Why should customers care about developers getting a bigger cut if it leads to less competitive storefronts and worse services.
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
Tim Sweeney: “If Valve commits to a permanent 88% revenue share, we’ll stop making new exclusive deals” (Read Staff Post)
- Thread starter Carlius
- Start date
If you care about competition and having lower prices, this doesn't help you.
1) Because bullying competitors out of a market can lead to accusations of monopolisation and predatory pricing tactics.
2) Because Valve's business philosophy embraces the free market, and anything that causes competitors to become financially unstable and drop out harms that free market, and is not what they want.
Put another way, they could easily have become a literal monopoly years ago and pushed a good number of stores out. They chose not, not only because it was legally questionable, but because they want competition based on pricing, features and content. Unfortunately, EGS chooses to not compete on pricing or features, and pushes exclusive content as their core tenet in competing.
Edit: The wiki spells out it out simply:
Nice goalpost moving. When it's clear you don't have to pay more to cover foreign processing fees, the conversation is suddenly about Valve not doing enough to deserve the industry standard cut.
Predictable. Not sure why I bothered.
I think this is also one of the things that people who like to jump in these threads and say "BUT COMPETITION GOOD?!?" miss all the time. Seeing as the EGS is "worse than most of its rivals," can anybody tell me what their main motivation (or urgency) is to put out a storefront that rivals others based on features and general appeal?
This is a company that is drowning in money and is using that money to create situations where customers are forced to shop at their store if they want to play a specific game. They're in no rush to add features to their store since they've got their new customers in an exclusivity trap and under no pressure to make the store better than their rivals. The idea that this whole thing is going to create the kind of competition that is going to make PC gaming better is horribly naive and as the quote said, "laughable."
Last edited:
And here I was warming up to the idea of buying from EGS a year or two down the line... The amount of bile this man spews is incredible.
Last edited:
What is even going on here.
Back to square one. Why should valve reduce their cut? Why for them? Why for me?
Are you just arguing that they /can reduce the cut, or that they /should reduce the cut? And if they should, why?
The cut a platform can demand, independent on if it is a open or closed garden, has very little to do with investment and risk the platform holder has. It has with how much the product owner values the service that the platform holder provide.
The reason for how much the product owner value a platform is subjective. Large publisher has already built their own store fronts, so some publishers has not seen the value that steam provides.
The interesting part about the EPIC store is that they have such a low value proposition for publishers, even with a very low cut that they need to pay for exclusive games. That if anything indicates to me that the value that Steam/valve provides is enough to justify the cut they demand.
Tim Sweeny: "please don't pay attention to the headlines about us killing our workers, please instead talk about Steam"
His argument changes based on who he is talking to at any given moment. Don't expect him to be logical.
No lies detected
Since Tim changes his story every couple of days. I don't see you can believe him.
For the record, i think hydro is awesome but i dont necessarily expect him to be logical lol. We happen to land on opposite sides of this issue and i think hydros not just wrong BUT MANIACLY OBTUSE (AAARRRRHHGG THE PAIN IN MY BRAIN FUCKING KILL ME) on this particular matter. But weve both been around for a time now so i wouldn't take that out of here.
But really, please kill me before he comes back.
I ran into a steam fanboy just this week using the words 'valve' and 'benevolent' in the same sentence. It's so strange how steam has massaged this community.
It's called Stockholm Syndrome.
30% cut that Steam takes is frankly obscene and I am glad developers have a reasonable alternative.
Why Valve should start to run their store in red and start to transfer fees as extra costs to end consumer like EGS is doing? Why to force yourself to basically self-ban yourself from China as you can't afford eat pre-paid card costs anymore without going deep into red for every card?
Also just on my own opinion on this: Sweeney is just bullshitting, I bet Epic has no intention to stop farming out Fortnite cash to lock down titles for exclusivity for few more years at least no matter what Valve does or doesn't do. Those are their only market value for consumers.
1 person =/= community thank you very much.
Again, it's industry standard, so I do hope you think the same of Sony and MS. And Apple. And Google.
Why is it obscene? Based in what metric?
Oh and by developers you mean publishers and super popular indie teams. Joy, the choices...
Strange thing for a game designer to come out with considering the people here are possibly consumers that would buy your product? Good luck with that.
Why is 12% not obscene? Only Tim Sweeney says that it is the lowest possible. Why not make it 5% or 1%?
"Epic is destroying the gaming Industry with this ridicolous high 12% cut, they should lower it."
Too bad Sony, M icrosoft and Nintendo are still bleeding them dry
It certainly hasn't gone without notice how many cognitively less capable people can only talk about muh steamfanboys and stockholm syndrome in threads like these instead of engaging with actual arguments who then vanish out of existence when called out on it, as if they are silently admitting that they have no actual point to make
The 30% cut is such a "but her emails" argument. When everything fails, bring that up and then disappear before it gets used against you.
At least the "monopoly" bit is not used much now. When you see what Epic is doing, that buzzword no longer works.
At least the "monopoly" bit is not used much now. When you see what Epic is doing, that buzzword no longer works.
Last edited:
It was. In the thread that did the math about what their cut actually worked out to
Yup. And relatedly, there is a definite "Valve/Steam Derangement Syndrome" that is not unlike Clinton Derangement Syndrome.
I mean a conversation could be had about the future of the cut taken and how it may be changed. Forgive my ignorance here if it exists, but does Valve do a scaling cut or is it a flat 30% no matter what? People who simply go "It's industry standard" don't impress me from the point of view that simply because something is how it is, doesn't mean the consumer best not question it and instead skip along like a good little spender and keep their mouth shut.
As much as I will dunk on Epic for their bullish and unsustainable tactics, I don't think any company is ever off-limits for discussing/critiquing. Some companies do have parts of their fanbases who behave like cults where one must never speak foul of the leader or else they face the wrath of the mob.
Hence why I'll bite back a little at some of the shit that has been going on around Valve, even if Epic are the main antagonizer in this debate.
If that's the case, then why aren't Google, Apple, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo being called out too?
Just like them, Valve also work on hardware (Steam Machines in the past and Valve Index today) as well as a bunch of handy software libraries such Proton, to quickly name an example.
It's not even 30% for all games anymore; just before EGS was announced, lower cuts were introduced for very successful games:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks#announcements/detail/1697191267930157838
Given all of that on top of access to a rather large (and dedicated) customer base, 20-30% sounds like a fair trade for selling on an established store that's stood the test of time.
If Epic can provide something similar (not necessarily including working on their own hardware) while also maintaining their low cut for years, it would most likely disprove the need for 20-30%. But for now, the fact that Epic only started their store once Fortnite got big raises a massive question over whether the store can last when that money dries up.
itch.io gets by on (a variable cut that defaults to) 10%. Admittedly, they're not working with the same volume, but the possibility is there!
12% always seemed to me like a weird number to choose, to be honest. 10 or 15 would be perfectly acceptable and still a strong move. I guess Tim just really likes the number 12 or 88. Maybe he's a Back To The Future fan or something!
People arguing that it's the industry Standard aren't generally doing it to defend it as a nessecary status quo, but rather to call out the implicit platform warrior mentality that pervades the majority of the conversation, wherein it's only bad if valve does it, which is further evidenced by the fact that usually when confronted with the truth, the creator of the original statement (or someone else in his stead) will go on to defend everyone elses right to take that cut, just not valves.
In regards to your question, valve announced a scaling cut at the end of last year with games that generate specific thresholds of profit.
https://www.polygon.com/2018/12/3/18123649/valve-steam-revenue-sharing
As usual, this kind of comments are written by people who aren't pc gamer at all.
I'm not going to defend fanboyism because it's dumb. But perhaps you should consider that pc gamers have their reasons for liking what Valve and GoG do, while strongly disliking what Epic is trying to do. Many pc gamers have bothered to explain this here on Era already.
Okay, but that's not how I think. I'll speak about any company. One thing I learned in life after fanboying Sony a little myself in my teens is no company gives a shit about you. Only your wallet. Treat them all the same. Stop idolizing companies. Stop being part of fandom cults. It's never healthy and it rots your ability to think critically at times, if not be unable to control your own emotions. Do not be beholden to the plastic boxes you put under your TV or the launcher/services you use.
Most people don't have a fucking clue what % some company takes of a game they buy. Keep that in mind when some of you are so conspiratorial you think everything is just a big bad mean campaign against Valve. Some hear of 30% because this whole PC platform war has gone viral and Epic are beating that drum. They weren't necessarily tuned in to what Apple or whoever the fuck else it is taking 30% on their platform.
Good, because I think scaling is a fairer solution to this when it's applicable.
What are you even on about? Using one incident to paint an entire community is really poor form.
I would love to hear what game you're working on.
Since you mention it like that...
Some people just outright hate PC gaming. Console favoritism is involved of course, and in their minds PC gaming should go back to the borderline irrelevancy of 10 years ago. Steam existing prevents it, and the whole EGS debacle is music to their ears.
They don't even care about devs getting a better deal, it's all about "owning the PC gamers".
Let's just say that some post histories on this very page can be quite revealing.
They recently (December 2018) do a scaling cut based on revenues generated (25% for $10-49 million and 20% for $50 million or more). You can see the Ars Technica article about how in many cases Valve effectively doesn't get the full 30% cut (0% cut when publishers sell their keys through third party stores, so the estimated overall cut for Valve is roughly 20%, though this can vary a lot depending on the game)
Hopefully Valve won't do anything about it. The 30% cut is better for the customer, since other storefronts can offer discounts based on that 30% cut.
I remember when sometime ago (maybe a a year and half or so back in time, maybe even some more) I started noticing how all the write ups about Steam data from Sergey Galyonkin started to have this bizarrely negative undertone, even when allegedly just "analyzing the market in a neutral manner".
At the time I couldn't help but wonder why the guy was shitting more and more openly on the same service he was basically leeching off.
Then the Epic Games Store was announced this Autumn and with it the full disclosure of Galyonkin's involvement with its development.
I remember thinking "Riiight... Now it all suddenly makes sense".
Last edited:
That's an enormous key difference though and that's just comparing volume and looking at it from an operational angle. Looking at the feature set that Steam is offering from both a consumer and developer perspective and how much Valve is investing in their platform there's a stark difference to put it mildly.
I alluded to this yesterday. Some people are so transparent.
We just ran into someone arguing that Epic is not at fault for the crunch happening at their own studio, but the developer themselves.
For months we've had people defending Sony position and lies about cross platform multiplayer.
There is people arguing for more uwp exclusives.
Etc..
Now the question, what does this have to do with most of the multiple arguments posted here ? Are we supposed to think that most people are against a 10~30% price increase with a worst service, because of some kind of fanboy syndrome ?
Were people against the Xbox One DRM restrictions because they were PC/sony/nintendo fanboy, or because it was making things worst for consumer, regardless of how it could benefit devs.
Are people against lootbox just something something fanboys who just can't see that magnificent argument : "devs makes more money with it, who cares if it's predatory".
Why won't people understand how it will all just trickle down.
12% looks more genuine because it isn't some arbitraty rounded number (10,15,30) but looks precisely calculated.
Actually, I think most people don't care about developers profits but them getting content for free while someone else pays for it.
Last edited:
I mean, I'm not entirely hostile to the idea of them lowering a bit for everyone. I'm sure they can still be very profitable even eroding their margins a bit.
It's asking for a drop to 12% that seems unreasonable, given what Valve is offering and considering they plan to offer even more in the near future.
I was actually responding in the context of questioning why the EGS doesn't go lower than 12. I actually do think Steam's cut is reasonably justified, but the person I was responding to was making the point that EGS's still isn't the cheapest cut, and I was underlining that.
What alternative? Eps are a walled garden. The only alternative I can see is itch.