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.
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.
“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.
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.