns out trying to deliver value in a market has tough as gaming is not easy, and you will make tons of mistakes... at least compared to extracting nearly every dollar you can and leaving a skeleton crew to run the ship.
And I guess make $1,100 PS4s as a side hustle.
The reason the 30% rate is sustained though IS the abuse of market power with the PMFN clause, which ensures that competitors cannot price lower.
Everything else is an attempt to stay the primary shopfront. Sure you can sell your game and give away steam keys - but you can't sell it for a lower price than on Steam, and we still want you to encourage your users to come to steam and buy things. We will give you free matchmaking - just not for players who have bought on another platform, so if players buy on another platform they can't play with their friends. This is just a way to stay default, not some sort of charity.
Yet somehow they have convinced lots of gamers that they should get c25% of all transactions for offering very little value and that that's a good deal (taking payments, serving games, having refunds(!) and adding a chat panel isn't big and complicated in 2026).
They are like everyone else, abusing network effects to achieve excess profits, unnecessarily taking £12 from a £40 game sale just so that Gabe can get another yacht (despite already having 4). I don't see why this is needed? If the market was efficient and this wasn't down to monopoly power and network effects, the fees would equalise, the £40 game can drop to £35 so people get cash back in their pockets, while the developers still get more money, and epic's store and steam would STILL be a gravy train. But they aren't the good guys - if they have a chance to cement their power or get an extra few bucks by being anti-consumer they will.