Epic Games Officially Rolls Out Their Own Game Store Alternative To Steam

[skeevy420]

Lol, you mean regressive royalty system, when useless garbage pay 30% and AAA developers only 20%? Well, according to recent news, they've already done this.

It's not my fault they're retarded and did it backwards.

[schmidtbag]

No one is asking for Steam either, but multiple stores is better than one dominant corrupt one. Getting Valve to open up about their revenue and slices, instead of bullying devs in private would be a good thing.

Kind of an irrelevant point. You can't ask for something that already exists and provides what you want. Trust me, if Steam disappeared today, people would be asking for it.

I believe that the fact that you only pay half the price, compared to Valve, will be very interesting for most game creators.

Don't other alternatives to Steam like GOG or HumbleBundle offer better deals?

Neither of you seem to realize I didn't bring up Steam, because they're not the only alternative.

[ALRBP]

A tax is based on the social contract of each nation, citizens pay for their nation's needs according to their ability. Obviously richer citizens should pay more because in the end, they rely on that nation's laws in order to be rich in the first place... If no national order existed, not to mention infastructure etc, the rich 1% would have been slaughtered long ago by the working class they keep exploiting since forever... So to pay more if they are rich is the least they should do...

While I quite agree with this idea, this is not the case of a lot of people, plus, this is actually not true in practice. Economists found that, summing all taxes of all kinds and taking into account all fiscal optimizations, the upper middle class is actually the one which pay the most taxes relatively to their incomes (rich are cheating with the help of government, they pay less than lower middle class or even lower classes).

Anyway, offering a discount for small users is a common commercial practice.

[Azpegath]

A tax is based on the social contract of each nation, citizens pay for their nation's needs according to their ability. Obviously richer citizens should pay more because in the end, they rely on that nation's laws in order to be rich in the first place... If no national order existed, not to mention infastructure etc, the rich 1% would have been slaughtered long ago by the working class they keep exploiting since forever... So to pay more if they are rich is the least they should do...

Nice socialistic ideas you foster. I gladly disagree with most of your statements.

[Aeder]

It is not a tax, those who sell more have no obligation to pay more. If anything, Valve should put the cost at 10% for everyone. 10% is a lot of money, when you are doing NOTHING other than managing a website with a desktop client.

The reason Valve used to get 30% was because 10 years ago retail stores cost a lot to distribute games, but now that digital distribution is more widespread and there are alternatives there really is no justification. If anything, i believe even a 5% cut should be very lucrative by 2018 standards. Webservers and bandwidth are cheap these days...

Erm... Steam is much more than "just a website with a desktop client". They do payment processing and refunds, they do distribution though their high speed CDN, they handle currency conversion in lots of different countries and do regional pricing (which is why Steam is the only store front getting lots of sales from the developing world, while every other store only wants USD and first world prices and gets no sales there), they run review, community, chat and streaming systems all of which help players discover what to play, they have in-house streaming applications, they provide input handling and auto configuration for players, they fund gaming infrastructure on Linux, they provide libraries game devs can use, they offer different services (like in-game voice chat) though the Steamworks SDK, etc.

If anything, Steam's mistake was not breaking down the cost of all those services and charging devs for the ones they want to use. You want to be listed? That's 1% of your revenue, you want your game distributed from our CDN instead of your server? Add 11% to the previous number, and so on.

[M@GOid]

It is not a tax, those who sell more have no obligation to pay more. If anything, Valve should put the cost at 10% for everyone. 10% is a lot of money, when you are doing NOTHING other than managing a website with a desktop client.

The reason Valve used to get 30% was because 10 years ago retail stores cost a lot to distribute games, but now that digital distribution is more widespread and there are alternatives there really is no justification. If anything, i believe even a 5% cut should be very lucrative by 2018 standards. Webservers and bandwidth are cheap these days...

Looks to me you are underestimating the effort required to maintaining Steam as we know it. First, all those high speed downloads won't come cheap on the server/bandwidth side. Second, Steam is by far the most complete and complex of the online stores you can find out there. That definitely does not come cheap on the developer side of things, nor are easy to do. Ask the poor souls that have to use Uplay.

I'm not saying the don't have fat to burn on those margins. But don't underestimate work that have to be done to take Valve's place on the market.

[humbug]

It is not a tax, those who sell more have no obligation to pay more. If anything, Valve should put the cost at 10% for everyone. 10% is a lot of money, when you are doing NOTHING other than managing a website with a desktop client.

Oh dear. Not justifying their 20-30% revenue cut.

But you really have no idea how much infrastructure Valve has running around the world to make all this happen. Steam is not merely a website just because it has webpages.

[carewolf]

Nice socialistic ideas you foster. I gladly disagree with most of your statements.

You disagree with reality?

[humbug]

Looks to me you are underestimating the effort required to maintaining Steam as we know it. First, all those high speed downloads won't come cheap on the server/bandwidth side. Second, Steam is by far the most complete and complex of the online stores you can find out there. That definitely does not come cheap on the developer side of things, nor are easy to do. Ask the poor souls that have to use Uplay.

I'm not saying the don't have fat to burn on those margins. But don't underestimate work that have to be done to take Valve's place on the market.

Exactly. As somebody who works in an ISP and has been involved in some data center projects it seems like people have no idea what it takes to have a global network of server infrastructure with the software stack, the hardware and ISP peering which allows you to even provide games download capacity which may be around 10,000 gigabits per second. And not crash when GTA 5 or Witcher 3 launches. It's very difficult. This is just one of the things which steam achieves...

I happen to believe they should reduce the 30% starting cut, but still what I have said above stands.

[Almindor]

I think steam needs good competition. They're in a very complacent state right now. I'm just afraid if they get pushed too much it might impact their linux push.