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.
Can I like and dislike a comment at the same time?
Sounds like it’s time to play through the free games I got before epic folds like a card table and revoked 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.
I don’t have an issue with a platform taking a small cut, but the 30% steam takes is ridiculous.
… and it still won’t dent Steam’s de-facto monopoly.
I would rather buy a game on steam, or better yet on gog, than giving my money to a company that is trying to make store exclusive games a thing.
So you want to give steam exclusive access to your money because epic wants it? Genius move, really. This won’t go badly for you in the next decade.
Yes, because they still allow you to spend your money elsewhere if a new storefront appears on the market. Epic is actively preventing that.
And yet, still, they can go fuck themselves.
Cool, still fuck em though
How are they affording this? It can’t be a sustainable model, right?
Here’s the details on the financials
https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/exclusive-the-numbers-behind-epics
They’d been paying a fortune for other ways to get more titles which never panned out. Steam said fuck the little guys so they’re trying to capitalize on that right now.
Fortnite, and it’s not. The store loses them hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
That’s the kind of competition I want. Not a plucky newcomer with fresh ideas, but an industry titan able to burn more money than some companies ever see in an attempt to undercut the competition. They surely aren’t factoring this as a deficit to recoup when they pull a massive reversal after securing market dominance. That’s never happened in the history of capitalism.
Epic can huff my huffables.
Dont they also get royalties from Unreal Engine?
Easy. On EGS most games don’t sell at all, so 0% of $0 is still $0. They get most of their money from Fortnite.
How many layoffs does that take? /s
I have to give it to Valve, their marketing team is really good.
Do they even have one? I thought it’s rare situation when the product speaks for itself.
I assume they mostly just do Steam sale and store organization stuff these days. Maybe they were involved with the SteamDeck but I mostly saw word of mouth for that.
Right?! Nobody ever talks about all the kids they got addicted to gambling. Bang up job, there.
Yeah, lmfao, one of my friends literally only wants to play cs2 because of the free weekly items… It seems that games with elements of gambling always do better than those without it
Is this an apology for the bad performance issues of UE5?
The desperation looks good on you Epic
Unreal Engine could’ve got us, like, Unreal Tournament. It almost did, in fact, it a little.
Die in eternal fire Epic
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%.
20% is still way too fucking high for little more than just hosting the games.
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.
Steam keeps getting slammed from both sides. They keep getting accused of being a monopoly, , while also getting accused of their rates.
…those are not different sides? The only reason they can charge such absurd rates is because of their position in the marketplace.
What they had been charging was about what other stores have been charging. Do you think a company that was by far in the lead over other stores dropping their prices further wouldn’t increase their user base even further, making it even harder for competition? They already have active legal cases against them for monopolizing.
What they had been charging was about what other stores have been charging.
When they have absolute monopoly.
Nintendo charges that much because only Nintendo provides Switch software.
Microsoft charges that much because only Microsoft provides Xbox software.
Sony charges that much because only Sony provides Playstation software.
Apple charges that much because only Apple provides iOS software… despite the EU’s best efforts.
Steam and Android act like they’re the only store that matters, for their platform. And it works. Because they are.
Steams competitors are mostly GOG and Epic Games…
What they had been charging was about what other stores have been charging
It’s not what Epic charges.
Do you think a company that was by far in the lead over other stores dropping their prices further wouldn’t increase their user base even further, making it even harder for competition?
No one would care if they were a monopoly and also charged less than everyone else. Pretty much every monopoly discussion revolves almost entirely around their absurd commission rates.
No it doesn’t. Do you think GOG and Epic Games want Steam to undercut their rates because they can annihilate them in volume? Steam may not answer back at epics first million $ rate cut because Steam kind of needs them as competition.
Epic only does it because they know they’re the underdog. If that were to one day become untrue they would never do anything like this again.
I mean, yeah.
You sorta figured out competition in marketplaces.
Hey, I’m a social democrat. I’m all for intervening in markets, but for commodity entertainment products competition works pretty well, as you just explained.
And steam doesn’t do it at all.
One approach is objectively better for the little guys than the other.
Sure, I’m just saying Epic is not any better than Valve in that regard. They’re just in a different position.
They will continue doing it if they need to compete. Capitalism working as intended. Who would’ve thought
Sure, I’m just saying Epic is not any better than Valve in that regard. They’re just in a different position. It wouldn’t make financial sense for Steam to do something like that.
Of course. They’re both just companies
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
I definitely want Steam to lose some market share
I want them to have some competition…
Yeah. I mean, same thing.
The point is you ideally want multiple players in the PC market competing with each other on features and approach that are all viable, sustainable and give users and developers a better deal as middlemen.
I don’t want Steam to go away, it’s an insanely good client and a great piece of software. But I don’t want every game having to be on Steam no matter what and only doing GoG or Epic or Xbox if they are being given a deal or for ideological reasons.
Valve is the only one in PC gaming to push an alternative operating system to Windows.
EGS, GOG,… all enforce a Windows hegemony. GOG Galaxy isn’t even available on Linux, despite the fact that it’s built on cross platform frameworks that make porting easy. Proton by Valve is open source and GOG Galaxy would be free to integrate it.
Heroic Launcher is a community effort that shows that it would be possible without massive investments. Epic and GOG/CD Project just chose not to.
I like GoG but they don’t support Linux, they don’t take a smaller cut, and developers are free to submit their games to Steam without DRM.
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.
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.
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 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.
Do they officially support Linux yet? No heroic doesn’t count.
Do they officially support Linux yet?
Unreal Engine has official Linux support since ages. Unreal Engine running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux is what movie CGI creators often use these days. It’s a highly lucrative market they’re not going to give up.
Epic Online Services supports Linux as well: https://dev.epicgames.com/docs/epic-online-services/eos-get-started/platform-support (which includes Easy Anti Cheat)
So when Fortnite and Rocket League have no Linux versions, it’s just because of lack of will, not anything technological.
They do not, and never will.
“Bite my shiny metal ass, penguins!”
~ Epic CEO (paraphrased)
GOG also doesn’t support Linux. And I’m not gonna hold that against Epic if I don’t hold it against GOG.
Here’s a different take, as a game dev:
Epic actual employs quite a few people who work with Linux. The Unreal engine (and even, to a certain degree, editor) has native support for Linux.
The reasons they’re not including Linux support in their store front are two fold:
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There aren’t enough pure Linux users to matter, and whatever percentage of their userbase would use Linux isn’t going to be large enough to make a dent[1].
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The only serious Linux user base in gaming relates to the Steam Deck, a product that pushes a rival (and the dominant) store front.
While Valve’s move to push Linux gaming is brilliant for us gamers, it also kind of cements us in their camp.
There is absolutely no reason for Epic to support Linux in anyway, and it absolutely supports their bottom line to attack it.
And, no, it isn’t because of any David v. Goliath tale of a little guy standing up to a brute: it’s because a fellow giant has decided to ally itself with Linux, and all of us have - invariably - been shuffled into their camp.
I think the Epic Games Store has a place in this world as a niche storefront with limited visibility but higher access to sales profits as a result of that.
They’ll never grow to the size of Steam, and that’s okay. The largest storefront in the world supports Linux not just on its platform, but by developing tools for everyone that makes Linux gaming viable. That is enough, IMO.
~[1] Edit: I was throwing around a made up 0.1% number earlier to indicate what I thought the number’d be - wasn’t meant to be factual, and was poorly worded, so I removed that.~
There is absolutely no reason for Epic to support Linux in anyway
Except for the fact that their entire technology stack already supports it and making Linux versions of their games is a compilation step away. Their Tencent buddies at One-Notebook would surely make a OneXPlayer with EpicOS. “Comes with Fortnite and get free games each week”.
They’ll never grow to the size of Steam, and that’s okay.
EGS has a massive installed base because of Fortnite.
It’s not about how easy it is to compile, my first point in my original comment was that they actively maintain an engine for Linux.
The install base is too low right now. Hopefully as our numbers grow we’ll have enough market impact to warrant pushing other store fronts.
Fortnite is great for Epic, but their debacle with Apple kind of proved that one popular game isn’t enough to push the public off one store front onto another.
2 is only true because they refuse to support it, and it’s going to be great to see them walk back everything they said once it’s too late. More handhelds are going to launch with official steamOS support, and a new batch of steam machines will come eventually, with a much better support.
In the same way they tell how to side load an apk in android, they can could tell you how to install heroic on the deck.
Hell, through 10-20 K to heroic and they will make it for you simple.
Where are you getting 0.1%? According to Steam Hardware Survey Linux is over 2% of Steam Users. This puts Linux way ahead of Mac which supported by Epic
TBH what matter more is revenue. Apple users always pay more
Totally made up, I don’t know what % of Epic Games users would play on Linux if given the chance.
I’m editing my original message, sorry about that!
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This goes along with their 0% engine fees, only surprising thing is that this wasn’t always in place
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
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).
