You mean like a website? I think it's more fruitful to imagine multiple merchants competing to sell devs wares and lessor commissions as a result of competition.
Admittedly it is supposedly lower value now, with Steam Direct replacing Greenlight, but it shouldn't be overlooked -- it's the same reason that tons of products are sold on Amazon even though you can also purchase the same product directly via the brand's website...
FWIW, I'm lead dev of SimAirport[0] which is in Steam's Early Access program. The 30% has been tough to swallow, but without Steam (and given our lack of internal marketing/spend) we probably wouldn't have sold a quarter of what we have thus far. And while we wouldn't qualify for any of these tiers had they been in place previously, it's still a solid upside "just in case" your game blows expectations out of the water.
I'd love to see them add a tier around $2-5M at 27-29%, even if just as a "bone" to indie developers; it'd make developing a 'game as a service' (ie long & consistent feedback-driven dev cycle) more palatable and likely result in demonstrably better games.
Tangentially related at best, but sometimes I wonder what Steam _actually_ optimizes for -- if their algorithms always show the "best" games (ie ones that players spend hundreds++ hours playing) then I'd expect that to actually hurt their revenues short term. In theory they'd be better off marketing/optimizing to push games that satisfy users but that have low play-time/hours on average, so that they can sell the player a different game that much sooner. It's a strange set of incentives & it's hard to tell how aligned they really are (with either players or developers).
Valve's rather enthusiastic and concrete support for Linux gaming certainly doesn't hurt, either. Coupled with the discovery features above, it makes it a lot easier to figure out which developers I'd like to keep supporting.
And I mean literal limits. That game had a bug where flights were limited by an internal variable that was smaller than the capacity you could build so after a while the game would just stop and you would be unable to get any more use out of your airport. You could easily test this by cancelling one contract which would immediately make a new offer pop up.
Anyway your game looks just the thing I've been looking for since that old early 2000s game. I'll be throwing some money your way for sure.
You can try to run your own website, to save 10% fees on a minuscule userbase, it simply doesn't cover the costs.
It's better than nothing but it's in no way comparable to what steam offers.
Stripe gives you a basic solution to accept payments in some locations and under some circumstances. Once a company reaches in the tens of millions in yearly turnaround or expand internationally, it has to move on and run multiple payment providers.
Steam helps you with that. You could try to do better yourself but the effort is not worth saving a few percent of fees (on a lot less sales).
It certainly won't translate the game for you, not that translating a bunch of text files is the hardest part, but it will help with everything else.
Ask international users what they think of other platforms. Like the one they couldn't use because it didn't accept their names with an accent or couldn't enter a billing address without a state.
OTOH if the game is in Japanese and only sold on a Japanese internet platform then you have two barriers - language and payment
It takes at least 10% commission to be able to run a company of this type. It's possible to run with as low as 5% in some niches, given a very lean operation and a billion dollar scale to amortize fixed costs. Eventually most of the company will be devoted to customer support and billing related tasks.
There is really not that much that can be shaved off. Small studios could never make a platform any efficient. A small group could spend all their time working on distribution and billing, never shipping an actual game. It's a really good deal to just use steam instead.
For AAA games it's annoying to pay 30% and they're rather make their own platform, that's why steam is dropping commission to 20% for top selling hits.