Comment on I make games and this literally happened to me this morning
Death@lemmy.world 1 month agoshouldn’t those service providers wait until the total is $100 before they started to receive my money due to cost associated to sending and receiving money then?
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The service providers are the ones who dictate the costs. They provide the infrastructure. The costs for these kind of transactions are much much lower because of economy of scale they handle millions of transactions per day across all their clients. Because they handle so many transactions they can charge a small percentage fee. The loss they make on small transactions, like in the cents, they will make up with bigger transactions.
While Steam uses a normal bank transactions to pay developers since they are business to business transactions. Some of them are in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars so you don’t want to have a third party handling those that asks a percentage fee. You’d rather just pay the fixed fee the bank charges per transaction. But that fee can be $10-$20 especially an international transactions. That’s why Steam waits till that money is above a $100. Otherwise Steam would lose money if they pay every developer who doesn’t clear that threshold, since Steam eats the costs.