Epic reduce their cut to 0% for the first $1 million in revenue for devs on the Epic Games Store
Epic reduce their cut to 0% for the first $1 million in revenue for devs on the Epic Games Store
Man it's a shame the Epic store sucks so so bad. I'd love to give developers a bigger cut. Steam is amazing but taking a 30% cut is a bit insane.
Still, having to struggle with the Epic launcher.. oof. GOG's isn't great either but it beats the hell out of Epic still.
30% has been industry standard across any digital storefront until Epic found out they couldn't beat steam by just paying for exclusivity deals. Then they decided to go down this race to the bottom strategy.
Steam is good because of that 30%.
Firstly, data transfer and storage isn't free and is an ongoing cost for Steam even after purchase. How many times can you think that you installed a game, then deleted it and ultimately downloaded it again—Steam doesn't get any more money, but that costs them. They could have done all the limited number of downloads or transfer speed limiting shit that used to be more common.
The profit they make on top goes straight back into Valve. They are a private company without shareholders to please and pay dividends to. This has allowed them to keep reinvesting into Steam and making it the best experience for the consumer they can—they've been rewarded with a load of goodwill and market share following that. You can guarantee that we wouldn't have proton or the steam deck without the money valve made from steam sales.
Epic doing this is just another attempt to try and tempt developers to choose their store and not list on Steam. They have no interest in actually improving their offering, their only strategy is to try and find ways to put Steam users at a disadvantage and hope that people go "well I guess I'll go for it on epic if I have to". They don't have any problem getting companies to list their games on Epic, this is 100% about manipulating developers to not list on Steam.
GoG is the alternative to Steam, and offers something that benefits consumers to compete with Steam in DRM free games.
Friends don't let friends reward Epic for anti-consumer business practices.
Hey don't mistake that comment for a defense of Epic. I am a fan of Steam in general (in so far as I can be regarding "license selling" companies.) I think Gabe did many great things for game distribution. I'm working on an indie game myself and if it ever gets to the point that I can release it, it will be on Steam no doubt. I do dread the day Gabe has to pass on the torch though.
Simple just use short term oriented goals because that's what the company is focusing on. Steam was always long term oriented from the beginning Gabe said CD less gaming.
Didn't Steam essentially create the "standard" for 30% price point for digital distribution in the first place? While a 30% margin makes sense for physical retail, it's never made sense for digital distribution.
If they created the problem in the first place, then isn't that actually an issue?
I don't think this is true. 20% was the standard, as I recall, not 30%. I think it has moved that way over time, though. And even that only made some sense while retailers were too powerful to compete with them on price. Storage and bandwidth are much cheaper than bricks and real estate and salaries.
This is a good thing, Steam's cut is too big, especially for a company with next to no staff that runs on a heavily Uber-ified model and produces very little and I an very tired of the fanboyism.
I agree that people should default to GoG when possible, though.
I do wonder just how much a policy like this would effect Valves bottom line though.
This would be pretty amazing for small studios.
Steam makes a shit load of money. The server fees are basically a joke and they have 80 employees in the steam division.
The only things that is being invested in is Gabens fleet of mega yatchs, worth an estimated 1 billion, and costing between 75 and 100 million annually to maintain.
Valve has been fined in the EU for anti-consumer practices and received an F from the better business bureau. They are currently in the middle of another lawsuit.
30% is way too high and it's a joke to see actual consumers defend it.
Steam is amazing because of that 30%. That money goes into features that attract users which in turn brings publishers.
No other store has invested so much money on their platform. If you take that 30% off, you defund development.
That said, Steam has different percentage tiers for different amounts of sales. That could obviously be better or refined to give indies a better chance.
But I'm more than happy when Steam takes big chunk out of Rockstar, EA and Ubisoft for example.
The tiers work in the opposite direction though, only huge titles will likely qualify for lower % takes while indies barely scraping by are getting hit for the full 30%.
Again this is only a minor point of criticism, I love valve in general. But man it would be so easy to add something like a "15% on the first $50.000 in sales" exception, wouldn't cost Valve all that much and would help small indie teams immensely.
I’d love to give developers a bigger cut.
Sure, but this just gives the publisher a bigger cut, developers and gamers will see absolutely no difference, as usual.
Developers do care about this. Investment on software is fleeing the market like crazy. Unless Valve has decided to go back to financing games, developers are desperate for publishers to get some cash flow these days.
Just curious what issues you're having with the Epic store. I've bought a few games now and thought the process was pretty smooth.
Main problem: incredibly slow/unresponsive. Clicking things doesn't give good visual feedback and can take forever for the underlying webpage to load/reload.
It's designed as a webshop first and game library second (third, fourth?) Unintuitive UI, hard to search, hard to categorize, poor feedback on what's being downloaded and why. Basically every quality of life feature from Steam is missing.
But to be fair it's been a few years since I opened it. Might have improved a lot since then. I use Heroic these days. Also not amazing but at least it's open source.
Honestly, it used to have much, much bigger functionality gaps than it currently does.
The things all major Steam competitors are missing are value added features Steam has been investing on for decades. Those aren't basic or fundamental, but you may miss things like their controller compatibility layer if you favor a Sony controller or their metadata layer if you use that a lot. And devs do get value from their dev back-end, that is true (although console digital distribution systems have similar features these days, albeit a bit less streamlined).
I don't think that extra value justifies a whole-ass monopoly, though.
Epic sucks so bad they have to bribe both the gamers and the developers to use it.
Also fuck Epic.
might have to reinstall and see how many more of my free games have magically disappeared.
Ah yes. Epic, store that gave Hell Let Loose for free in January and the community is still recovering.
Imagine Mahjong matches constantly visited by new players that sit down, dont say anything, flip the table and shout at you for losing.
I wish Etsy would follow suit.
