I don’t think anyone here is ‘whining’, and certainly many aren’t whining for the percentage steam gets. That’s not the point here. Also it is easy to throw out ‘increase marketing’ arguments when marketing would arguably require far greater budget than the game in question (depending on the cost). The fact is anything in between is like ‘Angry Bird’ a would be a lucky strike, an unplanned success story out of the blue. Even they invested 50 million in marketing to make it an international hit.
Marketing is certainly important and i think anyone serious would take this into account, no one denies that. But to completely ignore steam’s approach is wrong from the dev community.
When EA and co went full gambling and micro on consumers, did they all say ‘if you don’t like it don’t buy it’, perhaps that would be the rational thing to say, after all ‘free market’ right? But in the end people took to the ‘streets’ so to speak and now are making changes that would have these companies think twice about it, which impacts the industry as a whole to the better perhaps, certainly for those interested in their games.
Finally Steam is/was a good platform that’s what made it good for indie’s in the first place, but even a clean bar can get messy and would need someone to remind folks to not get drunk and throw bottles around.