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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[–] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 33 points 1 year ago (30 children)

You know you made a really interesting point that they marketed to the sellers not the ultimate customers. I hadn't really picked up on that before, but it does mitigate what should be a healthy dose of competition by altering the target audience a bit.

[–] hh93@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago (10 children)

I mean that's the same side that steam is using their monopoly for, too

For the users it's definitely the most relaxed option - but as a developer if you choose to not put up with steams 30% rule you are fucked.

The fact that pretty much immediately after epic gained traction steam announced cheaper rates for bigger publishers tells you that they definitely are aware of how 30% is too much

Personally that's why I buy all my games on gog if possible even though I have a Steamdeck and that makes stuff more complicated.

People denying steam has a monopoly are probably also denying other fundamental truths that would imply that they had to change their lifestyle (climate change anyone?)

[–] Chailles@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

You say that as if Steam has unreasonably high rates. Sony, Microsoft, Apple as a standard all have the same rate.

[–] wicked@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, those are all unreasonably high, which is why they have so many billions of dollars in profit. The cost of running their services is a pittance compared to their revenues.

[–] Nefyedardu@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is it surprising to you that Valve is a for-profit company, not a charity? Of course they profit from the 30%. Just like with any other product, you charge based on what people are willing to pay. If you charge too much, people won't pay for the product and you have to readjust the price. Obviously since companies are willing to pay the 30%, it must not be too high. Somehow I doubt if the people complaining about this woke up as the CEO of Valve, they would be willing to massively cut their companies profits because... why? Just to be nice to a bunch of other corporations?

[–] wicked@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No, of course it's not surprising that they're not a charity. Sure, the big app stores exploit their near-monopolies with exorbitant fees.

Good for Apple, Valve and Google, but I think it's better that game dev studios and app developers get money instead. However, devs don't currently have a real choice but to pay up.

Competition can change that, so we should support technically worse stores like Epic so developers will not have to pay their unreasonably high fees.

[–] Nefyedardu@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

"Exploit their near-monopolies". Except Valve doesn't "exploit" their near monopoly, I don't see Valve buying exclusives do you? They just provide a better product. Most importantly, they provide a better product then piracy. That is the bare minimum a games store on PC needs to reach and Epic does not reach that. Epic isn't failing because of Steam, it's failing because why buy a $60 game on a featureless store that launches an .exe for me when I can just download the .exe directly for free? If Epic wanted to provide a better product, they have billions of dollars and hundreds of devs to make that happen. They just choose not to.

but I think it’s better that game dev studios and app developers get money instead.

This tired old argument... There's absolutely no evidence that the extra money these companies get from the Epic cut doesn't just go straight into a Bobby Kotick yacht or some shit. There's a lot of grubby hands in-between the store platform and the actual dev teams and maybe I'm cynical but this "trickle-down" model of economics seems kind of far fetched.

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