"But sir they must pay bandwidth and server costs"
I think some people maybe don't have an intuition on how much bandwidth costs...
Lets do a scenario:
Say your $10, 1GB game gets 500 sales a day
- Revenue is $5k a day.
- Valve takes 30% * 5k = $1.5k
- Bandwidth used = 500GB

How much do you think was the bandwidth cost, from that $1.5k they got?

The answer was none it was 0.6%
Bandwidth is around 2 cents per GB, so 500GB a day = $10 a day. So less than a hundredth of their revenue. https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html

So, 100%-0.6%. What about the other 99.4%?
"But sir they also do conferences"
Do you understand the number $11 billion and how much a conference costs to run. If it costs $10m (??) to run WWDC (even ignoring $1k ticket prices), thats 1/1000th. So, 99.3% of profit left to go now!

"But sir " Do not bother correcting me unless your correction affects things by 10x. http://itch.io  survives with a staff of 6 people, and a revenue cut of minimum 0% (adjustable, default 10%), and you'd think a *bigger* team can streamline things *more*

"But sir! first you used valve, then it switched to apple midway. And your 99.4% figure was of one game's revenue but then you used the overall $11m revenue figure for that 0.1% specific game profit! You crafty manipulator!"
Ah... oh well my twitter time is up!!

Someone else can make a more accurate napkin calculation im sure, I just hadn't seen any so far so i was compelled to attempt one quickly, to get over these assumptions that server costs and conferences can justify even 1/10 of that 30%

A really common thing I see is qualititative arguments despite quantitative absurdity. e.g. A punch B, B kills A, and its totally justified because A did 'something bad' to B first. Like people's minds cannot comprehend the idea of the magnitude intuitively. "One, two, many"

This is at the core of a lot of internet arguments imo: the throwing away of quantitative nuances and ability to research and judge when quantity matters. "30% is too much but 10% is okay" is just random numbers to some people cause they have no reference points

.. and that's because thinking quantitatively requires you to put in quite a lot of effort finding numbers and spreadsheeting things. So this thread is an (admittedly p rough) attempt to do just that, thank you for reading. Now, consider the 30% indie game publishers take [1/41]