Can think about Steam tax whatever you want, but they provide a hell of a lot more than just a half-assed store and some exposure for your games like Epic does. Don’t get me wrong, I do gratefully take the free games and I do appreciate the competition, what I want to say is that Steam doesn’t just pocket that money. They provide forums; frameworks for stuff like modding and achievements; a much better client useful beyond games they sell; subsidized hardware and support for Linux as an alternative to Windows. All of this also benefits game developers one way or another and costs money to develop and maintain. (Software) engineers are anything but cheap.
Epic does have its steamworks alternative called epic online services which provide more or less the same functionality (achievements, p2p networking, anti cheat…) but it’s also completely free, cross store, and cross engine
I agree partially. They are competent rather than just able to do whatever cause money.
Now if they invested their profits into workers salaries and made a bid for management salaries to only double per rank, we would be going somewhere.
Does Valve officially have managers now? Last I checked, they had this extremely flat structure of everyone being basically equal and people self-determining what they’re working on and how
Thats what I heard as well, doesn’t change the fact that management gets paid 10-100 times of an engineer and profits go to the owner/s not the workers.
Are you talking about Valve, or generally? Because as I said, I don’t think there is such a thing as a generic manager role at Valve, much less one that gets paid so much more than other roles. How much of the profit goes to Gabe directly vs the employees or reinvested into the company I don’t know, but if you want to complain about compensation gaps, I’m very sure that Valve is absolutely not the company to start with.
It does suck, but I think the only thing Tim Epic can do is to fix his own store.
There’s a lot of stuff from Sweeny I disagree with, but I don’t think he’s wrong on this.
Yep, as much as I benefit from valve’s push on Linux, I know it’s not out of the kindness of their hearts, it’s out of self preservation.
I would gladly use epic’s store if it gave devs more of the profits, but it’s just incredibly immature. Basic options are missing, and it doesn’t support Linux. I can try to work around their shortcomings as much as possible using bottles and proton, but eventually I can’t play their games due to their invasive anti-cheat. On top of that, they seem to be building a walled garden of micro transactions that’s just a worse version of NFTs. They really don’t want me as a customer, and I’m not going to argue.
Wrong with what? 30% cut? It seems a lot, but from the greater distance I don’t think it’s that much.
Developers do get great benefits from this. The game is downloadable at any time with great speeds everywhere in the world. They get steam workshop for mods, free forums, reviews, steamplay, proton, friendlists with super easy game invites, … and all this is basically free advertisment for developer.
Now what does Epic offer in this regard? Nothing.
I don’t have any frame of reference for how much content delivery on Valve’s level costs, and whether a lower cut would be sustainable. I assume that a lower cut for the first $X of revenue a game makes on Steam would be doable without cutting into profits too much, and would probably help smaller indie devs. In the end, since Valve is private, we can kinda only speculate about what would be fair, or even just feasible.
Of course, Valve isn’t obligated to do any of this, but if they would in response to pressure from Epic, I’d consider that a good thing. Considering the article above, that seems unlikely, needless to say.
I also do agree that Epic’s store isn’t all that great.
But it’s not just content delivery, they have a lot of software engineers building and maintaining lots of things, such as:
- Steam Input
- Steam Link app
- Proton - for Steam Deck and Linux
And a bunch more. That cut isn’t just going into the coffers, it’s being invested in the platform.
What does EGS do?
- pay for exclusivity
- give away games
- twiddle their thumbs?
EGS basically wants to draw you in with the free games and exclusivity, but that’s it. They have no actual draw to their platform. Valve invests in their platform, EGS just buys eyeballs.
