Oh, I know. I got exactly 1 free game from EGS, which I promptly bought on stream myself once I realized that EGS had no offline mode (so the game I had been playing refused to launch during an Internet outage).
And that’s one of the many reasons EGS isn’t able to get a significant market share, because as I said initially, EGS fucking sucks. If they spent half as much on improving the store as they do for timed exclusives and trying to lure people in with free games, they might actually get somewhere.
Epic poured billions of Fortnite money with little to show for it.
Yes, Into fortnite, not EGS. The eggs spent all their money on timed exclusives instead of a better product, and that’s why they failed to make a steam competitor.
Ok, so then handle all of that yourself at cost. Which will lead to the death of your studio faster?
Seriously though, a $15 game selling just 100k copies is still $1m to you (before taxes) and has no upkeep. You do all that steam does yourself, you’re going to drown in operations costs and upkeep time.
Competition isn’t possible? EGS is an active competitor that only takes 12% and they still can’t get fucking anywhere because their store fucking sucks. GoG exists and also takes 30%, their store/launcher are ok, but they don’t offer nearly as much for that 30%, but they make up for that with drm free games. There are other minor players out there, so competition is definitely possible, but not one of them offers a comparable product.
The only way steam would lower their cut is if someone came along and made a game store that actually offered a significant portion of the services steam offered and was about as good but also had a lower cut of sales. But good luck finding someone who can do all of that and also takes less than 30%.
It’s actually pretty easy to argue it’s fair once you look at everything. Steam offers a shit ton of resources for that 30%, including hosting, distribution, patching, workshop, etc. And that’s not even getting into the fact that the dev can get all of that AND get steam keys that they can distribute themselves (meaning valve doesn’t get a cut of that) that still utilizes the same infra.
I wish I could find it, but I recently saw a video of Thor (@piratesoftware, does his own game dev and used to work for Blizzard) talking about this and going into even more detail than I can remember at the moment.
I love doom 3, but I also have a vivid memory of a sleepover at a buddy’s house in high school where we made a friend play it then we scared the bejesus out of him during one of the early locker scares that we saw coming and he didn’t.