I agree with the fact that 30% is a lot, but the way you’ve written it suggests no one but Valve takes a 30% cut. 30% is pretty standard for game platforms. Steam, GOG, Apple’s App Store, Google’s Play Store, PlayStation’s PSN, Microsoft’s Xbox Store, and Nintendo’s eShop all take 30%. The only reason why Epic Games takes less of a cut is because it’s the only way they might entice games to get published on their platform.

Steam is super problematic in so many ways, I just don’t think their 30% cut is as big a deal as everyone thinks it is.

I’m an adamant AI hater, but I think this is fine. If the game runs smoothly and without bugs, I don’t care if the game was programmed with AI. If it’s a buggy mess, it gets filtered out with all the other asset flip garbage. Steam supports returns and you can pretty quickly determine if a game is garbage within that return window, and leave a review saying it’s a buggy mess. Sure, it’s an extra step but almost all of the buggy garbage on Steam is immediately apparent from the Steam page or a AAA game, both of which would never get my purchase to begin with.

It has to do with how LLMs work. Put much, much too simply, to arrive at a response, they use weighted vectors (a line that conveys magnitude and direction) to find the next token that best follows the one before it.