Submitted 1 day ago by FirmDistribution@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
Seems like buying games to remove them from your competitor is a scummier thing to do.
I haven’t really looked deeply into this issue but what caught my eye was the claim that a 30% fee was excessive. I’m no insider into video game publishing but 30% is the standard retail markup for many things. If you bought a candy bar today, it probably cost the mini mart you bought it from 70% of what they’re charging.
Retail needs a location to store and sell their product. They need employees as well. One small Walmart has as many employees as steam does. Retails also buys the product in bulk, there is a bigger risk involved if it doesn’t sell or even sells slowly.
Huge difference imo.
That’s what Apple charges devs in their “ecosystem” correct?
thats what apple forces and imposes on any developer that uses the app store, which is most of them since on ios alt stores are only a thing on eu and japan afaik
Just letting you know that you commented the same thing twice.
If Epic spent half as much money as they are suing organisations and instead funded developing their shop into a gaming community platform like Steam, they’d probably have caught up by now.
Epic Games Launcher would always end up a pile of shit anyway. Tim Sweeney is a fuckhead and he has lots of investors to please.
He's also Tencent's bitch too.
its not about making better product for epic. its about removing competition so they dont have to.
Epic approach is the typical venture capitalist run company approach of running at loss then once they get market share start jacking up the prices.
Can’t really trust a company until they are actually profitable with a functioning sustainable business model. We’ve seen it time and time again where even Facebook launched without ads and look at it now.
They could remove that competition by making a better product, but that is somehow always the last thing they’d ever think about. It never stops being so fucking weird with all these business people who go to great lengths to do shitty stuff and always end up making it worse for everyone except a quick buck for themselves, even though they could easily make a lot more for a longer time by simply doing a good job. But no, that would require anything other than immediate greed. Absolutely vile people.
Sweeney is legit delulu tbh.
He literally said Epic’s launcher/store is ready as is, doesn’t need more development. It also runs in Unreal Engine, so you get Chromium (CEF) + Unreal Engine running just for one launcher/store.
At least on Linux you can run Unreal Editor without EGS (because it doesn’t exist on Linux) and if you’ve claimed any free games on Epic, you can use Heroic launcher to manage them easily.
if you’ve claimed any free games on Epic, you can use Heroic launcher to manage them easily.
Oooh. This is interesting. I wonder how much of the epic library is Linux compatible.
it’s often more risky and expensive to hire, train and develop systems and communities like that, especially when doing it against the tide, than to just try to trip up the competition. It’s not just that it’s dificult and it costs money, but it’s not preferred because investors abhor risks.
Isn’t this seen in global politics all the time. When US says China is too dominant in X and we need to fight it. They are not saying that US will invest in shit that will help them compete. All or 90% of the actions is to try to trip up, sabotage and sanction the competition.
Just a bunch of crabs in a bucket.
I wish they’d just focus on fixing Unreal. It’s a shit show.
You dont like games that look like you have grease smeared over your monitor?
Every time someone uses lumen the frame rate drops by roughly 2/3rds, it’s nuts.
Always has been
“Gaming community.”
Steam and Epic are both malware.
I wouldn’t call them malware, but both Valve and Epic are not your friends and they have done a lot of bad shit (Valve was huge in enabling lootbox gameplay).
To be honest, Epic is doing a good job of tearing down walled gardens in places like mobile, and we’ll probably be better off for it. But yeah, they’ve done a terrible job of competing with Steam.
They’re doing that because they want their own walled garden.
They only did that because they wanted their walled garden to be there too. Tim Sweeney is just butthurt his walled garden isn’t the biggest
The problem there comes from Epic taking secret deals to settle those cases instead of let any precedent be set that would actually benefit customers.
I don’t understand this I use it for rocket league occasionally and it all just works ™ ? I prefer Valve 100% to slopnite developers but the launcher seems fine to me. (On Linux Heroic is unlikely better than steam which has a bunch of random bugs every few weeks)
Same reason nobody, not even Sony, sued M$ for buying Activision-King and Bethesda.
Actually tried to fight it because of the COD franchise but didn’t get into suing them but they were a big part of the opposition when it came to governments giving approval of such a huge merger
Rocket League had a native Linux version, but they also pulled that.
And a Mac client.
I’m still bitter at Steam for taking a bunch of my single-player games off me that I’d already paid for when I moved to another country, and refusing to refund me because I’d already played 10 hours. Also the support guy treated me like I was a criminal for even trying.
Did they explain why moving to another country ment anything?
Some countries have huge taxes on entertainment while others have nearly none. I’d guess he moved to a county with a higher tax rate and Valve can’t just have people using a VPN to circumvent their local taxes. Valve is left without a way to determine where you were when you’d purchased the game so they geo lock the titles to where you purchased them.
There was a time when the swastika was not allowed to be shown in games because of a law in Germany, causing Wolfenstein (the uncencored version) to be banned. Maybe the country in question has similar laws?
Epic is trash, simple as
I didn't know Fall Guys got bought out. But then again, that was a flavor-of-the-week kind of game where streamers tried to care, then moved on and Fall Guys became irrelevant.
Because Steam is the world’s biggest games store on PC while Epic is statistically insignificant. What’s the question?
epic is irrelevant because nobody wants it, not because steam is trying to crush competition.
You prefer Walmart instead of Walmart?
Epic is irrelevant because Epic has not given anyone a single solitary reason to use their launcher and platform. Tim Sweeny loves the smell of his own shit in the morning after he takes a big wet dump in the toilet.
That launcher of theirs has a knack of sucking out all of your system resources, namely bandwidth and CPU, just to download games. Meanwhile, Valve gives you so many options to work around that.
What if I told you that the MAU count for Fortnite alone is more than half of the total MAU count for all of steam?
Even if the only game on epic was Fortnite, that doesn’t qualify as “statistically insignificant” no matter how you look at it.
Isn’t most of that from consoles and mobile?
Why is Epic insignificant?
They launched with a 12% service fee, dropped that service fee to 10%, and then dropped the service fee entirely for the first $1Mn in sales per year.
In June 2025, they released a new feature enabling developers to launch their own webshops hosted by the Epic Games Store. These webshops could offer players out-of-app purchases, as a more “cost-effective” alternative to in-app purchases.
They provide developers with free to generate license keys, and keyless integration with other e-shop stores including GOG, Humble Bundle, and Prime gaming.
They offer a user review system.
They also added cloud saves in July of 2025.
The thing is, they offer none of the other features Steam offers:
Epic launched their service in 2018. It’s been 7 years. The only reason not to offer feature parity (for a company that makes $4.6Bn - 5.7Bn in revenue, and a shop that makes $1.09Bn, you’d think they would be enticing users with the services they want.
What they have done instead is exclusivity deals that plenty of consumers complain about but devs don’t seem to care about so long as they’re getting paid.
So, the excuse that Steam got there first (as if it’s just about that and the reason their market share is what it is is because they have refined, adapted, and improved their service offering over time doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when steam has a significant percent of the market share (79.5% to epic’s 42.3%) but is only making twice the revenue of their rival store.
It makes sense for GOG or Itch.io who’s market cap is smaller by quite a lot to not offer the same feature parity. Each of those platforms has figured out they can offer other things to devs and consumers to make themselves competitive over time.
Sweeny’s attack is basically just a pitry party he’s throwing for himself because he doesn’t want to compete.
Shopping kart
Yes. The shopping kart feature. Something online stores and webshops came with when the Internet looked like MS Paint.
Somehow absent on a modern platform…
I’m being annoying, but why do you keep opening parentheses without closing them 😭
Steam isn’t being sued by Sweeny, they are being sued on behalf of 14 million UK gamers.
Also, epic has an estimated 3% to 7% of the market share, yet they should be regulated as well. If you stopped bootlicking for half a second, you would realise that this isn’t about who’s the worst but the fact that they are all bad (except itch, bless them).
Your enjoyment of their product doesn’t mean it isn’t having a serious and negative impact on the industry. Amazon is really convenient too, can you defend them next please?
I am definitely not on epic side here, but the reason they had to pay for exclusivity for games is because valve doesn’t allow any games on steam to be sold cheaper elsewhere. Which developers follow because steam brings in a lot of revenue.
Without that, epic could try to compete with steam (and its extra features) by offering lower prices, and letting the consumer make the choice of features vs price.
But valve policies effectively make it impossible for any new marketplace to compete.
Who sued who in the what now?
Because Valve has more money that someone winning a lawsuit can take from.
I haven’t really looked deeply into this issue but what caught my eye was the claim that a 30% fee was excessive. I’m no insider into video game publishing but 30% is the standard retail markup for many things. If you bought a candy bar today, it probably cost the mini mart you bought it from 70% of what they’re charging.
No one gives a flat fuck about epics launcher.
Stupid people do.
Everyone does the moment steam gets sued by consumers. It’s like the bar is set by epic or something and we can’t expect better things from any of them because of it.
they probably have a legal team protecting thats why, or they are paying of some judges/politicans.
Because it’s a patent troll who has attempted this a few times before.
Exactly.
And she's one of those who is doing it "for the children". So, one of those disgusting beings who hides behind children to get anything she wants done.
I dunno, killing the idea of ownership of games was pretty bad.
I don’t think any amount of Proton patches submitted is going to bring that back.
Steam didn’t do that. Even when you bought a physical disk you didn’t own the game.
Steam didn’t do that. Even Super Nintendo cartridges tried to claim in the Terms and Conditions that you legally didn’t own the copy you paid for. It was never contested, and thus we have the current software ownership debacle.
But Steam didn’t kill the idea of ownership of games? It never existed for digital distribution (or even physical with DRM), which existed before Steam.
Apparently a lot of games don’t have DRMs on Steam. The only thing missing is a badge indicating this.
Yes, some of them can be launched directly from the exe without the steam client, or with some modifications to the game files.
Here’s a list of DRM free games: pcgamingwiki.com/…/List_of_DRM-free_games_on_Stea…
Also it’s kind of silly how people automatically blame Steam for this, even though Valve does not force you to use DRM to publish to Steam. It is the developers themselves that chose to add DRM or tie themselves to the Steam API so that the game can’t run without it.
Valve is being sued because they are forcing others to follow policies that further entrenches Steam as the largest store.
Since Epic bought the game developer, it only applies to themselves. It is much harder to sue someone over a decision that only applies to something they own. How can a company be sued for not selling their product at a store? Should Valve be sued for not selling their own games on Epic or GOG?
Is Epic’s decision to only sell their games on their store annoying for users? Yes. But unfortunately, there is nothing illegal about. There would be a better chance of a lawsuit of Epic paying other game developers for exclusivity, but that would still not be easy as game exclusivity is still a significant factor on game consoles as well. Albeit much less than in the past.
Isn’t valve being sued for
Not allowing devs to sell steam download codes on other stores, But the ban only applies if they are selling the download code for cheaper than Steam
Not allowing devs to sell steam DLC download codes on other stores
I don’t think 1 or 2 puts other stores at any disadvantage. If a store wants to sell steam download codes then Valve has to get their normal cut. If they don’t want to pay the valve tax, then they don’t need to offer a Steam download code.
So the entire problem is about restrictions on steam codes?
Valve isn’t forcing anyone to use their platform.
If Steam’s terms aren’t satisfactory for developers, then they don’t have to use Steam.
I could see Valve controlling a bit of a monopoly in the game launcher and gaming social media markets.
A pro-consumer change that the EU could impose would be to split up the game marketplace from the game launcher and gaming social media markets through intercompatible APIs.
Maybe you could download games from steam in GOG or Lutris, and the steam overlay works on GOG or Lutris too. Maybe your discord friends could show up in the Steam friend list.
There are laws that say that abusing a monopoly is illegal. Steam is objectively a monopoly in pc games. Sure, you don’t have to use it, but it is basically impossible for indie developers to make a living without it.
Now, the question is if valve’s actions are actually abusing the monopoly, or normal business practices.
They essentially removed games that I owned and made it so I could no longer play them by drippy Linux support.
Which ones?
Marketshare.
It does remove easy Linux compatibility. Also you can run any storefront on steam deck, so not sure what your point is about hardware
A hypothetical Epic console.
TIL it was removed from steam. I play it on my deck all the time
What are they being sued for? I guess I missed this?
This would be like if someone sued Walmart for letting their local store go out of business.
Kick them to the curb valve at least until the lawsuit is resolved.
yopp@infosec.pub 3 hours ago
Because sweeney is greedy lying piece of shit, who’s using “think of poor developers being robbed by app stores” to cut himself bigger market share by suing fuck out of competitors
Like they won over google and guess what? He fucked over “all the poor developers” and cut himself a juicy deal to settle antitrust case
Fuck him, fuck Epic
appleinsider.com/…/epic-hypocrisy----google-gets-…