They offer a free operating system anyone can use that’s name after their company and designed to play games sold through the included store for a 30% cut of sales.
What saints!
If Google did something similar, I bet everyone would say they’re a great company and not at all evil…
Gabe is a billionaire monopolist, not your friend.
I really don’t get the love for Valve. They charge double the fees of some other digital platforms, and people flip the fuck out when a developer is like "we’re releasing on origin because paying Valve would cost more money than the entire net profit of the game.
I think what he means is multi-player games are typically cheaper than single-player because the devs make 6 maps or whatever and let the players loose.
A full campaign requires a lot more work to keep it interesting for more than a few minutes.
You think Valve taking an extortionate amount of the budget doesn’t affect you as a consumer?
Games have budgets. With Valve taking as much money as the actual development budget for many games, the end product is significantly impacted. Games are regularly released late while missing features and so buggy as to not work. The extra 18% of the gross taken up by Valve versus EGS could be used to put more resources into the actual game.
If they charged less.fpr the platform, they’d still be raking in more than they can spend while also not taking an extra 20% out of game development budgets versus the competition.
Steam also has anti-consumer policies. They just hide it better.
You think the reasen that games that are on both platforms don’t cost 20% more on Steam is because the devs love Gabe?
He’s a fucking billionaire who makes infinite money running an app store that takes a bigger cut of the game’s income than the combined pay of all the developers working on the game combined.
He’s not your friend. He’s a leech running a glorified app launcher.
Yeah. Those assholes. Taking 12% of the gross of a game sales instead of Valve’s 30% at a time when studios are struggling.
That better overlay and browser is totally worth 18% of the total value of a game and shouldn’t go to the employees making the product or into more features. I need my virtual stickers!
The thing is gaming is a weird industry where the consumer price is essentially fixed tegardless of platform/marketplace outside of sales.
Ideally, games would cost more on Steam to make up for the increased fees. That would create a market where Steam would probably have to lower its fees to be competitive. And if Steam did that, EGS would need to improve the quality of its service to remain competitive.
Or maybe Steam could be a boutique marketplace where the games cost more but the UU is better, while EGS is an unholy mess of a UX, but the games cost less.
But what we have right now is neither. With the customers being shielded from the price differences, the negative effects of Steam are invisible to most people and the market doesn’t properly function.
Is a better launcher really worth 18% of the gross value of a game?
If a developer decided to cut 20% of their content, and their excuse was “we want to use that budget towards a better third-party game launcher instead of using it to develop the game” would you be okay with that?
Because that’s what you’re suggesting they do by choosing Steam over EGS.
As much as I like using Steam, I’m on Epic’s side here. They sue over anti-competitive practices of other marketplaces that take almost triple the cut that Epic does on game sales.
If I were a developer and one platform took 12% while the other took 30%, I’d push my customers to the 12% option no matter how much better the in-game overlay or whatever was on the other platform. Game studios are closing left and right, and that extra 18% is a big deal when games are struggling to actually profit from the development.
I don’t understand why people are so in love with a Steam monopoly. Steam has a lot of neat features, but the main feature I’m looking for in a game is the game itself, and I’d prefer more of the money to go to the companies making the games.
And maybe if Valve didn’t take home a larger profit from game sales than the developers themselves, they’d go back to being a full-time game studio to make their money.
Agreed. But I was responding to the claim that the remasters suck. With the recent updates, that’s not as accurate unless the music is the most important part of the experience for you.
The improved controls, higher resolution, gameplay tweaks (fucking David Cross RC missions in the original were ludicrous), and restored lighting make a pretty compelling package. If the remasters launched in their current state they’d be considered excellent.
They actually updated the remaster a few weeks ago and it is a huge difference.
Now the only glaring issue is the music, since the originals came out before game studios knew to secure licensed music rights in a way that would allow future re-releases in different formats.