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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.
What valve produces is a user friendly platform. That's their value proposition and its worth many times its weight in gold
Thats worth 30% of the sale to me as a user. And is something epic and other publishers are completely unable to replicate. (I.e. no one in their right mind would ever trust epic to maintain such a position)
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.
you're so uninformed its hilarious. PS5 is a single hardware platform that almost certainly (if they continue as they historically have) on top of free bsd. their software stack is almost certainly an open source base with some small additions for developer friendliness on top. its small time compared to what steam does: multiple OS support with massive and varied hardware support.
Nor does sony contribute much back to the open source ecosystems they leech off of. meanwhile steam has been funding linux gaming improvements for over a decade now and are a huge reason that its as amazing as it is today.
the idea that sony spending a higher $ value vs steam is probably the most retarded thing i've heard all day. the $ value isnt what matters. its the impact/$. and steam leaves sony in the dust on this. again linux gaming wouldn't be anywhere near where it is without steam. meanwhile sony barely contributes anything.
Valve literally has funded the compatibility layer to bring DX games to linux. point to a single thing sony has done that's comparable.
Never mind all the benefits valve has ensure for gamers. a strong return policy. ongoing predictable sales. easy of use and cross platform support.
Never mind all the tooling they provide to developers of games.
Valve has very much earned the loyalty from gamers it has and i have no problem with them profitting off that fact. long as they keep up the good work we'll keep using and supporting their platform.
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.
and your point? its still a better policy than both GOG and EA origins provided. and the regulators where in a country steam likely gave 0 thoughts about. and then applied the change everywhere for everyone.
this is literally a non-issue now. so anything more recent than 2013 that any reasonable person would give a shit about?
context for everyone else:
or anything relevant to any of the points I made or you just going to keep tossing out decade old information as if its relevant.
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.
Yes, I gave them credit for have a generous policy for over a decade. which is a fucking fact. it isnt a fucking lie. lol. the mental gymnastics you're performing right now.
kindly fuck off and stop wasting everyones time.
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.
Currently valve has never walked back a pro-consumer policy (afaik). so yes. they currently ensure one; its a policy I'd expect EA/ubi to drop at the earliest convenience or first indicator they could make more money without it. for example: see apples reaction to being told to fuck off with their market place antics vs valves. valve lost the case in one minor country and rolled out the policy globally. I can't imagine apple/google/ea/ubisoft doing that.
but apparently you can. you seem to think anyone who backs up valve is somehow been misinformed. no, we just know valve is the best consumer facing company around based on their current / past behaviors.
are they perfect? nope. but they are miles better than their competition like EA and microsoft. GoG is fine afaik and are not struggling. no one here has shit on GoG afaik beyond a 'missing functionality' argument. but they're also not supporting the open source ecosystem to the same extent valve is.
The problem EA/microsoft/ubisoft have is not a technically one its a reputational one. they've done and continue to done so much misbehavior people don't trust them at all and are not willing to support them and no amount of money thrown at the problem will fix such a problem. Which is why EA has resorted to trying to sue valve for checks notes not following the capitalist playbook.
valve understands what they currently have and until a change in leadership or gaben demonstrates he and valve are no longer a BDFL people like me will continue to support them over EA/microsoft/ubisoft.
your problem is you think gabe's wealth and the fact 10+ years ago they only added a return policy at the conclusion of a law suite somehow changes this equation. which it doesnt for many people, because the good behavior of valve is more valuable than a few dollars here and there to us.
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.
Valve hasnt increased their %age since steams inception. you can argue its too high. but its certainly not a squeeze which requires an unnecessary and increasing rate that is detrimental to the developers.
its hilarious how well the publishers propaganda arm has influenced you to your own detriment. do you know much EA and other publishers demand as their cut? 50%. valve as a publisher is actually a fucking discount.