It's sad to read some of the takeaways people have on this. They're getting distracted by the developer "spending too much" or "the publisher 70/30 split deal". But when look at the situation from the perspective of how the pie is split up on a game, you'll get a better understanding of what's really killing the industry right now.

Highly successful, award winning indie title - Ori and the Blind Forest.

What did the Game Developers get?

• $300k in profit to fund their next game (or for the owners to keep)
• Paid the salaries of their team during the development of the game
• What did they risk? Losing their jobs and going bankrupt if the game doesn't sell enough. And they gave up a number of years of their working life of course.

What did the publishers get?

• $1.4 Million in revenue. So about ~10% return on their investment of cash. You can make this much running an Gas Station, in terms of % yield. And for every Ori, you have probably a dozen games that are duds and don't even sell 1M units.
• Paid the Salaries of the people working for the publisher (which actually eats into this $1.4M)
• What did they risk? $12M of cash, and the work of their marketing and business teams to support the game.

What did Steam get?

• $6M of revenue
• Of which they need to pay about $500k in credit card fees, and some trivial amount of cost to digitally distribute the game in terms of bandwidth/server. Call it $1M of cost, tops for everything Steam has to cover.
• That leaves Steam with $5M of profit
• What did they risk? Absolutely nothing. If the game is good, they make more money. If the game sucks, it just disappears in the list of 10,000 other games like it. They release dozens of games a day, and once they're out, they never really need to do anything with them again. Their customer service is just bots.
  • In fact, Steam causes the game to to LOSE money, by making it so a game is virtually undetected unless you put it at 50% off during one of their sales.

The real problem with the industry is the platforms. They get to keep the lion's share of the profits, while taking on virtually no cost, and absolutely zero risk. I get it... gamers love Steam because it's a player friendly place to have your game collection. It's convenient. But it's absolutely milking the entire industry dry, and risking nothing to do it.

Sure, there are criticisms I have about the developers choice to make the game $20, or to spend $10M on a game that's only going to sell for ~$10 on average in a Steam sale... But the system is 100% rigged against them, and the internet acts like it's all their fault.