So there is a whole lot more to selling through Steam than most people imagine, and when you understand that, it's not hard to understand why so many companies choose to do it. For very many people, they've actually only heard about products such as XPlane because they were on Steam!īeyond this, companies which sell on Steam don't just get the money sent to them from sales and nothing else, they get a very sophisticated set of analytical data tools made available to them which provide all kinds of demographic data about who buys and uses their software sold and used through Steam, and this allows them to tailor products to suit that demographic. Any enterprise which can offer the opportunity to promote a product to 125 million potential buyers is obviously gonna charge for the privilege, and most companies are smart enough to know that is a lot of sales opportunity they'd be missing out on, not to mention an absolutely astronomical advertising budget they'd be looking at too, in order to get that sort of exposure through regular advertising channels. Yes Valve takes a cut of the sales cost of the software, but do you somehow imagine that other sources of software distribution and advertising would simply promote and distribute XPlane out of the goodness of their hearts? Of course not. there are five times as many registered Steam users than there are Aussies, or to put it another way, every day there are considerably more people playing on Steam at any one time, than there are living on the entire continent of Australia. And to give you an idea of what those Steam user numbers mean, the entire population of Australia amounts to just under 25 million people, i.e. Every sale they gain via Steam is one they'd potentially not have gained any other way. It is because it literally costs those companies absolutely nothing to have their product promoted and made available to over 125 million registered Steam users, of which, over 33 million are active every single day. There is a very good reason why companies such as Laminar Research choose to sell market their products through Valve's Steam interface. Valve is not some profit-hungry monster appropriating profits from Laminar Research against its will either. What you actually pay for is a licence to be able to use that software.
And contrary to your belief, you actually don't own any of the software you have paid for, regardless of whether that's via Steam, or as a downloadable exe file, or as installation files on a CD or DVD. You can use Steam game content offline easily: From the main Steam window, go to the Steam menu and select Go Offline then click on Restart in Offline Mode.
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