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

Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world to Games@lemmy.world – 654 points –
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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.

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Epic only has a lower cut because they're leveraging their undoubtedly massive Chinese investments to gain market share. You can rest assured they would charge 30% if they could.

I don't like that Steam or Apple or Google charge 30%. I think it's absurd. But also Valve is basically a saint compared to every modern corporation so I don't think twice about it.

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