A lot has been said about the Epic Games Store and the fact that Epic Games has securing timed-exclusive titles for its digital store. And while the majority of PC gamers are really annoying by this exclusivity deals, a former Valve developer claimed that Steam’s 30% cut was unsustainable and that Epic Games is fixing it.
In a series of tweets, Richard Geldreich claimed that Steam was killing PC gaming with its 30% tax; a tax that was basically unsustainable. Still, this 30% cut made Valve a lot of money and also distorted the entire company (which could explain why Valve has not released any big PC game in the past few years).
https://twitter.com/richgel999/status/1113988444370300928
https://twitter.com/richgel999/status/1113994738745483264?
Geldreich also predicts that Epic Games will most likely keep signing deal for a year or even more.
https://twitter.com/richgel999/status/1115147875900579840
Last but not least, Geldreich agreed that the Epic Games Store currently lacks a lot of features, something that a lot of gamers criticized Epic Games for. And while Tim Sweeney’s company has been sniping multiple deals lately, it really needs to step up its game and add as many features as possible.
https://twitter.com/richgel999/status/1115154698569302017
https://twitter.com/richgel999/status/1115171856523206657
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
Contact: Email
God save Epic
God kill epic, cause its one of the worst things to happen in 2019 pc gaming. GTFO WITH THAT CONSOLE EXCLUSIVE BS
Yes, you have to pay $300 to buy the Epic launcher.
How dare developers make money!!!!
How dare developers/publishers treat customers as trash
do you work at Valve ?
Do you work at Epic games ?
No and you didn’t answer so…
Answered with the same stupidity as your question
So salty
So stupid. Like the vast majority of epic users.
And Steam fanboys.
Keep salty, i use both.
Everyone who doesn’t agree with me is a steam fanboy
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
F*k off, kid.
No one is salty, we just have standards and don’t like trash.
hitler
Tell me, my child.
The government of the People’s Republic of China, home to Epic Games’ key stakeholder Tencent, officially espouses state atheism. God won’t be saving Epic Games any time soon.
That guy’s an absolute retrd, i was reading all his sh**talk posts, and he’s totally out of his mind, he sounds and looks like a proper psycho.
All I can say to that is, and I’m sorry to repeat this joke, is b*llsh*t.
https://media2.giphy.com/media/tyqcJoNjNv0Fq/giphy.gif
This guy is off his rocker. EVERY digital distributor besides Epic is taking 30%, and it was Apple who introduced that figure, not Valve. As a customer, why should I care how much a developer gets paid off the launcher I have to use is awful?
we consumer did not care but developer/publisher will care about how much profit they will make. if developer/publisher did not care about this then they will never sign this exclusive deal with epic to begin with.
Just to make this extra clear — they’re not signing because of the cut, because a bigger cut of vastly smaller sales figures translates to less money overall. They’re signing because of the bigger cut and the free money Epic is handing out. The question is whether Epic will gain enough market share to attract business on its own, without sweetening every single deal, before it runs out of Fortnite money to give away.
Of course the publishers and devs care about their percentage cut. I’m asking why I as a customer should buy games from Epic if their store/client sucks and I can just wait a year for the few games I care about to come to a better platform? Those are 2 separate issues.
Yea, you wait a year and then buy a game in ultimate edition with all the dlc for $15 on Steam sale.
Probably got fired for a reason, wanted his 5min of fame. Steam killing pc gaming ?? how ? Sales are good, more and more games where coming out on steam since steam introduced how pc market is actually strong. Its like this dude hasnt been alive for 15years and doesnt know what the f hes talking about LOL.
The guy has no idea what’s he talking about, he’s been acting delusional for months, since that day when he started talking about internal problems at valve, making it all so completely, stupidly confusing.
Yeah I was feeling as my braincells were dying reading his tweets. Valve didnt make any games anymore cause they didnt seem to care to make more since their store was successful and running at full speed. Why would they invest time and effort to something that dont really matter to their profits. Unless it would be for steam fans that would be another story.
If making shitloads of money through a storefront killed Valve’s development department, the same will happen to Epic. Epic was already floundering in R&D — Fortnite: Save the World was fixing to bomb something fierce (because it genuinely sucks) before Epic got stupidly lucky by hopping onto the battle royale bandwagon. Furthermore, Epic canned the development of Unreal Tournament 4 altogether once Fortnite: Battle Royale blew up, so kiss newly developed games goodbye — it’s already gone downhill.
He knows what is talking about.The difference between you and him is so big that is not worth mention it or responding you but since there are 32 more people that are in same place as you, only gamers that plays a game and they think they know what means to be an entrepreneur, i mean people who goes to university 6 years to learn this are stupid, they should only play a game to learn this, just like you. Make a comparation between number of companies that went bankrupt in steam period vs number of companies before steam. After that open a company , note down your earnings from first year and next year tell electricity company to raise their prices with 20 % and tell me if you finish your year on plus and if you can manage next year to pay your employes the salaries. I know you’re a kid and dont understand these things but at least dont act like a grown man that he knows what he’s talking about.
Impressive how you drew the kid card, honestly no matter what you say then becomes irrelevant lol. I finished college with impressive grades of information system technologies, along with business degree. So I think you should go to bed kid, cause clearly you love kissing a$$.
Ok
If Im not wrong devs get even less from consoles right? Or has something changed lately?
10$ goes to the console manufacturer as royalties
ok but what about XLive and PSN stores?
To the same people ??? Sony and microsoft ?
so 10$ goes for hardware and shop maintain?
epic store is trash, how is it saving pc gaming or gamers by having lower share to the distributor?
Atleast lower the price of games.
I can tell you this, money cuts dont matter, if it did discord would have went full sail or some other garbage store. What I m saying most of the developers leaching of epic games since they give lots of millions for exclusivity. I hope they get leached and die.
Mentioned this elsewhere but it bears repeating: itch offers a 100/0 revenue split. Yes, there is a store out there that allows developers to pay absolutely nothing for the privilege of publishing a game. It also has, from what I’ve been told, the best developer tools in the business. Yet I don’t see any of the “more money for
developerspublishers means better games!” crowd tripping over itself to bumrush games onto itch.Its true, those games dont reach development team, they will spend the same amount on the game as they did period. I actually dont get how people can be that dense and think they gonna fund their games more if they dont have to ??? Look at EA their devil horn CEO rolling in money while firing employees.
by giving devs more money ? Money which determines how much time and resources can be put into projects. It’s a huge deal lol.
Look, I get it, it sucks for consumer choice when it comes to stores. If you care about that, I get why it sucks. Hate Epic if you want, I don’t mind. But you can’t just ignore the revenue cut. When Epic first announced it, everyone was like “Awesome 12% cut is so much better that will be good for devs”. Now everyone wants to pretend like the revenue thing doesn’t matter (which is laughable). Atleast be intellectually honest about it lol. You don’t have to like Epic, but atleast be honest about it.
I’ll be honest about it. Most of the actual devs never see that money. The deals are cut with large publishing houses for the most part, with only a few exceptions thus far. The devs are salaried. The “extra money” is going into the pockets of fat cats and shareholders, and I get no benefit from it (same as what happened with digital distribution as a whole — all the money companies save not needing to manufacture countless discs and distribute them across the globe and pay for store shelf space, yet “full price” is still $60).
If anyone tells you games are more expensive to make nowadays, laugh in their faces. There are more useful tools now than ever before. The only place you can say “more expensive” now is in AAA, and that’s only because they’re pouring more money into individual products while making far fewer of them (games as service) — their overall R&D expenditure is down significantly (which is how several of them have been able to claim record-breaking profits while simultaneously firing hundreds of actual developers). These are the leeches the “extra money” is going to. Still think it’ll lead to better games for us?
“It’s a huge deal lol.”
Its not lol,. if it they made 50% more money i would agree but as it is, its not that big.
How DARE you suggest that the superior, enlightened publishers should do something to benefit the consumer in order to attract them? The filthy plebeians will go wherever we say they go.
yeah this guy definitely got fired from Valve. Look how negative this guy is towards steam..
he has been posting antivalve bloggs and tweets since 2015 (iirc he was in Valve 2009-2014) … makes sense
That explains it LOL his so salty that his still trying lol. Talk about being a psycho and not moving on ? What the hell ? 😀
i just wanna know why he got fired or “left” as he said.
Hopefully John will add that crucial information to the article so as to give it some proper context.
Otherwise it reads like another sensationalist hit piece on Steam that one would routinely expect to see on garbage tier sites like PC Gamer, Eurogamer, Polygon and from rabidly anti-Steam YouTubers like Jim Sterling.
Someone compare John’s Patreon before and after the Epic Games Store re-lauch in December 2018.
Nevermind just checked. Its still not too healthy. Perhaps they got to him some other way.
Sounding a bit Alex Jones with that conspiracy theory! I’d say the likely explanation is merely that of sloppy/incomplete/lazy reporting from John rather than him being in league with EGS/Tencent.
The fact that you call this “reporting” is hilarious. 90% of the content on this site is copy pasted and reworded from other sites and the other 10% is just forum posts someone dug up, John or otherwise, or social media, and wrote 3 sentences abut.
‘hilarious’
This sounds like a Clickbait article, john…..You really want to believe what this ex-dev says,lol..
STEAM isn’t going anywhere tho, IMO.
Am I the only one here who is fine with Epic store stepping in the market?
Yes and you’re also welcome to step out of the website.
so anyone that did not agree with what you think is right cannot voice their opinion here?
You want the short answer? Yes.
ok noted.
Whoever’s fine with Epic’s step on the market is either biased some way, or he/she doesn’t (or has no interest to) understand how the market works and probably sees videogames as a mere time passing hobby.
As if you are not biased pro Steam.
No i’m not, but there would be very good reasons to be, unlike EGS.
good luck with that lol
I need no luck, you need a brain tho.
this coming from the one who effectively agreed to the point “if you disagree with me, you shouldn’t post here”
You’re taking me too seriously, besides, in this matter here i mean it, epic is bad period, there’s no other opinion about it, unless you’re uninformed on the whole thing.
https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/73292947/facts-dont-care-about-your-feelings.jpg
You should learn to respect other people’s opinions as well though. just because u don’t agree with them, doesn’t make them wrong…..grow up..
Not when they make no sense.
This is not a matter of opinion, it’s a matter of FACT.
learn the difference.
Facts > Opinions
And the fact is that Epic sucks balls.
Sieg heil indeed.
You are not entitled to your opinion in the sense that everyone else must respect it. You are entitled to think and say whatever you wish, and I am entitled to tell you how stupid and factually inaccurate your opinions and statements are, if they are stupid and factually inaccurate.
You are only entitled to whatever you can argue for.
People who don’t really care about the store/game launcher are fine with it. ie the vast majority of people.
That said, it’s understandable why many people do care about it. Steam has some pretty awesome features honestly.
For me, this is less about Steam having awesome features than it is about Epic trying to strong-arm the public through backroom deals with publishers. I don’t appreciate corporate bloodsuckers removing choice from the public. If you want to compete, then actually compete on offering a better service instead of strangling the market with forced monopolies on distribution.
Fair enough.
Epic have said why they’re doing it. They don’t think they can actually compete without doing it. At the end of the day, it is working. Exclusives drive numbers.
I get why people don’t like it. It is kind of scummy.
Do you have any actual proof at all that it’s working?
Yeah Epic should just hang out with the other loser platforms.
them entering the market isn’t the problem it’s how they’re doing it.
Yeah how dare they try to win the market. They could just hang out with the other losers like GOG and other key sellers
I only wish they did it with cheaper prices. Im being forced to pay more on EGS.
Try to learn self control if you feel a game store is forcing you to do something
Well you jump to conclusions pretty fast, lol
I like it, Epic is providing welfare for developers. Too bad that makes a lot of people a$$hurt for some reason.
I don’t support Valve for what it did but EPIC is not doing any good for us consumer. STEAM gives me country price and we live a a developing country and here all the game cost 50-75% less and thats all the reason for me to stay on steam and the community is so awesome and helpful
You do know Steam = Valve.
lol nope I don’t know. lol
Just seemed the way you worded it like you support Steam but not Valve.
Let’s break a natural quasi-monopoly that resulted from better service by creating a forced monopoly through backroom deals between publishers.
Nobody is saying that competition is bad. What everyone is saying, is that “buying” your market share through forced exclusivity shopping, is bad. Why are people not able to understand this?
Of course Steam is gouging publishers at 30%, but the way to compete with Steam, is not by forcing people to buy from your store. Period.
Why actually fight the champion when you can knock down a strawman that looks like the champion and declare yourself the new champion?
It’s not that they don’t understand it, it’s that they are dishonest, manipulative sophists.
You can’t beat a monopoly by playing fair. GoG tried to win hearts and minds with their “no DRM evolution” and they come at a distant second.
I remind you that you’re talking about beating the monopoly, which implies that the party attempting the action wishes to become the next monopoly, rather than removing monopoly forces altogether. Competition with Steam is more than possible while playing fair; GOG is evidence of that, as is itch. Beating Steam and becoming bigger than it certainly is not, but when in all of Epic’s propagandizing have any of its actions been about becoming Steam 2.0? I’m pretty sure they’re preaching the virtues of competition — while deliberately monopolizing games and constructing a walled garden.
GOG is evidence that no matter how good the service you wont get people to leave steam. you want to tell epic games and all their investors that? “go ahead give the customers everything hopefully you get 1% of steam market share aint that great?”
This. So much this, and there’s a few other digital distributors that could be substituted for GOG if so desired. AAA publishers and their customers have spoken loud and clear: they love exclusives, spotty support, no first-sale doctrine, cloaked middleware, etc. If it was any other way all the other distributors–most of which have actual features beyond merely being the biggest guy in the room–would have all the games too. Sweeney is just giving the people what they said they want.
Minor correction: 30% is not gouging. Middlemen have a habit of sucking up as much money as they possibly can; ask a musician what a “360 deal” is sometime. The fact that there’s an industry-standard flat cut in video games is frankly impressive, and hugely beneficial for developers, particularly given the wide-ranging feature set Steam offers. If anything’s gouging, it’s Epic’s 12%, which comes packaged with nothing.
Fair enough, yep. I just think given the share Valve has, they could back off the 30% a touch, and still make mountains of money.
Nail on the head about Epic’s 12% being packaged with nothing as well.
Agreed that Valve could stand to back down from 30% and set a new standard. I’ve been saying for a while now that all Valve has to do to take the wind out of Epic’s propaganda is cut its take to 20% across the board (the lowest cut they take currently for the highest selling titles). But Valve probably won’t do that, at least not right now. It would come off as a sign of weakness. If I were in Valve’s shoes, I’d wait for Epic to burn through the Fortnite money and crash, then lower the cut, just to prove a point.
“Valve probably won’t do that, at least not right now. It would come off as a sign of weakness”
This is why game developers love Epic. They are more friendly. Epic is a game developer so they better understand other developers. I hope Epic will replace Steam in next 2 years as leading shop on PC
With more money for developers games will be better.
They are more developer-friendly, and only if you buy their propaganda. In reality they’re more publisher-friendly, because that’s where all that extra money goes in the vast majority of cases. Unless we’re talking about indie devs, the devs are salaried employees of a studio that works for a publisher, and it is the publisher (by dint of the fact that it has exclusive distribution rights for that studio) who signs the deal with (and gets all the money from) Epic.
If you actually believe this “more money for developers” line, you frankly haven’t been around very long. I and others lived through the digital distribution revolution, where all the pundits and useful idiots preached exactly what you’re preaching — publishers won’t have to spend as much money on distribution, which means more money for development and maybe even lower game prices. I’ll let you guess whether any of that actually happened. (Spoiler: it didn’t. Publishers are greedy bastards in all media industries. Ask a musician sometime.)
Valve has developed more highly rated games than epic has.
that was like 2 decades ago. now they go for fads like mobas and card games
Fortnite isn’t gonna stop printing money anytime soon i’m afraid.
I give the phenomenon 5 additional years max, 1-2 in a more probable scenario since we’ve already seen its position shaken somewhat by Apex (there will be other competitors down the road). But regardless of whether the game continues to print money, Sweeney has already publicly stated that Epic’s current level of expenditure can’t be maintained long-term, which implies that they are spending faster than they are earning. At some point they must stop pouring money into exclusivity deals, or even the bottomless Fortnite war chest will run dry.
I’m not saying it’s right or good, but the market does not care of feelings. And when the biggest store on the market is this light-years ahead, how do you suggest they should compete? Good service? GoG does that, yet they still have a small market share.
The only way to get that far in the game is to do what they do. You might not like it, but it is not illegal. Hell, it’s not even regulated.
People are mad at Epic for playing “the game” right. Perhaps they should be mad at the game.
GoG also has a basically non existant game portfolio, with their no DRM policy and whatnot
GoG isn’t, and never was, a steam competitor, they dug their own niche and are happy with that, no more no less
Not really happy because they are having financial troubles. You have to be very aggressive and not play fair to compete with a monopoly.
Perhaps they should be mad at the desire to get far for the sake of getting far. Growth for growth’s sake is not a good thing. The only people mindless growth serves are shareholders and investors.
Yes, and it’s legal and will continue to happen.
Shareholders and investors demand it for growth.
Execs and high management push it for bonuses.
Everyone else does it because it’s their job.
So, why don’t Steam lower the tax to compete with epic?
“but the way to compete with Steam, is not by forcing people to buy from your store. Period.”
Hysterical hyperbole aside, what would you suggest the right way to compete (and win) is then? you seem like the smarta$$ type, i’m sure you figure it out something lmao
Wow, you sure told him.
Why does every person with s**t for brains, end their posts with “lmao”, as though you just cracked some hilarious joke? Get your head out of your a**, and use what few brain cells you have left.
I was just asking a question, what would you suggest EGS do, be another failed GOG?
You don’t seem to grasp how economics and business work.
Businesses that compete with each other do so by offering things in addition to the products. The products themselves are trivial, although if you carry items your competitor doesn’t, it helps at first. Down the road you can stop carrying them altogether, even carry less products anyone wants, and still stay on top.
Epic Games Store could compete with Steam easily on legitimate grounds. All they’d have to do is offer a comparable package. Mod support, forums, responsive customer service, a better refund policy, cloud saves, auto-patching, better library management, friends, chat, streaming, voip, fully customizable universal controller support, things like that, in addition to actual cheaper prices, or even DRM free games that don’t require EGL.
“Easily” being a focus entirely on client improvement, while they still have that Fortnite money to use, rather than short term bribes that do nothing for the consumer whatsoever.
And competing isn’t going to be EGS replacing Steam. They aren’t going to “win.” Did Walmart “win” over Kroger or Target? No. The only store of that type that went out of business is Kmart (in the past 30 years) and that still took until 2012 or so. That will never happen. Not because Valve has a monopoly – they don’t; because Valve has proven themselves reliable and invested in running their business and improving it. Epic hasn’t.
I don’t personally buy anything through Steam if it’s at all avoidable, but like me, people are still going to keep supporting Steam even if they don’t buy their games there. And make no mistake, Valve does not have a monopoly. There isn’t a single game you ever will have to buy from Steam itself unless it’s a super obscure indie or an asset flip.
They have a monopoly on user retention, just like any social media site. You don’t win that amount of users by “playing fair”, just compare Gog to Steam and you see why.
“All they’d have to do is offer a comparable package. Mod support, forums, responsive customer service, a better refund policy, cloud saves, auto-patching, better library management, friends, chat, streaming, voip, fully customizable universal controller support, things like that, in addition to actual cheaper prices, or even DRM free games that don’t require EGL.”
All of these features are irrelevant if you don’t have THE F-ING GAMES. That’s what gets people attention(EGS would be irrelevant today if they didn’t got agressive with exclusivity), just look at console exclusives for reference.
Oh bullcrap they have a monopoly on user retention. Casual gamers don’t even have Steam in their system startup. They see a shiny, and they click what they have to to get the shiny.
Max concurrent users online in 16 years has been about 20 million, less than 20% of all users. I wouldn’t say retention is high.
You’re still missing the point. Epic Games Store doesn’t have the games because their focus is entirely on exclusion, not on a viable business model of actually offering to sell games. If they had literally anything on EGS besides paid for exclusives and a select few indies – most of which aren’t even released yet – they would be picking up users in addition to those gained by giving away games.
There are THOUSANDS of games they could be adding to EGS – they aren’t. It’s not like Valve had games on their store when it came out, either. They had to do the work. Epic isn’t doing that work.
“There are THOUSANDS of games they could be adding to EGS – they aren’t.”
They don’t need to add thousands, just the best and hot new stuff to attract attention. As for “viable business model” let’s wait and see, no need to get mad either way, if Epic fails, at least they gave money to some devs, jumpstarted some games, etc, but i see people fear that they actually manage to be sucessful. Just wait and see.
So you’re saying they should run a crappy store for hipsters who only play bad new games. That will probably get a large chunk of people, no doubt.
Metro Exodus is pretty good, don’t know about the rest.
Bad for who?
It’s not bad for the developers by the looks of it.
As a gamer I don’t feel anything bad about installing another launcher on my PC.
While Steam was actually saving PC gaming ecosystem with good deals, good support, more and better features, Epic Games heads were busy blaming PC gaming filthy pirates cuz we did not bought their baby Gears of War bruh!
so what? that was in the past. thats like saying that while muslims were killing each other christianity kept europe together so lets go pray to jesus?
yes sure steam saved pc gaming back then or at least helped it by a lot. but they cant keep charging 30% if they want games to go to their store. they just dont offer that much anymore
I’m glad developers are making more money now. If only it wouldn’t come at extra cost of consumers. Steam is significantly cheaper than Epic and has constant sales. Epic is now doing its first ever sale, guess what… 50% off Darksiders 3. What a fcking joke.
I do not know if all he says is true BUT 30% cut was bound to hurt devs sooner or later. Can’t blame publishers for taking the essy $ route and go the EGS way.
Our perception might change eventually. When steam came out i hated it, despised it etc, now i love it. Is this the same case for EGS ?
Time will tell.
Right. It was “kiling PC gaming”. That’s why the PC is the most at parity with game releases, than it has ever been. Ever. Valve has been killing PC gaming.
If this is what morons call “killing PC gaming”, then please, kill on, Valve.
Valve need is competition. Finally Epic store seem ready to give it to them. I hope Steam will be forced to get better to keep their giant piece of the pie.
I hope Steam forces Epic to lose all of their pie tbh. Sod off to a company that left PC gaming when it needed help the most.
“PC gamers are all pirates. Consoles are the future; consoles are where the money is.”
—Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games (not verbatim, but pretty close)
And that’s where he loses any and all respect. Same goes for ubisoft.
Steam won’t do $hit when people are just fanboying it.
All anyone can say is 30% is too much and I agree it’s high but how much longer will Steam let this drag on for? I don’t understand why Steam just doesn’t lower their cut already. Is the entry into VR hardware expensive enough that they don’t want to justify a cut in revenue? I guess I’m just wonder why Steam hasn’t fought back yet against losing some of the biggest releases of the year to Epic (aside from that ridiculous 10 million sales thing).
Most people don’t realize this but Valve’s 30% covers transactions of payment providers which is how they’re able to have good regional pricing. Many people are complaining about games being too expensive on the Epic store with them having pay at least the extra equivalent of $10 in their country because of transaction fees being tacked on. Epic have stated that the fees are too expensive for them to cover so consumers will have to pay for it.
I could be wrong but aren’t transaction fees only 2.5% – 5%? On a $60 that’s $3 ($4.5 on $90 game etc)
It depends on the region. I was reading how someone had to pay an extra €6 euros for the €80 deluxe edition of a game through the Epic Store. The Japanese use Wallet Credit and it charges 10-15% of the price of a game Steam fortunately covers the cost which is how Japan is starting to grow a PC player base.
Somethings also gotta pay for their legal department when the authoritarian vultures in the EU and Australia constantly sue them for frivolous reasons and their own misunderstanding of how Valve operates.
Once you’re a global company, you’ve got a lot of lawsuits to deal with and other companies to sue.
quote from Richard Geldreich tweet
Richard Geldreich
@richgel999
Steam was killing PC gaming. It was a 30% tax on an entire industry. It was unsustainable. You have no idea how profitable Steam was for Valve. It was a virtual printing press. It distorted the entire company. Epic is fixing this for all gamers
Apple App Store and Google Play take 70/30 not just valve and most of the dev do phone games now XD
https://www.polygon.com/201…
i don’t know about ps store,xbox store and eshop royalties.
just my opinion:
30% tax on an entire industry not just valve so valve royalties is standard and if the dev want to fight valve to lower royalties they have to fight the other platform not just valve to be fair.
Considering there’s no shipping cost , or physical cost like the box disc etc. 30% is perfectly fine. Not to mention there use to be no return policy for years.
If Epic is the saviour of the PC gaming, I’m done.
I’ll say goodbye to this hobby and leave it to the 12-yo horde of Fortnite players.
So long, and thanks for all the games.
Don’t even think to give weight to a delusional butthurt psycho’s words, they’re meaningless.
Don’t worry, I won’t!
Okay, bye bye 🙂
Epic is not the saviour of PC gaming…
What kind of braindead zombie are you ?
Just block him, he has serious mental issues
bizzysgs is a self-confessed Sony console fanboy, obsessive Destiny cheerleader and lover of Anthem. As you say, a “braindead zombie”.
Basically free money for Valve and cash crunch for the developers.
That was what Rebel Galaxy was saying, but what do they know, they are only developers…..
One of the few actual developers Epic has given money to. Most of the deals are with big publishers. Ask a musician what a “360 deal” is sometime and you’ll quickly find out just how well big publishing houses pay the actual artists. This “more money for developers” line is complete horseshit — propaganda used by publishers to rake in more money while they pay pittances to the actually talented people beneath them.
Yeah, that’s steam’s money! *snark*
In seriousness (and I realize this is a major over-response, but bear with me, it goes somewhere!), Steam takes 30%, a number it cribbed from Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. Nobody claims those organizations are killing their respective markets. And 30% is a far, far cry from the ridiculous cuts most large middlemen will demand — music sees amounts greater than 90%, with modern signing deals taking money at every possible opportunity (e.g., artists used to make more money for themselves through concerts than through music sales, so now the middlemen demand huge cuts of concert income).
“The ability to sell a game year-round, at variable prices, while keeping the majority of the revenue is a far cry from the old days of having a one-month shelf-life in a retail store and collecting a few percentage points in royalties – if you were lucky. That’s the old traditional model, and I’m happy it’s dying.” —Lars Doucet, developer of Defender’s Quest
Epic’s line is that a lower cut will allow more developers to survive — yet it’s not allowing just anyone onto its store. It plans to curate constantly, same as Steam used to — and when Steam was curating, all the indies complained that they weren’t getting onto Steam. Fast forward to now, and they’re complaining that, since they are all now allowed onto Steam (exactly as they all wanted), Steam isn’t a magical meal ticket anymore, and they’re salivating at the thought of Epic letting them in, but not their competition. They want a walled garden, but only if they get to be on the inside.
As a wise Twitter user once said:
“Should Steam give special treatment to indies?”
“No. Unless it’s me.”
Steam is curating some trash games away.
Who cares, publishers fund the development of a game, it’s simple as that. You are arguing apples and oranges or something
No, I’m pointing out that publishers tend to keep as much money for themselves as possible. This is not a new or unique concept; the entire media industry is choked with publishing houses that gouge at every opportunity. As I said — ask a musician what a “360 deal” is sometime.
As for publishers funding development, that’s only sometimes true. Sometimes the distribution deal is negotiated after the game is done or nearly done. Not always, but sometimes. And even when it’s negotiated before, it’s a distribution deal, not a “we will fund this game in its entirety and then we will sell it” deal (although those also exist).
Epic / Tencent will never get a single penny from me. Period.
A fired disgruntled ex valve employee.
From what I’m seeing this isn’t really about the percentage split but anti-steam people having a bandwagon to jump on and devs getting easy money from Epic Games. If it was really about percentage splits we should be seeing a lot of games on the Discord Store then since they offer a 90/10% cut and have a large user base. The only devs/publishers I have seen say good things about the Epic Store are those that were paid off by Epic. I have yet to see dev or publisher say their game sold better on the Epic Store than Steam as well.
Metro: Exodus with Deep Silver/Koch Media. No numbers provided of course. Just saying it sold better than “Metro: Last Light on Steam”.
Worse than that. They neglected to say that these sales numbers for Metro Exodus included the Steam pre orders lmfao!
Even worse than that.
We don’t know any of the following:
1. Which platforms those LL sales were on (some? all? just PC?)
2. How many copies LL sold total — because the only figure we have for that is 1.5m for the Redux bundle
3. Which version(s) of LL the figure accounts for (OG? Redux? both?)
4. Whether Redux Bundle sales count as sales of LL
“2.5 times better than Last Light” is a meaningless statistic that exists purely as propaganda. Until I see the methodology behind the number, it’s sh*t.
They specifically said “2.5x more than on Steam.” but like everyone’s said, there’s no proof.
The only data available is that LL only shows like 20,000 users on SteamSpy, but none of that data is reliable anymore either.
Precisely. Sadly, quite a few people including games journalists were predictably gullible enough to swallow said vacuous PR hook, line and sinker.
But it isn’t a game that has a simultaneous release on both platforms or Epic Store version releasing after Steam and somehow doing better than the Steam version within its time span.
If it were really about revenue cuts, everyone would be on itch.io, which offers a 100/0 split.
It’s that and market share. Epic brings in the bucks to developers as an incentive
It’s about hypothetical future market share, for Epic specifically. It seems to want to become the go-to location for all the big names that don’t have their own platforms already. Its current strategy is to purchase their presence on EGS in the hopes that, by the time the Fortnite money is exhausted, EGS will have garnered enough market share through brute force to incentivize the continued presence of said big names purely through “we don’t charge as much as Steam” (and also a nice side helping of “we’ll let you completely disable those pesky consumer reviews so you have total brand image control”).
The point is that preaching the revenue-share line is disingenuous when there already existed a store far better than EGS at revenue sharing. This is not some altruistic principled position Epic has; it is a position of convenience, used for Epic’s own immediate benefit (as it lets them easily portray themselves as the good guys and Valve as the bad guys).
I don’t believe in Epic altruism, more like mutual cooperation. They have money to spare (provided they get exclusivity) and devs/publishers benefit. We can also pirate with a clearer conscience since they already got paid lmao
Steam cried MS store would hurt pc gaming, meanwhile, steam WAS Ms store before ms store. They didn’t want competition. Newell is a hypocrite, in the guise of for gamers, it’s for his fat bank account. Dont understand hate on epic for trying to help developers BRING GAMES TO PC! Less fee = more incentive to platform.
Gamers would find a way to cry if you handed them a million dollars with every game they played. Seriously.
Dafuq did I just read
Are you mentally retarded?
What, did you lose your mind?
https://i.imgur.com/gVpmhWg.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yg02UiwdlGw/VHOTfwFgbAI/AAAAAAAASZw/JUjVWe5LnA8/w1200-h630-p-nu/what-you-talkin-bout-willis-quote-1.jpg
Whet the heck, are you really that naive?
Uh…no.
MS Store has all of the features of XBL integrated, but, it’s not at all the same thing as Steam. You can rarely ever buy an MS Store key anywhere except MS Store for full price. There is no competition.
Also VALVE is the name of the company, not Steam, but we wouldn’t expect you to know that because like all people with no clue what they’re talking about, we can tell you’re ignorant by the fact that you think Steam is a company.
Epic isn’t “helping developers bring games to PC.”
There is literally nothing stopping developers like Quantic Dream from bringing their games to PC except Sony’s legalese, if that. If they wanted a publisher, all they had to do was shop around for one. You’re talking about 4 games – Journey, Heavy Rain, BTS, and Detroit BH. Two developers, one of them a small indie which was understandable.
Random question, which triggers you more, the increased cost of PC gaming hardware, or Epic exclusivity?
To be honest, PC Gaming Hardware are most likely to be a case. Cost is one of the reason.
Jen-Hsun ‘Jensen’ Huang wearing that Terminator-style black leather jacket at his age triggers me the most!
Gaming hardware obviously
Valve killed PC GAMING SO HARD that pc is toady the biggest platform after mobile
“the biggest platform after mobile”
Maybe they killed it by pumping so much mobile and f2p trash
Except valve never did that
DOTA
Which is irrelevant?
DOTA2 is one game. And it’s significantly smaller than LoL, like less than 2% of the amount of players. The only “F2P trash” Valve has any involvement with is TF2 and DOTA2 and the monetization of dumb hats and stuff.
There aren’t even a million people playing TF2, or DOTA2. I wouldn’t ever call that ruining PC gaming.
Yeah, it’s just the usual innundating PC market with shovelware crap and clone games.
there are no mobile games on steam.. it is A PC STORE
Should have said mobile like quality, or worse
YOU WILL NEVER BE HAPPY.
XDDDDDFF HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA..
What the fck are you talking about?
I rather don’t want to know if I want to comment the guy. Embarrassing somehow.
Geldreich …. i remember that guy … wasnt he the one who posted the tweets and bloggs about how horrible is it working at valve?
No surprise he keeps sh**ting on it
To be fair it probably is horrible to work at Valve – if you want to actually make games.
well the stuff he mention in those exagerrated tweets applied for pretty much every corporation ever … and not everyone is able to work in corporates
Valve fired this clearly unstable disgruntled person (probably for good reason, just look at his venom filled tweets) and now he is bad mouthing Valve. Just shows how great his character is.
Considering his illogical statements, I say its true. Its almost laughable how hard he tried even tho facts show completely different picture.
Nice ad-hominem
dont act like valve is great
Well compared to other trash companies they are a godsend and deserve every bit of success that has come their way. Other than Valve/Steam & CD Projekt RED/GOG can you name me any other company that you would want to be in charge of managing PC Games digital distribution.
(Psssst — GOG is a separate company; both it and CDPR are owned by CD Projekt.)
I know.
Lest we forget that CD Projekt aren’t the modern-day saints that their army of overly precious cheerleaders paint them to be. A few examples that spring to mind,
– changing GOG’s regional pricing policy shortly before The Witcher III was made available to pre-order
– taking a 30% cut (no reduction for top-selling games like Steam does)
– reportedly taking a 50% cut of indie games partly funded by them
– the obfuscation of showing the PC version of TW3 at ultra settings in the run-up to that game’s release
– laughably denying TW3 had been downgraded relative to promotional footage
– selling TW3 on digital stores with screenshots on the store pages of the game prior to the epic downgrade
– official moderators censoring and banning people on their official forums for trying to debate the downgrade
– publicly whining that key vendors were legally offering TW3 for sale
– downgraded modding suite for TW3 relative to TW2
– allegations of mistreating employees
Also I think CD Projekt got their start from pirated software for Polish players.
Nonetheless no company is a complete saint but some companies are definitely way less abhorrent than others.
Epic 12% includes
– game engine Unreal Engine 4 with full support (DX12, Raytracing, DLSS)
– online store
Valve 30% includes
– 20 years old Source engine without any big feature updates in last 10 years
– online store
Epic is developer friendly because they still develop own games and support own game engine – unreal. Valve don’t do this anymore. Where are games from Valve? Where is modern Source engine?
You seem to have left a few things out and mixed other things in that don’t belong.
Epic’s 12% includes:
–
game engine Unreal Engine 4 with full support (DX12, Raytracing, DLSS)– online store
Valve’s 30% includes:
–
20 years old Source engine without any big features update in last 10 years– online store
– native streaming platform
– fastest CDN in the entire industry (download as fast as your connection can handle)
– vastly smaller patch sizes than any other platform (thanks to the manifest system)
– native forums for discussion and tech support (users can help each other)
– reviews (customers can judge for themselves easily)
– robust curation tools (the only person who knows your taste is you)
– baked-in support for achievements, leaderboards, and multiplayer (so devs don’t have to make these things from scratch)
– baked-in support for near-effortless modding
– the ability for users to go back to any past version of almost any game they’d like (via Steam’s command line and the depot system)
– …and plenty more
Mostly except the CDN part isn’t true. I have 1 gbps fiber connection. Steam is fast but the data centers have trash connections. The one here in Houston won’t even give your connection a run for its money., When I downloaded Anthem when it came out, my download was going 105 Megabyte ( thats 840 mbps) per second. The fastest I’ve EVER downloaded anything from Steam was 70. Origin and Battle.net almost always download faster than Steam when I use them, maybe because no one uses their trash, but I’ve had Origin be severely slow on me too.
For those of us with good internet, we’re the few people getting left out on that one but what does 3 min vs 5 min really matter? It’s not like I pay over $100 a month for it.
For me Batllenet is slow and I never had any problem filling my 1gbps network in Steam. It all depends where do you live.
This is my situation as well.
For me Steam has always been capped to 25mb while Origin downloaded like 50mb
You’re retrdness incarnate jesus christ off urself.
i just wanna let you know that Apex Legends made by Source engine.
A heavily modified one but yes.
Do you really think that Valve Source engine is better than Epic Unreal Engine 4? I don’t think so. But we will see in future because all unreal engine games will be exclusive to Epic store.
Sigh ok man. Ride the amd hype train until you get disappointing as usual
Think? No. I know for a fact.
Unreal Engine 4 has far more advanced graphics and effects, as well as sound features like binaural sound. Some of the most amazing looking games I’ve seen like Hellblade (looking. It has amazingly good graphics) are in Unreal 4.
Graphics aren’t everything,. In fact, they’re closer to nothing.
Games made with Source play better. They run better. They have virtually non-exstent issues with hit registration, tick rate, or anything else related to online play. .Titanfall l1 and 2 and Apex are incredibly stable, responsive games where network latency and hardware performance simply aren’t ever negative factors for people with good connections and machines.
But every single Unreal Engine game besides Unreal Tournament feels like trash online. Insurgency Sandstorm makes improvements each time but still often feels wonky and unresponsive. Red Orchestra 1 and 2 both had constant issues. Rising Storm 2 felt like absolute trash last time I played it, where bullets flat out do not work. Tribes Ascension? Garbage. America’s Army? Was always wonky.
Of all the online games in Unreal, Killing Floor is probably the only one that isn’t trash besides Gears 4 (multiplayer is trash tho because of bad design, like the Gnasher).
Unreal is great for offline singleplayer games. That’s it. Even then it’s a stretch, they have very few games that are great listed on their page. Versus Source? Every single game on Source engine is quite successful, CS Source. CS Go. DoD Source. Insurgency. Day of Infamy. Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2. HL2. Apex. Titanfall. Titanfall 2.
Source is stutter free. Unreal is known for stutters and texture loading issues
I played and play tons of RS2, RO2, RO1, Sandstorm, and this has always been true at least since UE3.
Epic 100% POS/Disloyal/Hypocrites
-Anti-Consumer, Anti-Competition etc
-Abandoned PC Gamers/PC Gaming because of “piracy” and now want back in once all the hard work has been done by Valve/Steam.
-Fornite Cancer
Valve 100% Amazing/Loyal/Genuine
-Pro-Consumer, Pro-Competition
-Recognized Piracy was a service issue and single-handedly saved PC Gaming by creating Steam and continues to evolve it.
-No Fortnite Cancer
Also, it might be argued that Tim Sweeney is being used as a pawn by major stakeholder Tencent, and therefore the Chinese, to establish control of PC gaming.
Every cent spent on Fortnite micro-transactions and on Epic Games Store is contributing toward the Chinese seizing control of PC gaming.
Yup. Tim Sweeney is worth $2 Billion but still a slave to Tencent.
Indeed. Tencent owns a 48.4% stake in Epic Games and has the right to nominate individuals to Epic Games’ board of directors.
Tencent also has ownership stakes in Riot Games (100%), Activision-Blizzard (5%) and Ubisoft (5%).
Just stop.
A. Source isn’t 20 years old. HL2 came out in November 2004. Even including development time, the current version of Source is still from 2007.
B. Unreal Engine, since you’re including development time and early versions of Source in your non-logic, is OLDER than Source. The first build of Unreal Engine was, in fact, 20 years ago – May 1998. Goldsrc – Half-Life 1 – is a modified Quake engine. Valve built an entirely new engine from scratch that was superior to every engine on the market including CryEngine. Cry may have had better graphics but Source had better physics and better performance, not to mention it was more stable and far friendlier than any version of UE before UE4. If you don’t want to take my word for it, go see how much user created content exists for Source versus any unreal game.
C. Steam is far more than an “online store.”
– Cloud saves as well as options to choose offline saves
– Automatic patching, updating, DLC management
– Built in mod support
– Built in achievement support
– Built in overlay so you can use Chromium and all Steam features while still in game, with no performance impact at all
– Built in streaming
– Built in VoIP
– Built in 100% remappable, customizable controller configurations as well as Xbox and Sony standard gamepad supporrt
– Community forums including technical support , bug reporting, with a direct line to the developers for many games, as well as community guides
– Screenshots
– Automatic modular library management, customized game categorization
– Friends including built in instant messaging with integrated steam community linking, videos, gifs, VoIP, etc.
– Customizable UI
– EXTREMELY user-customizable online store that also has developer news for the game right there
– Community also allows you to follow developers and publishers, see live streams for any game you look at on store
– As to your other stupid comment, Valve also has their own custom hardware and custom operating system. SteamOS, Steam Controller, Steam Link, they partially created HTC Vive and right now they have their own custom 100% Valve VR headset coming out. In addition to the ill-fated Steam Boxes.
True, some of my friends refused to buy metro exodus on epic store, just went to pirate it and played it for free. So yeah thats how epic games encourage community to support beloved franchises :I
Yeah I was watching a video writing this LOL
“Epic is fixing this for all gamers.” No, it’s not! It’s fixing this for all “devs” financial departments!
How to fix this for all gamers AND devs: refuse EXCLUSIVES (on either platform), offer some extras on Epic side (or maybe a slight more appealing price (although keeping the better profit), offer a better platform (and without a gazillion junk games in the mix), and above all: explain and expose to the gamers how Steam’s greed is being bad for all industry (share some fcking numbers if needed)… so they can join your cause…
… and that way make Epic look like it’s the good guy in all this crap (even if it isn’t).
All in all: LOOK AT STEAM WEAKPOINTS AND MAKE THEM YOUR FCKING STRONG ONES. That’s how you offer proper competition, be the better service, get the gamers attention and support.
Don’t you want to pay extra to the devs in EGS, so they can add your hard earned cash to their swimming pool full of bribe money?
https://media.giphy.com/media/SsTcO55LJDBsI/giphy.gif
https://media2.giphy.com/media/l3V0slU7u7quJuZ3O/giphy.gif
No, but Epic wants to pay, so why stop them?
EPIC GAMES in 2007 “PC is dead and you will never see Gears of War 2 on PC like EVER”. I still remember that Timy boy. Valve isn’t perfect but at least they care about PC platform.
To be fair, that was mostly ex employer Cliff Blezynsky making an a*s out of the company to hide the fact that Microsoft woudn’t allow any more Gears of War on PC
o be fair, that was mostly ex employer Cliff Blezynsky making an a$$ out of the company to hide the fact that Microsoft woudn’t allow any more Gears of War on PC
Yea, no.
Google is killing Android market by taking 30%. Apple is killing iOS market by taking 30%. Suicidal Sony and Microsoft are not working for 10% and killing their own consoles markets. Gotta go buy few Fortnite skins so Epic have enough money to save ’em to.
P.S. One ate too much shrooms, other wants to be on a payroll as PC Gamer. Right John?
Sony and MS take 30% price of games and deliver:
– own custom hardware below production costs
– own operating system with custom game libraries
– create own games
– own online store
Valve take 30% price of games
– only online store
Epic take 12% price of games
– epic unreal engine 4
– online store
Valve’s online store offers way more features than Sony, MS and especially Epic’s online stores. Valve’s online store has better regional pricing with no transaction fees because their 30% covers it unlike the Epic store where it drops the transaction fee on consumers making games cost more.
Steam has access to regions that the Epic Store doesn’t such as China which is a market too big to ignore now. Valve provide anti cheat software, dedicated servers, DRM, workshop managing mods that can be sold, cafe program, cloud storage and etc. Valve have their own Linux Distro and Wine emulator. Valve have their own custom controller, VR headset and up until recently a streaming box.
“Steam has access to regions that the Epic Store doesn’t such as China which is a market too big to ignore now.”
Interesting, and that may explain their new censorship policies. Not that people care about these stuff, people care about good games, that’s why there is so much hatred towards EGS in the first place.
Don’t forget the gimmick hardwares being sold on Steam (actually, i already forgot). Fanboys gonna fanboy
Nobody said anything about the cut, even, people agree that is too much, the problem is exclusivity, that is another thing. You put money to avoid competition, you put money to take away options from customers. That is the problem, you are paying to force customers to use your product, and there is almost no pros for customers, there is no better games or cheaper, only less services and awful policies.
“Forcing customers to use your product” I actually remember when people said that about Steam. But I agree, it’s BS and exclusivity even to a digital store front sucks.
People were being forced to install and log in to Steam when installing retail games they bought at a store.
They weren’t being forced to buy a game from only one place, and THEN also use that places trash software.
steam probably saved pc gaming from piracy…
They made enough money from that 30% cut, I really don’t care if they’re going to lower that or not. Epic’s store can’t do sh*t against steam but i think the guy has a point if you know how lazy was valve in recent years!
So lazy they poured lots of money and time into improving Linux gaming, and had a huge effect on improving game compatibility with Linux. Look up Proton sometime.
So lazy they overhauled the chat system when Discord showed them up.
So lazy they added native streaming and started indirectly competing with Twitch.
Yeah, they’ve been doing nothing of note lately. Just resting on their laurels.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f7c25d9c4280b4225a41a40b1e52a902c1432a1c8944232e04fe33d779f8d027.png
I like how you forgot to underline “publisher and digital distribution company”. And last I checked, they developed a game quite recently. It’s easily the worst game they’ve ever made, but development isn’t really a thing they do anymore, so I’m not surprised. I’d sooner they just struck “game developer” from the list of things they supposedly are, and stuck to being a distribution service provider.
Also, that image in no way disproves my point. Valve hasn’t been lazy. Valve just hasn’t been making games — it’s been making PC great again.
As if people care about this
He says, replying to someone who clearly cares, in a comment section mostly populated by people who care.
I wasn’t talking about the average nerd
Then you are correct, the average non-gaming layman doesn’t care, nor does the average dudebro CoD player. But they also don’t care about Valve’s alleged laziness, which was the point of comparison here.
I do care about Valve dropping out of game development (huge fan of half-life)
I’d kinda like to see a Valve that still made good games, myself. But I don’t think they have that mojo anymore, and surely we can both agree (even if on little else so far) that a Valve that makes no games is better than a Valve that makes bad games.
They could also just fund new games if they let other devs work on their franchises (or create new ones)
Interestingly enough, fickle narrowminded casuals like you and Bad Raja aren’t the entirety of the PC gaming audience.
People do definitely care about all the not-making-a-game things Valve does.
The fact that they implemented universal, customizable controller support for ANY controller on PC – Steam, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS4, any other controller you can interface – is enough alone to be completely happy with.
Valve is not “lazy.” They simply haven’t released a huge 10/10 game since 2009. Only the crybabby gamer audience would completely trash people for this. Do you trash Tool because it’s been 13 years since their last album? Do you trash GRRM because Winds of Winter still isn’t out?
Yet the same hypocrites will say things like “Plz take the time you need to release a finished game.”
And I hate to once again bring FACTS into the discussion but Gabe said in the last AMA Valve is currently working on multiple games. Only one of those games – Artifact – has come out since.
Stfu.
Talk about being a casual while wanting to play with controllers. Also, coudn’t you just leave out trash game Artifact with your Steam shilling? lol
He’s not wrong about either Valve or Steam.
Though he is wrong about Epic
“oppressive”
“abusive”
Sounds like an SJW.
Also seems extremely butthurt to no longer have a job at Valve.
Scroll down on his twitter and you’ll find him retweeting some feminist BS about the pay gap. So yeah, a lot of people shilling for Epic seem to be SJWs, makes me wonder if Gabe being a bad boy by relaxing censorship on Steam is part of the motivation for all the Epic d*cksucking.
How crushingly predictable. Yet another attention-seeking SJW on Twitter with an axe to grind against the world. Muh oppression.
“a lot of people shilling for Epic seem to be SJWs”
So very true. Ever since Gaben refused demands from activist games ‘journalists’ to censor Steam in accordance with SJW ideology the usual suspects of PC Gamer, Eurogamer, Polygon, Jim Sterling and more have all adopted a clear anti-Steam stance.
Make no mistake about it. The anti-Steam pro-EGS narrative we’re consistently witnessing on a regular basis from certain notorious soyboy-infested sites in the shill media and SJW activists on YouTube is absolutely politically motivated. Said sites and individuals won’t be content until Steam bends the knee to their Far Left political ideology.
“So very true. Ever since Gaben refused demands from activist games ‘journalists’ to censor Steam in accordance with SJW ideology the usual suspects of PC Gamer, Eurogamer, Polygon, Jim Sterling and more have all adopted a clear anti-Steam stance.”
You do realize they already cucked on this issue right?
Nowhere near the extent to which the SJW activist media were clamouring for.
“makes me wonder if Gabe being a bad boy by relaxing censorship on Steam is part of the motivation for all the Epic d*cksucking.”
relaxing censorship? You sure it’s not the other way around?
Shame you use the term SJW so I have to ignore everything said in this thread.
You seem like a SQW to me, shame :/
Delighted to hear that. Move along.
I do think Valve should reduce their cut to something like 20%. That’s still reasonable and still makes them money.
What game developers should do is release their games on Epic and Steam simultaneously, and charge more on Steam to cover Valve’s cut. Then let the market decide. Nobody can complain then.
but but but actual capitalism wouldn’t work in the favor of companies /s/s/s/s but no seriously crappy companies would take a huge hit if people ACTUALLY had a choice, Valve included.
Is there any major person in the gaming industry that has officially defended EGS, without being bribed?
Lol,how much tim pay this guy to sh*t talk about Valve…smh
And i think this guy now officially epic exclusive 😀
quote from Richard Geldreich tweet
Apple App Store and Google Play take 70/30 not just valve and most of the dev do phone games now XD
https://www.polygon.com/2018/12/4/18125498/epic-games-store-details-revenue-split-launch-date
i don’t know about ps store,xbox store and eshop royalties.
just my opinion:
30% tax on an entire industry not just valve so valve royalties is standard and if the dev want to fight valve to lower royalties they have to fight the other platform not just valve to be fair.
What load of cr*p if it wasn’t for Steam PC gaming wouldn’t be doing as good as it is now and companies like Epic Games wouldn’t even be trying to make a Steam competitor because they believed the platform to be dead because of piracy.
Devs thinking from only their pov. Not surprised at all by his words. All these “it’s good for all gamers” nut-jobs think from only their perspective, never what the actual consumer wants.
Valve saved suffering PC gaming when consoles were taking it over. Everyone who’s been following PC gaming for a decade or two knows this
I’m frankly amazed that it took these anti-PC gaming nut jobs years to come out of hiding, to parade another crusade against the open platform in this manner. I hope they go away forever this time. I miss the days of old, when idiots where shunned right back into a corner.
May be the case, but they’re putting it at risk again by their greed.
Dominance by any company is not good
How? PC gaming is rising even now. Many notable Japanese developers are starting to take interest on it aswell and not just Visual Novel makers.
Dominance is bad yes, but Steam is free market, devs and publishers had always a choice.
Valve offers by far the best platform and features and people use Steam because of that. Not because of they are being forced to use it like in Epic’s case if they want to play games
Isn’t hard to understand.
The less prohibitive it is for developers to get their games to customers, the greater the interest in developing for the format, the greater potential for savings to be passed on to customers, more money can me invested into developing gamesgame.
Valve has a Monopoly basically and can charge what they like.
That’s not healthy.
lol
do you really believe that a publisher, having a bigger cut, would A- reinvest that money AND B- give that money back to you, the costumer, in form of lower price
really? then what was the point of having a bigger cut? just to lose double over it?
it isn’t hard to understand, they won’t do this, they never intended to and never will, you can see for youself, go on epic store and watch how low the prices are
It’s not the healthiest of things, can’t see how epic’s monopolistic manoeuvres is healthier tho
Competition is always healthy for everyone involved.
I never advocated a Monopoly by any company.
yes, this kind of competition will put more money in the pocket of the dev/publisher, which is what I was saying
make no mistake, you, the costumer, isn’t involved, you can only feel the consequences (ie gog closing their moneyback anti regional pricing thing)
never said you did, just saying that if you don’t want a monopoly, epic’s manoeuvres isn’t the direction you want
They charge as much as Sony and MS do. So far Epic charging less has made no benefits to consumer. You pay that same 60€ price for less feature rich spyware platform.
And it’s the publisher who gets the difference aka suits and shareholders. Not those hardworking people who make those games possible
Just stop. They for a fact don’t. There are at least 12 other places to buy Steam keys besides through Steam.
Valve has already come out and said they don’t make money off of third party key sales – the keys are generated for free.
It’s not 2006. You no longer have to buy a retail disc with a built in Steam installer. If you do buy a steam key, that doesn’t mean Valve is getting money.
Twelve legal places to buy keys?
Still doesn’t stop then levying a 30% charge against developers which is steap by any standards and such heavy charges were responsible for developers supporting Sony against Nintendo when PlayStation was created.
So, no, you stop
You’re clearly a fanatic with no sense of objectivity.
You want to see Steam and Valve as some sort of Messiah, when clearly they’re not.
Bro stop.
-Greenmangaming
-HumbleBundle
-IndieGala
-Fanatical
-Direct2Drive
-Gamersgate
-Amazon
-Best Buy
-GameStop
-Walmart
-Target
-Game
– Fry’s
– Microcenter
– NewEgg
and yes that’s not including grey market.
You don’t know what the word objectivity means. Valve isn’t doing anything literally every other distributor in the games industry and other industrys haven’t also been doing for decades. Yet amazingly, somehow despite this oppression, PC gaming has exploded in scale and reach and amount of games, hardware, etc available. Definitely sounds like Valve’s “30%” cut is strangling the industry alright.
I forget, which developers are the ones operating solely on spreadsheets that lead to closing studios and laying everyone off? Oh right it’s not Valve destroying all innovation, suffocating studios to death through intentional mismanagement, and forcing everyone to put in microtransactions and profiteering schemes in their games in order to rake in massive profits.
You can keep crying, as an ignorant casual who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, about how Valve is a “monopoly” but that doesn’t change the facts. The PC gaming market has literally the most choice in the entire gaming industry. Period. It isn’t up for debate. In addition to all those legal stores , you have Origin, GOG, Uplay, EGS, Battlenet, Microsoft, Bethesda, and then you have greymarkets – kinguin, cdkeys, g2a, and I’m sure more.
What is Valve monopolizing, exactly? What are they doing that prevents other companies from selling games on PC?
Steam offers lots of services, they deserve 30%. Evennon steam games can use the services without paying Valve. Epic looses money with every sale with 12% nobody sold games there Epic needs to pay publishers. Epic will increase their share and stop with the exclusives iwth money run out. Steam will remain the top destination for AAA.
Steam still has the luxury to charge 30% because it provides the Publishers the access to Millions of potential gamers/customers. The perks of being the first proper games digital store and years domination at that. And they know it very well.
They won’t do anything anytime soon. If Epic store drags, they benefit, they’ll get the publishers back and at the same rate. If Epic store succeeds, they also benefit, they been scoring 30% for years, they can afford to finally slack off the margin and still have the humongous multi-Million customer database advantage.
I just don’t understand how Steam’s 30% is insane, but 30% on consoles is ok?
And Steam killed pc gaming? I remember PC gaming before Steam, console exclusives where a normal thing. Today almost all exclusives are first party and Microsoft bringing all of their exlusexclu to PC. In countries like Russia piracy was at such levels that you couldn’t buy legal games even if you wanted. Steam made it so easy that people preferred to buy games, than to pirate games. And now Epic bringing people back to piracy.
Honestly, the guy sounds like an absolute spoilt man-child, who got fired for having a crappy opinion.
I’ve read his tweets and the guy is basically warped and thinks just like Tim. He only gives the “EGS needs them features” because he has no choice, if he had a choice I bet you he’d hand wave that sh*t so fast.
The fact he thinks the other sh**ty clients being AAA “cream of the crop”, while the second good store gets all the crap is something good, then I’d honestly be done with gaming.
No seriously this is blasphemy what this guy is saying. It is cut and dry blasphemy. I’ll admit that I love Valve but they definitely aren’t perfect. But I don’t have to love them to recognize the irrefutable fact that Valve has been CRUCIAL to the life of PC gaming.
Discussions like your comment ? also you forgot your popcorn meme.
lol we all do
This guy is an idiot. Without Steam, PC gaming would be long dead and console games only stay.
Huh, commentation full of trash. I rather see the game with at least having a better content than the graphics instead of saying money all the time and time trash negativity comment about the cost of games. I’M DONE. I still stick with older games I play, include the games with better content.
So neither steam and epic would interest me. Right now I mostly saw most of the games is lesser content compared to old generation. Talking the cost for these game right released nowadays, what a joke.
Most of the cost of the games you’re likely referring to is marketing. The development cost has not increased as exponentially as the advertising.
So which games are you currently still playing?
Well I still playing older games like command and conquer, older generation of nfs, even other classic games too.
Oldschool NFS never gets old 🙂 The soundtracks in those games are iconic
And the content too. I agree your point.
Development costs are down overall. They’ve been trending down since roughly the release of GTAV, the point at which all the big AAA publishers seemed to realize that Rockstar/Take Two was making a killing off a single game and not pumping out a new one every year. Only the costs of individual AAA titles have gone up; actual R&D cost overall is decreasing steadily. How else do studios announce record-shattering profits while firing hundreds of developers? They’ve got whales on the microtransaction teat, and they milk them for years.
Well now we’re both referring to those garbage AAA games, like everything EA and Ubisoft are pumping out.
Development cost for actual good games did go up, I don’t see how it couldn’t.
If I’m really were to make games, I rather do the opposite. Making with meaningful content and lower cost. Of course the focus is on customer rather on money. Of course money is required to built a better team but instead of other companies just care about money. I think not many developer may take these route to make any kind of games.
It’s the devs that don’t that make the true GOTY games. Witcher3 obviously, the Divinity franchise, and small gems like Stardew Valley.
Yeah. They are being addicted to the power of money. That much i agree on you.
It didn’t because there are far more tools available now than there have ever been, even freely available ones. Unless you’re making your engine from scratch, your development costs are a fraction of what they would’ve been 10-20 years ago. Want to make a first-person shooter? Unreal has you covered on practically everything; just buy the SDK and give Epic 5% of your sales revenue. Trivial in comparison to having to build such an engine yourself. Or if you want to go old-school, use one of the ZDoom variants — completely free and insanely well documented. Much of the intermediate work has already been done, and developers of today stand on the shoulders of those before.
It depends of developers who mae such games though. However not many developers would like to care about customers demand to provide a better community. Nowadays games are made with lesser content and beautiful graphics but what else we can see now? Also I did agree with you some point that most of the engine can be used for build games or building engine from scratch cause one of my friend also build from stratch too with just basic 2d games, just to improve c# and skills
Less content and prettier visuals pretty well sums up the direction of AAA games.
For the condition right now, yes.
I actually suspect that they are most likely trying to go on the virtual, arguments and mixed reality in the future. In order to do that, this direction is part of the route.
For sure but game engines have been created by the mastodonts of the industry since the early days, and available to license for everyone else. Things may be easier now, but this is still only covering the game engine. All assets still have to be created from scratch. Unless you’re Ubisoft of course.
What truly drives the cost up is the customers increased demand for higher quality story telling, voice acting, tight controls, textures, meshes and cinematics. The bar has raised and devs need to keep up.
This assumes you’re talking about developers who are attempting to keep pace with AAA (or become AAA themselves), which I thought we had diverged from discussing. Middle-market and indie developers do not require the highest polish; the whole point of indie, initially, was to get back to mechanical soundness as opposed to visual panache.
Yes and no, I mean everyone is competing for the same audience so whether we discuss one or the other, it will always boil down to the same.
What Remains of Edith Finch is a nice example, a masterpiece in all aspects and even some groundbreaking gameplay/storytelling intertwining and still came with an indie pricetag. (I bought it over a year ago on Steam for a fraction of the cost it’s currently selling on EGS, hue)
But everyone isn’t competing for the same audience. That’s the mindset of AAA, the idea that gamers are a single, homogeneous blob.
If World of Warcraft and the MMO Wars proved one thing, it is that each individual game is a market unto itself. You can only target based on more generalized interests, and very few people will move from one game to another (much as very few people will move from one store to another) just because Game Y is “Game X but better”. There’s a vast, sprawling, dizzying array of mechanical diversity out there, more than you or I even know about, and while there is some overlap between them, it’s not a single blob with some outliers.
Yeah I can’t deny that. I had a friend who was extremely into CoD and FIFA, for many years, and I always suggested him better, more fun games. But when both of those went down the toilet he just quit gaming altogether and didn’t even bother with anything else.
I guess I’m an exception to that rule, I swap games all the time. Also the main reason why I won’t budge with boycotting EGS, if I gotta skip one excellent game that is exclusive to them, I got hundreds of others to try.
Cheers to you for this conversation. Civilised talk is rare in these kinda sites 🙂
Infinity Ward would say your friend wasn’t actually a gamer. They would be right, just as you’d be right to say that a guy who’s exclusively into basketball isn’t a “sports” fan.
Cheers to you as well. =)
To be clear, I tried to diverge from discussing “those garbage AAA games, like everything EA and Ubisoft are pumping out.”, I believe there are still quite a number of good AAA publishers out there.
I did really hate what I’m saying but it’s true.
Doesn’t Sony take 30%? What about GameStop or Wal-Mart? When you sell a copy of a game through one them isn’t the cut around 30/30/30? The developer makes even less this way and nobody says anything.
Amazon lowered prices to earn market share and slowly removed the perks and cheap prices as it became the dominant store. Epic will do the same.
They definitely aren’t ending up with 50% profit on retail sales.
Valve “killed” PC gaming so hard, that today I can play niche games I could never dreamed of ten years ago on my PC, buying it legally at much affordable regional prices without any monstrous DRMs like SecuROM or StarForce that make Denuvo look pale in comparison, and also having gaming centered social network at one place.
Thanks, Valve, you killed it.
Is this the new version of the annual “pc gaming is dying” article that we are subjected to by paid shills like PC Gamer and GameSpot? Parading out a former developer with no proof that he has any authority on the topic, but trusting him as a source because he “worked at Valve” ?
PC Gaming was not a strong market in the 90s or even before. Literally everything was coming from a small or medium sized independent developer who relied entirely on precarious relationships with big name console (and in some cases PC only) publishers. Origin Systems, Bullfrog, Valve, Stainless Steel, Firaxis, Eidos, Maxis, Westwood, etc. All of them had to play the game to get their titles made just so they could sell a few hundred thousand copies and be deemed a failure by EA etc. Legendary games like System Shock 1 and 2 were failures according to the publishers when the reality is they were reaching a huge group of people in the first place.
Everything has changed since then. It’s much easier and more affordable for a customer to get adequate hardware to play games. It’s much easier and more affordable to actually get your hands on a cd key now for a customer, not to mention get the word out about your game as a developer.
Valve may have nothing to do with the hardware, but they are effectively solely responsible (I’m not saying other little companies or other companies at all didn’t help but Valve deserves the majority of the credit) for the prevalence and the evolution of the digital games market place. The absolute amazing things Valve did for PC gaming are undeniable. Steam has grown by tens of millions of users per year. In 16 years the PC gaming market has grown to dwarf all consoles combined.
In what possible way is Valve killing PC gaming? Truly I’d love to know. To say something like this is just utterly ridiculous. Sure, Valve accomplished it by forcing Steam into retail game discs, forcing the key to activate through Steam and forcing you to install it. That made a lot of us angry one time. Once you had a Steam account, if you weren’t an early adopter, there was nothing to get mad about (other than bugs and such but all software has bugs.)
It’s like people forgot what PC gaming was like in 2002, 2003, or before. I literally had a notebook where I wrote CD keys down because I knew I was going to lose either the CD, the case, the insert, the manual, the box, or all 5. I had to install mplayer, and GameSpy later, to play Rainbow Six online, To play Battlefield 1942, or Call of Duty, SoF 2 or other games. Oh I could use the in game browser for some of those, but it was a pain. I had to use Xfire to chat with my friends while in games, see what they were playing, easily join their server. I had to use Ventrilo to chat with them in game across games because most games didn’t have built in VoIP.
Valve made most of those things go away. And all of that is just the user experience as a customer and gamer. That isn’t mentioning what they’ve done for indie development.
Hell if I know about that. To be exact, all I see is the games are mostly going to AAA in the first place, lesser content with better graphics. It doesn’t matter it is killing or not. It is most likely the people are toxicated for certain comparison and use this as their advantage. Like using epic for good things and accusing the valve as the bad thing.
I think it’s about time to say most people accusing each other about both platform or what ever it is. It is no longer about the cost anymore even it is related. Because people getting easily addicted with those negative motions and things. That is the way I’m seeing things right now.
Hear, hear. Superb comment.
To continue my huge comment.
Look at the PC gaming space right now.
Steam, uplay, Origin, GOG, Epic, Bethesda, Battle.net
15 years ago it was Steam and Battle.net – Blizzard always had their games inside their own ecosystem and that was expected. Battle,net was seen as a guarantee of QoS.
In 2012 Ubisoft decided to launch their own platform, so they could stop giving Valve as much money. That’s all the proof you need, period, that Valve did exactly the opposite of killing PC gaming. It got other publishers to take an interest in PC gaming and launch their own platforms. EA followed suit in 2013 by trotting out the copyright of Origin systems, a developer they bought and destroyed, for their own platform so that they wouldn’t ever have to give Valve any money again.
Please do tell us how Valve killed PC gaming. Seems to me like they spurred competition.
To continue my huge comment.
Look at the PC gaming space right now.
Steam, uplay, Origin, GOG, Epic, Bethesda, Battlenet
15 years ago it was Steam and Battlenet – Blizzard always had their games inside their own ecosystem and that was expected. Battle,net was seen as a guarantee of QoS.
In 2012 Ubisoft decided to launch their own platform, so they could stop giving Valve as much money. That’s all the proof you need, period, that Valve did exactly the opposite of killing PC gaming. It got other publishers to take an interest in PC gaming and launch their own platforms, guaranteeing sales and profit instead of crying about “piracy” when their games didn’t sell the expected 10 million copies on PC each. EA followed suit in 2013 by trotting out the copyright of Origin systems, a developer they bought and destroyed, for their own platform so that they wouldn’t ever have to give Valve any money again.
Please do tell us how Valve killed PC gaming. Seems to me like they spurred competition. Even if only because their 30% was “oppressive.” And let’s be serious we’re talking specifically about two GIGANTIC companies – both of which are WAY bigger than Valve – who decided to leave because they wanted MORE money.
Ubisoft has offices in every time zone. They make games with a dozen dev teams around the globe working on them. Each AC game tells you that – making a point of telling you “this game was made by a multicultural multifaith team of derps around the globe etc etc” and then you can sit and watch the credits where way too many people are involved around the globe. Quebec, Montreal, Shanghai, you name it.
EA has been buying and destroying IPs and companies since the late 80s. Hell they even bought 20% of Ubisoft at one point, before selling the shares. They aren’t the little guy, suffering from Valve’s huge 30% cut. Maybe Valve is getting richer than they deserve to but if that’s the case, why have none of the hundreds of developers selling games through Steam – some of them only through Steam – not said a word for 10+ years until now?
Y, AAA publishers didn’t make their own launchers because Steam was taking too much… it was because Steam was taking something. (“giving x to Steam” VS “giving nothing and take full control of their own store/product”). Specially EA which is the king of greed, they soon started to bash heads with Steam because of the DLCs… Mass Effect 2 was one of the games in question with the Cerberus Network in which EA sold ME2 DLCs. EA didn’t want to have DLCs in Steam (because it would take a cut, any cut), and we all know how high EA bets on DLCs and microtransactions… there’s ZERO chance EA wouldn’t have a store of their own and let Valve take even 1% of profit instead of EA getting all of it, and let Steam interfere with their own AAA management, including: launches, prices (specially sales), in game monetizing decisions, DLC’s, packs, and any other post-launch microtransactions.
AAA publisher’s launchers/stores has nothing to do with the 30% Steam cut… it has to do with any cut, regardless of the amount. Even 1% cut is 1% of profit lost.
Seems to me like they spurred competition… And incited greed in those who think they can do better by throwing some money around.
Steam has always been pro consumer, often at the cost of the developer. But as a consumer with a healthy brain, wouldn’t you rather support the platform that gives you the most value for your hard earned money? Steam will remain my go to place for games until someone else offers equal or better games, at equal or lower prices.
Exactly.
F5 for edit 🙂 I added something
Which better games?
Those are better? Lmao
When i look at my Steam wishlist, I don’t mind at all
CDPR already said its not happening
CDPR is not AMD
You said companies. AMD isn’t one?
In what way broseph? What better games?
– Metro Exodus probably sucks considering Last Light was bad and Exodus is a huge departure from the original as well
– Phoenix Point has been in development for years and is just X-com-ier X-Com, made by the original creator of Xcom. I’m not missing anything by noit playing it right now.
– Outer Worlds we know nothing about but it looks generic and boring
– Division 2 I can guarantee is garbage
– Sunken City, not a priority at all
– Borderlands series is garbage and the only remotely good entry was the original
Oh, shucks, I’m out of Epic exclusives.
If those are your examples of “good games” , much less “better” [than what’s on Steam] then rofl mao to you. Hellmao in fact.
Press X to Jason – the PINNACLE of game design.
The Epic Games cancer is spreading because Tencent owns a 5% stake in two of the companies you’ve referred to. Namely Ubisoft and Activision-Blizzard.
Wait what? It helped, a lot. I’m not against competition, especially with more of a cut going to indie devs. But EPIC needs to get their features in place to match so much as uPlay.
That is so f*king stupid. Brick and Mortar stores would take a cut similar to 30% and the publisher had to pay to produce the physical software and ship them.
Hey would you know it I thought of more things to thank Valve for.
Ever notice how Sega’s ENTIRE catalog in the history of time is on Steam? Ignoring some newer games from their Atlus acquisition like Persona or Dragon’s Crown, obviously.
Because Sega “built” a crappy emulator for every single one of their games dating back to Genesis and has them all available individually on Steam, in addition to other larger bundles.
Something you literally wouldn’t be able to do right now on ANY system, legally, except a Genesis, if it weren’t for Valve. Obviously you could just use an emulator and download a couple hundred ROMs.
But thanks to Valve there’s a way to do that – console parity with Xbox and Nintendo (Sony are profiteering clowns who refuse to allow backwards compatibility any longer).
Although to be fair CDP is the one to thank for backwards compatibility being a thing right now in Windows.
This is actually quite simple – if not for downloading services I’m a pirate. Since those exist – I’m not. That is money that previously wasn’t there so there you have it, just a tiny simple fact. Now think whatever you want of Valve (they aren’t the only “game” in town), just know that this guy is talking out of his aiiss.
*Tim Swiney
*Richie Guiltrich
There, just making sense of this whole mess
If this guy actually worked at valve, wouldn’t he realize it took them YEARS to add the features they currently have?
This guy seems to have a deep personal grudge against Valve.
They could have implemented the 12% cut in sales without forcing exclusivity on the Epic Store and it would have made a huge impact, minus the hate. I feel like they were willing to risk their reputation just to strong arm the industry with their new found fortune.
Translation: they could have just stayed irrelevant. What drives this business is games, you could argue features all day, but in the end, it’s all about the games
Somehow I knew this was going to be the response. This will serve as your reminder that, if Epic can afford exclusives, it can also afford non-exclusive contracts and advertising deals. “Hey, here’s some money. Release your game on our store too. Also, here’s some extra money to purchase your relative silence about Steam and/or to get you to promote your game’s presence on our store as opposed to Steam. Here’s what we bring to the table. Preach 12% over 30% and how that’s good for you, and encourage your playerbase to buy on EGS as a way of showing extra support.” Wouldn’t have been as huge, but it would’ve worked to some extent, and I for one would have evangelized for EGS the same way I evangelize for GOG.
“Wouldn’t have been as huge”
You hit the nail with this one. If you don’t have ambition and ruthlessness, you can jam with the rest
Indeed, but then this is 100% about Epic’s position in the industry, and not about any alleged future benefits that will come from passing the crown from Steam to EGS. Growth for growth’s sake, not for any principle Epic holds and wishes to spread. Which is my point elsewhere in this comment section — Epic’s actions are purely mercenary, and not designed to benefit anyone but Epic (and tangentially those entities which can themselves benefit Epic further).
You aren’t understanding the concept of PC gaming. It is expected to be able to buy a game basically at any of 10 retailers you want. If you have to play it outside of steam, no one cares. It’s not about following the games. It’s about choice.
Nice philosophy brah, too bad no one gives a f*
“It’s about choice.”
That’s why i choose pirate bay and warez sites
Fun fact: “Geld reich” is German for “money rich”.
I’d be okay with EGS becoming as big as Steam if they match its features. But right now I can’t take EGS seriously. This idea of branding it as the premium store where the big titles go – maybe that will work for them but I’m personally turned off by this if anything. When I read “AAA” I think of garbage like Anthem, soulless remakes and reboots and console ports that run horribly. “Big titles” almost always disappoint.
Never seen people defend a monopoly with this passion.
Valve isn’t a monopoly. Please refrain from talking until you educate yourself.
get off
Yeah because having your account hacked by fortnite scammers and sending your personal data to the chinese government is totally saving PC gaming.
This guy is a grade A idiot.
Notice it says ‘former’ Vale employee. The guy is clearly a disgruntled ex employee; he also said Steam is for indie and p*rn games while Epic store is for AAA.
Everyone is having the wrong argument because marketers have you all confused, which by the way is a marketing 101 tactic. Companies want everyone fighting over the best “store” when we should be fighting for purchased software being separate from ALL stores – aka DRM free.
ALL distro platforms overstep by disguising themselves as DRM platforms. Just because they’re called the Steam “Store” or Epic “Store” doesn’t make them innocent little stores. A game purchased from ANY store should be able to run independent of every single store – and a store should be a platform of distribution and THAT’S IT. We give money; they give product; end of interaction, period. The only reason Steam was given a pass is because it was the only one – but now people finally see the downside of library locked DRM platforms.
DRM freedom is the only right way – just like we did with iTunes.