If I’m honest, I don’t disagree.

I would love for Steam to have **actual competition. Which is difficult, sure, but you could run a slightly less feature-rich store, take less of a cut, and pass the reduction fully on to consumers and you’d be an easy choice for many gamers.

But that’s not what Epic is after. They tried to go hard after the sellers, figuring that if they can corner enough fo the market with exclusives the buyers will have to come. But they underestimated that even their nigh-infinite coffers struggle to keep up with the raw amount of games releasing, and also the unpredictability of the indie market where you can’t really know what to buy as an exclusive.
Nevermind that buying one is a good way to make it forgotten.

So yeah, fully agreed. Compared to Epic, I vastly prefer Steam’s 30% cut. As the consumer I pay the same anyways, and Steam offers lots of stuff for it like forums, a client that boots before the heat death of the universe, in-house streaming, library sharing, cloud sync that sometimes works.

  • @beefcat
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    111 year ago

    it’s the paypal problem

    sellers everywhere fucking hate paypal

    but they all still use it because buyers fucking love paypal

    • Neshura
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      61 year ago

      I’d say PayPal problem but in reverse, customers hate Epic but still have to put up with it to get to the exclusives.

      • @beefcat
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        41 year ago

        sort of. the fact that egs is still not profitable on its own merits and that developers still shuttle their games over to steam once exclusivity is up tells me that not enough customers are taking the bait.

        if being on egs didn’t mean taking a huge hit in total sales, developers would be putting games exclusively on it without uncle tim slapping them over the face with a bag of money