It does suck, but I think the only thing Tim Epic can do is to fix his own store.
I loathe Epic Store but I wish there was better competition to Steam. They definitely offer better cuts for devs but I think they still need to understand what makes Steam popular the way that it is. There’s a huge social media aspect, proton, bigger picture with the controller support…
We are in a very delicate situation where Valve can do whatever they want. They can suddenly decide to start making steam worse for users, adding more ads than we already have and we won’t be able to do anything, because in the end we don’t really own anything we have there.
Edit: many typos lol
The competition for Steam is GoG as it is effectively the only platform to offer you something Steam doesn’t.
gog has always been so anal about linux though, that it kind of feels like a epic games to me. you can’t have a platform ran on drm free games, and then when people want to play them on linux (the “drm free” platform), they ignore and alienate them.
How has it been anal about Linux? Are we talking Galaxy? The launcher is pretty butt and it’s better to just download the games directly and then they can be run with proton because of the lack of DRM.
Generally Steam does a lot more, especially for linux but GoG is the only store offering DRM free as the default.
I always forget GoG exists lol
What do they offer that steam doesn’t? Old games?
There’s other things but mostly the lack of DRM.
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There’s a lot of stuff from Sweeny I disagree with, but I don’t think he’s wrong on this.
Yep, as much as I benefit from valve’s push on Linux, I know it’s not out of the kindness of their hearts, it’s out of self preservation.
I would gladly use epic’s store if it gave devs more of the profits, but it’s just incredibly immature. Basic options are missing, and it doesn’t support Linux. I can try to work around their shortcomings as much as possible using bottles and proton, but eventually I can’t play their games due to their invasive anti-cheat. On top of that, they seem to be building a walled garden of micro transactions that’s just a worse version of NFTs. They really don’t want me as a customer, and I’m not going to argue.
Wrong with what? 30% cut? It seems a lot, but from the greater distance I don’t think it’s that much.
Developers do get great benefits from this. The game is downloadable at any time with great speeds everywhere in the world. They get steam workshop for mods, free forums, reviews, steamplay, proton, friendlists with super easy game invites, … and all this is basically free advertisment for developer.
Now what does Epic offer in this regard? Nothing.
I think many folks are too young to remember before the Internet when everything was published through retail stores. Publishers took big risks paying for advance copies of games to be produced and shipped, and developers typically got less than 70% all told.
When steam came out 30% and you didn’t need to print advance copies, or deal with retail channels, it was a huge win.
Now, the world has changed, but so has steam. Steam has continued to introduce features, sales based % tiers, grown the community, push Linux development, push VR, etc. they also go out of their way to support their devices and make them user repairable.
In any other sector people would be bitching about not having a pro customer option, and yet in this market we get a bunch of non-developers bitching about the revenue split from the best game store other than GoG.
It boggles the mind.
A bigger cut for developers would be nice if mostly any gaming studio actually did profit sharing. I’m not going to be riled up and motivated for some capitalists to get a fat fucking bonus while using a shittier platform. But billionaire Sweeny is all for claiming it’s all for the little guy while not giving a shit if his own employees stack up 60hr work weeks.
I don’t have any frame of reference for how much content delivery on Valve’s level costs, and whether a lower cut would be sustainable. I assume that a lower cut for the first $X of revenue a game makes on Steam would be doable without cutting into profits too much, and would probably help smaller indie devs. In the end, since Valve is private, we can kinda only speculate about what would be fair, or even just feasible.
Of course, Valve isn’t obligated to do any of this, but if they would in response to pressure from Epic, I’d consider that a good thing. Considering the article above, that seems unlikely, needless to say.
I also do agree that Epic’s store isn’t all that great.
But it’s not just content delivery, they have a lot of software engineers building and maintaining lots of things, such as:
- Steam Input
- Steam Link app
- Proton - for Steam Deck and Linux
And a bunch more. That cut isn’t just going into the coffers, it’s being invested in the platform.
What does EGS do?
- pay for exclusivity
- give away games
- twiddle their thumbs?
EGS basically wants to draw you in with the free games and exclusivity, but that’s it. They have no actual draw to their platform. Valve invests in their platform, EGS just buys eyeballs.
Can think about Steam tax whatever you want, but they provide a hell of a lot more than just a half-assed store and some exposure for your games like Epic does. Don’t get me wrong, I do gratefully take the free games and I do appreciate the competition, what I want to say is that Steam doesn’t just pocket that money. They provide forums; frameworks for stuff like modding and achievements; a much better client useful beyond games they sell; subsidized hardware and support for Linux as an alternative to Windows. All of this also benefits game developers one way or another and costs money to develop and maintain. (Software) engineers are anything but cheap.
Epic does have its steamworks alternative called epic online services which provide more or less the same functionality (achievements, p2p networking, anti cheat…) but it’s also completely free, cross store, and cross engine
I agree partially. They are competent rather than just able to do whatever cause money.
Now if they invested their profits into workers salaries and made a bid for management salaries to only double per rank, we would be going somewhere.
Does Valve officially have managers now? Last I checked, they had this extremely flat structure of everyone being basically equal and people self-determining what they’re working on and how
Thats what I heard as well, doesn’t change the fact that management gets paid 10-100 times of an engineer and profits go to the owner/s not the workers.
Are you talking about Valve, or generally? Because as I said, I don’t think there is such a thing as a generic manager role at Valve, much less one that gets paid so much more than other roles. How much of the profit goes to Gabe directly vs the employees or reinvested into the company I don’t know, but if you want to complain about compensation gaps, I’m very sure that Valve is absolutely not the company to start with.
although valve is by no means the worst offender, they’re no angel either. Between raking in billions of dollars and taking no small cut from game developers (plus the fact that they take 100 $ just to put games on steam, even for free from what I read) they arent our savior by a long shot.
FOSS is. We‘re seeing massive effort of people to democratize software development and it is glorious. So while I get that valve isnt an example for the worst of the worst, they still fit in „billionaire bad“.
OK a bit of a rant from me but here I go:
Tim could easily see a smaller cut from Valve for a big game and say “yeah that’s great sign me up” but he doesn’t. He literally says “You should support the smaller players rather than the large ones”. He’s arguing to give a better rate to struggling developers rather than the successful ones. That’s what the COO says “umadbro” to. Honestly, that’s enough for me to really reconsider buying new games from Steam.
The issue is: This is exactly how Sweeney talks to people on Twitter. There was a particularly good reply to him once, which basically went: I agree with you and support your principled stance, but I can’t trust you because you are such a troll.
This is the problem. I truly believe Sweeney is a good person, and he actually wants more open markets not just for Epic but for everyone. Yes, he ships Unreal which smaller devs use and a sale for them means a sale for him, but really you don’t lean into things like this unless you actually want to democratise making games as a principled stance.
But he can just be such a jerk that people just don’t like talking to him or dealing with him or his companies. It’s frustrating to be honest, because he can be such a voice for good.
