Discoverability is a big one. There are indies who do have their own stores, and they ask their fans to buy through them, but majority of their sales still come from Steam.
There are some indies who are quite open with their numbers you can google around and find the details. Steam sales are also huge for old games.
But even distribution is still an issue. Even indi games today are multiple GB in size. And on the first few days of release (or sales or bundles etc.) you have huge download spikes spikes.
Sure you can put it on aws, but better make sure to read you CDN fineprint so you don't end up with astronomical aws bill. In addition steam out of the box support partial updates,which again you can implement on your own, but that too takes time.
Payment. You can google around for problems indies who tried to roll their own store had. Today you have more options some of them explicitly catering to indies but its still an issue. Aditionaly steam supports charging in foreighen currencies, you can lower price in poorer countries etc.
Additionally steam offers their SDK that includes matchmaking and netwrking and host of other feautures, that are used by a lot of games.
Then there is in game chat, friendliest integration, cheat prevention, cloud saves and steam workshop integration, forums (which suck but are still there and have some auto moderation for spam) ...
Sure you could do all of that on your own, but some of it requires quite a bit of effort.
But even distribution is still an issue. Even indi games today are multiple GB in size. And on the first few days of release (or sales or bundles etc.) you have huge download spikes spikes.
Sure you can put it on aws, but better make sure to read you CDN fineprint so you don't end up with astronomical aws bill. In addition steam out of the box support partial updates,which again you can implement on your own, but that too takes time.
Payment. You can google around for problems indies who tried to roll their own store had. Today you have more options some of them explicitly catering to indies but its still an issue. Aditionaly steam supports charging in foreighen currencies, you can lower price in poorer countries etc.
Additionally steam offers their SDK that includes matchmaking and netwrking and host of other feautures, that are used by a lot of games.
Then there is in game chat, friendliest integration, cheat prevention, cloud saves and steam workshop integration, forums (which suck but are still there and have some auto moderation for spam) ...
Sure you could do all of that on your own, but some of it requires quite a bit of effort.