Everything except making a store people wanted to use? Ethan Evans, who was previously Vice President of Prime Gaming at Amazon, has a short retrospective of trying to take on Steam.
Everything except making a store people wanted to use? Ethan Evans, who was previously Vice President of Prime Gaming at Amazon, has a short retrospective of trying to take on Steam.
Incorrect.
What Epic means by “for developers,” is… developers keep more of the money. Walk me through how that, specifically, is bad for you.
I am not interested in general attacks against Epic. I make no general defense of Epic. Fortnite’s business model should be illegal. But what you’re doing is bad argumentation. You’re reaching for ways to say ‘Epic bad’ as if that’s gotta be relevant. As if attacking Epic in general constitutes a defense of one specific thing Valve does. As if promoting Valve in general means this one specific thing can’t be wrong.
As for indie support - Valve doesn’t need to push big games on their store, because they have a monopoly. There is no sense telling people ‘if you’re gonna buy it on PC, buy it on Steam!,’ because of course you will. Indie games ‘don’t make Epic money’ because Alan fucking Wake barely makes them money. Their market share is garbage. Steam has the freedom and the incentive to push more game sales, of any kind, and there’s a lot more little games than big ones.
None of what Valve is doing would suddenly disappear if they took only one-quarter of gross revenue. Or a fifth. Or less. They’re shaving straight off the top for nearly the entire PC gaming market. Their war-chest is ridiculous. They have such a “petro curse” that they briefly forgot to make games. Yet they treat the studios that make them all of their money the same way Nintendo and Sony squeeze console developers.
Would criticizing this specific cut be easier, if we talked about Apple’s iron grip on the App Store? Because it’s the same damn policy. Feel free to talk shit about when Apple does it, if you insist on judging whole entities instead of what they do.
Except that it isn’t? Apple doesn’t let you circumvent their store, while Steam not only allows games to have their own monetization system, it allows off-site sales of the game on Steam. That is significantly more permissive, by a degree of magnitude that makes me wonder about your sincerity.
Two comments ago:
Let’s try this again.
How is a 30% gross cut worse for consumers than 15%? Because that policy, that specific policy, is shared by Nintendo, Apple, Google, Sony, Microsoft… and Valve.