To each their own but I'm happy for them to pull a premium.

As a customer: They're making gaming on Linux awesome, and my SteamDeck has killed off my console usage (YMMV), I love it so much. I'm way happier to buy games on Steam where it funds cool initiatives like that than on Epic where a big chunk of the value is accrued by TenCent and Disney.

As a game dev Steam also brings a lot of value: A big customer base, to the point where a game with mid-tier popularity can still do brisk business (not nearly as true on Epic). Their backend is unintuitive but has loads more features than EOS. They also offer really cool tech like SDR (Steam Datagram Relay), etc. If you're selling a PC game, there's no better place to be and you get value for the premium.

They do offer many features for game developers, though. Multiplayer, Remote Play and the Workshop just for example. Those cost money to run and offer an amazing benefit basically "for free" (included in the cut) to game devs.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features

I don't see the problem with that personally, since there's basically no restriction on how you distribute your games on the platform. It's not like iOS where you have 1 option.

People publishing games just have to do the math and see if the benefits justify the costs.

my point is that valve/steam takes 30% "because they can". they could charge 5% and im sure still make tons of money. it's still a cut throat business, and while yeah they could be doing shittier things to make more money, i think they also do risk assessments on disturbing the golden goose