There were no fixed revenue tiers prior to that announcement. 30% was the standard and certain publishers had negotiated more amicable terms with Valve along the years. That wasn't some trade secret, just like the 30% split was never publicly stated by Valve and yet ended up being widely known.
The streamlined tiers were not meant to appease big publishers. Valve has always been in touch with major publishers, a lot of changes to Steam were made to keep them onboard, they were fully aware about what sort of moves were being done and they also knew the EGS was coming. There are always rumblings around developer circles and these are ultimately small communities where most people are fairly well connected.
The announcement about the revenue tiers was mainly done in response to public pressure and to make things more transparent for devs worldwide, in the face of growing dissatisfaction with Steam and the bad PR they've been receiving lately. The new revenue tiers are meant to reward successful independent studios and teams; they're not going to make publishers reconsider anything, only failure will do that.
We live in a world where Call of Duty was once so popular that Acti successfully negotiated a "very modest" cut of XBL sub revenue, so I don't deny the possibility; however, again, in the absence of any sort of evidence, and as there is evidence to the contrary (granted, THQ wasn't a major publisher), I'm just not convinced. I realise Valve has played favourites in select instances (e.g. working with Bethesda to manually grant Skyrim SE to relevant owners of the original release, allowing Ubisoft to run dailies during a big sale, etc.), but the notion that this extends to revenue cuts as well strikes me as spurious.
But, hey, if I'm wrong, I'm wrong!
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