Valve was founded on 24 August 1996, by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, two Microsoft engineers who left to make games. That’s the anniversary being marked today, and most of the coverage is doing what anniversary coverage does: Half-Life in 1998, Steam in 2003, Counter-Strike, Portal, thirty years of “changed PC gaming forever.” All true, and I’m not going to relitigate it.
What I want to look at instead is the one number in that history that actually determines whether a small studio can afford to exist, and how little it’s actually changed in three decades.
The number everyone remembers is the wrong one
When Valve announced changes to Steam’s revenue split in 2018, it made headlines as “Valve cuts its take.” That’s technically correct and mostly irrelevant to anyone reading this. The actual structure is tiered per title, not per studio: Valve keeps 30% on a game’s first $10 million in lifetime gross, 25% between $10 million and $50 million, and 20% above that.
Read that again as a small studio or a solo dev, and the reform disappears. The tiers only start moving once a single game has grossed ten million dollars — not revenue, not budget, gross sales, on Steam specifically, before refunds and regional pricing eat into it. The overwhelming majority of games on Steam, including almost everything an environment or technical artist working solo or in a two-to-five-person team is likely to ship, never gets near that line. For that project, the split in 2026 is the exact same 70/30 it was the week Steam opened to third-party publishers in 2005. Twenty-one years, unchanged, for the tier that actually applies to most of the platform’s catalogue.
What that cut buys, compared to the alternatives
I’m not writing this to argue 30% is unreasonable in isolation — plenty of retail and app-store models sit in the same range, and Valve isn’t uniquely greedy here. What’s worth knowing is what the alternatives actually offer, because “just publish somewhere cheaper” gets said a lot and is rarely followed with numbers.
itch.io lets you set your own cut, anywhere from 0% to 100%, with no platform minimum enforced — the site defaults to suggesting 10% and plenty of developers pay that or a bit more to keep the platform funded, but you can legally take everything. Epic Games Store runs 88/12 above roughly $1 million a year in a title’s revenue, and takes nothing at all below that threshold. Both are objectively cheaper than Steam for a small team’s first project.
Neither has Steam’s wishlist system, its discovery algorithm, its existing install base, or the fact that most PC players already have a Steam library and are far less likely to create a second account for a platform they’ve never used. That’s the actual trade a small studio is making when it stays on Steam at 30%: not “Valve is the only option,” but “the traffic is worth more than the eleven-to-eighteen points I’d save elsewhere” — a bet that gets harder to justify the smaller your marketing budget already is.
Why this is worth flagging today specifically
This is hardly news — the tier structure has been public since 2018 and itch.io’s model has been public since it launched. What the anniversary is a good excuse for is saying it plainly, because “Valve lowered its fees” is the kind of headline that circulates every few years without the threshold attached, and I’ve had more than one conversation with artists assuming it applies to them the moment they self-publish a small asset pack or a first game on Steam. It doesn’t, until the project is already a commercial outlier.
If you’re weighing where to put a small project, weigh the actual numbers for the size you’re actually shipping at, not the headline about the size Valve renegotiated for. For most of us, that’s still 70 cents on the dollar, same as it’s been since Steam stopped being a mandatory patcher for Half-Life 2 and became a storefront.
Sources: Tom’s Hardware, TechCrunch on the 2018 tier change, and itch.io’s and Epic Games Store’s own published fee terms.