He’s just salty because the only games people “purchase” are the weekly free ones.

true

What do you mean? Isn't Kratos dancing orange justice innovative enough?

They developed the Unreal engine. Not sure how “like Proton” you meant, but it’s used by lots of games and is quite a complex and well-regarded 3D engine.

Epic would charge Steam's fees if they had Steam's marketshare.

Everyone thinking they care about creators or customers is a fucking moron.

if you use unreal engine but don’t sell on egs they get a 5% royalty fee on all your sales.

Sounds like abusing market power.

I still don't get this. As far as I can find, Steam doesn't allow steam keys to be sold cheaper elsewhere, but they don't bother with prices of games in other stores.

This is tricky. Officially Valve doesn't have any rules about non-Steam game prices on other stores. Unofficially evidence has been put forward by way of emails between developers and Valve that seem to show that Valve unofficially requires price parity with other stores and will punish games that offer lower prices elsewhere.

The charitable interpretation is that their policies are worded confusingly and some of their agents are misinterpreting the rule requiring Steam key prices to be uniform as applying to non-Steam keys. The uncharitable interpretation is that Valve knows such a policy would get them in hot water with anti-monopoly laws and so they're careful to make sure it stays an unofficial policy.

That's... Weird, given I usually get games on sale from Humble if I'm getting them on steam. Might just be full price?

Steam, and Epic, both have exclusives. Steam is more incidental (some devs just don't bother releasing elsewhere), while Epic had a deal going on for devs that released exclusively on Epic for the first 6 months of the game's life. Don't remember what the deal was, but it was a marketing thing to try and get people over to Epic. After the 6 months was up most devs also released to Steam.

Is that true? I've seen devs list their games off steam for steamprice -30%. Often you can go to a devs website and buy the game $10 cheaper. However I still buy it via steam because i feel like i'll forget about the game if its just a key in my email.

If I'm remembering correctly, price parity only applies to keys sold off platform, rather than the game itself because they don't profit from the keys being generated.

He wants access to massive user bases for fortnite without having to pay anything to the platforms. That's why he's so intent on attacking Steam, Apple and Google. Steam would be a massive increase in revenue even with a 30% cut going to steam for epic, but mutual benefit isn't in vogue at the moment.

But Epic is super successful. Its Unreal Engine has almost the entire gaming landscape in a stranglehold and is making big gains in film productions.

Fortnite is one of the most successful games on Earth and EGS exclusive Rocket League recently achieved one million concurrent players.

Being obviously self-interested doesn’t make him wrong about app store monopolies, whether Apple, Google, or Valve.

They thank you for your support

TBH, I would take their stuff even if I get it for free.

It feels like all the other corpos are mad and want to sue Valve to force them into enshittification.

I'm all for holding companies accountable - when legal pressure forced Valve into creating a return policy, I was happy for that. But this is a $900 Million nothing burger imo. Publishers are mad they can't get the exposure and sales numbers on a cheaper platform. Cheaper platforms are mad that they still can't get people to switch to them by significantly under-cutting Steam. That's (publishers) customers mad they have to pay a 'premium' (basically the 'market rate' for the service before epic decided to start under-cutting btw) for a better service and the competition mad that a LOT of (publishers) customers are willing to pay that 'premium'.

That’s why they are getting sued.

Their store UI could be better, searching the database by conditions and clearly seeing why something isn't available in your region\country\demographic would be good.

But at the same time it's good enough for me to even be thinking about such conveniences.

Also I've remembered recently my dad saying some 6 years ago that nobody makes convenient UIs because it's bad for commerce. A UI filled with suffering allows you to charge for directed solutions. And if a UI isn't filled with suffering, there must be something else. Like Telegram and VK which are convenient to use (compared to WhatsApp and Facebook and ...), but are Russian special services' honeypots.

Convenience is a weapon. And a very expensive one, if Steam store's UI were more convenient, the load on servers would probably be 10x what it is, for a similar structure of purchases, except probably harder to direct.