Originally Posted by Kriss
A retail game at $60, is a profit of $7 for the publisher and the developer might not even see a single cent of that or at best $2 if they have some sort of deal.
Accoring to this article, margins of 25-30% for the publisher and 50-60% for the retailer are typical (£30 retail gives £10 to publisher, £3 to developer) which ties in roughly with your figure, once costs are factored in.

The high retailer margin is (partially) justified by the expenses most stores incur (high street rents, staff, etc) but also explains why large mail order firms can offer major discounts, even on launch day.

So even if Steam hogged 30% (which is high given the far lower costs they incur compared to retail), normal "digital" prices need only be half that of physical retail to give publishers/developers the same profit.
Originally Posted by Jito463
Keep in mind, that there are other costs besides bandwidth. Servers have to be maintained, with multiple redundancies, for all the games currently for sale (or were ever for sale at one time) on Steam. Technicians have to be paid to maintain those servers. And all this on multiple networks across the globe...
Yes, servers and staff have a cost, but Steam uses a CDN which handles that aspect and their bandwidth cost is almost trivial ($0.10/GB means a cost of $1 for a "typical" 10GB download, and a major customer like Valve can probably negotiate better rates still).

Last edited by Stargazer; 10/07/14 08:42 PM.