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this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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It's false equivalence to claim steam has a monopoly when you're literally giving epic a monopoly on your games for financial kickbacks between yourselves that in the best case doesn't impact the user and worst case actively compells them to a much worse platform. What epic and gearbox did is monopolistic, what steam did is just make a good enough product that no one gives a sh*t about EGS. If you want an actual competitive store front, make something your users want, not your business partners. Gog is struggling but it's still my first goto for games because even if it's missing all of steams functionality, it gives me ownership of games that can't just be revoked or broken by publishers. That's a value add I'm willing to pay for. Paying more so publishers can make more money and sell a worse experience through EGS ain't moving me.
Steam has exclusive games too. Is that okay?
It’s a little different to have your own games exclusively on your platform than to pay other devs not to release on other platforms, and it’s entirely different if devs just choose not to release elsewhere because no other store is worth the effort for them.
Steam did exactly that for years under the "Steam Greenlight" prism where users voted for games to be released on steam with the condition that they would be exclusive. They only stopped it when they decided to go the Amazon route and sell any old shit with zero curation instead.
And Tim Sweeny made the offer to stop offering Epic exclusivity and even sell their games on Steam if Valve offered to provide their service to developers at the same rate as Epic.
But Steam charges nearly triple what Epic does and can depend on gamers to defend them for some reason.
The cut taken by stores is of little concern to me as a consumer. Greenlight was a mess for a lot of reasons, but they discontinued it years ago, while Epic continues to pay for exclusivity deals. Steam provides lots of services to me that Epic doesn’t, though, as others have listed here. That said, I also like GOG and itch.io.
It makes the cost of developing games more expensive. They have to charge nearly 20% more for games on Steam to make the same money they do on EGS.
It's also why Valve hardly makes games anymore. They sell 4 games made with other people's money and they'll have the same gross income as selling a game they paid to develop. Throw in the cost of development, and they just can't justify game development as a major part of their business.
The last time they made a full-sized game was Half-life 2, which launched the same day as Steam.
This argument about cost of development would hold more weight if the game store savings were passed onto the users rather than just eaten up by the publishers. Borderlands 3 base game has the exact same price on steam vs EGS atm, £49.99. Clearly those 20% savings are just extra money the publisher wants to pocket rather than actual necessary costs to the game. If their happy to pass it off to steam when sold on the steam platform rather than raise the price to recoup the platform tax.
Yes, but with EGS more money goes to the company making the games. AAA games have never been more expensive to produce, and developers are shutting doors left and right. After the costs of marketing and overhead, more of the proceeds of the game are going to the fucking download service than the people making the game when it's on Steam.
Blame the publishers then. They set the price and they dictate the bonuses of the devs based on sales. Choosing to believe more money from the game store is actually making its way to devs instead of shareholders is naive at best.
Alyx was a full game, portal 1/2?
Alyx was a tech demo, and it, Portal, and Portal 2 combined are about the size of Half Life 2.
Have you played Alyx? It's a full game
It's litterally a tunnel shooter with endless repetition to pad it out and pretend it's a full game, when in reality it's a tech demo to bundle with VR hardware and try and make Steam the default home of VR games.
Tim Sweeny didn't make an offer, he tried to make positive PR to EGS while trying to paint Valve as the bad guys; Valve obviously wouldn't charge the same rate as Epic because they include a lot more value for both user and developers than Epic does: to list a few of Valve services that Epic doesn't have:
That's not to mention the benefits developers can get from Steam's platform and SDK:
If you ask me, I think Epic is the one charging way too much
Name any Steam exclusives. I can think of Half Life Alyx; you could get everything up to The Orange Box and even Portal 2 on disc.
The entire greenlight catalog was exclusive. That's over 100 third-party games, and they only reason it stopped is because they stopped curating products to become the Amazon of online gaming.