Plenty of great games are not immune to failing even when they’re on Steam. The market is tough. But at the same time, it makes perfect sense that Steam has a rule preventing you from taking advantage of their infrastructure for marketing and communicating with customers while you make it available on Epic first for less money.
Comment on Legal action over 'unfair' Steam game store prices given go ahead
lofuw@sh.itjust.works 20 hours ago
alleges Valve “forces” game publishers to sign up to conditions which prevents them from selling their titles earlier or for less on rival platforms.
As always, these moves are being perpetuated by scumbags who just want to make more money without putting in any additional effort.
If Steam is worth releasing a game on in the eyes of the developers, then they have to pay the price to do it. If it’s not worth the price, then they are under no obligation at all to release their game on Steam.
Most games on Steam fail to gain any traction. If your game fails, it’s not because it isn’t on Steam; it’s because it’s a pile of shit and you’re not special because you made something.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
It’s more nuanced than that.
Choosing not to release on Steam isn’t easy because it’s not a balanced market, at all. It’s trying to release a Disney-style animated movie, but only in adult theatres.
Steam is the 900-pound gorilla. Yes, they have a good interface, but they take a ludicrous portion of game revenue. Epic has a shit interface, but they take well-under half of the fees Steammdoes for the same game.
Gabe is not your friend. He’s a billionaire yacht-collector. Half-Life 2 wasn’t designed to be a great game. It was designed to launch a digital storefront that allowed Valve to rake in 30% of all revenue for games sold on the platform - which is often a larger percentage than is paid to the actual people making the games.
Why are we defending a system where the fucking checkout system is valued as much as the people making the games?
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
Choosing not to release on Steam isn’t easy because it’s not a balanced market, at all.
It’s not Steam’s fault that the majority of the competition sucks ass.
but they take a ludicrous portion of game revenue.
It’s a standard cut for online storefronts, even today. And they even reduce their once game sales hit certain mile stones. It gets down to around 20%. The only reason anyone talks about it is because Tim Swiney harps on it nonstop because he wants to be the one with the monopoly
Stern@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Yes, they have a good interface, but they take a ludicrous portion of game revenue.
They take the same cut as Microsft, EA, Nintendo, Google, Apple, Sony, and more. You wanna argue 30% is excessive? I agree, but Steam isn’t an outlier here. At least Steam has enough extra shit they do for devs to make that 30% almost feel worth it.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
They take the same cut as companies that monopolize the app stores on their hardware.
They take more than other PC platforms.
Stern@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
IIRC Gog takes 30% but not sure we can count them owing to what they distribute.
The only actual competitor store (i.e. not reselling steam keys) at present is Epic with its 88/12 split after a million in sales, and as far as I know it hasn’t been profitable since it opened in 2018, despite straight up giving away product and buying exclusives to try and build a base, so not really the best argument.
Obligatory LOL if we’re going to note either the EA or Ubisoft stores in this discussion. MS probably falls into that pile too but tbh haven’t looked into them much.
lofuw@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
It’s more nuanced than that.
It’s not, though. If people actually want to play your game, then Steam isn’t going to get in the way.
Look at MMOs. Look at fortnite. Minecraft. Roblox. Those games can succeed without Steam because people want to play them.
If a game can’t succeed without being on Steam, then Steam isn’t the problem.
Why are we defending a system where the fucking checkout system is valued as much as the people making the games?
You’re asking the wrong question here. You should be asking why you’re defending the developers who just want to make more money and don’t care about how it may impact the experience for their customers.
Gabe isn’t your friend and neither are the whiny/greedy developers.
ToTheGraveMyLove@sh.itjust.works 7 hours ago
Half-Life 2 wasn’t designed to be a great game. It was designed to launch a digital storefront that allowed Valve to rake in 30% of all revenue for games sold on the platform - which is often a larger percentage than is paid to the actual people making the games.
Those things aren’t mutually exclusive. It was used to launch Steam, but it was also an objectively great game because Valve cares about their craft.
Goodeye8@piefed.social 19 hours ago
And to add to this, allowing a lower price on a different storefront isn’t going to make the game cheaper to purchase. Either it’s not going to have any impact on pricing, unless a competing store has money to burn and will pay the publisher extra to sell the game for cheaper (which will actually hurt only the smaller storefronts), or it will lead to games being overpriced on Steam which is a near guaranteed controversy to any publisher pulling this stunt, at which point it would be cheaper to not change pricing or just go full exclusivity.
It’s an argument on paper but in practicality it’s bullshit. If Steam removed this clause or wouldn’t be a net positive for the consumer and worst case would be a net negative.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
It’s crazy to me that when they sell a steam key on another store front, steam takes none of the profits from that at all, the key is free to generate for the dev, and the only stipulation is that they have to sell if for the same price it is on the steam store front.
protogen420@lemmy.blahaj.zone 19 hours ago
the main reason this lawsuit is even moving is that leaked emails that valve does indeed force price parity even for non steamkeys, I really doubt those leaked emails since I have seen first hand plenty of cases of games having different prices, sometimes even extreme differemce in pricing, for example, mindustry is paid ln steam but free on itch.io, google play store, fdroid
many other, even more questionable claims are raised withour evidence or drawn very dubiosly in the law suit
this lawsuit is pure theatre
beyond this, plenty of companies have even more and clearly anti competitive with their practices extending beyond game selling and distribution, namely apple and google, who control respectively iOS’ (very genericly poorly named) apps store and play store who clearly display anti competive behaviour and are clear monopolies
Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 hours ago
Mindustry is straight up open source, it is available on github under the GNU GPL v3
False@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
It’s worth giving the dev his $5 though. Great game and open source
Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 hours ago
More like 3.33$ (or 3.33€ in my case) plus fees, but agreed