>11 percent. That is the charge back rate in gaming. The "overall" stat for all transactions is something like 3 percent.
1. source?
2. How does that justify a 30% rate, when presumably it's clawed back from developers?
>Card processing isnt free. There are fees, and supporting card processing still has more humans in the loop than one needs. Never mind all the technology that comes with running the dam platform.
Again, nowhere near 30% though
>Meanwhile, AWS has a 30+ percent margin and I dont see CTO's lining up to run hardware...
30% margins on renting hardware is totally different than a 30% tax on transactions, and it's disingenuous to imply they're comparable. At the very least amazon needs to spend the other 70% on running servers and investing in datacenters, whereas valve doesn't. It's studios that are actually doing the development. Valve just is charging 30% on top of that. To take an extreme example, compare the 2-3% fees charged by visa vs the ~15% gross margins that car companies make. Even though that's 5x higher, I doubt many are outraged about car companies' profiteering.
I wonder then how you expect valve to operate profitably. Paying for the maintenance and upgrade of equipment, the developers to build the features and SRE to monitor the systems, designers, marketers, HR and lawyers.
For some reason, people in tech live under the illusion that everything nontangible should be literally free
Valve also hosts and maintains the game files for consumers to download, and the bandwidth/hardware needed to serve hundreds of GBs for each game to millions of customers across the globe is not trivial.
1. source?
2. How does that justify a 30% rate, when presumably it's clawed back from developers?
>Card processing isnt free. There are fees, and supporting card processing still has more humans in the loop than one needs. Never mind all the technology that comes with running the dam platform.
Again, nowhere near 30% though
>Meanwhile, AWS has a 30+ percent margin and I dont see CTO's lining up to run hardware...
30% margins on renting hardware is totally different than a 30% tax on transactions, and it's disingenuous to imply they're comparable. At the very least amazon needs to spend the other 70% on running servers and investing in datacenters, whereas valve doesn't. It's studios that are actually doing the development. Valve just is charging 30% on top of that. To take an extreme example, compare the 2-3% fees charged by visa vs the ~15% gross margins that car companies make. Even though that's 5x higher, I doubt many are outraged about car companies' profiteering.