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Comment on Dusk Developer David Szymanski: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly

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wicked@programming.dev ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Yeah, I understand why people like and buy from Steam. It gives real value.

However, especially for smaller game studios, I believe I get more value if actual game developers get more money than Steam getting it. Let’s say a studio gets $1m in revenue after years of work. Having $180k more ($120k Epic fee vs $300k Steam fee) to spend on artists and developers for their next games/DLCs is a big difference.

Those $300k is literally 0.003409% of Steam’s revenue (estimated 8.8 billion in 2020). Valve could have an army of over 40,000 developers at a yearly $200k compensation and still be profitable just from selling other people’s games.

So I make a big convenience sacrifice when I buy from Epic. I also don’t like to support Tencent. But unless the dev is selling Steam keys directly from their web site, that’s where they get the most money.

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Nefyedardu@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Smaller game studios on Epic are DOA anyway because Epic refuses to implement game discovery features.

When it introduced Steam Direct, Valve prioritized the development of Steam features that helped users discover games they might be interested in, such as the Discovery Queue. The Epic Games Store will continue to get interface updates, but as a matter of principle, Allison says that Epic will not track user behavior and use it to algorithmically recommend games. Epic has said in the past that it's more interested in supporting the game discovery that already happens outside of stores, such as on Twitch and YouTube.

So Epic will put your game trailer on their YouTube for 300 views and call it a day.

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