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

Gaben isn't going to last forever. But honestly the only other good games storefront is GoG. I'll continue using Steam for as long as it's still good.

Gaben has been hands off at valve for a decade. He's off breaking world records with research submersibles. Playing with his rubber duckies in the bathtub.

Both Valve and Epic are private companies. I still trust Valve over Epic, but I think technically Tim Sweeney has pretty much full control over Epic as well (for better or for worse).

In Gaben we trust.

When he's gone I assume it will go to shit.

Don't fix what ain't broke.

That's because you are not in a position to produce and sell a game.

As a user it sure is the case but as a developer you are in a position that you either have to take their 30% cut or accept that you are selling way less

The fact that pretty much immediately after epic launched their store steam lowered the cut for big publishers tells you that they are fully aware that 30% is too much to be reasonable but they completely could get away with that because Devs just didn't have a choice.

Because of epic that now changed since even if you don't actually sell more games you at least can get a guaranteed profit as if you sold those games that you miss out on by not being on steam.

Sure the way epic is doing it is not good but I really don't see another way how a significant number of buyers would ever come to another store. That didn't work for EA, that didn't work for Ubisoft, that also didn't work for GOG where you actually own the game without DRM and not just a license to play it as long as the server is allowing you.

People are fundamentally lazy and hate changing their routines - that's why forcing them into buying at your store is necessary if you want to get them to switch.

Friends are shocked to hear Kingdom Hearts is on PC. But it's Epic exclusive.

This and the paid exclusives mean I haven’t, and won’t use EGS out of pure spite.

I believe it used to be illegal to sell things at less than cost because the original monopolists did this too. Why did we make that legal again?

While 30% is high it seems developers consider it acceptable since number of games Steam releases is not reducing. Any one of those developers can decide not to publish on steam and go that way, but in the end I think Valve's service offers so much exposure that it's worth considering.

Getting 100% of 1000 sales is not the same amount of money as getting 70% of 30000 sales, especially when it's a digital distribution where copying bytes costs nothing. Steam also offers bunch of other services as well, things like networking, cloud saves, streaming and similar all of which cost money to maintain.

That's what I always said, why use Epic store? As a user you get worse treatment. Sure price is the same or they give you some discount but number of services offered is far from being on par with Steam. No family sharing, no refund policy, no cloud saves, no networking system, no streaming, no card collecting, no steam play. I might not use or desire all of those but some people do.

The fact Epic had to resort to extremes like timed exclusives just meant I dropped those developers off of my list of wanted games as it only went to show they are willing to sacrifice your inconvenience and happiness for some extra money. For them it was probably making sure project succeeds but in the end I don't care about them if they don't care about me.

it's the paypal problem

sellers everywhere fucking hate paypal

but they all still use it because buyers fucking love paypal

I mean that's the same side that steam is using their monopoly for, too

For the users it's definitely the most relaxed option - but as a developer if you choose to not put up with steams 30% rule you are fucked.

The fact that pretty much immediately after epic gained traction steam announced cheaper rates for bigger publishers tells you that they definitely are aware of how 30% is too much

Personally that's why I buy all my games on gog if possible even though I have a Steamdeck and that makes stuff more complicated.

People denying steam has a monopoly are probably also denying other fundamental truths that would imply that they had to change their lifestyle (climate change anyone?)

💯

Although, I can imagine supporting Epic is annoying. Unlike even GOG, they don't have their own support mechanism like a forum. I can see why someone would release on Steam (and hence stuff like GMG and Humble) and even GOG but not Epic. Example Baldur's Gate 3, which released on everything except Epic. Although in their case Larian commented that the decision to not release on Epic was specifically to not show support for their exclusives-everything stance. Hence on everything except Epic.

Man the thing I hate the most about fortnite is that it killed UT4...

Same, I always check whether GOG has a game first, and whether it's patched up to par. Sadly, surprisingly often while games release on GOG they then lack features (although personally I do not really care about achievements) or worse, the devs give up on releasing patches for the non-Steam versions.

What did they do to Unreal?

It's not a hard thing to get. Over the years Valve has had relatively low amount of blunders and for the most part they were of the misjudging customer base kind but ultimately they have been very consumer oriented and have provided great value for the money. From universal refund policy to family sharing and similar. Their service consists of many benefits for the consumer but all of that is charged from the developer. Very hard not to like such approach.

Epic on the other hand did the opposite. They catered to developers and inconvenienced consumers. You get to pay the same price as everywhere but you are forced to get exclusives from them and you don't get any of the benefits Steam has. Am in fact surprised it gained as much popularity as it did. Goes to show people will sell their own pride for occasional free game you don't even get to chose.

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

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

You seem to know what you are talking about, so this is for those who don't, the "illusion of competition" has become such a staple in the modern world. In the US (and much of the world as I understand it) eyeglass sellers are all owned by the same company. Pearl Vision, LensCrafters, and I think even the Walmart vision centers are all owned and operated by Luxottica. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxottica

It is a vertical monopoly that controls everything from materials acquisition to sales, directly "competes" with itself, and lies to customers every day to make them think they are actually in control.

Then you have companies like 3M, or Nestle, who control most of the entire industries. A good 85% of all food on the shelves in the USA is produced by one of 4 or 5 companies that definitely collude to fix prices and use aggressive tactics to protect their position. They also follow the "compete with yourself" model to make you think you are actually making a decision with your money. You aren't.

Then there is the big Ag companies. In Ohio they have actually gotten laws on the books that make it illegal to do Farm Shares, where you purchase a share of the crops they produce for the year and for about 8 months a year you get a big basket of fresh produce delivered to you. An ex and I got to do it for a year before we split and it was amazing. It was a ton of food and only cost us about $150 for the half-share we purchased. It would be amazing right now with prices and it would help local private farms, which is precisely why they pushed it out.

I can rant for hours... So I cut here. This whole topic just infuriates me to no end.

I think the pseudo-quote you wanted to do the other way around.

The thing is, sure, I prefer buying things from say, GOG. But Epic is horrible, and that's even just from my consumer perspective with it's bad client, terrible discoverability and lack of forums or anything. So as a consumer I have no incentive to support Epic, no matter whether I want to give my money to Steam or another place.

While I can understand the difficulty of trying to come up with competition to a pre-existing and dominant storefront, they went about it almost entirely the wrong way. They underestimated consumers' aversion to change and overestimated the value their own launcher provided.

Everybody and their mother used Steam at the time, and it provided a whole lot more than just a storefront and icons to click. When Epic launched EGS, it offered absolutely none of that. Without any social aspects or significant consumer buy-in to their ecosystem, it had no staying power. People—myself included—would go to it to play a shiny new free game until it stopped being fun, then fuck right off back to Steam to play our other games with friends. If they had spent more time cooking up the EGS ecosystem into something more similar to XBL or PSN before trying to attract consumers en masse, they likely would've been pretty successful. They could've even just decided to partner up with (or buy) NexusMods and integrated a mod manager, and a lot of us would've had a good reason to prefer EGS over Steam for some games.

Instead of doing something to make their ecosystem more appealing, though, they used paid-for exclusives to make other ecosystems less appealing. It was an obvious attempt to herd consumers into their ecosystem, and it backfired spectacularly. Before that, most people were either indifferent or liked them as a company due to their legacy and/or Unreal Engine. These days, I see a lot of bitching about "timed exclusives".

The reason that it's so hard to compete with Steam is that Steam just does what it does so well.

I don't have much desire to change my primary digital storefront because there isn't really much of anything more I want from a digital storefront that Steam doesn't already provide. If the quality of Steam's experience declines at some point, I would welcome competition, but otherwise, why would I bother switching to another service when I don't really have any complaints about Steam?

Besides, the TV/movie streaming service market has already demonstrated what happens when not enough competition suddenly turns into too much competition. If Epic were able to demonstrate that it was possible to overtake Steam, everyone would try to copycat their strategy, and then you likely end up with a balkanized market where no one has the market share or resources to provide the level of quality that Steam does.

In what way? Genuine question? The dev cited there has a reason for his opinion, after all.