Some interesting industry news for you here. Epic Games have announced a change to the revenue model of the Epic Games Store, as they try to pull in more developers and more gamers to actually purchase things.
If Steam turns to shit I have no problems reacquiring my collection through Piracy. There is no sunk-cost here. Epic is actively anti-consumer so I refuse to use it.
no, it’s because they had about a 15 year head start. you think steam started the way it is now? it started as a launcher for steam games and it was worse than ubisoft’s launcher.
Also, folks fucking hated it at the jump. Whats wild to me is that Epic could factor in all the lessons Steam learned over near two decades resulting in a relatively equal product, but instead… doesn’t.
GOG doesn’t need a launcher, because the games don’t have DRM. It is just nice to have, in order to keep games up to date.
Steam, Epic, Origin and the Microsoft thing needs a launcher, because DRM. The non-optional part is what is annoying, it is not a choice, if you buy something there, you have to use their launcher software, that needs to run in the background all the time (Sure it doesn’t need to run all the time, but just having to start it in addition to the game, is annoying).
With Steam being the first one to require a launcher, it was annoying at first, but became useful and people started considering it the standard game delivery solution. Now we need another one for Epic and all other stores that peddle DRMified games.
If Epic would be just another store, where you buy and download games, nobody would complain, but Epic created (reinvented) an additional incompatible game delivery solution that required their launcher, that is what people are mostly annoyed about.
If the industry would come together and create a vendor neutral and compatible software and game delivery mechanism, where people are free to choose where to buy their software and games, and with which launcher they want to keep it up to date, that would be awesome, but sadly capitalism favors short sighted, wasteful and monopoly building competition instead of cooperation.
I am against monopolistic competition practices and that includes exclusivity deals and predatory pricing.
And as far as I know, Epic does this more than Valve or GOG. Granted, Valve doesn’t need to, because they are already the main player, but they also mostly avoided enshittyfication for now.
Granted it is hard to enter a market that is already dominated by another company, but instead of doing those business practices they could offer a better service.
Yes. That is rather high, but AFAIK the same on Xbox, PlayStation and GOG. Itch.io is on 10%.
It’s not possible for valve OR epic to enshit according to the definition of the word.
What do you mean by that? Enshittyfication is when companies try to offer a good platform first to reach many content producers and consumers and then, once the consumers and producers depend on the platform, it goes bad for them in order to favor profits of the company owners or stakeholders.
Just because a company is private, it can still change to favor short term money extractions from all their customers.
I don’t really understand what it is I would be wrong about. Is it about the word “shareholders” in the wiki instead of “owners”, what I called them?
Shareholders of a private company is often a small group of individuals or just one person, and they can also be called the owners. “Private” means the shares are not traded publicly.
A shareholder (in the United States often referred to as stockholder) of corporate stock refers to an individual or legal entity (such as another corporation, a body politic, a trust or partnership) that is registered by the corporation as the legal owner of shares of the share capital of a public or private corporation.
They understand that devs are in steam because it’s where users are. Do you think they are stupid? There is no much they can do to bring users if there are no games, they are 15-20 years behind Steam in years of existence.
TBH I haven’t seen evidence that layoffs generate capital. It just fudges cost to revenue ratios to emulate quarterly gains in hopes of appeasing shareholders.
Yeah yeah, what about making the EGS program not suck for customers? An overglorified browser running on top of unreal engine, no user reviews for games…
The no user reviews is a terrible choice. I don’t understand why they wouldn’t have them. Maybe they’re afraid of spam on Fortnite. But I can’t imagine reviews on Fortnite would matter all that much.
Steam really needs something like this. Even the first 100k would be a great start for boosting indie devs.
Instead they do the opposite and reward the big players.
Steam actually reduces their cut as you hit certain milestones. For your first $10M in sales, they take that standard 30%. Hit the $10M mark, and their cut drops to 25% for sales between $10M and $50M. Push past $50M, and Steam only takes 20%.
I think ideally the first xk should have somethong like 10% since there’s still payment processing fees and such. After that have 30% then go down on huge amount of sales (to keep the big boys happy and on steam)
My go-to is GoG, but I definitely want Steam to lose some market share in favor of literally anybody else. I will worry about moving that extra share towards GoG when the market isn’t a full on monopoly.
But hey, yeah, stop using Steam and go to Gog whenever you can. You heard it here first. DRM-free software should be your first choice.
GOG and Itch are both great services. Epic is run by a psychopath and working hard to create the walled garden they themselves have been railing against. That’s why EGS can go to hell but I’ll gladly buy from the others.
I do not know or care about the personality or intentions of any of the executives in these corporations. Pick your variety of libertarian tech billionaire, I don’t intend to root for any of them.
This is a Godzilla “let them fight” moment where in my ideal scenario none of these people would have this amount of money or control over other people’s work, but since that’s the world we live in, them being in competition benefits me down the line, so I don’t want any one of them to get away with the whole thing.
Reminder that the world’s biggest money makers in PC gaming are not on Steam.
Minecraft isn’t (it’s on Microsoft Store and a stand-alone web store), Fortnite isn’t (it’s EGS exclusive), Roblox isn’t (its own store), League of Legends and Valorant aren’t (Riot Launcher and EGS),…
And that’s a fantastic showcase of the bar you need to hit to not be effectively toiling in the Steam mines. Assassin’s Creed, FIFA, Call of Duty? Not big enough. Still have to deal with Steam.
It takes being significantly bigger than the entire Epic store to even consider not doing Steam on PC. And none of those is even close to having a viable platform for third party releases outside of Epic, which is perhaps the last one standing on that front and currently not managing to get a foothold. And judging by the rabid fanboy backlash anytime they try to do something nice to attract devs, not even finding a path towards one at any point in the future, either.
That’s a bad look for competition on the PC market. There aren’t that many Fortnites or Minecrafts coming in the future. Gaming investment is drying up and gaming is becoming a cash business, rather than an investment business. And the cash flows to Valve.
Assassin’s Creed, FIFA, Call of Duty? Not big enough. Still have to deal with Steam.
They don’t have to. OK, maybe Microsoft has to because they are the actual monopolist and making the Activision Blizzard franchises available on storefronts other than Microsoft’s own is to keep the watchdogs away.
Also, none of the franchises are exclusive to Steam, so Steam has no monopoly.
It takes being significantly bigger than the entire Epic store to even consider not doing Steam on PC.
That sentence makes no sense. Fortnite is exclusive to EGS, therefore it cannot be “significantly bigger than the entire Epic store”.
Steam has no policies that forbid offering games on other stores, Epic has policies that makes certain games timed exclusives to EGS.
What makes EGS unattractive compared to Steam is the simple fact that Epic chooses to most prominently display their own games on EGS. Valve does front page banners, fests, that window that opens with every Steam launch, etc. and goes out of their way to make everything from big launches as well as solo dev indie games discoverable.
Epic has it in their own hands to make EGS more than the Fortnite launcher. They could promote other EGS games inside Fortnite but they don’t. They host concerts inside Fortnite but nothing to promote 3rd party EGS games, for examle.
That’s a bad look for competition on the PC market. There aren’t that many Fortnites or Minecrafts coming in the future. Gaming investment is drying up and gaming is becoming a cash business, rather than an investment business. And the cash flows to Valve.
USD 45 billion overall PC gaming revenue and all of Steam combined is 8.6bn. “And the cash flows to Valve”? Sure…
For generic SteamWorks integration, there already exists a open source DLL called Goldberg Emulator. If publishers opt for real DRM, the games are not available on GOG anyway.
Also, downloading and backing up the games have to be done by yourself before the storefront goes bust. Distributing GOG games outside of GOG is a copyright violation, unless the copyright holders explicitly allow it.
So, to sum up: You can backup DRM-free Steam games and make them work with little effort.
the vast majority of the money that valve makes comes from indie games, not big studios
This is definitely not the case. Big studios price their games higher and sell more copies. There are only a handful of indie games like Stardew Valley and Terraria that come close to being in the same spot of the bell curve. Most of Valve’s money comes from microtransactions in the longest-running live services and the biggest games of the year.
Ah yeah my bad its the number of sales where indie games win. In terms of money its almost 50/50 tho. People are sick and tired of expensive garbage games and that shows in the drastic changes in revenue from 2023-2024.
Ofcourse if you include in game costs, then it probably changes again.
People are sick and tired of expensive garbage games and that shows in the drastic changes in revenue from 2023-2024.
Be careful not to make the data fit your conclusion. Anecdotally, I’ve observed a similar sentiment, but for one thing, AAA releases have slowed down due to long development times, so there just aren’t that many of them in a given year. For another, we know that, by a wide margin, most time spent gaming is only on a handful of mainstay games that first debuted years ago, like Counter-Strike 2, Grand Theft Auto V, Fortnite, Minecraft, etc. Plenty of those aren’t on Steam, but the same concept applies to the games that top the Steam charts.
Cause that would probably get abused for things like money laundering, since Steam is open for everyone who wants to sell a game unlike Epic’s store where you get vetted. You can just set up a shell corp that releases shitty shovelware and buy the game from yourself with steam cards you bought from the store with your dirty cash. And then you’d get all your money back ready to be taxed and laundered.
Couldn’t you just like… sell those stolen gift cards on G2A, Kinguin and such instead? You wouldn’t have the 100 euro posting game fee + needing to have it checked and such.
I’m not talking about stolen gift cards. The goal of money laundering is to move dirty cash from the criminal underworld into lawful society. Selling stolen gift cards on G2A doesn’t help with that. You want to create proof for the tax man that the money you earn comes from a legitimate source. If you sell stolen gift card you don’t have a paper trail for where you have sourced those cards. It’s suspicious. And selling cards on G2A you buy with your dirty cash from a legit store is still suspicious since you still have to proof if the money you used to buy those cards was earned legitimately.
If you buy gift cards with your dirty cash at a store and then pretend to be a customer by buying your own game you have created a money paper trail for the tax man since your earnings will come from Valve with receipts and all and you don’t have to proof where and how your “customers” have bought those gift cards. And then once that money is taxed that money is earned legitimately.
You could buy stolen gift cards from another criminal but good chance stores report to their supplier if a batch of cards is stolen and then it gets reported to Valve. And Valve knows which numbers those are. If they see a game getting bought with cards from the same stolen batches and have almost no other sales there is a chance the game gets flagged automatically by their systems and they probably report it to the authorities.
You have given money laundering via making terrible games a suspicious amount of thought.
I mean, one could argue that this is on Steam to manage, and that the way to manage it shouldn’t be “we’ll just keep 30%”. It was Steam who spent an inordinate amount of effort and terrible half-assed attempts automating game curation so they could have fewer people looking at approving games the way other first parties do. If Valve wants to Uberify game distribution they have an onus on moderation and on protecting the developers using their platform.
But that’s irrelevant because nobody needs them to lower their cut to 0%. 20% would be great. 10% would be fantastic. Flipping the current order of things to give more money back to smaller games and keep more money from bigger games would be more than good enough. Whatever arbitrary bar you think would stop this entirely imaginary scheme they could meet and it’d still be an improvement.
Hell, I have never laundered money, but from what I hear out there 30% may not be enough to put a stop to that. That may be a decent return for some squeaky clean money out of Unreal asset flips. Should Valve set their cut to 50%? You know, in the interest of international security?
It’s not that strange a thing to think about. Steam partners have abused the system before creating a fuckton of games just for achievements, trading cards and emoticons. Also Banana
Which is entirely a result of Steam abandoning any human intervention on their curation system, first by trying to crowdsource it and when that didn’t work just opening the floodgates and implementing the lightest possible moderation, social media-style.
So okay, do they want to avoid exploits? Go back to curating the library. That’s how it used to work, it didn’t need to be an automated, hands-free process.
But if you’re going to let everybody upload to it then you are on the hook for the costs of moderation. It’s not a valid excuse to charge more for the privilege of being slotted against shovelware. It’s not a viable argument at all.
From the POV of steam, you want the big releases to happen on your platform and take your cut even if its a bit smaller. In the end people change platforms for the big releases. Its the main reason I haven’t fully switched to GOG yet, it doesn’t have the major releases I want (or gets them late like Kingdom Come Deliverance 2).
You can spread idealism, but I rather stay realistic.
You can’t simultaneously go “it is what it is” when Valve gives big games a better deal to secure their position and be mad that Epic gives games exclusivity deals. It just doesn’t follow. Realistically.
If it free, there is an incentive to release quantity and not quality, it could become a spam problem. I am all for having a lower percentage though, but 0 could be a problem.
But hey, yeah, nobody is advocating a 0% cut for Valve. Epic is doing this because they need to attract developers and most of their money comes from Fortnite anyway, so it’s something they can try.
But Valve has a looot of ground between 0 and 30% and a lot of ways to give back to the developers that built their empire. And I don’t think starting by treating smaller devs as well as they treat major corporations would be a bad start at all.
You are joking, right? The customer support alone (at the level at which it stands, which is very high for Steam) is well worth the price, especially for big players.
I dont think the curve would look like this without valves efforts to push linux, so i am a bit forgiving when it comes to them wanting money to do random research and development. So far they have always been making cool stuff with that money.
They’re constantly making cool, free shit for gamers because valve at its core is a company of gamers - they happen to make a shit ton of money because their passion for gaming ended up delivering a superior product, but it’s that passion that keeps them at the top.
Look at remote play together and family sharing - neither of those concepts help valve sell more games… if anything, they reduce the number of games sold (ie, their entire profit model), but they’re great ideas that make sense… so they spent a bunch of the companies time and money developing them.
Epic will forever be garbage as long as it’s only goal is to dick with steam… and it will always fail because they’re treating steam like a greedy corporation when really, it’s just a bunch of passionate gamers building the toys they wish they had when they were kids.
Steam keeps getting slammed from both sides. They keep getting accused of being a monopoly, , while also getting accused of their rates. But if they drop their rates they get accused of being anticompetitive and monopolistic.
So if they do something similar like Epic, they’ll go back to using their monopoly over the market to keep competitors down.
Sounds like it’s time to play through the free games I got before epic folds like a card table and revokes my access to them.
In a sane world, the library could host the people’s digital store front with no cuts taken from the sales. Gaming is our culture, we should preserve it. We should collectively own it. We should be free to sell the games without a middleman taking a cut.
As long as Fortnite prints money, Tim gets to cosplay as a consumer crusader.
I think both Steam and Epic will let you generate codes to sell your game yourself, but this will attract a shit load of fraudulent credit card sales, and it’s pretty much not worth doing.
At least Valve takes some of the money that they make from Steam and use it for Steam. You cant run an entire gaming platform based on developers alone, you also need to make it at least somewhat bearable for consumers.
Steam takes 30% at first, and there is a discount after tens of millions of dollars in sales.
Steam offers a ton of benefits for game companies through steam, such as the Friends list, reviews, having a way to show live play from the store page, and a bunch of other things. There is a reason that everyone is flocking to steam, and that 30% cut isn’t keeping anyone away.
Plus steam input, remote play, play together, trophies, hell there’s a whole API for you to use to make your game multiplayer and have it integrate with steam friends easily. So much built in for devs lives to be easier.
Just check out steam works. There’s so much for developers
Steam is, in my opinion, way better for the user (even if it may be worse for the developer).
Epic lacks features that are important to me like reviews, the ability to view your library in a browser, warnings about DRM, Linux support, a hole bunch of features to discover games, a workshop, big picture mode.
Additionally, in my experience at least, their official launcher under Windows is a buggy mess compared to steam.
The way Epics reviews work are awful, though. They are trying to be really attractive to developers but they aren’t attractive enough to USERS.
For example, you have to be INVITED to review games on Epic. The system is automated and will occasionally ask for a review after you close a game, assuming you’ve been playing long enough. They claim it’s to avoid things like “review bombing”, but that’s a cop-out to shield bad developers/publishers from the repercussions of their actions (like when Denuvo was non-consensually added to Ghostwire Tokyo a year after release).
Implying review bombing is always warranted is as misguided as it gets. Games regularly get review bombed for something as trivial as having a non-white person for a protagonist.
I don’t disagree that’s a problem, but that is not what I said or implied. That’s the reason Steam has other mechanisms for scoring and scaling reviews. There are plenty of valid reasons for “review bombing” that are organic and natural consequences of developer activity: like adding Denuvo a year after release, adding a launxher or login/account requirement after the fact, etc. Making reviews “invite only” is anti-consumer.
And the thing is… Because Steam is better for the user, it becomes better from the developer. 70% of your game’s Steam revenue will always be bigger than 100% of your Epic revenue. It’s probably bigger than 300% of your Epic revenue. That’s why Steam doesn’t need to buy exclusives or run loss leaders or try to lock you in with “free!” promos. Epic needs to pay developers up front to get them to not go to Steam, because in every case a dual Steam/whatever-else release is better than a whatever-else release. So Epic needs to pay the indie game studio that made a $10 game a million dollars for timed exclusivity, which allows the studio to not worry about losing their Steam revenue from selling 130,000 copies. Then they release it on Steam later anyway.
If it was as simple as “cutting out middlemen” or using cheaper middlemen, devs would just be selling you exe files. CDN costs wouldn’t come close to 30% of revenue, after all. People like buying games on Steam. People buy games on Steam that are cheaper and DRM-free on GOG or Itch. People buy games on Steam that are free downloads like Dwarf Fortress. People buy games on Steam that are free browser pages like Cookie Clicker. Epic wants people to be invested in their “free!” libraries enough to actually be like “oh I mean I’ve got the Epic account, may as well buy this game here because it’s cheaper or more of my money goes to the devs or because it’s a timed exclusive…” And people simply aren’t doing it.
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In this thread a bunch of monopolists tell epic to fuck off so they can keep feeding a monopoly that licenses drm keys to them.
Steam fans are a cult lol. Invested too much money they hate to admit so now they sing it’s praises till they die.
If Steam turns to shit I have no problems reacquiring my collection through Piracy. There is no sunk-cost here. Epic is actively anti-consumer so I refuse to use it.
Can I like and dislike a comment at the same time?
Am just gonna like yours to show my split opinion.
You can’t tell me that if epic somehow wins this war that they won’t immediately enshittify the platform. Valve has my trust.
Correct, nobody can predict the future with accuracy.
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Good job cassie
Steam is a monopoly because it is the only one of these platforms to actually be good.
no, it’s because they had about a 15 year head start. you think steam started the way it is now? it started as a launcher for steam games and it was worse than ubisoft’s launcher.
Also, folks fucking hated it at the jump. Whats wild to me is that Epic could factor in all the lessons Steam learned over near two decades resulting in a relatively equal product, but instead… doesn’t.
eh it’s currently second only to steam imo. and don’t come at me with gog galaxy, it’s absolutely awful, and feels like it’s also abandoned.
GOG doesn’t need a launcher, because the games don’t have DRM. It is just nice to have, in order to keep games up to date.
Steam, Epic, Origin and the Microsoft thing needs a launcher, because DRM. The non-optional part is what is annoying, it is not a choice, if you buy something there, you have to use their launcher software, that needs to run in the background all the time (Sure it doesn’t need to run all the time, but just having to start it in addition to the game, is annoying).
With Steam being the first one to require a launcher, it was annoying at first, but became useful and people started considering it the standard game delivery solution. Now we need another one for Epic and all other stores that peddle DRMified games.
If Epic would be just another store, where you buy and download games, nobody would complain, but Epic created (reinvented) an additional incompatible game delivery solution that required their launcher, that is what people are mostly annoyed about.
If the industry would come together and create a vendor neutral and compatible software and game delivery mechanism, where people are free to choose where to buy their software and games, and with which launcher they want to keep it up to date, that would be awesome, but sadly capitalism favors short sighted, wasteful and monopoly building competition instead of cooperation.
Epic can even beat them if they just improved their store, but they would rather fight other stores so that it would be worse for everyone.
It’s more than the store they need to improve.
They’re not just playing catch-up either.
I am against monopolistic competition practices and that includes exclusivity deals and predatory pricing.
And as far as I know, Epic does this more than Valve or GOG. Granted, Valve doesn’t need to, because they are already the main player, but they also mostly avoided enshittyfication for now.
Granted it is hard to enter a market that is already dominated by another company, but instead of doing those business practices they could offer a better service.
Valve is private and already takes a 30% cut.
It’s not possible for valve OR epic to enshit according to the definition of the word.
Yes. That is rather high, but AFAIK the same on Xbox, PlayStation and GOG. Itch.io is on 10%.
What do you mean by that? Enshittyfication is when companies try to offer a good platform first to reach many content producers and consumers and then, once the consumers and producers depend on the platform, it goes bad for them in order to favor profits of the company owners or stakeholders.
Just because a company is private, it can still change to favor short term money extractions from all their customers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
I don’t really understand what it is I would be wrong about. Is it about the word “shareholders” in the wiki instead of “owners”, what I called them?
Shareholders of a private company is often a small group of individuals or just one person, and they can also be called the owners. “Private” means the shares are not traded publicly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder
epic can have a seat at the table when they actually start competing with valve in terms of features and customer service.
I guess I don’t understand Epic’s model. How is Epic different from Steam in this regard?
Unreal Engine could’ve got us, like, Unreal Tournament. It almost did, in fact, it a little.
Die in eternal fire Epic
Cool
Epic Games store and Tim Sweeney are both still peices of shit.
Honestly, I completely forgot I had Epic installed on my PC
They’re so desperate to make their store front a thing 😂
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Games that need a third party app to run on Linux
They understand that devs are in steam because it’s where users are. Do you think they are stupid? There is no much they can do to bring users if there are no games, they are 15-20 years behind Steam in years of existence.
Screwed over is what they get
I just deny the existence of any game that is an Epic Games exclusive title.
So true. All they have to do is WAY FUCKING MORE THAN THEY ARE WILLING TO.
Fuck Epic
Fortnite kids will sustain them. Gotta darken those patterns just a little…
That’s pretty cool, actually. Sorely needed in the current economic climate. Good for them.
I wish their software and platform were a lot better to go along with this, but in isolation this is great.
How many layoffs does that take? /s
TBH I haven’t seen evidence that layoffs generate capital. It just fudges cost to revenue ratios to emulate quarterly gains in hopes of appeasing shareholders.
Yeah yeah, what about making the EGS program not suck for customers? An overglorified browser running on top of unreal engine, no user reviews for games…
The no user reviews is a terrible choice. I don’t understand why they wouldn’t have them. Maybe they’re afraid of spam on Fortnite. But I can’t imagine reviews on Fortnite would matter all that much.
Steam really needs something like this. Even the first 100k would be a great start for boosting indie devs.
Instead they do the opposite and reward the big players.
I think ideally the first xk should have somethong like 10% since there’s still payment processing fees and such. After that have 30% then go down on huge amount of sales (to keep the big boys happy and on steam)
Why do you want to keep “the big boys” happy?
I mean, if you’re Gabe then I get it. If you have a spare yacht call me, let’s talk.
But if you’re not, then… what’s the reasoning there?
Not me, but i do want steam to stay the main game platform, if the alternative is epic games. That means you want to keep big studios on the platform.
On the other hand the vast majority of the money that valve makes comes from indie games, not big studios.
My go-to is GoG, but I definitely want Steam to lose some market share in favor of literally anybody else. I will worry about moving that extra share towards GoG when the market isn’t a full on monopoly.
But hey, yeah, stop using Steam and go to Gog whenever you can. You heard it here first. DRM-free software should be your first choice.
GOG and Itch are both great services. Epic is run by a psychopath and working hard to create the walled garden they themselves have been railing against. That’s why EGS can go to hell but I’ll gladly buy from the others.
I do not know or care about the personality or intentions of any of the executives in these corporations. Pick your variety of libertarian tech billionaire, I don’t intend to root for any of them.
This is a Godzilla “let them fight” moment where in my ideal scenario none of these people would have this amount of money or control over other people’s work, but since that’s the world we live in, them being in competition benefits me down the line, so I don’t want any one of them to get away with the whole thing.
Reminder that the world’s biggest money makers in PC gaming are not on Steam.
Minecraft isn’t (it’s on Microsoft Store and a stand-alone web store), Fortnite isn’t (it’s EGS exclusive), Roblox isn’t (its own store), League of Legends and Valorant aren’t (Riot Launcher and EGS),…
Yeah.
And that’s a fantastic showcase of the bar you need to hit to not be effectively toiling in the Steam mines. Assassin’s Creed, FIFA, Call of Duty? Not big enough. Still have to deal with Steam.
It takes being significantly bigger than the entire Epic store to even consider not doing Steam on PC. And none of those is even close to having a viable platform for third party releases outside of Epic, which is perhaps the last one standing on that front and currently not managing to get a foothold. And judging by the rabid fanboy backlash anytime they try to do something nice to attract devs, not even finding a path towards one at any point in the future, either.
That’s a bad look for competition on the PC market. There aren’t that many Fortnites or Minecrafts coming in the future. Gaming investment is drying up and gaming is becoming a cash business, rather than an investment business. And the cash flows to Valve.
They don’t have to. OK, maybe Microsoft has to because they are the actual monopolist and making the Activision Blizzard franchises available on storefronts other than Microsoft’s own is to keep the watchdogs away.
Also, none of the franchises are exclusive to Steam, so Steam has no monopoly.
That sentence makes no sense. Fortnite is exclusive to EGS, therefore it cannot be “significantly bigger than the entire Epic store”.
Steam has no policies that forbid offering games on other stores, Epic has policies that makes certain games timed exclusives to EGS.
What makes EGS unattractive compared to Steam is the simple fact that Epic chooses to most prominently display their own games on EGS. Valve does front page banners, fests, that window that opens with every Steam launch, etc. and goes out of their way to make everything from big launches as well as solo dev indie games discoverable.
Epic has it in their own hands to make EGS more than the Fortnite launcher. They could promote other EGS games inside Fortnite but they don’t. They host concerts inside Fortnite but nothing to promote 3rd party EGS games, for examle.
USD 45 billion overall PC gaming revenue and all of Steam combined is 8.6bn. “And the cash flows to Valve”? Sure…
Naw, each time I buy on gog over steam I end up regretting it for some reason, usually related to modding or portability.
Gogs great, but has limitations. With steam everything works better.
Until it doesnt and your entire game library is done…
For generic SteamWorks integration, there already exists a open source DLL called Goldberg Emulator. If publishers opt for real DRM, the games are not available on GOG anyway.
Also, downloading and backing up the games have to be done by yourself before the storefront goes bust. Distributing GOG games outside of GOG is a copyright violation, unless the copyright holders explicitly allow it.
So, to sum up: You can backup DRM-free Steam games and make them work with little effort.
This is definitely not the case. Big studios price their games higher and sell more copies. There are only a handful of indie games like Stardew Valley and Terraria that come close to being in the same spot of the bell curve. Most of Valve’s money comes from microtransactions in the longest-running live services and the biggest games of the year.
Ah yeah my bad its the number of sales where indie games win. In terms of money its almost 50/50 tho. People are sick and tired of expensive garbage games and that shows in the drastic changes in revenue from 2023-2024.
Ofcourse if you include in game costs, then it probably changes again.
Be careful not to make the data fit your conclusion. Anecdotally, I’ve observed a similar sentiment, but for one thing, AAA releases have slowed down due to long development times, so there just aren’t that many of them in a given year. For another, we know that, by a wide margin, most time spent gaming is only on a handful of mainstay games that first debuted years ago, like Counter-Strike 2, Grand Theft Auto V, Fortnite, Minecraft, etc. Plenty of those aren’t on Steam, but the same concept applies to the games that top the Steam charts.
Cause that would probably get abused for things like money laundering, since Steam is open for everyone who wants to sell a game unlike Epic’s store where you get vetted. You can just set up a shell corp that releases shitty shovelware and buy the game from yourself with steam cards you bought from the store with your dirty cash. And then you’d get all your money back ready to be taxed and laundered.
Couldn’t you just like… sell those stolen gift cards on G2A, Kinguin and such instead? You wouldn’t have the 100 euro posting game fee + needing to have it checked and such.
I’m not talking about stolen gift cards. The goal of money laundering is to move dirty cash from the criminal underworld into lawful society. Selling stolen gift cards on G2A doesn’t help with that. You want to create proof for the tax man that the money you earn comes from a legitimate source. If you sell stolen gift card you don’t have a paper trail for where you have sourced those cards. It’s suspicious. And selling cards on G2A you buy with your dirty cash from a legit store is still suspicious since you still have to proof if the money you used to buy those cards was earned legitimately.
If you buy gift cards with your dirty cash at a store and then pretend to be a customer by buying your own game you have created a money paper trail for the tax man since your earnings will come from Valve with receipts and all and you don’t have to proof where and how your “customers” have bought those gift cards. And then once that money is taxed that money is earned legitimately.
You could buy stolen gift cards from another criminal but good chance stores report to their supplier if a batch of cards is stolen and then it gets reported to Valve. And Valve knows which numbers those are. If they see a game getting bought with cards from the same stolen batches and have almost no other sales there is a chance the game gets flagged automatically by their systems and they probably report it to the authorities.
You have given money laundering via making terrible games a suspicious amount of thought.
I mean, one could argue that this is on Steam to manage, and that the way to manage it shouldn’t be “we’ll just keep 30%”. It was Steam who spent an inordinate amount of effort and terrible half-assed attempts automating game curation so they could have fewer people looking at approving games the way other first parties do. If Valve wants to Uberify game distribution they have an onus on moderation and on protecting the developers using their platform.
But that’s irrelevant because nobody needs them to lower their cut to 0%. 20% would be great. 10% would be fantastic. Flipping the current order of things to give more money back to smaller games and keep more money from bigger games would be more than good enough. Whatever arbitrary bar you think would stop this entirely imaginary scheme they could meet and it’d still be an improvement.
Hell, I have never laundered money, but from what I hear out there 30% may not be enough to put a stop to that. That may be a decent return for some squeaky clean money out of Unreal asset flips. Should Valve set their cut to 50%? You know, in the interest of international security?
That was a serious reach, friend.
It’s not that strange a thing to think about. Steam partners have abused the system before creating a fuckton of games just for achievements, trading cards and emoticons. Also Banana
Which is entirely a result of Steam abandoning any human intervention on their curation system, first by trying to crowdsource it and when that didn’t work just opening the floodgates and implementing the lightest possible moderation, social media-style.
So okay, do they want to avoid exploits? Go back to curating the library. That’s how it used to work, it didn’t need to be an automated, hands-free process.
But if you’re going to let everybody upload to it then you are on the hook for the costs of moderation. It’s not a valid excuse to charge more for the privilege of being slotted against shovelware. It’s not a viable argument at all.
From the POV of steam, you want the big releases to happen on your platform and take your cut even if its a bit smaller. In the end people change platforms for the big releases. Its the main reason I haven’t fully switched to GOG yet, it doesn’t have the major releases I want (or gets them late like Kingdom Come Deliverance 2).
You can spread idealism, but I rather stay realistic.
Yeah, but I’m not in the POV of Steam.
I’m in my POV.
You can’t simultaneously go “it is what it is” when Valve gives big games a better deal to secure their position and be mad that Epic gives games exclusivity deals. It just doesn’t follow. Realistically.
If it free, there is an incentive to release quantity and not quality, it could become a spam problem. I am all for having a lower percentage though, but 0 could be a problem.
You think the current cut Steam is taking…
… is preventing shovelware spam?
Have you been on Steam this decade?
But hey, yeah, nobody is advocating a 0% cut for Valve. Epic is doing this because they need to attract developers and most of their money comes from Fortnite anyway, so it’s something they can try.
But Valve has a looot of ground between 0 and 30% and a lot of ways to give back to the developers that built their empire. And I don’t think starting by treating smaller devs as well as they treat major corporations would be a bad start at all.
20% is still way too fucking high for little more than just hosting the games.
The hosting part is like the smallest portion of what valve does.
You are joking, right? The customer support alone (at the level at which it stands, which is very high for Steam) is well worth the price, especially for big players.
I dont think the curve would look like this without valves efforts to push linux, so i am a bit forgiving when it comes to them wanting money to do random research and development. So far they have always been making cool stuff with that money.
They’re constantly making cool, free shit for gamers because valve at its core is a company of gamers - they happen to make a shit ton of money because their passion for gaming ended up delivering a superior product, but it’s that passion that keeps them at the top.
Look at remote play together and family sharing - neither of those concepts help valve sell more games… if anything, they reduce the number of games sold (ie, their entire profit model), but they’re great ideas that make sense… so they spent a bunch of the companies time and money developing them.
Epic will forever be garbage as long as it’s only goal is to dick with steam… and it will always fail because they’re treating steam like a greedy corporation when really, it’s just a bunch of passionate gamers building the toys they wish they had when they were kids.
Steam keeps getting slammed from both sides. They keep getting accused of being a monopoly, , while also getting accused of their rates. But if they drop their rates they get accused of being anticompetitive and monopolistic.
So if they do something similar like Epic, they’ll go back to using their monopoly over the market to keep competitors down.
Oh hell yeah. This shit crazy good
The desperation looks good on you Epic
Sounds like it’s time to play through the free games I got before epic folds like a card table and revokes my access to them.
In a sane world, the library could host the people’s digital store front with no cuts taken from the sales. Gaming is our culture, we should preserve it. We should collectively own it. We should be free to sell the games without a middleman taking a cut.
As long as Fortnite prints money, Tim gets to cosplay as a consumer crusader.
I think both Steam and Epic will let you generate codes to sell your game yourself, but this will attract a shit load of fraudulent credit card sales, and it’s pretty much not worth doing.
I don’t have an issue with a platform taking a small cut, but the 30% steam takes is ridiculous.
At least Valve takes some of the money that they make from Steam and use it for Steam. You cant run an entire gaming platform based on developers alone, you also need to make it at least somewhat bearable for consumers.
So what does Steam’s revenue share look like in comparison?
Steam takes 30% at first, and there is a discount after tens of millions of dollars in sales.
Steam offers a ton of benefits for game companies through steam, such as the Friends list, reviews, having a way to show live play from the store page, and a bunch of other things. There is a reason that everyone is flocking to steam, and that 30% cut isn’t keeping anyone away.
Plus steam input, remote play, play together, trophies, hell there’s a whole API for you to use to make your game multiplayer and have it integrate with steam friends easily. So much built in for devs lives to be easier.
Just check out steam works. There’s so much for developers
https://partner.steamgames.com/
User base and brand loyalty
Nothing about what Valve does but you can’t afford to not be on Steam even though it’s the inferior product
That’s why EOS works with any platform
Steam is, in my opinion, way better for the user (even if it may be worse for the developer).
Epic lacks features that are important to me like reviews, the ability to view your library in a browser, warnings about DRM, Linux support, a hole bunch of features to discover games, a workshop, big picture mode.
Additionally, in my experience at least, their official launcher under Windows is a buggy mess compared to steam.
EGS has reviews as far as I can tell. I still think Steam is better, but this is a welcome move out of them. Competition is a good thing
Edit: downvoted for pointing out that EGS has reviews. Y’all are weird lol
The way Epics reviews work are awful, though. They are trying to be really attractive to developers but they aren’t attractive enough to USERS.
For example, you have to be INVITED to review games on Epic. The system is automated and will occasionally ask for a review after you close a game, assuming you’ve been playing long enough. They claim it’s to avoid things like “review bombing”, but that’s a cop-out to shield bad developers/publishers from the repercussions of their actions (like when Denuvo was non-consensually added to Ghostwire Tokyo a year after release).
Implying review bombing is always warranted is as misguided as it gets. Games regularly get review bombed for something as trivial as having a non-white person for a protagonist.
I don’t disagree that’s a problem, but that is not what I said or implied. That’s the reason Steam has other mechanisms for scoring and scaling reviews. There are plenty of valid reasons for “review bombing” that are organic and natural consequences of developer activity: like adding Denuvo a year after release, adding a launxher or login/account requirement after the fact, etc. Making reviews “invite only” is anti-consumer.
I was talking about written reviews, not just a like/dislike (star) system
And the thing is… Because Steam is better for the user, it becomes better from the developer. 70% of your game’s Steam revenue will always be bigger than 100% of your Epic revenue. It’s probably bigger than 300% of your Epic revenue. That’s why Steam doesn’t need to buy exclusives or run loss leaders or try to lock you in with “free!” promos. Epic needs to pay developers up front to get them to not go to Steam, because in every case a dual Steam/whatever-else release is better than a whatever-else release. So Epic needs to pay the indie game studio that made a $10 game a million dollars for timed exclusivity, which allows the studio to not worry about losing their Steam revenue from selling 130,000 copies. Then they release it on Steam later anyway.
If it was as simple as “cutting out middlemen” or using cheaper middlemen, devs would just be selling you exe files. CDN costs wouldn’t come close to 30% of revenue, after all. People like buying games on Steam. People buy games on Steam that are cheaper and DRM-free on GOG or Itch. People buy games on Steam that are free downloads like Dwarf Fortress. People buy games on Steam that are free browser pages like Cookie Clicker. Epic wants people to be invested in their “free!” libraries enough to actually be like “oh I mean I’ve got the Epic account, may as well buy this game here because it’s cheaper or more of my money goes to the devs or because it’s a timed exclusive…” And people simply aren’t doing it.