That's something those products need to figure out, not the users, one potential solution is to erect paywalls and find out how much those products are actually worth to their users ;)
I recall when the first LCD TVs came out and I wanted to get a cheap 1080 one. The problem was that almost every TV said 1080 even if it was just 720 upscaled.
I put a uniform image in BMP on a memory stick - every column being R, then G, then B repeated. As the image was exactly 1080, viewing it in full-screen on a 1080 screen gave a sort of uniform grey color. On an upscaled monitor you could see very visible banding.
This would not have worked had the image been JPG.
Overscan is where it cuts off the edges of the image right?
I’m sure an LLM could offer an explanation, but I genuinely have never understood why overscan is even a thing on HDMI ports.
Most times I plug my AppleTV or laptop into a TV using HDMI by default it’s cutting off the edge of the image. When is it ever a good thing to cut off the edges of the incoming digital image and why does this seem to be the default behaviour on most TVs?
Edit: I asked an LLM and it says some content includes junk on the edge of images because it was never meant to be visible, so TVs enable it by default to cut down complaints/support requests. Apparently, even though HDMI supports a way to signal to TVs to disable overscan, many TVs ignore it.
I’m in my 40’s and have yet to personally encounter content where overscan should be used.
Maybe there were particularly crappy and prevalent analogue to digital converters in the early days of HDMI, but TV manufactures just never stopped doing it even though it’s almost never an issue any more. So we probably have a situation now where probably everyone has either manually changed their TV from its default or more likely are seeing an over scanned and thus non-pixel aligned image.
> I genuinely have never understood why overscan is even a thing on HDMI ports.
Remember that an HDMI port may be an input for another device where overscan is necessary to prevent the “garbage” at the edges of the screen. An example of this would be a DVR that outputs HDMI to your TV but perhaps records video that needs to have overscan set. Or VHS as an input. Those are just examples.
I'm also in my 40's and I haven't seen a reason for a TV to overscan in AGES. I only dealt with overscan when it was with old Analog signals like from an old VCR where timecode and close captioning data is on top most lines of the NTSC signal or when using a really old VGA to RCA adapter where you'd want the over scan to "stretch" your computer's desktop to fit the screen. I think your assessment is right, it's a hold over from before the Analog->Digital conversion and there hasn't been a big enough complaint to remove it.
Maybe having some image processing circuitry that deals with both the analogue-originated signals and the HDMI-originated signals reduced cost and/or time-to-market.
You can do that with JPEGs, just not the obvious way (i.e. by exporting the JPEG at the target resolution.)
Instead, you need to export the JPEG at a resampled resolution that's a multiple of your target resolution, such that each pre-transform source-image pixel gets mapped to its own entirely-independent JPEG color block.
Most obvious (though perhaps not optimal?) approach: nearest-neighbour upscale your image by 8x, and then save as JPEG with 100% quality (which will create 8x8 blocks with 4:4:4 subsampling.)
Did you actually test? I did it and it worked fine (and zooming in confirmed that the RGB bars are nicely preserved). Be sure to put your subsampling at 4:4:4.
Interesting, I made me think when was the last time I wanted to look at the App Store and it was… never? I mean I have to to install something, but I never go there just to window shop. (My kids do, but that’s because the games have video previews.)
Steam is the most dominant because of their extremely customer friendly policies, their insane price crashes and the ease of publishing and installing games from the platform. If other platforms are able to provide all of that, with a commission below 30%, I'm sure they could easily take over.
But turns out, neither Epic nor EA are interested in serving the customer.
>Steam is the most dominant because of their ... insane price crashes
Are steam deals really better than on other platforms? They might have better deals compared to brick and mortar retailers but publishers generally have price parity across various digital storefronts (eg. epic vs steam), so attributing low prices to steam doesn't really make much sense. If anything steam is actually more expensive if you factor in authorized keystores (eg. greenmangaming), which are occasionally cheaper.
I've never seen any platform go that low on price except for Humble Bundle maybe. And even then, Steam has an EXTREMELY generous refund policy compared to any other platform.
IME they're matched by other platforms. If Cyberpunk is discounted for a steam summer sale, it's similarly discounted on Epic or GOG as well. It's not a Steam exclusive, and therefore can't be cited as an advantage.
A 15–20% fee would be much fairer in my opinion. They’d still be making plenty of money while letting developers keep more of what they earn through their hard work. At the very least, they should differentiate between big players and smaller indie developers.
Taking a larger cut from big players would incentivise them to make them create their own marketplace, where they exclusively publish their own games. Then we're back to square one.
Honestly, I think 15-20% is doable, if they make money in other ways. CS skins, new game releases from inhouse, etc.
Anytime I see the complaint about the 30% fee, I wonder what people feel would be fair for the service, because it also includes storage, distribution for new instalations and patching for older ones, along with generating keys to be sold at other stores.
Would people feel better with a lower fee, but no distribution network, for example?
Agreed. The Steam platform has so much value for developers and yet they still complain about the 30%.
To put into perspective, when Epic only takes 15%. They themselves admitted that is not a sustainable thing. EGS is constantly losing money.
So now I invite everyone to gauge just how "big" the EGS is. How many "features" they offer etc. This platform in so much smaller than Steam and even they state that a 15% cut is not sustainable to keep the light on.
Judging just how big the Steam platform is, do people honestly think Valve could be forced into reducing their cut to this proposed 15%? When this little hobbyshop that is EGS cannot make it work. Why would it work for a much much larger and therefore more expensive platform?
I am furthermore given to understand when you distribute on Steam you are free to run your own store front. You are free to create your own Steam keys for your games and sell them in your shop which is supposedly have a 0% cut for Valve.
Of course then you would have to run your own store with all the effort and cost that go along with it.
Or you simply put it on Steam. A storefront visited by millions of paying customers. Which handles everything. From purchase/refund/CDN for Downloading and updating the game binaries/communityhub to directly engage with the customers if you wish
In the end, the only way they are forced to use steam is because that is where the customers are. and since there are alternatives around, these customers could very well shop some place else. but they dont. they shop where they get the best experience. and if that is on steam, thats where they go.
If "developers" were really honest they would all disclose just how much they sold on Steam vs any other digital store front in case they distribute their offerings to any store that will let them.
Just because you get 4 sales on Epic vs 4 million sales on Steam does mean Steam is a monopoly. It just means Epic is a steaming pile and given the chance the customer goes to the better option.
30% on mobile platforms if generally frowned upon as source of massive overcharging compared to actual costs (since its a massive revenue & income stream for their owners), but somehow for Steam its fine because... they also generate keys? Or what should be the magical justfication.
No its not fine, its a cash cow milking customers. Valve may be better than their competition but they are not saints (same company basically inventing addictive lootboxes mechanism, albeit not in its worst possible form), its a for-profit company that has tons of profit. I am not saying 15% is OK or X% is OK, but 30% is too much in 2025.
Maybe they should have tiers ie 0-10% for first 5k sales, 20% above 100k etc. There are many options to be nicer to customers & developers.
The difference is that a game with its own market power is free to distribute directly on their website and keep that 30% for themselves, whereas an IOS app is not.
If Microsoft charged every program you download 30% of gross Windows proceeds, that would be inappropriate. If Apple allowed a free tier where you get 0 marketing power but you can link from your website to the ios store for a downloadable app, and charge what you want, it would be another matter.
It isn't overcharging on Mobile either IMO but the difference is pretty obvious: there is only one way to get your app onto an iPhone or an Android and that's through those stores.
PCs are an open platform. It is very different.
>its a for-profit company that has tons of profit. I am not saying 15% is OK or X% is OK, but 30% is too much in 2025.
And you base this on what? Nothing. It is a privately held company and you don't have access to its books.
Steam getting a 30% cut is certainly less objectional that Apple getting 30% because they've locked other people out of selling on iPhones.
On the other hand, that Steam taking as big a cut as Apple can claim because of their unfortunate practices isn't great.
Generally, the smallest indie creators, who aren't really likely to benefit from organic discovery on Steam, seem to priority selling on itch, which, by default, only takes a 10%, despite doing all the work you mention.
That Steam seems to have a marketplace monopoly based on network effects, and this allows them to claw money from all but the largest and smallest game developers is not something they have a strong right to claim to morally, and something society would benefit from doing away with. It appears that 72% of game devs feel that way too.
So, to answer your question, for me, two thirds of Steam's revenue seem unfair.
Maybe Steam and Apple deserved to obtain a partial monopoly but now they can just sit and relax and take 30% to copy/paste games/apps to each user that wants them.
So yes, 30% is high and unjust to the games creators who are doing the 2025 work.
I would love for steam to offer even the complement:
Only distribution & SSO services, so I can have fast downloads and quick non-replayable-auth for games I buy/subscribe elsewhere (not subject to steam peculiarities about squeezing out maximum price for each region by purchasing power).
Of course, that would need to have a wildly different fee schedule than when they carry major legal & reputational risks plus more significant customer support volume.
No other service actually saturates my download speed. That's probably an expensive luxury that could be cut. Even netflix with their CDNs in every city tries to minimize bandwith and it results in terrible video quality-if it can even deliver it at all.
You are free to install an alternative store, that probably has all the games that you are buying from Steam.
I can't do that with my iPhone.
They charge it because people use it voluntarily for the better customer and user experience. If Apple didn't provide their store installed by default, allowed alternative stores without manipulating their content and yet people still used it, it would be a closer analogy.
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