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Epic Game Store’s free giveaways just cause a huge spike in Steam sales, reveals New Blood CEO (frvr.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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[–] -3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (9 children)

EGS is used as an example. They don’t charge devs until they earn $1M so you’d think games would release there at least but we now have many many Steam exclusives. It’s gotten to the point where indie games release demos on Itch.io but don’t release full games outside of Steam because they need algorithmic momentum there.

Check out EU DMA and how it impacts gatekeepers like Valve (even if Valve somehow dodged that label, probably because their finances are private).

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  • [+] 7 points 9 months ago (7 children)
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  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago (6 children)

    I’ve done so in this community it repeatedly over the course of ~2 years. If you don’t want to make an effort why would I.

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  • [+] 2 points 9 months ago (5 children)
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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

    Enforce interoperability, lower Valve cut as abusive and punish abusive clauses in developer agreement (you can’t price your game lower than Steam on other storefronts).

    Ideally you’d treat Valve like a telecom monopoly, meaning you’d have to break it down into two companies - Valve infra (handling license ledger, storage, bandwidth) and Valve store/developer. Allow other stores to notify that user owns a game and allow access to Valve infra with third party stores. Valve infra can’t give preferential treatment to Valve store.

    If Valve is as good as everyone says they have nothing to fear, they provide better service after all. Where I live this approach killed monopolies and prices dropped quickly.

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  • [+] 3 points 9 months ago* (3 children)
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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago* (2 children)

    It’s not leeching, Valve mostly lucked into this monopoly because of how grossly incompetent competition was at the time. Valve owners were rewarded handsomely for this already, there’s no reason for this to continue until heat death of the universe because there’s not that much value added that they provide now.

    It’s cool that they pay salaries of like 3 Linux devs and piggyback on Wine work that Codeweavers funded for the past 30 years. You’d think there’s so much more they could do with 30% cut of nearly all PC game sales however which is why they need competition.

    Details of such breakup can be ironed out but it’s important to keep in mind that this option exists and was used before successfuly.

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  • [+] 3 points 9 months ago (1 child)
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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    Consumers aren’t the only consideration. Even if Epic sucks in many ways they’re much more better for smaller devs because they don’t take anything until you make $1M. One would think that this would be enough for indies to publish there but they don’t want to split sales between platforms (they need all sales to happen on Steam so that they rank better there, it’s the only store that matters).

    It’s a viscous cycle where smaller competition like GOG or Itch.io have no chance in hell to compete. I’m pretty sure anyone considering competing with Steam has done this math, hence you get only competition backed by big $$$, which usually is the worst people imaginable.

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