Epic is anti-consumer and also anti-Linux, they don’t make any effort to support other platforms, the app is shit.
Meanwhile, Steam is
Actively working with the FOSS community to help preserve old games
Kernel improvements for better graphics performance
Lots of VR and HDR work
Many contributions to the open-source AMD drivers
Has been supporting Linux gaming for a decade with no signs of backing down
They have a portable Linux gaming console experience, and it’s intentionally left wide open for users to mess with
They’ve taken several community features and built them into the OS
Their DRM is weak and unintrusive
Their anticheat is ununtrusive
The sales are pretty good
They have tons of features for users:
Family sharing
Remote Play Together
Remote Play
Streaming
Community forums for every game
Mod workshop
Matchmaking
Steam Chat / Voice Chat / Streaming
The only appealing thing for EGS is, EGS takes a lower cut from the developers who just pockets it and doesn’t even result in lower prices for users. As a Linux user, praise our Lord GabeN for all the good Valve has done for gamers. Even for the developers, most are quite happy with the services they get back from that 30% cut.
I’d say the dislike is mainly that for the users, EGS doesn’t bring in anything new or interesting or useful that Steam didn’t already do well, and goes directly against a lot of the good Steam has been doing. It’s just a store that makes big developers slightly more happy.
I completely agree with what you said. It’s been years since I bought any games and yet my experience just gets better and better on Steam, especially as a Linux user.
most are quite happy with the services they get back from that 30% cut.
I agree with most of that, but this part just isn’t true. 30% is highway robbery. It’s a scam. But PC gamers are trained that Steam is where the games are, with few exceptions. If you don’t pay steam their cut, your game doesn’t sell at all.
Consider all that goes into development of a game and compare that to the effort/infrastructure to host a download and display a webpage. Is Steam really providing 30% of the game experience?
I think Steam could be profitable at less than a 10% cut.
effort/infrastructure to host a download and display a webpage
Except that’s not all Valve does. Game files and updates need to be distributed, and that alone is a massive task at the scale Steam operates on, both the storage and transmission of data, and the operating cost of the CDN. Steam Cloud is also not free, it’s covered by the 30% so the players don’t have to pay for the service separately. Add to that the cost of sales where the discount is covered by Valve.
The EGS isn’t profitable either, it’s kept alive by Fortnite money.
And all that forever too. The developers don’t pay a dime after Steam’s cut to keep the game alive and downloadable and playable. Even Steam keys, you can sell as many as you want outside of Steam, for free.
The devs can just raise the price by 30% if they feel they really need the money. I’ll pay the extra to have it on Steam and just work out of the box in Proton. Unlike Apple, it’s not a monopoly, nothing stopping anyone from just distributing on their own.
Actually they can’t. Steam’s TOS has a “most favored nation” clause that forbids developers from charging less for their games on other platforms (at least this is how I understand it, I’m not a lawyer). From a small developer’s perspective, it sucks that they can’t unburden the player from the 30% where it doesn’t apply. From Valve’s perspective, that would turn Steam into an advertising platform for other stores.
Check isthereanydeals for deals on steam keys that aren’t gray market and lower than Steam. How do they get around it? Well it seems to more apply to retail price and not sales price.
You also recognize that 30% of each game sale applies to each game sale, right?
Do you really think 30% of developing a game is hosting not just the original game, but also the updates and the save files? CDNs only make it cheaper.
Steam is able to charge 30% because they effectively have a walled garden on PC games. Very few publishers are well known enough to successfully sell their game outside of Steam.
It’s not as egregious as the Apple or Google stores, but they’re basically all in this together. It’s like the old mob families where they split territory.
Consequence of what you are proposing is that companies with economies of sale or are willing to operate at a loss due to other sections of the corporation being their main source of profitable revenue would be only ones left. Ironically ensuring higher barriers to entry than there already is. The 10% is more realistic for key resellers than those trying to launch a profitable mainstream platform hosting and distributing everything as opposed to side project that can lose money.
The CD Projekt-owned PC gaming storefront GOG just released a “facts and figures” breakdown of 2022 in an official blog post. The upshot? GOG experienced steady growth in its user base and library while also turning a tidy $1.2 million profit. It’s a heartening turnaround to see as the service actually lost money—$1.15 million to be exact—the previous year.
The cut GOG takes is 30%. Epic operates at a loss and is more a side project they are willing to lose money on, since Fortnite and Unreal is there real money.
GOG also started to limit cloud storage per game to 200 MB
As the size and number of games increase, so does the demand for Cloud Storage. These limits ensure that all players have access to sufficient and manageable space for their game progress, and that we keep the associated costs under control. By optimizing our storage allocation, we aim to continue providing a reliable and user-friendly platform for everyone.
Have you ever seen the interview with game devs that said something along the lines of Steam cut justifying itself just from the fact that hosting your own webstore and selling your game there can result in so much shit just from people refunding and such that the steam cut is actually cheaper in the long term for smaller devs.
Have you ever seen the interview with game devs that said something along the lines of Steam cut justifying itself just from the fact that hosting your own webstore and selling your game there can result in so much shit just from people refunding and such that the steam cut is actually cheaper in the long term for smaller devs.
Epic is anti-consumer and also anti-Linux, they don’t make any effort to support other platforms, the app is shit.
Also to add context, Tencent (Chinese tech conglomerate) owns 35% of Epic and helped them pivot to GaaS and aggressively push into the game store market.
People’s first impression of it was Metro Exodus being pulled from Steam close to launch and becoming exclusive to Epic despite even physical copies having the Steam logo.
Turned out people don’t really like a company going out of its way to try and remove purchasing options from consumers for third party titles. This not only affected steam but releases on GOG too.
A lot of people requested that DARQ be made available on GOG. I was happy to work with GOG to bring the game to their platform. I wish the Epic Store would allow indie games to be sold there non-exclusively, as they do with larger, still unreleased games (Cyberpunk 2077), so players can enjoy what they want: a choice.
I bought Rocket League because it had a Linux version, and Linux games were scarce before proton. Epic bought the developers of rocket League, and made it Epic exclusive. People who bought the steam version got to keep it, except for Linux users because Epic cancelled Linux support.
Epic loves to act like they’re anti monopoly, but they only care about that when they’re competing for market share. They’re extremely pro Microsoft and anti Linux.
Also one of the biggest concerns about Valve having a monopoly in the PC gaming space is that they could use their marketshare and money to block rival stores from getting popular games, making it hard to compete and removing user choice. In reality, Valve hasn’t done this, but Epic is leveraging their big pile of fortnite money to do this. It makes people think that if Epic ever gets into a dominate market position, that they’ll absolutely be an abusive monopoly that makes the market space worse for everyone else.
I prefer how information dense and responsive steam is.
Epic is laggy, logs me out constantly, and is inefficiently organized (at least by default). I don’t want to scroll through cards or change my sorting filters/layout each time I want to find something. When I open steam, it has a permanent tab that says LIBRARY at the top, and when I click on that, it gives me a massive scrollable list of my games, defaulting to A-Z. Simple is better.
Plus, user reviews are really nice to have when considering dropping $ on something.
In addition to the exclusives issue, the client and store were not particularly well made and were missing pretty standard features stuff like no shopping cart so if you wanted to buy multiple games at the same time you had to do them as separate purchases and stuff like wishlisting.
I remember Valve got quite a bit of dislike when they first introduced Steam as a requirement to play Counter Strike Source and HL2 (of course back then it was only for Valves own games).