Microsoft and Epic take less because they have less. Both their ecosystems are shit. They are also trying to get into the market, once they own a decent share of it they are hiking that right back up. Gaben is smart leaving it how it always has been, while continuously improving the platform.
People don’t like the 30%, but they are still choosing steam because it’s the better platform. Epic and co are the ones who make things exclusive and try to corner the market.
The article points to a “similar case with sony”, but it’s not similar really. Sony has exclusives too.
This entire article is shit and there’s no victim here, except Microsoft and Epic maybe. This is a class action lawsuit nobody asked for.
Any articles for this speculation or uncertainty? Because that’s also something Valve would be quick to shut down and point to Sony, for legal reasons.
Or is this all reddit threads from people who don’t understand how steam works?
Steam doesn’t push changelists from developer accounts, and don’t push it themselves without making a major announcement. This is why all the reporting on this has been clear AH/Sony delisted it. There are countless articles confirming this days ago.
Sony made the strange decision to delist Helldivers 2 from over 150 different countries in which the PlayStation Network isn’t supported, though we’re still not quite sure for what reason.
Unless there’s evidence that AH got a special deal, there’s no chance they didn’t know this was an eventual requirement.
I’ve been an engineer in the AA/AAA games industry for almost 2 decades, my job often involves assessing the technical feasibility of games that big publishers like Sony want to invest in/ acquire.
Someone somewhere at AW agreed to shove PSN sign-in requirements in the deal, hoping it would blow over like many games before. (e.g rocket league / epic account debacle). Now the devs are sorry it’s not working out and say “their hands are tied”, but they must have known this was coming. There are way too many legal ramifications for this to be a random power-move by Sony.
Edit: sony apparently lifted the requirement today
What does it matter if the game “launches successfully” if it doesn’t sustain itself? They knew theyd likely lose their players but they were hoping theyd be special - this game is not successful in the end.
Your entire argument boils down to: they wouldn’t have been able to cheat us into thinking this was a good game without sony. If theyre going to take my money and kill the game anyway, it would have been better to not make it at all. That’s what thousands of indie devs have to contend with every day.
They got really buffed on investments during the pandemic like we were going to stay in our house for the rest of our lives.
Now interest is high and investors aren’t as excited. It wouldn’t hurt for the industry to crash and get rid of these moneygrabbers who are in for a short peak, we’d have better games
Yeah that was kinda my point. All that matters is what the spreadsheet looks like now. It would have probably been a net positive to keep me given they are only going to grow and spend a fortune on hiring and new stocks. That’s a different spreadsheet though, I also live in a country where it’s expensive to fire full time employees collectively, so it’s not like they are paying these kinds of sums for everyone. It’s pretty cheap to make things look good on paper.
They make 5 billion a year, thats less than 2.5% of the money they make every year, it’s a rounding error to make the spreadsheets look real good to the money lenders .
My company just let me go with a 6 figure package (x amount of pay + stocks). They could have easily kept me there for another year, but that’s not as good for the spreadsheets.