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Epic reduce their cut to 0% for the first $1 million in revenue for devs on the Epic Games Store
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this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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Steam really needs something like this. Even the first 100k would be a great start for boosting indie devs.
Instead they do the opposite and reward the big players.
Epic only does it because they know they're the underdog. If that were to one day become untrue they would never do anything like this again.
I mean, yeah.
You sorta figured out competition in marketplaces.
Hey, I'm a social democrat. I'm all for intervening in markets, but for commodity entertainment products competition works pretty well, as you just explained.
but no, steam has maintained its 30% cut since its inception do you know the rate publishers like EA demand? 50%. EA is just pissed valve is a better and more reasonable publisher than they are.
so long as EA and other publishers exist and are taking a bigger cut than valve. I'm happy to give valve a pass atm at the better option.
the issue at hand atm is gamers won't tolerate price increases and inflation has cut into the original profit margin. and so publishers are running around screaming about valve's 30% cut when they demand a larger cut.
You are mistaking publishing for distribution.
Publishing is not distribution.
smile the whole point of publishers back in the day before the internet was distribution and marketing. no I am not mistaking one for the other.
No, you absolutely are. Publishers will typically pay for retail manufacturing costs (so printing, boxing and shipping), but that's not the same as digital distribution. Digital distribution doesn't map to shipping game boxes, it maps to retail.
Which is why games on Steam have deals with publishers, NOT with Valve.
No, I'm not. you're assuming i am. game developers dont generally have the relationships with distributors. the whole point of a publisher is to handle that relationship + the relationship with marketing avenues.
with digital distribution the role of a publisher is greatly reduced. mostly down to just marketing.
Not even a little bit. Man, you sure like to keep digging when given a shovel, huh?
Look, I'm not here to write a textbook on game publishing, but I do recommend you take that shovel and go dig up some accurate information in the off-chance you're not just posting whatever autocorrect feeds you as the first word choice.
You go write that text book. Let me know when you publish your first game, you clearly have it all figured out! You know... minus the basics.
Your problem is you're antivalve for reasons no one really gives a shit about. Your issues with valve are not the %age it charges for sales on its steam store, but with moral positions you have personally and it colors your viewpoints.
Facts: valve has charged a 30% commission since it made steam available for other studios to use.
Fact: no one complained for literally 15 years.
Fact: complaints about the split start after two things occurred. Massive inflation cutting into margins and steam dominating the distribution of games.
You're arguments to date have been: Gabe/valve are bad people because they're a monopoly! Here are issues from over a decade that are no longer even relevant.
Like if you want to argue that the percentage valve takes is too high, then sure we can discuss that. And hey, you wont even hear a peep from me in that case. Because its true imo.
But the problem is GOG also takes 30%. And every other distributor has reputational issues that make them non-starters.
unless you have a valid and active issue with valves practices that are unique to valve maybe its time to take the L, fuck off on this topic, and get a clue? Because no one is defending valve because they're valve. We're defending them because they're the best company in the market for consumers.
I think ideally the first xk should have somethong like 10% since there's still payment processing fees and such. After that have 30% then go down on huge amount of sales (to keep the big boys happy and on steam)
Why do you want to keep "the big boys" happy?
I mean, if you're Gabe then I get it. If you have a spare yacht call me, let's talk.
But if you're not, then... what's the reasoning there?
Not me, but i do want steam to stay the main game platform, if the alternative is epic games. That means you want to keep big studios on the platform.
On the other hand the vast majority of the money that valve makes comes from indie games, not big studios.
This is definitely not the case. Big studios price their games higher and sell more copies. There are only a handful of indie games like Stardew Valley and Terraria that come close to being in the same spot of the bell curve. Most of Valve's money comes from microtransactions in the longest-running live services and the biggest games of the year.
Ah yeah my bad its the number of sales where indie games win. In terms of money its almost 50/50 tho. People are sick and tired of expensive garbage games and that shows in the drastic changes in revenue from 2023-2024.
Ofcourse if you include in game costs, then it probably changes again.
Be careful not to make the data fit your conclusion. Anecdotally, I've observed a similar sentiment, but for one thing, AAA releases have slowed down due to long development times, so there just aren't that many of them in a given year. For another, we know that, by a wide margin, most time spent gaming is only on a handful of mainstay games that first debuted years ago, like Counter-Strike 2, Grand Theft Auto V, Fortnite, Minecraft, etc. Plenty of those aren't on Steam, but the same concept applies to the games that top the Steam charts.
My go-to is GoG, but I definitely want Steam to lose some market share in favor of literally anybody else. I will worry about moving that extra share towards GoG when the market isn't a full on monopoly.
But hey, yeah, stop using Steam and go to Gog whenever you can. You heard it here first. DRM-free software should be your first choice.
GOG and Itch are both great services. Epic is run by a psychopath and working hard to create the walled garden they themselves have been railing against. That's why EGS can go to hell but I'll gladly buy from the others.
Reminder that the world's biggest money makers in PC gaming are not on Steam.
Minecraft isn't (it's on Microsoft Store and a stand-alone web store), Fortnite isn't (it's EGS exclusive), Roblox isn't (its own store), League of Legends and Valorant aren't (Riot Launcher and EGS),...
I want them to have some competition...
Yeah. I mean, same thing.
The point is you ideally want multiple players in the PC market competing with each other on features and approach that are all viable, sustainable and give users and developers a better deal as middlemen.
I don't want Steam to go away, it's an insanely good client and a great piece of software. But I don't want every game having to be on Steam no matter what and only doing GoG or Epic or Xbox if they are being given a deal or for ideological reasons.
Valve is the only one in PC gaming to push an alternative operating system to Windows.
EGS, GOG,... all enforce a Windows hegemony. GOG Galaxy isn't even available on Linux, despite the fact that it's built on cross platform frameworks that make porting easy. Proton by Valve is open source and GOG Galaxy would be free to integrate it.
Heroic Launcher is a community effort that shows that it would be possible without massive investments. Epic and GOG/CD Project just chose not to.
I like GoG but they don't support Linux, they don't take a smaller cut, and developers are free to submit their games to Steam without DRM.
Naw, each time I buy on gog over steam I end up regretting it for some reason, usually related to modding or portability.
Gogs great, but has limitations. With steam everything works better.
If it free, there is an incentive to release quantity and not quality, it could become a spam problem. I am all for having a lower percentage though, but 0 could be a problem.
You think the current cut Steam is taking...
... is preventing shovelware spam?
Have you been on Steam this decade?
But hey, yeah, nobody is advocating a 0% cut for Valve. Epic is doing this because they need to attract developers and most of their money comes from Fortnite anyway, so it's something they can try.
But Valve has a looot of ground between 0 and 30% and a lot of ways to give back to the developers that built their empire. And I don't think starting by treating smaller devs as well as they treat major corporations would be a bad start at all.
Cause that would probably get abused for things like money laundering, since Steam is open for everyone who wants to sell a game unlike Epic’s store where you get vetted. You can just set up a shell corp that releases shitty shovelware and buy the game from yourself with steam cards you bought from the store with your dirty cash. And then you’d get all your money back ready to be taxed and laundered.
Steam keeps getting slammed from both sides. They keep getting accused of being a monopoly, , while also getting accused of their rates. But if they drop their rates they get accused of being anticompetitive and monopolistic.
So if they do something similar like Epic, they'll go back to using their monopoly over the market to keep competitors down.
...those are not different sides? The only reason they can charge such absurd rates is because of their position in the marketplace.
What they had been charging was about what other stores have been charging. Do you think a company that was by far in the lead over other stores dropping their prices further wouldn't increase their user base even further, making it even harder for competition? They already have active legal cases against them for monopolizing.