• masterspace@lemmy.ca
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    11 months ago

    He’s entirely right. Valve is just stealing money from gamers and developers by not lowering their fees.

    • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Valve is just stealing money from gamers

      If you actually think that reduced fees mean lower cost for consumer, you’re out of touch with reality.

      and developers

      They are free to go somewhere else like the EGS utopia where developers are definitively get paid directly an equal cut of each sale and no publisher intermediary like EA and Activision is just taking all the revenue and the developers get paid their usual salary anyhow.

    • xtapa@discuss.tchncs.de
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      11 months ago

      You’re right. Giving 30% for really fucking good platform services is way worse than having to find a publisher that takes in 70 to 90% of revenue and pushes devs to release unfinished games.

      • skulkingaround@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        Yeah seriously. As a dev, that 30% cut gets you a lot of stuff with absolutely no additional charges. Trying to roll your own distribution for your downloads could exceed that 30% by itself after you:

        • Host the files somewhere that can be downloaded anywhere close to as fast as steam’s servers
        • Handle payment processing fees
        • Develop and maintain a site with high reliability

        And that’s only downloads. With steam you also get:

        • p2p networking tools
        • game server hosting
        • steam community integration
        • analytics
        • cloud saves
        • voip

        And like 50 other things. It’s ridiculously good value unless you’re developing some super low rent single player indie title. Even then, just having it available on steam will get you way more sales to make up for it.

        Sure, epic charges 10% but you basically only get distribution and some super half baked community features.

    • Phegan@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      They are not stealing from gamers. A game would still cost 70 dollars on steam no matter the cut they take.

      Developers, I won’t argue with

    • criticalimpact@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      EGS is not profitable with the cut they take atm.

      Sweeney it’s on drugs if he thinks valves cut is unfair

    • TORFdot0@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      And Epic Games is just distributing games to gamers and providing services to developers at cost?

      I don’t like Steam but its clear that Epic is just mad because they were late to market and would otherwise charge similar fees.

      • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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        11 months ago

        What about our economy makes you think that multiple industries can’t be corporate controlled monopolies / oligopolies?

        • The_Lopen@sh.itjust.works
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          11 months ago

          You know what, I appreciate the call-out. I don’t trust our economy, and shouldn’t reference it in defense of one (in my experience) honorably led company.