Download speed is highly relative to latency (bandwidth/delay product). If you have global users and you actually want them to download dozens (if not more) of gigs of data, then yea...they should be distributed.

Fuck for as much hate as cloudflare and akamai (and Amazon and Google and all the others too, but CDN is their bread and butter) get, the internet could not be nearly as fast and efficient if not for CDNs and their massively scalable infrastructure.

Unless you think we should all go back to hosting websites off of an old Pentium in the garage. Which...okay yeah we should do that too, but it's not at all functional for game distribution.

...So to educate you, locally hosted servers, which all CDNs use, allow for greater download speeds and less overall network strain and complexity, which reduces the chance for failed downloads via lost packets.

Every single download and major content service you have used in the last 15 years has used this, and this is why your downloads rarely if ever say 'download failed' like they did pre-2005.

This is also very expensive, hosting a server in every major country/download area and then replicating files across those disparate servers is expensive.

Let's say you want to host your 2GB game, and only that, in the US and Europe. Well the US is a giant place but the core infrastructure is good enough that you can get away with a single location, so that's two servers. Each will probably be $50/month or so per 500GB traffic (since it's just file hosting we don't care about stats, but you're not getting above 10Mbps for less than that at that traffic limit).

That's 250 times that can download your game. In America. And 250 in Europe. Let's say you get the ideal sales numbers and 500 people buy your game.

If you're selling your game for $5, that is one download per person for their lifetime that you can afford(assuming 30% or less goes to hosting) If you increase your price to $7.20 you hit that 30% cap but those 500 people can download it any time for a year. Or, if we assume we get 6,000 people (the theoretical maximum number of people that can download your game at that price) you can have a salary of $25,920.

But lets be honest, most indie games off steam never make it to 6,000 sales. And the ones that do take years of basically hosting for free as a passion project.

So make your game cost... $21? Well you've cut off any chance of anyone outside of the US and Europe of ever buying your game, but you can now host for 3 years for those 6,000 sales and you'd even have a decent enough salary to pay tax... which for a small business in the US will take another 3rd of your costs, and you still haven't paid for marketing or your payment provider fees or their taxes or sales tax or VAT for Europe....

Or. You pay steam that 30%. They handle hosting, which already cost you 30%, and everything else, and the admin overhead of selling to 190 countries like calculating (and already paying out of your cut) tax.

It can't be done without MONEY.

"Absolutely, yes, 1000%."

Then do just that? Unlike with Sony, Nintendo, Apple, MS ecosystems, the PC is an open platform, you don't have to ask anyone's permission to just start selling your stuff for it over the internet.