• Tim Sweeney- If Valve commits to permanent 88/12 cut, we will stop exclusivity
    281 replies, posted
Yes, lets guilt trip and blackmail people into using a service, sounds very ethical.
If you count underhanded penny pinching tactics "industry standard", and even then they don't compare. We're talking about something that wasn't ever questioned until someone made a ludicrous proposition. A proposition that goes two ways FYI. Fucking think about it for once in your life before saying bulshit. EA and Ubisoft relied on Steam to distribute their games. Then they remembered, they can sell their own games through stores THEY own, and maximize profits. Max sales profits, in exchange for making people mad at them for ditching the arguably better store. But hey, their games, their rules. It didn't affect me all that much for example, since EA games are GARBAGE and Ubisoft has most of their games on Steam already, oddly enough. These weren't because mean Steam takes 30% too much, this was because they wanted to maximize profits. Did they need those 30% back? Fuck no! Activision Blizzard made 4.2 billion in revenue and doesnt even pays taxes, firing people on top of it and giving millions as a welcoming gift to new CEOs, you think distributing CoD through Steam would have dented it? Maybe, not nearly enough because you can sell CoD to fucking anyone. Bethesda fucked up HARD with 76 and bethesda.net in search of max profits, and they even pulled out of exclusivity with their own store because it will DAMAGE them by not selli g Doom and Rage on Steam. To hell with not paying 30% lmao. EA are hypebeasts so nobody cares about using their launcher for their games. Their games suck ASS, you can see it a mile away aswell, through lies and shit, and they still sell HARD. EA just wants to do the same as Activision. Maximize profit. At least the launcher is actually alright to use. Routine mention on the support, which is fantastic. Ubisoft does this for the same reason. These companies are maximizing profits, because they can, and they will. They have the power to do so while also using underhanded tactics like shit dlc, microtransactions, loot boxes, whatever, and people don't bat an eyelash. But why do people not complain as much about these? Its their games, and their launchers aren't the Epic launcher. They could sell their stuff on Steam and they would be perfectly fine, the 30% cut wouldn't hurt them at all and you"d be crazy to think that it would lol. A good example of where it would though, would be bethesda.net as I've mentioned. Their games would fail if they sold them through either one of the launchers. 12% and the ire of people, or not a dyme and the behemoth rage instead? OR... several million sales with the average 30% cut? The answer is obvious, because Doom would make whatever money Epic would give them and more, on Steam, in preorders alone.
No they don’t. I think it was @Janus Vesta who showed why this claim is BS
Except on further inspection, Epic is about to also face that exact problem if there's still no way to sort their store listing. Doesn't matter, that is what a lot of small-timer devs are lead to believe. They'll be in for a rude awakening when their games can't even get into the store.
Sekiro sold "a few million copies" sometime after launch and its a niche genre and it still did fine without being on EGS? And yeah, Phoenix Point is a niche genre but people were excited enough that they collectively spent $2 million to make it a reality And they can get dicked by snapshot games to be on Epic and receive so much money that they made a profit even if everyone got a refund, and you're telling me the big reason why they basically lied to their backers were the revenue split?
I've gone through this before but this Jim Sterling talking point doesn't hold up under scrutiny. To be readily exposed to the trash you have to go through the good shit first or else be specifically looking for it. The two places it shows up are deep in the recommendation queue and if you view literally all new releases. And yeah, of course devs have to dedicate time to spreading word, that's literally just marketing and that's something they have to do to get their game visibility. And the tools for doing that are numerous and many, many of which are free including those provided by Steam. Remember that Steam let's devs get keys freely to distribute to streamers and YouTubers or basically anywhere to help them get visibility.
Just as a reminder Paypal accounts directly connected to banks go away if Valve were to answer to Tim Sweeney's challenge, because of the surcharges that come with it. You can only use Paypal if it's connected to a credit card for Epic purchases.
Civ 4, 5 and 6 have been on the best sellers list on steam years after release
Stop using a fucking word you don't know the meaning of. XCOM is not a niche series.
The Jim Sterling Syndrome is bulshit. I've never even heard of half of the games Sterling for example complains about being on Steam, nor have I seen them on Steam itself. This and the Randy Bitchfork excuse of "steam reviews are baaaaad!" are made up reasons for developers to justify themselves into using the EGS and take whatever money Epic gave them lmao. This shit is absolutely laughable, because you can see devs lying through their teeth in an attempt to not show the pure greed behind their reasoning.
Basically it came down to you having to be actively searching for garbage only(Like Sterling did). Like you really had to work hard at only looking for garbage to start skewing your search results. What a surprise if you search for only garbage steam is going to recommend that to you because it thinks you like bad games for some weird reason. Any normal user is going to see actual titles and not the 2 hours in unity games. Unless they go through the entire game list where they'll start getting bad games near the end of the recommendations because there's literally nothing good left to recommend.
That's not an argument about why explicitly the 30% split alone is problematic.
People keep saying this, and you're especially guilty of repeating this point despite people shooting it down. You will feasibly never have a problem with being 'buried in trash' as an indie game on Steam. Assuming you put in the bare minimal amount of advertising/word of mouth, your game will have no problem being visible on the market place. This idea of there being 'piles of trash' that actively obscure other games is flat out wrong. Steam is heavy with curated content and algorithms that help push the quality titles to the top. The end user does not have to deal with the trash, and Indie devs, assuming they're not selling trash themselves, should have no problem getting their games out there and into those suggestion algorithms. In fact, I might even go as far to argue that Steam is the only hope some of these indie games actually have at being noticed - I've picked up some awesome hidden gems that have crept their way onto my recommended lists, titles I've never heard of.
Again; and I've already ranted about this. FUCK DEVELOPERS. As a consumer; I am not going to get myself dicked over by an inferior service with less access to voice my opinion of dissatisfaction just so I can fund Johnny Come Lately and the Two Stooges dev team who makes yet another fucking pixel shooter where I get told about the evils of clicking my mouse to cause an explosion between two incredibly unlikable self inserts. The gaming market is entirely oversatured with far too many games people cling to and far to many games eating up viewership. If you're in a 1 to 2 man team; either grow that team to 10 to 25 or leave. The AAA market is touted as releasing too many games; the fuck makes you think Indies are any different?
You are not entitled to every last penny when you are being provided a valuable service in the form of a storefront which has its own associsted costs. Valve provides free DDoS protection, advertising, etc... simply by hosting the game. valve earns its cut as a middleman which does A LOT. You either deal through a middleman or do everything yourself.
Anything less than 100% does then, but that's irrelevant because the argument was, and I quote, So state why 30% is awful. That has nothing to do with any other store or any or split. What makes 30%, on it's own, awful.
While there is a point to be made about developers with unreasonable expectations of success, this isn't exactly fair. Gunpoint is a fantastic game made by one guy as his first game, and VA-11 Hall-A was predominantly made by two people. Size isn't really the issue, it's just the gold rush mentality indie devs have where they expect that if they make a game it has to be a hit because other indie devs before them made a hit. Other points made though, like devs trying to avoid sources criticism, are absolutely right and that is shitty behavior they need to fuck off with.
How could it “easily be less”. And lmao give me a break “breakout” Indie games are dime a dozen.
Why could it be less? Why does it need to be other than, "To make it less"? You can't use circular logic in this, it's not going to work. How are indies being punished.
In the meantime, EGS won't even allow those people to make any money on their storefront at all.
If some of you guys did research, not only would you find Tim admitting 12% is not enough to run a store front https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1091025939109199879 But also that Valve doesn't even take 30% as of last December. They take 25%, and in some cases, 20%. Valve introduces new revenue share tiers for Steam, promising bi..
That decision is likely because they need to cover costs associated with hosting and selling the game (and other services provided to devs for FREE) and that after a certain threshold of sales those costs are covered and the extra cut isn’t needed. this is like business 101
That's called economics of scale and is one of the simplest, most basic concepts in economics. The more sales something has, the less needs to be made off the individual unit to maintain profit and growth. This is basic economics.
Boo hoo? Games aren’t entitled to a sale, and nor are devs entitled to more for services provided for free that sell and market their game, not to mention all of the backend developer stuff given for free.
How is that punishment? Punishment would be increasing the cut to 40% if they fail to sell x amount of units in a certain timeframe. Dropping to 25 and 20% is incentive to create a well liked game.
By your logic, Epic's idea of bribing is fantastic, because devs get money upfront even! oh right, you're forgetting the CONSUMER THIS IS THE PROBLEM. The consumers get SHAFTED. The even bigger problem is that consumers don't give a fuck about this and would probably not mind about getting hit in the head if it became the norm.
Why do you even care? Nobody gave a shit about this before, literally nobody, not even devs. This is just a manufactured public relations tactic Tim Sweeney is using to try and prop up his shitty broken storefront.
Those are the 1 in a million though; same with Undertale. The vast majority will never reach those heights nor be as good.
Since people love the 30% so much, just look at it from this point. As many said 30% is industry standard across many stores. You know what is not industry standard but Steam provides with those 30%? Steamworks and everything that is included in that, from free cloud storage, DLC/Microtransaction management, an item market, anti-cheat etc. Is it really that hard to grasp that what Steam offers with those 30% cut is a shitload more compared to what other stores offer? I would argue that 30% on other stores like Google Play or Apple Store are pretty shit if we want to stay with games. EGS at this moment does not offer something comparable, they showed something like that, which does look promising but so far games have to offer their own multiplayer solution and everything else. Yes, they get a better cut but the extra cut gets reduced right away from running costs of your own solutions to what Steam offers. Those things cost extra money in forms of developer talent as well, sometimes extra licensing if you buy some pre-made solutions. 30% with what Steam offers in that is reasonable.
They already are. Where do you think that other 70% goes?
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.