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Epic reduce their cut to 0% for the first $1 million in revenue for devs on the Epic Games Store
(www.gamingonlinux.com)
this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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I don't think this is true. 20% was the standard, as I recall, not 30%. I think it has moved that way over time, though. And even that only made some sense while retailers were too powerful to compete with them on price. Storage and bandwidth are much cheaper than bricks and real estate and salaries.
This is a good thing, Steam's cut is too big, especially for a company with next to no staff that runs on a heavily Uber-ified model and produces very little and I an very tired of the fanboyism.
I agree that people should default to GoG when possible, though.
Valve sure does show how to run PR from the design level out and does this by putting the squeeze on developers rather than users whenever it can.
I am not ok with that. I would much prefer a user friendly platform that is investing on more than its position as a dominant market force and putting more of the revenue back into the space where games are made.
Oh, and on being DRM-free, too.
So I don't need to trust Epic for anything, but I also don't need to trust Valve with a monopoly. Which is, of course, why I default to GoG, as I said.
Lol in what way are they "putting the squeeze" on developers aside from the 30% cut?
Also your prior comment that valve does nothing else is hilarious, the steam deck, steamOS, Proton, the valve index.
They do SO MUCH more.
Automatic save cloud syncing, steam remote play, steam link, the community forums, steam workshop.
Get your head out of your ass, no other platform comes close to feature parity and putting back into improving pc gaming.
Also steam DRM is laughably easy to circumvent and they haven't shown any interest in over a decade of doing anything about it.
Plenty of other platforms spend more money on the platform than Steam. Definitely. Easy.
I mean, for one thing the console manufacturers are shipping a TON more hardware, often with very low margins. And they are all bigger than Steam and have as much of a software upkeep. They are spending more money on game development than Steam, too.
Steam Deck, Steam OS, the Index and Proton are at most on par with what Sony does just for the PS5 platform.
Oh, and to your first question, Steam does very much tell developers what they want them to do. They are a first party, and have their own preferences an policies. They are currently in court for banning developers from offering games cheaper on any other competing service, for instance.
People get mad at me for caling Dunning-Kruger in these things, and it inevitably gets to that point, but...
...come on, what am I supposed to do with this?
For the record, Valve specifically avoided having a return policy until regulators threatened to impose one.
The first platform that implemented no-questions-asked return policy?
EA's Origin, believe it or not.
I mean, it's only relevant because you incorrectly gave them credit. The rest of it is just word salad, but that one was stating a fact and the fact was a lie, so I wouldn't want somebody to read it and get the wrong impression.
Also for the record, Steam's current refund policy is more strict than GoG, in that GoG's has no playtime limit, just a time-from-purchase limit, which is a fairly decent parallel to return policies in retail. Given the fact that there's no DRM on GoG games either is pretty meaningless, and it's anybody's guess whether GoG could sustain it with the kind of volumes and exploiting Steam faces, but now we're getting to levels of nuance well beyond writing misinformation-laden rants with no caps.
I'll give you that my brain is getting quite sore from this conversation. I don't know if it's gymnastics, but man, it is quite draining.
And, for the record, you didn't give them credit for having a good refund policy, you first heavily implied they had "ensured" one for gamers, which they didn't and actively resisted doing, and then that theirs was more generous than GoG's, which is also not true. It's still written up there.
The only reason I don't think you were lying is I'm pretty sure you had no idea about any of that in the first place and you didn't bother to look it up. "Lying" implies knowing something is false, so I guess you're off the hook on that front.
Oh, hey, you acknowledged they're not perfect and most of their positioning is them understanding PR better than competitors. I'm gonna count that as an agree to disagree and stop talking to you because holy crap.