this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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Steam is just perfect at keeping the gamers behind them as they are only assholes behind doors to the Devs on their platform.
30% is an absurd cut for a store that has such a monopoly that if you don't release there your game is pretty much cancelled even if you release at your own store without DRM and with additional goodies (Looking at GOG and The Witcher - they released the Gwent standalone like a year later on steam because it didn't sell at all on GOG and then it apparently outsold the GOG version without a week)
People are just too lazy and Steam is keeping them happy enough to not bother looking another way.
Epic isn't a good guy in any case but the exclusive deals on AAA Games they do is probably the only way to get someone to buy the game there instead of Steam
Correct! Minecraft would never have been successful if not for Steam!
An outlier makes systemic problems disappear.
Or league, or WOW, or BF4, BF1, overwatch, fortnite, genshin...
A short list of the biggest fucking games in half a dozen genres. Do you know what an outlier is? There's not just the one.
As a direct comparison: Fortnite probably installed a lot of Android copies outside the Play Store. But surely 99.9% of Android games are still installed through the Play Store. No matter how hard any particular ultra-popular game could have gone, the reality for an overwhelming majority of cases is that being outside that one store is death.
I know we happen to be a minority, but given how much valve has done for linux gaming, I'm happy to vote and support them with my wallet.
For reference, before they started giving a good linux experience I didn't buy games for more than 15 years, so is not like the game developers were going to get 100% of the money I'm paying for games now, the choice is to get 70% or nothing because I wouldn't play their games. Not only that, if the proton compatibility layer fails, I'm very confident that steam's refund policy has my back, again, without this policy I wouldn't buy games.
Remember, not everyone is you, and not everyone plays games the way you do.
I recently moved my main desktop to Linux (everything else has been for a long time), and - aside from some problems with Wayland (due to NVidia) - everything has just worked. Every game I've played has been working flawlessly. They've been doing an amazing job with Proton.
This is me too. I'd moved away from PC gaming completely when I dropped Windows from my PCs back during the XP era. The Steam Deck has brought me back though. I really like the experience, and I get a kickass Linux handheld PC for a great price.
I've stayed with Windows just because of that, but I can't think of any games I regularly play that haven't worked on my steam deck.
30% is the cut only if the sale happens on Steam itself. Devs can sell keys through other means and Valve gets 0%.
An offer made generously because they know it won't matter. They're basically a monopoly.
75% is not "basically a monopoly", especially not when there are so many other ways to buy and sell games. Plenty of games have been incredibly successful without ever being on Steam.
They have an overwhelming majority that makes assorted competitors individually irrelevant. Jesus, do I hate having to say "they have an overwhelming majority that makes assorted competitors individually irrelevant," just because people get in a snit about the word "monopoly."
You know Standard Oil didn't own all the oil - right? They peaked around 85% of sales. They had many competitors. Those competitors did not matter.
For every game that's done well outside Steam, there's ten that eventually came to Steam and sold massively better than before. That jump is the power Steam wields. That is why we regulate competition, beyond 'do competitors exist.'
The barrier to entry is a huge concern on whether something should be considered a monopoly or not. Extracting and refining oil is nowhere near the same as selling your videogame online. Today the barrier of entry for digital distribution incredibly low.
And yet: 75%.
They can hand out keys with no strings attached, and it does not matter.
It definitely does matter. Some games effectively pay Valve about 15%, which basically nullifies Sweeneys whining since it's roughly the same they'd pay on the Epic store.
You're right about Steam being the dominant game store, but the narrative around it is all wrong. Steam offers far more functionality for their cut than any other competitor could even come close to.
Only for companies as big as Epic.
For the overwhelming majority of developers: it's 30%. Keys sell, but who's buying?
Steam's primary functionality is its market share. They could do a lot less and nothing would change. They stay big because they are big.
The epic games store user experience is awful. Exclusives are awful. I have zero reason to ever use it except for if I’d been taking advantage of the countless free games they’ve been giving away.
Steam offers a service, hosting downloads and all the backend for friends/multiplayer connectivity/etc isn’t free. If you’re big enough to not need that(minecraft), good for you! Otherwise, it’s clearly difficult to make a launcher/game platform that doesn’t suck ass(uplay/origin/etc) - sorry that steam is just better than any alternative right now.
You say that like we are making any kind of sacrifice by using steam. I used Epic and Xbox Gamepass or whatever on PC for like a year or two but stopped using either because the steam experience is just better and the exclusives weren't worth changing.
I will buy from other storefronts if the deal is good, I have bought plenty from GOG. Epic are just anti-consumer and I refuse to support that store.
Steam just offers peace of mind with refunds and the feature set they provide is next to none, I haven't been given a reason to look elsewhere primarily.
That's exactly why they take 30%. Because having your game on Steam is a huge deal. Because Steam is very popular and lucrative. Because it's well-made and useful. Little Timmy wants to skip to having a popular and lucrative platform without first doing the step of making it well-made and useful.
The exclusive on epic game store is a cancer that should not exist. And epic should remove their parody of launcher from existence because they somehow managed to make this a cancer too.
It seems you think some of that is valve's fault.
The 30% is.
What, did a wizard curse this number upon them? Gaben could say "make it twenty" with a shrug, and it'd be done by close-of-business.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/why-valve-actually-gets-less-than-30-percent-of-steam-game-sales/