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Dusk Developer David Szymanski: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly (twitter.com)

submitted 1 year ago by Carighan@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world

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If I'm honest, I don't disagree.

I would love for Steam to have **actual competition. Which is difficult, sure, but you could run a slightly less feature-rich store, take less of a cut, and pass the reduction fully on to consumers and you'd be an easy choice for many gamers.

But that's not what Epic is after. They tried to go hard after the sellers, figuring that if they can corner enough fo the market with exclusives the buyers will have to come. But they underestimated that even their nigh-infinite coffers struggle to keep up with the raw amount of games releasing, and also the unpredictability of the indie market where you can't really know what to buy as an exclusive.
Nevermind that buying one is a good way to make it forgotten.

So yeah, fully agreed. Compared to Epic, I vastly prefer Steam's 30% cut. As the consumer I pay the same anyways, and Steam offers lots of stuff for it like forums, a client that boots before the heat death of the universe, in-house streaming, library sharing, cloud sync that sometimes works.

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[-] HughJanus@lemmy.ml 43 points 1 year ago

Epic only has a lower cut because they're leveraging their undoubtedly massive Chinese investments to gain market share. You can rest assured they would charge 30% if they could.

I don't like that Steam or Apple or Google charge 30%. I think it's absurd. But also Valve is basically a saint compared to every modern corporation so I don't think twice about it.

[-] MeanEYE@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

While 30% is high it seems developers consider it acceptable since number of games Steam releases is not reducing. Any one of those developers can decide not to publish on steam and go that way, but in the end I think Valve's service offers so much exposure that it's worth considering.

Getting 100% of 1000 sales is not the same amount of money as getting 70% of 30000 sales, especially when it's a digital distribution where copying bytes costs nothing. Steam also offers bunch of other services as well, things like networking, cloud saves, streaming and similar all of which cost money to maintain.

[-] HughJanus@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

While 30% is high it seems developers consider it acceptable since number of games Steam releases is not reducing.

Yeah that's not how that works. Acceptable or not, if you want to sell your games, they have to be on Steam because that's where people are buying them.

[-] MeanEYE@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

That's the whole point. If people prefer to buy it on Steam, then that's it. Forcing people to move away to other store due to exclusive deals and similar means only making people with money more annoyed and more inconvenienced.

[-] HughJanus@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

Your "point" is shit. Backing people into a corner and then claiming that your choice is "acceptable" because they didn't go somewhere else is bullshit.