Why is Valve being sued for almost $900 million, but Epic Games wasn't sued when they bought Rocket League and Fall Guys to remove them from steam?
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Their approach feels like how lot of companies are currently focusing on AI to market to investors and AI data centers directly, and ignoring what consumers want assuming their opinions are of little relevance. Like how Microsoft doesn't care if people dont want copilot, and keeps talking up the corporate side with the assumption that they know people will use Microsoft no matter what.
Which is much like Epic with them focusing more on giving money to publishers to lock up titles in the past like Final Fantasy 7 Remake from Square Enix over concerning themselves with the demographic of people buying the product.
Its not a consumer focused business model, because the idea of consumers not buying it is impossible to comprehend. Their headlines never seem to be around how its better for the consumer and the benefits to using them over the competition.
we are products and cattle for them, not customers. Their customers are other rich people they associate with and exchange favors and assets with.
I wonder if this is how it would be to live in world dominated by vampires.
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and steam needs data centers and servers and power and all the stuff to keep those running. ultimately though it didn’t matter. if steam thinks that their ecosystem is worth charging that much, then it’s up to the dev to decide if what steam provides is worth it to them
We don't know how much it costs for their servers but I doubt it's anywhere near what they charge devs. Gaben having an 11bn dollar net worth kind of points to that.
The biggest problem is that it isn't up to devs since steam has market dominance. Not putting your game on steam is basically suicide, they have close to 90% of the PC market..
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I think devs actually get quite a bit for that 30%. Let's present a hypothetical. What if Valve offered an option where you could list your game on Steam with no restrictions and they'd only take a 10% cut, but the tradeoff is, they won't promote your game at all? Like, it won't show up in any Steam storefront advertisements, can't participate in sales, etc. - it's still there if it's linked to from off-Steam or if someone searches for it, but it won't be promoted, period.
How do you think that would work out for developers? I'd argue not well, especially for small studios.
The promotion those games get applies to the game as a whole, not only through Steam - someone can see the promotion on Steam, then go shop around and buy it elsewhere. Why should Valve promote a game if they aren't getting a cut of the sales?
Plus you get the download servers, payment processing, customer support, reviews, ...
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I haven't really looked deeply into this issue but what caught my eye was the claim that a 30% fee was excessive. I'm no insider into video game publishing but 30% is the standard retail markup for many things. If you bought a candy bar today, it probably cost the mini mart you bought it from 70% of what they're charging.
30% is the standard retail markup for many things
It most certainly is not standard in retail. Most retail stores have a margin of a couple percentage points. Walmart, for example, is ~3% net margin most years
Unless you're trying to compare wholesale price to final consumer price. In which case I would say that's a silly and pointless thing to compare, but even then it's far smaller than 30% across retail and varies wildly based on the individual item being sold
A 30% cut is only really common in the tech sector where the underlying economics make it feasible
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Why would a restaurant allow delivery services if it causes them to lose money?
They don't get a choice.
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Because sweeney is greedy lying piece of shit, who’s using “think of poor developers being robbed by app stores” to cut himself bigger market share by suing fuck out of competitors
Like they won over google and guess what? He fucked over “all the poor developers” and cut himself a juicy deal to settle antitrust case
Fuck him, fuck Epic
Epic customer support is also garbage. I've sworn off the company.
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Yeah, that seems to one of the few things here that might actually be relevant.
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They don't get a choice.
For real? I don't know how any of this works from the restaurant side. I thought they had to "join" something like GrubHub, that's not the case?
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I'm being annoying, but why do you keep opening parentheses without closing them
You're not being annoying. It's probably because I lost track and for what it's worth I am sorry, I'll try to fix it but probably won't catch all of them.
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They do not allow steam keys (free to generate steam licenses of games) to be sold cheaper anywhere else for less than the game is sold for on steam.
That itself is false too with a quick look at isthereanydeals showing lot of steam games being sold cheaper outside of the steam store.
Even the Steam key guidelines don't explicitly state that steam keys can't be sold cheaper.
It's OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
Key word being comparable which is why if you are a user of isthereanydeals or /r/gamedeals you've likely gotten most of your steam games from outside the official Steam store.
I think some people just assume Steam sales must be the cheapest and don't look beyond it.
By sold cheaper I meant MSRP price, not sale price.
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Yes, almost certainly. A gaming device is a gaming device, what matters is how many users you have.
If we're concerned about distinguishing between platform, then steam is statistically insignificant on the vast majority of platforms people game on.
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There was a time when the swastika was not allowed to be shown in games because of a law in Germany, causing Wolfenstein (the uncencored version) to be banned. Maybe the country in question has similar laws?
I suspect Germany was the reason Kane and Lynch 1/2 was so heavily censored. They even got a bright orange bulletin on the Steam store page claiming that German citizens were unable to purchase or play the game.
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Seems like buying games to remove them from your competitor is a scummier thing to do.
Because Epic and Tencent should have first pick from the IP farm.
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We don't know how much it costs for their servers but I doubt it's anywhere near what they charge devs. Gaben having an 11bn dollar net worth kind of points to that.
The biggest problem is that it isn't up to devs since steam has market dominance. Not putting your game on steam is basically suicide, they have close to 90% of the PC market..
market dominance is not a monopoly. market dominance is a label given to the most successful product. and the product is successful because they offer a service that none else seems to be able to or wish to fulfill.
devs can choose to sell their game on steam, or windows live, or gog, epic game store, playstation, nintendo online, android app store, ios app store, on their own site, eb games, or the back of their car, what ever.
are all of these equally effective? nope. when you put your game on steam you get, the vast user base cultivated by valve, server space to host your game, massive server upload speeds, a built in store front, the discussion boards, steam game cloud, the stream overlays and stream input, steam workshop, community hubs, steam achievements, global money processing, themed sales, two special discovery windows. blah blah blah.
again, it’s up to the dev to decide if they want to pay 30% for these things.
to put it in perspective, when epic game store has a sale, steam makes a profit.
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Seems like buying games to remove them from your competitor is a scummier thing to do.
Im just a caveman, but wouldnt keeping the same price as steam mean the developers get more money from Epic Games Store at the same price point because of the lower fees?
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Ya, I misread it and I'm way off. It's 4bn. Epic also made a lot less, my stats are not for gross revenue but generated revenue before they split it with the devs. Amateur hour over here (me, not you).
I went off in my other comment and was a bit of a dick throughout the convo. It just feels like someone is being robbed here. 4bn is a lot of money and, from the wolffire lawsuit leak, they have less than 100 people working on steam full time.
From what I read, that $4BN number could be taken two ways. I don't know if that analyst excluded the games Valve developed, and that $4BN is games sales of everything else, or if that's what they made from their own titles. I didn't want to go through the rigamarole of Xitter to see the direct quote and I haven't had a chance to find it in the internet archive.
I also kind of want a good run down of what steam offers to developers that makes their platform so attractive because my understanding is it's more than just e-shop services and that's one of the reasons I have seen touted as why people feel the service fee is reasonable.
I didn't want to leave you on read, but I also am still looking up all kinds of random information to put together.
Also, my confusion is because there are two different lawsuits involving the 30% cut of game sales.
There's a class action lawsuit in the UK involving all of steams consumers there, predicated on the idea that the 30% service fee makes games more expensive to the detriment if those consumers.
And there's a different class action lawsuit brought by developers Wolfire and Dark Catt representing every developer who uses Steam as an E-Shop platform, also over the 30% service fee and alleged anti-competitve practices (Wolfire say that Steam told them they couldn't sell their game anywhere else for less than it was available on Steam (even if they didn't use steams license keys)).
I know I can come off as really terse, and tone is hard via text anyway. But thank you for addressing it.
Sorry about yet another wall of text.
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You're not being annoying. It's probably because I lost track and for what it's worth I am sorry, I'll try to fix it but probably won't catch all of them.
No worries, I still knew where you meant to end them, it just took me a second pass.
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Seems like buying games to remove them from your competitor is a scummier thing to do.
I am still playing Fall Guys via Steam
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Depends if you're a big developer or some indie one. Big developers commonly don't pay fees or have special deals (Uber, etc.). Smaller ones pay 15% up to 1 million downloads, then it's 30%. So if you want to pay less, get really rich first.
That being said, this is on top of the VAT, not part of it. Still charging 30% in 2026 feels criminal and greedy. This applies to nearly all big corporations, including Valve Corporation with Gabe's fleet of yachts and company making more money per employee than any other company. It made more sense to take 30% cut when 100Gb of HDD costed thousand dollars, internet was metered in megabytes and the whole infrastructure was just not there yet, but this "industry standart" tax never changed even tho for them distributing apps has become far, far cheaper than it used to.
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Seems like buying games to remove them from your competitor is a scummier thing to do.
because of the anti-competitive price restrictions that Valve often imposes on game developers and producers (the Price Parity Obligations). This means a publisher or developer would not be able to list a game on another platform as well as Steam, unless the prices offered on Steam is the same or lower. This applies to games on all other distribution stores (including online and physical stores) not just those distributed by Steam Keys
Textbook anti-trust lawsuit. Different from what Epic does, I doubt they impose such rules on developers.
