The cut taken by stores is of little concern to me as a consumer. Greenlight was a mess for a lot of reasons, but they discontinued it years ago, while Epic continues to pay for exclusivity deals. Steam provides lots of services to me that Epic doesn’t, though, as others have listed here. That said, I also like GOG and itch.io.
It makes the cost of developing games more expensive. They have to charge nearly 20% more for games on Steam to make the same money they do on EGS.
It’s also why Valve hardly makes games anymore. They sell 4 games made with other people’s money and they’ll have the same gross income as selling a game they paid to develop. Throw in the cost of development, and they just can’t justify game development as a major part of their business.
The last time they made a full-sized game was Half-life 2, which launched the same day as Steam.
This argument about cost of development would hold more weight if the game store savings were passed onto the users rather than just eaten up by the publishers. Borderlands 3 base game has the exact same price on steam vs EGS atm, £49.99. Clearly those 20% savings are just extra money the publisher wants to pocket rather than actual necessary costs to the game. If their happy to pass it off to steam when sold on the steam platform rather than raise the price to recoup the platform tax.
Yes, but with EGS more money goes to the company making the games. AAA games have never been more expensive to produce, and developers are shutting doors left and right. After the costs of marketing and overhead, more of the proceeds of the game are going to the fucking download service than the people making the game when it’s on Steam.
Alyx was a tech demo, and it, Portal, and Portal 2 combined are about the size of Half Life 2.
