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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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Nefyedardu@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Is it surprising to you that Valve is a for-profit company, not a charity? Of course they profit from the 30%. Just like with any other product, you charge based on what people are willing to pay. If you charge too much, people won't pay for the product and you have to readjust the price. Obviously since companies are willing to pay the 30%, it must not be too high. Somehow I doubt if the people complaining about this woke up as the CEO of Valve, they would be willing to massively cut their companies profits because... why? Just to be nice to a bunch of other corporations?

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wicked@programming.dev ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
No, of course it’s not surprising that they’re not a charity. Sure, the big app stores exploit their near-monopolies with exorbitant fees.

Good for Apple, Valve and Google, but I think it’s better that game dev studios and app developers get money instead. However, devs don’t currently have a real choice but to pay up.

Competition can change that, so we should support technically worse stores like Epic so developers will not have to pay their unreasonably high fees.

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- Nefyedardu@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  "Exploit their near-monopolies". Except Valve doesn't "exploit" their near monopoly, I don't see Valve buying exclusives do you? They just provide a better product. Most importantly, they provide a better product then piracy. That is the bare minimum a games store on PC needs to reach and Epic does not reach that. Epic isn't failing because of Steam, it's failing because why buy a $60 game on a featureless store that launches an .exe for me when I can just download the .exe directly for free? If Epic wanted to provide a better product, they have billions of dollars and hundreds of devs to make that happen. They just choose not to.
  
  but I think it’s better that game dev studios and app developers get money instead.
  
  This tired old argument... There's absolutely no evidence that the extra money these companies get from the Epic cut doesn't just go straight into a Bobby Kotick yacht or some shit. There's a lot of grubby hands in-between the store platform and the actual dev teams and maybe I'm cynical but this "trickle-down" model of economics seems kind of far fetched.
  
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