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Tim should just start his own store where he can set the rules and let the market decide whether or not they like the disclosures.
If he's right, his store would be a dominant force, and ... what's that? He's been trying that for the better part of a decade and nobody buys anything there?
Has no one sat Tim down and explained to him how much free marketing he gives Steam?
All digital storefronts take 30% btw
Used to. Not anymore.
Epic is 0% up to $1 million and 12% after.
Microsoft store is 5% if it's through your website and 15% if it's through the app.
GoG is 30%
Google Play store is 30% after 1 million
Why lie?
They may just be misinformed. Sony and MS take 30% on both their platforms so that may be why they think that.
And selling to brick and mortar (which doesnt exist much anymore anyway) ends up costing even more.
The big take away is him arguing AI discloser is somehow an afront to developer privacy. Bullshit. I like the response in the screenshot: Sweeney is telling us to be okay buying food without ingredients lists. AI slop is cancerous to the industry and the vast majority of indie dev communities for instance despise GenAI and want the disclosures.
No matter what your living conditions, you can never beat Valve on the price of real estate. Because they will live for free in Sweeney's mind as long as he's alive.
A disclosure for transparency is not a hate campaign. Actually, Tim is doing a hate campaign against Valve.
There is no AI hate campaign, it's natural hate!
Sweeney is such a fucking clown
Fuck around and find out. He fucks around and still doesn't find out.
He's so jealous of Steam you can smell it.
Ah there's the Tim Sweeney we know! Balance has been restored
So I really hate epic. And the Ai BS. And this moron. But I have an unpopular opinion on steam/valve.
I will say, a couple friends are game devs and they have a very negative outlook on the 30% cut. One told me that there's something like 80 games a month added to steam and that most have a 1-5% success rate. In other words, most of these game developers are being milked by steam(punny coffee joke). So rough math aside, between the steam cut, taxes--I don't know if the steam cut is taxed, overhead; then splitting up pay and likely getting taxed on that, you're basically making pennies. Bantering for Valve is like bantering for Google. Think of it this way, you go to work get paid but 30% of your paycheck is taken but you get nothing out of it. And you're told worship your employer, just like you should worship amazon and walmart.
Way more than 80 games are being released. It not 2 decades ago anymore where a decent indie title was enough to get you noticed.
Biggest challenge now isn't even the 30% cut but just people even knowing your game exists with the massively low barrier to games now. You aren't just competing against triple a titles, but every other aspiring indie dev hoping to make the next Balatro.
Its a plus now if your games get pirated, since that means among the thousands of gamss released per month you have a chance to actually have people know your game exists.
Valve offers an awful lot for that 30%. It's not their fault every game doesn't take off. It's not like indie devs can't sell the game themselves on their own site if they want. It just means they have to take on all the marketing responsibilities themselves and are going to miss selling to people that only buy off steam because it's so much easier to manage your updates and shit on that platform.
"Get nothing out of it?" Go ahead and spin up a store front that processes payments with every major channel, then come back to me in a decade when you've got that up and I'll give you your next task.
Could just as easily argue it's Valve who isn't getting anything for your ten shovelware asset flip titles getting no sales, but they still have to pay for your overhead.
Your friends can just request Steam keys and sell them outside of the Steam Store. Then there's no 30% cut. That cut only applies to games and software sold on the Steam store.
Valve does offer the best features on their storefront by far, thus the 30% cut. And honestly comparable storefronts (Sony also 30%, Microsoft also 30% up until August 2021, and Nintendo also 30%) all take comparable cuts. This isn't anything new or unique to Valve.
The real crime is that Valve requires price parity when you independently (no Steam keys) sell your game on a different store, as well as the Steam store. ("Most Favored Nation" clause.) It means that developers are allowed to pocket the profits if a game is sold on a store that has a lower percentage cut, but they aren't allowed to share the lower cost with the customer, because that could encourage people to not use the Steam Store when buying games.
I've looked through court documents for this. They're sneaky about it, but they implicitly threaten you with your game's sales being crippled by being taken out of their recommendation algorithm. With Steam being the biggest store, that's a death sentence for most indie developers.
As an indie dev myself: Indie devs forget during the brick and mortar days up to 80% or more of revenue is consumed by middlemen before reaching the consumer. Steam absolutely makes indie dev sales easier.
Is that the case? I didn't really ask much about it since it becomes a heated discussion.
YES
Also your friends should figure out how much it costs to host and distribute themselves with infinite scaling in case their game catches on.
Only restriction I know for this scheme is you can't sell the keys outside steam for less than you sell on Steam. Otherwise you can just undercut them while still using their services
he can just not use steam
It's the eternal dilemma for game devs. They loathe the 30% cut (even though it's the same for every console, except you don't have any choice there) but at the same time steam does offer discoverability and platform features the devs and gamers love.
I would have loved if Epic could compete with steam, but they instead chose to just throw money at gamers instead.
Steam/Valve are not the good guys, they seem more normal because they are not complete shit like all other large gaming companies.
The 30% cut is clearly not market driven. Network effects are not an inherent property of Steam itself.
They also pioneered lootboxes and tried to do their best to scam on refunds (typical American bullshit).
The 30% cut is clearly not market driven
How is it not? The market is gaming platforms for developers (i.e you're not in the market as a gamer), and every other platforms are either 30% with good features, or 12% but no features.
I meant market in the real sense not the American polemical form.
A real market-driven price/cut is determined by supply and demand, the 30% figure was chosen by some American oligarchs that Valve decided to copy.
Have you ever wondered why it's not 29.1% or 34.5% and the 30% figure never changes (other than than for well connected insiders?). How can market driven price never change, especially in a highly dynamic globalized market like gaming?
The market has spoken, no one has been able to provide a better service for less, so 30 stays. Technically they could even have increased the cut because of that if you follow market rules.
But even then, you can get a lower cut on Steam if you are a very big publisher, so the 30% figure is not set in stone.
And again, the market is not gaming as a whole but gaming platforms, of which there are very few players, and none have tried to really compete with steam as a platform. Most publishers platforms were entirely driven by maximizing their profit, not competing. Most of them are basic digital storefronts, and not platforms.
Totally! The market has spoken!
It just so happens that all major service providers have the same 30% figure irrespective of their specific vertical focus, the geographic component of their industry or even the developments in their vertical over the past 20-25 years?
That's how a market works! Right?
P.S. You can also set it to 100% (you physical can if you want), that's not what we are discussing though.
You're free to build your own platform to undercut Valve and others if you think the market is wrong. Epic has been trying (barely I know) but haven't succeeded afaik
have you ever wondered why no one can provide the services Valve does for cheaper than Valve does? Is it because of their famously anticompetitive practices, their notorious lobbying and threats to politicians, their strong-arm manipulation of vendors against each other? Perhaps they have some other method of defeating market forces?
I could rant about him again but I'll just post my favourite photoshop of him instead this time since he's just repeating himself obnoxiously.
BTW searching the web for +"epig games" (which usually forces to find words with this specifically) with a search engine, the top result is Epic Games related. So "Epig" and "Epic" seems interchangeable.
Aw don’t tie good looking doggies to this guy. It’s a slur on dogs.
That’s an improvement.
A lot of us don't hate AI. Maybe he should ask AI for advice on not sounding like a dumbass
Step 1. Devs who use AI don't boast about how little effort they put into their products by using it
I don't know but the quote sound exactly like what something AI will say.
presume that if people know about AI, they hate AI; a true evangelist for AI!
Sorry, who is that?
Tim Epic
Nobody.