• Feydaikin@beehaw.org
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    8 months ago

    It’s about more than just taking a 30% cut of sales. Everyone agrees that it’s a high price. So what else might the potential competition do that make them stand out as worse than Valve?

    Also, overworked and underpaid Devs are a different matter. You have look at their Publishers about that. I believe Valves Devs are quite well paid and far from overburdened.

    • stardust@lemmy.ca
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      8 months ago

      Yeah, same goes for Apple and Google. People just look at cuts, but these companies do pay their employees well and the cut they take may be a large part of it, and they branch out to other things like Apple with Vision Pro, or Google and their many failed projects like Stadia. Companies that run on razor thin margins can lead to Amazon or Walmart working conditions. The treatment of devs is more the publisher issue with the company not taking care of their own employees.

      Could cuts be better for creators? Yes. But, just fixating on cuts is a very simplified metric, and even Epic has shown themselves their inability to dedicate resources operating on the cut they are now that is losing them money and still years later struggling to be nothing more a worse fanatical or humble bundle with a launcher. Which tends to lean towards if you want to offer low cuts being a more simple key reseller storefront is more realistic than trying to maintain an ecosystem off of it and profit, since making a feature rich launcher is turning out to be much harder than thought.