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Dusk Developer David Szymanski: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly (twitter.com)

submitted 1 year ago by Carighan@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world

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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.

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[-] DingoBilly@lemmy.world 24 points 1 year ago

Eh, they're all just companies and all just as fallible as one another.

Not sure I get the Valve worship here.

[-] Carighan@lemmy.world 25 points 1 year ago

Oh, don't mistake me preferring Steam (and GOG, for example, who have an actual value proposition to me as a consumer - unlike Epic!) to "Valve worship". They're simply the least bad option, but of course they're all huge corporations. Realistically though Valve has actually surprisingly little bad given the amount of money and market control they have, so eh... for now, I'm happy buying about half my games there (usually ends up that way, though I prefer GOG for games also releasing on that).

[-] beefcat@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago

steam is good and egs sucks. it's not worship, just consumers voicing their preference for a better product.

[-] wicked@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago

Steam is a better product, but you give less money to the developers of the actual game. Unless it has Steam exclusives (e.g. Steam workshop) I would rather buy wherever I give the devs most money.

[-] beefcat@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

features like steam input and steam play benefit every game regardless if the developer actively supports them. i use the latter quite frequently.

[-] wicked@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I understand why people like and buy from Steam. It gives real value.

However, especially for smaller game studios, I believe I get more value if actual game developers get more money than Steam getting it. Let's say a studio gets $1m in revenue after years of work. Having $180k more ($120k Epic fee vs $300k Steam fee) to spend on artists and developers for their next games/DLCs is a big difference.

Those $300k is literally 0.003409% of Steam's revenue (estimated 8.8 billion in 2020). Valve could have an army of over 40,000 developers at a yearly $200k compensation and still be profitable just from selling other people's games.

So I make a big convenience sacrifice when I buy from Epic. I also don't like to support Tencent. But unless the dev is selling Steam keys directly from their web site, that's where they get the most money.

[-] Nefyedardu@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Smaller game studios on Epic are DOA anyway because Epic refuses to implement game discovery features.

When it introduced Steam Direct, Valve prioritized the development of Steam features that helped users discover games they might be interested in, such as the Discovery Queue. The Epic Games Store will continue to get interface updates, but as a matter of principle, Allison says that Epic will not track user behavior and use it to algorithmically recommend games. Epic has said in the past that it's more interested in supporting the game discovery that already happens outside of stores, such as on Twitch and YouTube.

So Epic will put your game trailer on their YouTube for 300 views and call it a day.

[-] sirboozebum@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago

I remember when Valve and Steam was the great enemy in the early 2000s.

Everyone hated how buggy it was and needing it to play Counterstrike.

[-] echo64@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

it's a big circlejerk, it happens. everyone has the exact same opinion but also wants to feel like they are making a valiant statement in opposition of the bad thing

it's all a massive oversight of course, statisticly everyone here is likely going to outlive Gabe Newel. and when valve goes public someone else will control that monopoly.

[-] systemglitch@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

What's not to get? I'm genuinely curious.

[-] DingoBilly@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Why do people just want Steam as one store monopoly vs. Having two companies compete where Steam is one of them.

It's only good for consumers..

[-] Zetta@mander.xyz 3 points 1 year ago

I don't think anyone has a problem with their being two big competitors, it's just we don't want it to be epic games. gog games would be a good competitor