If you go into any of the remotely "pro epic" spaces online, there seems to be this idea that 30% is exploitative, and abnormal.
So, we have ignorant people calling the industry standard exploitative(it might be, but that's a debate) defending some of the most abnormal, and exploitative practices put in place by an online store front.
Epic are only offering more to try and knock steam out of the market. It's similar to how supermarkets when setting up in area would bring all their prices really low to try and kill off all the local competition and then raise it once they were the dominant market force. They're operating at an unsustainable level using their fortnite money to essentially try and kill off steam.
The point still stands about EGS being inferior user experience, which they want to shove down our throats.
It's inferior but they aren't the terrible demons that people are painting them as. They're just a newer storefront attempting to get s foothold. Am I thrilled that they're licensing exclusive? Hell no. Does this make them evil? Also no.
Know how you sway people to your platform? Be innovative and have a better platform for consumers. What the hell happened to everyone here preaching about pro consumer practices. "They need a foothold" is a shit excuse, they could use all that money they are throwing for exclusives at making the platform better or offering a lower cost for the consumer by lowering their cut.
I dunno about you but unfair competition is definitely "evil" in my eyes. It should never be endorsed. Instead, support services and platforms who actually offer something that the consumer wants and is asking for. A bloody shopping cart would have been a good start.
Wouldn't this mean if you're a smaller dev with fewer methods of distribution than some big AAA studio, Valve's end cut would be larger as most keys get sold via Steam?
This would just mean that Valve's getting an bigger cut from those that Steam fucks over the most while AAAs and bigger releases give them less of cut and get on fine with it.
Epic's store is pushing a lot of taxes and processing fees over to the consumer to hold their 12% cut for developers
As for needing a foothold, Epic already has a foothold with over 40 million fortnite users.
"[The storefront model is] nearly perfect for consumers already...There is no hope of displacing a dominant storefront solely by adding marginally more store features or a marginally better install experience. These battles will be won on the basis of game supply, consumer prices, and developer revenue sharing."
They think they can win this game by putting their money into buying the exclusives instead of making more store features.
I don't get where all these epic white-knights come from, why would you defend something so obviously anti-consumer it makes Apple's dick hard.
I think that they're either naive people who haven't stepped in the dog shit yet, trolls, or actual shills.
But you don't get it! Steam is a monopoly* and they haven't innovated in years**!
* If you completely disregard the definition of monopoly to make steam sound like an evil boogyman.
** Wanting innovation for the sake of innovation with no idea on how it would make things better, or even what they could do is a common sentiment.
Real talk, you can want steam to improve without immediately jumping on the dick of a worse store just because "it's competition".
Not surprised after Mr Fuck-costumer Sweeney said he doesn't give a fuck about consumers opinions on his store
Poor Epic who want to become a storefront like Steam and can't do it the right away...
Still have no idea why people have so much pity for the companies, even after getting shafted hard by them.
30% is exploitative but not abnormal.
Licensing desls are are not abnormal nor exploitative.
No, that’s not what a “monopoly” is. A Monopoly is: “the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service.”
exclusive being the key word. Steam is far from being the only digital storefront. They do not exclude other storefronts. They are not buying other storefronts (or games). Having the largest market share does not make you a monopoly.
I agree but how the heck do you compete with 15 years or whatever of developing a store front and loyal consumer base? Cause even if Epic Store didn't have all the issues it has, I don't think it'd be able to compete without buying up exclusives and stuff.
Not really. Indie devs use this for a lot of things, like Humble Bundle/Keys, GMG, <...>, Itch keys, etc. It's not really too hard for indie games to be sold on a multitude of avenues nowadays.
If anything, AAA studios will either skip steam entirely for their own platforms or sell on both of them, like Ubisoft does.
Not really, Amazon took a big chunk out of Steam's marketshare when they began to more aggressively push game delivery in the last several years. GOG and itch.io do indie games, but that is a massive market itself and as a collective is a powerhouse in the industry. Also just being the biggest isn't the only qualification for being a monopoly. A majority isn't even correct for a monopoly. Infact Epic's behavior is more monopolistic as it actively hampers the possibility for competition.
One of the only options they have is to target other under-served parts of the market, such as developers, which is EXACTLY what they’re doing.
This is industry standard in a lot of industries, not just games.
Provide a superior customer experience. That is by and large the determining factor for where customers go in a competitive market. Better prices, better service features, better customer support, things like that. Steam became big in no small part because of this. It's not like there weren't other platforms also trying to do the same thing as them, Steam just provided a much more customer focused experience.
That's what I'm saying though, GoG basically does all of that.
Only up to a point. Just being DRM free and having good customer support is not all a customer experience is. Those are good from a consumer rights perspective, but it failed to provide substantial social features, networking features, easy patching, and a lot more. GoG is great for consumers from just the perspective of consumer rights but it left much to be desired elsewhere.
That’s a just fine opinion, one that I and many other developers disagree with, but also wholly irrelevant. Whether or not you think they are properly served or not doesn’t mean it’s not a vector for competition.
Yes, I think the social features is especially important but not because of how advanced they are but because you've got steam, all your friends got steam, anybody you ever wanted to game with has steam so it's got that advantage. I'll go out on a limb and say that I think even if you provided better social features on another platform aswell as a bunch of other better features, it's not enough to get people to move to your platform - having exclusives will. Then once you have them there, the quality of your service can help determine wether they'll keep buying their games on steam or consider getting them on your new store instead but I don't think it'll be enough in the first place.
I think it's absolutely valid to shit on EGS for being a shit service though, I just don't think it being a good one would be good enough to make it viable.
At first I thought the 'i don't get the drama' posters were genuinely uninformed, but it's the same people posting the same stuff in every thread.
is it to shill epic or because they don't like steam? I don't know, but it's getting a bit tiring having to roll my eyes at seeing the same posts in every thread.
I'm sure devs are the ones benefiting from these deals the most. Especially when majority of devs that are under publishers find out about the exclusivity from the day of or after the announcement. You have to be absolutely blind to think the cuts are purely aiming for developers and not mostly publishers.
Actually those were two separate things I did. The shovelware comes from either the discovery queue if you had viewed literally thousands of games (I check it at least once a day so mine is now over 10,000 games viewed.) Or if you look at all new releases. Everywhere else you will never see the shovelware, and even in the case of the discovery queue you will still not see it without having seen the quality shit first. And if you are a new user or in an incognito mode then you're just going to get popular stuff.
The other issue was developers thinking Valve was trying to screw over Indies, when it was actually related to a bug that was causing views and recommendations to behave weird, and they fixed it an reworked the algorithms a bit. Most of those devs ended up having their views return to normal albeit it from different sources, so the algorithm wasn't disfavoring them.
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