What do you think about steam?

[Aleksanderus]

I personally hate steam (for unknown reasons) also i don't know why was it even created and why it's so popular among both players and developers.

[Tzan]

I think its great!
For the big games like Skyrim and Starcraft you buy the box somewhere.
For smaller games like FTL, Bastion, Child of Light, you go to Steam.

For a developer just handing off to Steam makes all the distribution and payments easy.
One less thing to worry about.

The achievements are fun to try and get when it isn't just hitting a checkpoint.
The trading cards seem pointless.

[CaptainKraft]

I'm not a fan  of DRM so I try to avoid steam when I can.

As for why its popular, that is probably dude to it being the first platform to do digital distribution well. They quickly became known and they did it better than everyone else.

[Krice]

Digital distribution is future, but I think we are still only half way there. We need a model where the location of distribution doesn't matter and the company that takes care of payment etc. doesn't take percentage of profits at all. It's too much for Valve and Apple for practically doing nothing. Of course they need to maintain the infra, but it's still nothing compared to huge amount of profits they get now. It has to change and besides we really don't want only couple of big companies to handle digital distribution.

[Rickton]

Digital distribution is future, but I think we are still only half way there. We need a model where the location of distribution doesn't matter and the company that takes care of payment etc. doesn't take percentage of profits at all. It's too much for Valve and Apple for practically doing nothing. Of course they need to maintain the infra, but it's still nothing compared to huge amount of profits they get now. It has to change and besides we really don't want only couple of big companies to handle digital distribution.

Well, I think any distributor has to take some money from somewhere, like you said they have to maintain infrastructure and I'm sure it's not cheap to have the hardware to handle all those (sometimes massive) downloads.

That said, itch.io is pretty nice. It lets the uploader set the % they want to go towards the host (even 0% if that's what they want), and it also lets people pay extra for the game if they want to.