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Valve COO on Epic's Tim Sweeney "you mad bro?" when launching the Epic Store
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this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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Valve has been nice to Linux users, but Sweeny has excellent points. What Apple does is ridiculous, and it's disrespectful to see Valve give the big players better deals than the indie devs.
Epic contributing to Linux would be real nice, but they can't seem to piece together where the vocal minority hold out is coming from.
I don't totally disagree with you, and I don't totally disagree with Tim's points here, but then we (gamers) see Epic pulling exclusivity agreement bullshit, which is annoying as hell to consumers. Isn't it possible that Valve's cut is actually worth it? It's the superior store from a consumer perspective, they have good customer service, easy refunds, helpful review scores, and a hundred other things. There are many, many reasons that Steam is on top.
I don't see indie devs telling people "buy my game on Epic instead of Steam because Epic takes a smaller cut". Many devs actually do say that when their game is on Itch.io, but I haven't seen many indie devs defending Epic here. The only ones going exclusive to Epic are the ones that Tim literally paid to do so.
Until epic actually has a store that is profitable and self sustaining all of it means nothing, since without fortnite cash flow it would have closed. And even with fortnite cash their features are still lacking that it makes you wonder how even more bare bones the launcher would be without fortnite money. They can't even afford to justify putting resources to Linux anticheat support for fortnite for example.
They don't curently have a working business money that proves their percentage can actually bring in money to provide a feature rich launcher, and fund other projects in the process if Fortnite didn't exist. It's like the equivalent right now of some rich kid being given some antique store to run nobody goes to so their parents can brag that their kid is a business owner.
If Steam didn't curve developers to sell at the same price, then developers on Epic could compete with Steam on lower fees by passing those cost savings on to consumers.
Right now, there's no reason to buy on Epic: it's just a worse Steam at the same price (aside from the free games, of course.) If they charged 20% less across the board, then that might move the needle enough to get the volume to start to complete with Steam.
The price-match clause is anticompetitive; it should be a revenue-match clause, imho, so developers can sell direct downloads for 30% less (no fees) or on Epic for 20% less (10% fees) and not face any consequences from Steam, for example.
Except I find the cost saving hard to really believe when non Steam games that weren't obligated to sell at $70 launched at $70. And Epic not being profitable on top of that and the launcher being so bare bones makes me wonder do they have enough to function beyond being a glorified fanatical or humble bundle storefront with a launcher with only Fortnite money keeping it afloat. It's a loss right now same way YouTube was before ads. So a non money maker making any claims and is trying to just use a price tactic like Walmart isn't super convincing.
I remember some publishers didn't even like coupons when epic was eating the cost and opted out of it due to seeing it as devaluing the price of their games, since companies generally want to sell as many copies at the highest price point possible. So people think companies would sell cheaper, but companies don't really like to pass on savings to consumers and ideally would have their games be Nintendo sustained prices.
And even then there's stuff like humble bundles where I can buy something like 10 games for cheaper than a single game in the bundle has gone for like this month with Nioh 2, price is something I care about the least.
And with stuff like isthereanydeals I don't even need to settle for epic. I can buy from numerous storefronts for steam versions of games cheaper than steam, and no I'm not talking about gray market keys but keys publishers choose to provide to places like fanatical.
I was thinking indie devs, but yeah: good points.
Oh indies. Yeah people seem to have been more positive about them taking the exclusive deals with lot of the frustration directed more towards triple a studios.
Indie games are already so cheap though. Including AA titles like the recent hits like Palworld and Helldivers 2 that low price seems an even a harder draw to convince people to get an epic version over steam for those games.
Then there's been talks about how epic seems like a black hole when it comes to marketing. Often times I've forgotten completely about a game that went epic exclusive until there's some announcement that the game is finally coming to Steam or it gets given away.
Epic need to improve their entire platform or be seen as a lesser option over storefronts like fanatical, indiegala, humble bundle, and gmg where people can buy cheap games and bundles and have more options to choose the platform they want the game for.
Price cut alone seems more an incentive to devs and publishers, but consumers are the ones buying the games that lead to eventual profitability. Which epic seems to completely disregard with the belief that consumers can be forced to buy from them and keep marketing revenue cuts to sellers when that's not a selling point to most consumers.
Isn't it just better % cut if you sell more than X? That's pretty standard and ensures the bigger games that people demand stay on a platform. It may not be "fair" but when has business ever been fair?
I generally have to disagree on it being disrespectful. There's an inherent cost in any business relationship that has to be accounted for with low volume partners. Every company that offers volume discounting does it for this exact reason -- the price per piece doesn't change, but the other costs can be spread over more pieces.
Could Valve eat some of this cost to promote indie development? Absolutely. But it's not disrespectful to price your product with volume discounts.