You do know that those ratings aren't really important for Steam sales numbers, right? Being on the "new Releases" page is, and right now good titles get drowned out by tons and tons of rereleases, DLC releases, and just new crap that's getting released.
Again, the services performed by Publishers are vital. Getting your book in front of reviewers and other people willing and able to tell people that this book exists and is worth money is not something a self-published author can do easily; By the time you have the contacts and skills to actually pull off the whole self-publishing thing as a sustainable source of income, you will also have the skills
to make more money using traditional publishing, because presumably your prose is strong enough to sell in good enough numbers to sustain you for a year or two between releases.
Self-publishing always sounds great. But being a good writer does not mean you are a good businessperson, or a good editor, or a good typesetter (Yes, even in the ebook age, typesetting is still something that needs to be done), or a good art director, or a good marketing person. These are all functions you still have to cover in some form, by doing them yourself or hiring others, and every bit of this means spending time
not writing, i. e.
not generating something that can be sold.
"The concept of a publisher who does nothing but rake in profits" does not exist in the real world. As Battuta said, you have no clue about what a publisher does, or how the publisher/writer relationship works.
Luckily, Charlie Stross has prepared an overview about how the system works. Please read it before reentering that subthread of this discussion.
Well, quite a few people I know had problems of various sorts with publishers. For example, a professor on my uni published an SF novel, which costs about 30 zloty (about 10$, converting from our worthless currency). What does he get from it? 2 zlote or so per book sold... Maybe your publisher is less greedy, but it seems that in Poland, author's cut looks like that in most places. To say nothing about publishers sitting on copyright for an out-of-print work, making it impossible (or very hard) to obtain. Happens depressingly often with various music sheets and certain specialist texts.
The author's cut always seems very low. But, in a normal publishing contract, that's because the bulk of the money has been paid when the contract was signed and the manuscript delivered. See the link above.
If there existed some sort of commonly accepted, e-book oriented framework for self-publishing, this could be much more viable. The closest thing to it that exists is Amazon, but it's just plain horrible. Also, it'd be great to have some way to ensure the author gets the majority of the price people pay for the e-book, not measly 10% or so. Right now, the only way to have that would be to run your own web store, which isn't exactly good at reaching out to broad audiences unless you're already popular.
The author does get the majority of the money in a self-publishing situation. But, a) the total amount of money is far lower (because of less exposure, an overall lower price, and lower sales numbers) b) a lot of the money will be eaten up by the overhead incurred to make the book (By the time you manage to publish a work, you have already sunk a lot of hours into it, all of which have to be financed in some way), and c) you may be on the hook to pay for that editor you paid to give you feedback on that thing you were writing, the artist who did your cover art, and whoever else you had to pay to get the thing done.
