This is great and it’s not like they have shit revenue splits anyway as last I checked it was 88/12 which is by far the best around.
Thats because they have a reputational problem that makes them toxic to the gamer base. If they ever get market share that split will change willy nilly.
I’m interested in why you think they are toxic to the gamer base?
Thought i responded to this, but oh well will do it again.
Epic, EA, Microsoft, sony, ubisoft all have a long history of poor worker conditions or anti-consumer practices.
Valve and gog have 20+ years of decent but not perfect history of worker and pro gamer practices.
The contention in this thread is from people who think valve cant be trusted because capitalism and those who say as long as they continue good behavior they’re a better choice than any of the others in the space. While epic has never shown this procommunity behavior.
Basically gog is valves only real competitor and since they dont support linux or provide many of the game featurss valve does for developers its no contest.
So what does Steam’s revenue share look like in comparison?
Steam takes 30% at first, and there is a discount after tens of millions of dollars in sales.
Steam offers a ton of benefits for game companies through steam, such as the Friends list, reviews, having a way to show live play from the store page, and a bunch of other things. There is a reason that everyone is flocking to steam, and that 30% cut isn’t keeping anyone away.
User base and brand loyalty
Nothing about what Valve does but you can’t afford to not be on Steam even though it’s the inferior product
That’s why EOS works with any platform
Steam is, in my opinion, way better for the user (even if it may be worse for the developer).
Epic lacks features that are important to me like reviews, the ability to view your library in a browser, warnings about DRM, Linux support, a hole bunch of features to discover games, a workshop, big picture mode.
Additionally, in my experience at least, their official launcher under Windows is a buggy mess compared to steam.
EGS has reviews as far as I can tell. I still think Steam is better, but this is a welcome move out of them. Competition is a good thing
Edit: downvoted for pointing out that EGS has reviews. Y’all are weird lol
The way Epics reviews work are awful, though. They are trying to be really attractive to developers but they aren’t attractive enough to USERS.
For example, you have to be INVITED to review games on Epic. The system is automated and will occasionally ask for a review after you close a game, assuming you’ve been playing long enough. They claim it’s to avoid things like “review bombing”, but that’s a cop-out to shield bad developers/publishers from the repercussions of their actions (like when Denuvo was non-consensually added to Ghostwire Tokyo a year after release).
Implying review bombing is always warranted is as misguided as it gets. Games regularly get review bombed for something as trivial as having a non-white person for a protagonist.
I don’t disagree that’s a problem, but that is not what I said or implied. That’s the reason Steam has other mechanisms for scoring and scaling reviews. There are plenty of valid reasons for “review bombing” that are organic and natural consequences of developer activity: like adding Denuvo a year after release, adding a launxher or login/account requirement after the fact, etc. Making reviews “invite only” is anti-consumer.
I was talking about written reviews, not just a like/dislike (star) system
And the thing is… Because Steam is better for the user, it becomes better from the developer. 70% of your game’s Steam revenue will always be bigger than 100% of your Epic revenue. It’s probably bigger than 300% of your Epic revenue. That’s why Steam doesn’t need to buy exclusives or run loss leaders or try to lock you in with “free!” promos. Epic needs to pay developers up front to get them to not go to Steam, because in every case a dual Steam/whatever-else release is better than a whatever-else release. So Epic needs to pay the indie game studio that made a $10 game a million dollars for timed exclusivity, which allows the studio to not worry about losing their Steam revenue from selling 130,000 copies. Then they release it on Steam later anyway.
If it was as simple as “cutting out middlemen” or using cheaper middlemen, devs would just be selling you exe files. CDN costs wouldn’t come close to 30% of revenue, after all. People like buying games on Steam. People buy games on Steam that are cheaper and DRM-free on GOG or Itch. People buy games on Steam that are free downloads like Dwarf Fortress. People buy games on Steam that are free browser pages like Cookie Clicker. Epic wants people to be invested in their “free!” libraries enough to actually be like “oh I mean I’ve got the Epic account, may as well buy this game here because it’s cheaper or more of my money goes to the devs or because it’s a timed exclusive…” And people simply aren’t doing it.
Plus steam input, remote play, play together, trophies, hell there’s a whole API for you to use to make your game multiplayer and have it integrate with steam friends easily. So much built in for devs lives to be easier.
Just check out steam works. There’s so much for developers
Oh yeah. I forgot I have an Epic account.
fuck apple and their customers btw
And yet, still, they can go fuck themselves.
A lot of Steam Stans here.
Here’s some neat facts:
- Epic Games is the same Source Developers behind Unreal Engine 5. UE5 is arguably the best game engine right now for modern graphics.
- Epic Games Unreal Engine 5 is Free to start developing and only kicks in commission after X% of sales.
- Both Steam and GoG take a ~30% commission on all game sales.
- Steam games aren’t DRM-free (neither is EGS, but 0% + the driving force behind UE5?)
- The Steam Source 2 Engine is proprietary; only their team can develop Source games.
It sucks that EGS is looking to suck up games, customers, data, etc. Their App / Interface also kinda sucks. UE5 on the other hand kinda rules, and Steam has been quietly collecting cheques while their Source Engine has collected dust. Almost all my games are on Steam but the ones I want to keep I’ve been getting through GoG.
GoG I think has a solid business model of DRM free games and game preservation. EGS is leading in one of the industry’s most innovative and developer-accessible game engines for the foreseeable future. Steam is going to have to make some tough decisions I think to compete as time goes on.
Not one of those data points justifies their shitty client, which, as a consumer, is all I really care about.
Tim, what are you doing here?
Yet Steam has a history that proves they will not fuck customers over, and if they try new features people hate they’ll not pushing it through no matter what for the purpose of maximizing profits (also not through dark patterns). This is something phenomenally rare and which you can’t buy with any amount of money.
So yeah, not sure what will happen in the future. But competing with Steam always will be just painful unless you got your own niche (like GOG) by the mere fact that Valve isn’t “just another company that will screw you over” <-- the default expectation these days.
You do realize the market share of GOG is about 0.5%, right? That’s despite Projekt Red being a beloved developer, the great launcher features, the fairest DRM practices, many years in the business, and so on. It only proves the point that Steam is a monopoly that cannot be disrupted whether you do it nicely like GOG or aggressively like Epic.
Gog doesnt support linux or id look at them. But they also charge 30%
From what I’ve been hearing, their fee is flexible. 30% is uncommon on PC.
So is valves. Shrug. Simply using the publicly available information.
I’m not aware of any evidence of Valve’s cut ever adapting to a dev’s circumstances. It’s 30% until they’ve made $10M, which drops it to 25%, and to 20% after $50M. I’d call that scalability available only to the most successful few, not flexibility.
That is a dynamic rate by definition, not saying its perfect. But its available to any dev whos game hits those numbers.
I don’t think the GoG numbers matter, and I do think Steam’s days are numbered if they continue on their current course (like, within the next 50 years, not tomorrow, but in my lifetime). GoGs DRM free and game archive mantra is going to give them longevity. The World continues to digitize, and eventually, society is going to have to grapple with Internet privacy and digital ownership. Steam on the otherhand is catering to the same crowd EGS is at a 30% tax. No doubt Steam has the numbers, no doubt they will for awhile, but I do think they will eventually run out of Steam if they don’t invest in a more sustainable business model.
To be clear, I don’t hate Steam or am in any way rooting against Steam, this is just my PoV in comparing their business model to EGS who has primarily invested in their UE5 engine. Valve on the otherthand does well with hardware, Steamdeck and SteamVR I think are both solid.
I also don’t believe that EGS is as bad as a company as people make them out to be.
None of these are why people hate epic games or like gog/steam.
EG is toxicily anticonsumer. Their platform is assbackwards with no good functional community features. They bombard users with ads for games they already own. They spyware they call a store front has repeatedly been caught snooping through user files without consent and sending unknown amounts of data back to their server without permission to gather that data in the first place.
And the cherry on top is their close relationship with tencent, aka one facet of the propaganda arm of the CCP.
And the cherry on top is their close relationship with tencent, aka one facet of the propaganda arm of the CCP.
I see this a lot and… do they though? From what I can tell, Steam also operates in China. Sure, Tencent invested in EGS, but not in any kind of controlling stake. Tencent does invest in tech and EGS is probably a solid investment.
Operating in China and having 10% of your company publicly owned by an entity of the Chinese government are two different things, and EGS has reportedly been all to happy to give over any and all information they have on identified users to the CCP. One article in 2019 suggesting that Hong Kong activists were being targeted by data in part provided through such means.
Operating in China and having 10% of your company publicly owned by an entity of the Chinese government are two different things
I don’t think it is. Steam operates in China and even allows China to censor the Steam store page and games as needed. Valve doesn’t take much issue bending over for China either in that regard. EGS and Steam are both Corporations and China is a large market.
I would argue UE5 enables and encourages bad development practices that lead to the unoptimized mess that “modern graphics” games are right now. Their work is cool, but so many games rely on temporal aliasing for in-game effects now, and UE5 is the common denominator.
Steam and GOG have a strong history and userbase. 0% commission is nice, but Steam in particular offers a world of more value than Epic Games Store, including but not limited to a usable fucking user interface (I use Rare to play my EGS library because it’s so bad).
Steam games are DRM free unless you consider Steam itself a form of DRM. DRM is implemented by the developers of the game, not by the marketplace it’s sold on.
And I find it strange that you think GOG has a better business model than Steam and will be more competitive long-term. Why do you think so?
I find it strange that you think GOG has a better business model than Steam and will be more competitive long-term. Why do you think so?
Steam is it’s own DRM system. Control (2020) is a perfect example. You can’t run that from your steamapps folder due to Steams DRM to verify a purchase license. GoG on the other hand has the same game, usually cheaper, an runs entirely independent of any platform. Not every Steam game is like this, but most major releases are.
The nice thing about a “Free” Engine is that anyone can pick it up. This means the more people pick it up, the more tutorials, the more docs, the most common issues are found, the more common solutions, etc. So while you believe that performance is an issue, it really is one of the better available engines out there and it can only get better. Again, Steam does not let other people use their Engine - what’s the next best free thing - Unity?
Source 2 is closed source, however it’s absolutely available to third parties. There are a couple non-Valve Source 2 games in development right now.
Could you point to these games or any documentation on how a developer may reach out to Valve regarding developing in the Source 2 Engine?
I was able to find sources for the Source engine, but not Source 2 which Valve has been primarily making games on in the last 10 years. In any case, neither are as widely supported or available as UE5.
Neat facts, but they don’t justify the awful game store they have created. They can’t even handle a downloads queue that you can change around, which is embarrassing. They have 1% of the features that Steam provides, so rightly they can’t charge the same.
Would be nice if Source 2 was available to anyone, but it isn’t a product they want to sell/support. It’s mostly meant to power their own games (like most game studios, they can have their own inhouse engines). Maybe as it gets more mature they could explore this possibility idk.
Steam has been quietly collecting cheques while their Source Engine has collected dust.
Very innacurate.
Valve create so much great software around gaming. Steam gets updated very frequently with bug fixes and new features (just recently we got game recording).
Source 2 is likely constantly being worked on (featured in 2 of the most popular pc games: CS2 and Dota2). Maybe randoms like us could never use it, but they still work on it unlike your statement would suggest.
Not to mention Proton, which helps every linux gamer run Windows games.
30% may sound steep, but it’s not really when you consider what Steam provides: Game distribution (downloads, forever), community features, steam workshop/marketplace (if implemented), inventory system, game networking, in-game purchasing, achievements, etc, etc. I’m not a game developer, but theres probably a million more things they do. I’m not even mentioning the features they provide just for us, the gamers (mainly family share, thats simply amazing).
I’ve been getting through GoG.
Very awesome, GOG and their goal of preserving video games is great.
My p.s. wrapup is that Epic is barely a launcher when compared with Steam. Yes Epic can launch a game, but it does nothing else (well) at all.
Even with all the years they have had for development, they’d rather try to shove money into game devs faces (or customers with free games) than fix their app. I hope they realise this is a mistake, because you can get game devs to move over with lots of money, but customers who are spending money won’t if they arent treated well. This isn’t a long term strategy they have been using and this 0% fee seems like desparation to me (not to say they are poor, cuz fortnite pays the bills, but they likely aren’t seeing much growth).
I hate defending corporations, but Valve is the one that I hope every other company looks at and tries to mimic because they have only done good for their customers.
Unreal Engine could’ve got us, like, Unreal Tournament. It almost did, in fact, it a little.
Die in eternal fire Epic
Good for them, but until EGS starts being more pro- consumer, I’m not spending a cent there
even if they do become pro-consumer you shouldn’t spend there. because it’d be a temporary affair and soon as they win market share from steam it’ll disappear.
No one cares.
I hate epic too but game devs do
Eh, I’ve mostly moved over to Godot for actual game making
This is for the store, not the engine.
They’re so desperate to make their store front a thing 😂
It is hilarious.
Epic tried getting users by giving them free games. But that didn’t translate to increased sales. And now they are trying to woo developers to abandon Steam, hoping that way customers will be forced to buy from Epic.
They don’t understand that developers are on Steam because customers are there. And what does a customer get when they use Epic over Steam?
I just deny the existence of any game that is an Epic Games exclusive title.
Games that need a third party app to run on Linux
They understand that devs are in steam because it’s where users are. Do you think they are stupid? There is no much they can do to bring users if there are no games, they are 15-20 years behind Steam in years of existence.
Screwed over is what they get
So true. All they have to do is WAY FUCKING MORE THAN THEY ARE WILLING TO.
Fuck Epic
I can’t wait to get more games on my Epic deck, oh wait it was Valve who pioneered an incredible platform that can play AAA games on a handheld running Linux and made compatibility a reality for thousands of games.
They didn’t pioneer it, companies like GPD did. Not shitting in the Steam Deck, love that thing. Just wanting to get the facts straight.
I think it still counts, due to all the work they did on the software side.
At least Valve takes some of the money that they make from Steam and use it for Steam. You cant run an entire gaming platform based on developers alone, you also need to make it at least somewhat bearable for consumers.
This goes along with their 0% engine fees, only surprising thing is that this wasn’t always in place
Cool, still fuck em though
