Poll regarding Steam users

[TheGrunch]

For the most part I agree with you Blackdog, I just think that we're LUCKY that it's Steam and not something more irritating or obtrusive, given that we're dealing with Ubi and 1C, of whom Ubi love DRM and being dicks to their consumers as much as possible if it protects their margins and of whom 1C just love Steam for obvious reasons - they are a small publisher who can't afford gigantic advertising campaigns for their fairly niche titles - CoD probably in the middle of the road or even leaning towards mainstream compared to some of them, and to some extent Steam do this for them in their news section (if Ubi will let them do so straight away) and also it saves developers a bit of time in terms of creating a multiplayer system beyond the actual basic netcode and server system and you get a better deal than with retailers as regards profit.

I don't think that people are getting the way the money issue works here, though, probably because as you say, a lot of people don't seem to understand that 1C is a publisher and Maddox Games is the developer here, they are not the same thing, 1C are co-publishing with Ubi, with Ubi publishing wherever they can be arsed to but supposedly the US, Western Europe and Australia, 1C publishing inside Russia and maybe parts of Eastern Europe and Asia I suspect.
That oft-quoted article about the money division from Steam (quoted as between 60:40 and 70:30) is from the perspective of the PUBLISHER. They still take their cut unless Maddox Games decided to self-publish through Steam only. So it will go 70:30 1C:Steam and then how much Maddox Games gets from that 70% depends on what their contract with 1C is as to the division of profits (if indeed they don't just get a fixed sum on the completion of the game, I hope not, I expect this to sell well). So although the proportion of money is greater from publisher:middleman than with retailers, the amount that Maddox Games gets is still dependent upon their agreement with the publisher as to the division of profits *out* of this greater cut from Steam.