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Comment on Valve runs its massive PC gaming ecosystem with only about 350 employees

HauntedCupcake@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

No harm meant. I do think Steam is the golden example of a big business done right. All I’m saying is that there’s room for improvement.

However do we know their full PNL/balance sheet?

We can make an educated guess. Amazon’s S3 charges roughly $0.025 per GB, so an 100GB game would cost $2.50 for Steam to upload to a user. For a $30 game, that’s around ~8.5% or just over 3 downloads before it’s unprofitable.

Obviously Valve isn’t paying consumer level S3 prices, and obviously users can download multiple times. But I would be extremely surprised if they didn’t make a rather large margin on each sale

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Corigan@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Total fair always room for improvement, no ones perfect.

Appreciate the good discussion!

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uis@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Assuming there will never be any updates, 3 downloads is what regular gamer can do. First computer, second(friend’s) computer and reinstallation on first computer.

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- HauntedCupcake@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  $0.025 per GB is the most expensive option on S3 I could find rounded up. It would be absolutely insane if Steam were paying those prices when they have their own servers. I also used 100GB game size as a large number, and $30 as a small price tag (for an 100GB game).
  
  I was trying to be charitable with the numbers and it still came out pretty positive
  
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  - uis@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    $0.025 per GB is the most expensive option on S3 I could find rounded up.
    
    What is cheapest and at what speed?
    
    I also used 100GB game size as a large number, and $30 as a small price tag (for an 100GB game).
    
    I get it, but then there are all those heavy f2p games like War Thunder, from which Steam doesn’t get anything.
    
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    HauntedCupcake@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You can look it up yourself, I was just giving a worst case scenario
    
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uis@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Amazon’s S3 charges roughly $0.025 per GB

For storage or for download?

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- HauntedCupcake@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Download. It’s also rounded up
  
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  - Kecessa@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    And their cost is going down over time while their revenues are increasing since they take a % off every sales and sales are increasing and so is the average price of games.
    
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