So, genuine question here: do companies have to pay full price in order to finance a technology that is used by 5% of their daily users?

Of course this is a "devil advocate" question, but I would not consider Valve as "safer" than any other game / tech companies to be honest...

> So, genuine question here: do companies have to pay full price in order to finance a technology that is used by 5% of their daily users?

As far as I know; Valve has cut the rate for larger companies.

> Of course this is a "devil advocate" question, but I would not consider Valve as "safer" than any other game / tech companies to be honest...

I do not know what the point of this comment is. We were not discussing if a company is 'safer'. As one US judge said when an Indie game company sued Valve and lost; the 30% rate is common among digital platforms. The point myself and the above poster made was that Valve does a lot more then most platforms that do charge 30%. Myself as a Linux enthusiast is very thankful for Valve for their work on Proton and Mesa.

> As far as I know; Valve has cut the rate for larger companies.

Oh yeah, because that's totally fair business practices

You are not investing in Steam, you are paying them for something. Whether that is marketing, content distribution, or additional features. When you buy a car and don't use the seatbelt or turn signals, you are not paying for everyone else to have a seatbelt and turn signals. It just comes with the car.

Proton is open source, so AFAIK, nobody had to pay to use it.