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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 (twitter.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I mean that’s the same side that steam is using their monopoly for, too

Steam only has a monopoly because they have the absolute feature advantage. There is no other launcher that offers all of the features Steam does. Steams Monopoly is a natural one, it formed because every other choice was worse and developers don't want to put the game on another 30 stores where it won't sell anyway. Epic is trying to create an artificial monopoly where everyone uses Epic because the developers literally cannot sell the game anywhere else (at least for a time).

Steam: Developers voluntarily restrict themselves to that single store out of convenience (99% of the customer base is there, why bother with another store). The customer base is there because the store is feature rich. Epic: Developers are artificially restricted to that single store. The customer base is there because they can't get the game anywhere else.

Given the above I predict that, unless Epic gets their Store feature equal to Steam (which won't happen imo), Epic will have to continue forcing exclusivity indefinitely. The moment they stop forcing people to use their store their customers will migrate back to Steam for a better experience.