- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
You must log in or register to comment.
Hilarious. Didn’t Epic just introduce microtransactions for user-created content in Fortnite with intention of taking 63% fee on that? All the while, trying to turn the said Fortnite in Roblox-like major store for games?
TIL that Tim Fortnite does not consider Sony or Nintendo to be ‘major stores’.
TIL that the video game industry has never had nor currently has titles that are priced exclusively on certain platforms.
(Where ‘its only available for purchase on one platform’ is an effective price of infinity on other platforms)
Just… from the article:
“Steam’s rules do explicitly prohibit games from steering players to competing purchase methods, forcing everyone to pay 30% to Valve,” he [Sweeney] recently tweeted. “Apple and Google did the same until the court explicitly found this practice to be unlawful. Now they don’t!”
It’s not clear exactly what rule Sweeney’s referring to here, but Steam’s own guidelines state that “it’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.” Though Valve would also prefer that developers “don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam key purchasers.”
It’s almost like this guy is malding, crashing out even, and has just… departed from the realm of even trying to make sense.
What is happening here is that Tim is losing his mind because Unreal Engine 5 only runs on GPUs (mostly from Nvidia) that cost as much as an entire PC did 2 or 3 years ago, and so many AAA studios that used UE 5 to make a pretty but hollow and buggy game are now collapsing or seeing a dramatic consumer pullback.
See how this is all connected, and these idiots did this to themselves?
Nvidia decides that Real Time Ray Tracing is the new paradigm for gaming graphics, and Unreal is the primary way people will experience this, by having all the lighting be done ‘auto-magically’ by UE 5, from the perspective of game devs.
Fastforward 5 or so years, half of everything computer hardware is too expensive now, hugely funded AAA games are routinely failing and causing financial disasters for publishers, Unreal Engine 5 is a hugely stigmatized joke because its not any kind of optimized for hardware people actually have, and outside of AAA games, is notorious for low quality UE asset store flips and actual scam games…
…this paradigm doesn’t work.
Compare that to Valve pretty close to singlehandedly developing its own VR hardware, and showcase AAA tier game for it… and well hey shucks, yeah, its too expensive for wide adoption, but that didn’t ruin their entire business’s financials.
They just actually properly accounted for the costs of trying that paradigm shift, and are today still iterating on and improving it, ala the upcoming SteamFrame and new software layer for translating ARM to x86 calls.
that seems like an issue that the makers of games can decide. they are not under any gun to choose steam. if the devs don’t see value in steam then they can go elsewhere. for me as a buyer it’s steam, or it’s the developers own website. i will not buy from another store front
The only Epic Games Store games I have, I play through Heroic Launcher. In part due to lack of Linux support, but primarily because the Epic Games launcher fucking sucks.
Steam is different from the Google or Apple stores, because they aren’t the gatekeeper of a platform.
But yeah maybe 30% is a bit high for games that don’t use any of the steam features, just the payment processing, review section and download servers.
Devs are also paying for the Steam recommendation algorithm. It’s not just a store that puts games on a shelf and just forgets about it. The store actively promotes games to the right audience. The algorithm is how small indie games from a team without an advertising budget can blow up into millions of dollars in revenue. No other digital games store has a recommendation algorithm that is as good (for the buyer and the seller) as Steam.
Yeah people consistently forget this, and will say things like ‘Valve isn’t even doing any marketing for me!’
No, they are.
Its just that its on their platform.
Via their categorization and recommendation snd review systems.
As opposed to… other pay to win ad platforms that shove ads in peoples faces depending on how much money you throw at them.
Also, while this is more of a minor point, Valve’s cut drops to 25% for games sales past $10 million, 20% for game sales past $50 million.
Been that way for 7 or 8 years.
There are other platforms devs can release games. GOG, microsoft, epic store, or you can release physical CD copies to sell at retailers. Steam isn’t gate keeping anything.
Right, because managing, securing, updating, and operating steam is all black magic that costs valve nothing.
Listen, they need that revenue for their R&D for the steam deck 2 and steam machines and shit. Fuck off ya hoser, eh?
Listen, they need that revenue for their R&D for the steam deck 2 and steam machines and shit. Fuck off ya hoser, eh?
And also for Gabe’s fleet of billionaire yachts
Hey, we don’t talk about that here! Gaben is wholesome and even though he is a billionaire who owns a yacht company funded by lootboxes, he’s one of the good ones!
I’m no Epic Games fan, but this is an overcorrection. Valve makes money hand over fist and they aren’t making those products simply out of passion. They’re doing it to make even more money. The company are pioneers in micro transactions and loot boxes. The other large game companies (and especially alternative storefronts) have just been so shit that gamers feel a weird attachment to this company.
How about you fuck off defending the mafioso vig that Apple, Google, and Valve have extorted from game developers for years, you monopoly bootlicker?
FYI: Games like Ready or not have started the early access outside of Steam.
So if you advertise your game properly, you can make it as well. Just need to work on your discoverability.
But Steam makes it way easier.
So either go with Steam, Epic, GOG, Itch.io or any other store.
No need to fixate on only steamNobody is forced to use any of those platforms.
You’re the one licking the boot of developers who just want to profit off of your stupidity.
Aw, those poor hardworking app stores with their razor-thin ::checks notes:: 78% profit margins
You’re a useful idiot.
Says the wanker defending billionaires’ profit margins
I’m not defending anyone.
I’m calling stupidity out for what it is.
Well I suppose at least it’s subject matter related, unlike when he usually opens his mouth.
Tim’s opinion is clearly unbiased.
WTF is this comments section here? I don’t give a rat’s fuck (if that is a thing), about what Tim Sweeney thinks about Valve, or if Valve is a good company or not.
Charging 30% of revenue for a digital store is clearly nit justifiable and Valve makes insane amount of profits just by having a near monopoly on PC game sales. They don’t need that much and it’s still just digital feudalism regardless if who does it.
You guys are just stuck in the good guy/ bad guy mentality and honestly, it’s kind of embarrassing to get this defensive over a company.
Having a 21 year old Steam account and having bought quite some games makes it hard to stay subjective about this for me. I don’t disagree with you but I see Valve as the best monopoly if I could choose. And I don’t see Epic performing the same services while tryharding tremendously to be the monoply themselves by giving away free games.
agreed, i feel like Valve is using their monopolization for good then bad, look at Valve’s competitors using their monopolization stance for bad.
and i feel like Valve has monopoly cause they do less mistakes then their competitors(compare Steam with like Epic Games and GOG)
am not defending valve here.They aren’t a monopoly, they are simply better than all their competitors in every feature that matters. They aren’t anti-competitive, and Epic is free to try making a decent product instead of the pile of garbage they currently have.
ok i get the full picture now
I’m honestly not sure whether it’s some huge astroturfing campaing or just people simply sucking off billionaires for no reason, but every time we see ANY criticism towards Valve or Gaben, most of the commenters flock in support of Valve. Underage gambling? Oh, who cares. Lootboxes? Well, that’s okay. Taking 30% cut for games? Uh, actually, that’s not a lot! Gaben owning a ton of yachts? Well, he’s a good guy, so it’s fine. And when Valve got forced by Australian court to create a refund policy, I saw a TON of comments saying it was actually wholesome valve who voluntarily decided to create it. But apparently they get a pass because they’re smart enough to invest in a backup solution (Linux) in case Microsoft fucks them over.
as long as they avoid enshittification that hurts the consumer they may continue to get away with it.
I think it’s worth discussing though.
What about game devs though? They are clearly hurt already by the insane fees.
Just think about it. When you buy a game for 10€ on steam, steam get’s a flat 3.33€ just for giving you a “buy game” button. The gamedeev get’s maybe half of what you payed (Taxes, engine fees etc.).
Don’t you think, that there is something kind of fucked up about that?
it’s not really hurting the devs. if anything it hurts consumers, but even that’s a stretch considering the service both sides are getting.
holy hell can’t you see the difference between EGS and steam? one works reliably. the other is all over the place. to me that’s worth 30%
That’s disingenuous. They do a lot more than that.
Discovery for one. Hosting the game so that downloads are fast and paying for the server and network infrastructure for that. Handling payment processing from all around the world.
That all has a cost. And any developer can just drop the installer on their own website and pay all of these things themselves.
if that was all they got the money for, and the devs were indeed hurt to a significant degree by it, a competitor with a lower fee (say, epic, with their 8%) would have outgrown them years ago, since steam doesn’t do exclusivity deals.
That’s not how this stuff works. Gamers decide, what stores succeed, not game devs.
Also Valve has policies, that say that you can’t offer your game for cheaper elsewhere, which means, that gamers can never notice the difference between a 30% cut or an 8% cut.
okay, so all a storefront has to do is build a better system and take, say, 20%. that would pull in both sellers and buyers. why isn’t the other storefronts building competitors? epic has infinite money but all they seem to use it on is bribes. gog offers standalone installers and online community systems, but not both at the same time. itch is held together by duct tape and dreams.
if it’s not justifiable, then the game devs can go elsewere.
That’s not how the network effect works. If Deva go elsewhere, nobody buys their game. Most people will never even know of the games outside of steam.
and why would gamers not buy their game elsewhere?
you could try answering, but conceding works just as well
it’s an asynchronous medium. the answer could come tomorrow, or next week. not answering within an hour is not “conceding”.
Well Timmy that should make it pretty easy to make a platform that both users and content producers like more. If you actually try to compete you might accomplish something.
It won’t change the fact that no one wants to use your product, Tim.
It’s not about the epic store being a success. It’s about getting fortnite on steam with little to no fees being paid to steam. Just like the lawsuit against apple.
But it isn’t the same scenario. Apple is a closed system, im steams case there are many alternatives. You don’t have to put your game on steam. Alan Wake 1 is on steam and Alan Wake 2 isn’t for example. You can also buy keys separately and then activate on steam, you are not forced to use steam like apple.
It’s still the steam ecosystem when you sell steam keys. Why should a game be able to use steam to distribute their game that they sell for a free or reduced price then sell micro transactions without paying steam? If you don’t want to pay steam a cut don’t use their store or distribution.
As far as I know you can sell keys outside of steam, it is allowed and steam doesn’t take the 30% if sold outside of steam.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
It’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.
You can sell keys, but it’s still part of the steam ecosystem, so you can’t sell in game purchases without using steam as the processor.
Yea, but the argument is you have to pay the 30% fee. You can sell keys outside and not pay it. Also you can also sell your game on GOG, but the customer will have to stick with were he bought the game from for the DLC.
https://www.gog.com/en/game/clair_obscur_expedition_33
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1903340/Clair_Obscur_Expedition_33/
In apple’s case you can’t even buy it outside of apple you have to use apple payment system. Steam doesn’t block you from buying the game from other store like GOG, meanwhile apple does.
https://prospect.org/2025/05/02/2025-05-02-apples-monopoly-finally-held-accountable/
The case before the court concerned Apple’s monopoly power over its iOS App Store. Apple has built a tollbooth whereby apps that offer items for purchase must pay a 30 percent tax to Apple. (A few select apps have a smaller 15 percent tax.) Epic Games, the makers of Fortnite, wanted to offer game purchases off the app through a link at a cheaper price point, but Apple barred Fortnite from the App Store for such circumvention, and denied any developer the ability to steer people to off-app purchasing. This discouraged app developers, since they would not be able to load on iPhones and would therefore lose access to a huge number of potential customers. (Google has a similar 30 percent tax for its Android phones.)
Wait…
People still play Fortnite?
Right this minute, if Fortnite players were all on Steam it’d be the #2 most popular game there, with a 24hr peak easily hitting #1. I’m not a fan of Tim either, but the game is still massively popular.
Like gangbusters.
How does he not know that this is obviously admitting defeat? It reeks of desperation.
This is like Drake being so humiliated by Kendrick Lamar that he sued his own record label.
Tim Sweeney supports a lawsuit against Valve?!?!
I’m shocked.
In other news, Pepsi agrees with the claims against coca cola
If the majority of developers gave a shit about the difference between Valve’s 30% and EGS’s 10 or 15% cut, you’d think they’d actually be going over there. But they’re not. If anything, they put their game out everywhere. So clearly the 30% cut thing isn’t a problem. The only devs they are coaxing over to EGS over Steam are the ones they strike up exclusivity deals with, which is anti-competitive bullshit.
Sounds like a long winded way to say you don’t understand network effects or monopolies
Complaining about Valve bootlickers while being an Epic bootlicker :D
I’m sorry you can’t understand the difference between a principled anti-monopolist like Lina Khan and a Tim Epic simp
sounds like YOU don’t know what a monopoly is
How do Tim Sweeny’s balls taste? I imagine they’re kinda sour, but I figured I might ask someone who clearly has them in their mouth.
How does it feel not grasping what it means to be an antimonopolist? I imagine it’s kind of expensive.
You’re the one defending the anti-competitive company, dumbass. So I ask again: How do Sweeny’s balls taste?
Who is defending Epic? You seem to be conflating legitimate criticism of Valve (which everyone should do) with defending the douchebag Tim Sweeney (which no one should do). But it’s a false choice to think you have to support one team or the other; both companies can be bad, and criticism of app store fees (whether Apple’s or Valve’s) has nothing to do with supporting Epic, that’s just a false equivalence.
You literally are spouting out the same nonesense Sweeny does multiple places in this post. To say you’re not defending him or his platform is a blatant lie anyone with eyeballs reading this thread can see.
Good day, sir or madam.
Let’s say Donald Trump says corporate landlords shouldn’t be able to own houses. If someone else makes the same argument, that doesn’t make them a Trump supporter. You get that, right?
I think a majority of devs would jump ship if epic had the userbase, that 10-15% difference can be huge! But the store is bad and doesn’t have the consumers so it’s mostly a waste of resources
Prior to me switching to Linux, the main reason I preferred Steam over others was the Steam Workshop. Modding is typically so easy on Steam. As far as I’m aware, none of the other stores have that. I’d love to proven wrong though, because that just means more games can use mods.
But now, as far as I’m aware, Steam is the only major one that supports Linux.
Anyone else here old enough to remember old-school modding with multiplayer games? Having to make sure everyone at the LAN has the same base game with the right patches applied, the right mod versions and of course if a new version has come out since last meet there might be files that need to be changed/shifted/removed.
Ahh those were the days… that sucked. Thank god for Steam workshop! So much easier especially in games with deep support for it. ARK Survival Evolved for example. If you join a server that uses mods they automatically install from Workshop! What a time to be alive.
Though I have to admit, I haven’t used EGS for a while, I bet their version of Steam Workshop is even better! Otherwise Tim would look like an absolute muppet with the constant criticisms of other platforms.
They definitely do a lot to earn that 30%, there’s a ton of dev tools for games. Workshop, leaderboards, multiplayer, etc
Yup, and this kind of stuff is why I support the lawsuits against Valve - in the sense that I do want oversight and fair judgement on the issues being raised, especially since one included an email from a Valve employee saying a developer isn’t allowed to sell their game cheaper than on steam.
I imagine if Valve isn’t doing anything wrong, it’ll just waste some time - but it could also do good for game developers and players, by reducing the cut, but also potentially by opening up Steam’s tools for networking, input, workshop to not be locked into their platform (since that can definitely keep devs on steam in cases where they might want to diversify)
People seem to forget that without courts of law, the steam refund policy wouldn’t exist. Valve fought tooth and nail to be exempt from that.
Offering servers as a service would be great, so many PC only games that rely on steam’s multiplayer would be easier to port!
If you don’t like it, you don’t have to use it. You got your own store, Timmy.
It isn’t fair that their store is vastly superior to mine and don’t pay developers to use it exclusively like we do! - little timmy wah wah boo hoo
Not how market dominance and unfair competition laws work though.
Name 2 anti-competitive actions steam has done.
Simply having a better product than your competiton does not make you anti-competitive.
Using your dominance in one market to gain advantage in another market is anti-competitive. I don’t think it’s cut-and-dry but I think there’s a good argument that they’re using their dominance in games distribution to gain an advantage in microtransaction handling.
I think Google (and Apple) using their app-delivery dominance to force app-makers to pay them a fee for in-app purchases is definitely bullshit. Consumers’ options are more limited there, but that just means the market dominance is greater: the same argument applies in the case of Steam and the question is just how dominant something has to be for this to be a problem.
I’d argue selling games and selling content in those games is the same market though.
And the problem with Google/Apple wasn’t “dominance”, but more “absolute control”, Apple blocked third party stores completely on their hardware, and Google had secret deals with phone manufacturers where they had to include all the Google apps and couldn’t include alternate app stores, and made using third party stores difficult. As long as Valve aren’t blocking third party stores on their OS and not being pre-shipped on the OS of most of Steam’s customers, there’s probably not much of a case.
Maybe Timmy could try making a store people wanna use instead of whatever epic is
Sure, they can do that. Doesn’t prevent abuse of market dominance ok.
Fair
But I wanna riff on Timmy!
Heh :p
This is about micro-transactions specifically. Tim Fortnite is arguing that games sold on Steam should be able to offer in-game purchases with payment options outside of Steam.
It’s very similar to Epic Games v. Apple, where Apple had required in-app purchases for iOS apps, notably Fortnite, to be handled through their app-store so they get a cut.
One big difference that I see here: On PC, a developer isn’t required to use Steam to distribute software. Players often prefer Steam because Valve has made Steam a great option and has lots of good-will with players. Still, Steam does dominate a massive portion of the PC market.
And a 30% cut is high. Especially for smaller games with less financial resources. As a developer, that’s a trade-off you’d have to choose. I think it’d be best to offer the game on multiple platforms.
For Steam-bought games, I think having an option to pay off-platform would be fair, but I think the option needs to remain available through Steam too. For many games, I don’t want to give my payment details to yet another developer, company or third-party.
And a 30% cut is high.
Is it? It’s my understanding that it’s comparable to what brick and mortar stores would charge to have a game on their shelves.
Also, anyone who thinks EGS will keep developer fees low if they had a higher marketshare is incredibly naive.
By what definition is the 30% cut high? It’s the same percentage for Apple, Google, and Steam. Brick and mortar is generally around 50%. Amazon is a large range, but 30% is roughly average or even low. eBay charges less, but doesn’t do anything other than facilitate the transaction. Epic charges less to small developers, but that’s also mostly marketing.
It’s not about the “cut” you’re thinking; it refer to in-app purchases.
Once you bought a game, Valve keep demand a 30% cuts on anything you sell once the customer launch your executable (.exe, binary file/game engine).
hypothetical scenario to help visualize (it won’t go like that most of the time, but useful to understand the concept):
- customer Install and Launch Steam
- customer buy (Valve earn 30% cutshare) and install game on Steam
- customer uninstall Steam, keep installed game
- customer launch game (if is made in a way don’t need Steam dependencies).
- Anything sold while game engine is running must give 30%,of further earning, to Valve.
If a developer doesn’t like those terms, can’t they just remove their game from Steam or never release it there to begin with?
If a user doesn’t like those terms, they don’t have to buy the game.
Developers and users are voting with their wallets every day and the votes say Steam is worth the cost.
Hmm, so is Tim Fortnite willing to let me purchase DLC from a third party store to go with that free game that I got on Epic?
Still, Steam does dominate a massive portion of the PC market.
Steam revenue in 2023: USD 8.5 bn.
Overall PC gaming revenue that year: 45 bn.
Steam is big but the biggest cash cows are Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft. Neither is on Steam.
Also, Microsoft uses their Windows monopoly to ship the Xbox Games store to almost every PC user.
If Steam had a dominating market position, the EU would have classified it as a gate keeper under the Digital Markets Act.
Microsoft also owns Battlenet now
Do people actually consider that a competitor?
I think we’d be foolish to not. From what I can find Blizzard gets over 25 million monthly users really consistently and that’s not including the rest of the store. Toss in Minecraft and Microsoft Store and I honestly would be shocked if Microsoft doesn’t hold more monthly users than Epic Game Store.
If Steam was as monopolistic as it is claimed by Sweeny, having exclusivity away from Steam would be a death sentence for a game.
Tim Fortnite is arguing that games sold on Steam should be able to offer in-game purchases with payment options outside of Steam.
But they already can and already do. For example If I wanted to buy ARX for Elite Dangerous, you have to go through Frontier’s website to purchase it. Same for Daybreak cash for Planetside 2. And isn’t Maplestoy also on Steam? You most certainly have to kiss the Nexxon ring before purchasing NX.
War thunder I can pay either through steam (I prefer that personally) or you can just buy the stuff from their site and ignore the steam part entirely.
But they already can and already do. For example If I wanted to buy ARX for Elite Dangerous, you have to go through Frontier’s website to purchase it.
You can buy ARX on Steam now, but you don’t have to.
For the life of me I could not find this while I was playing. It always redirects me to a browser with the Frontier store when I try to buy ARX in game. Thanks for this lol I like using my steam wallet funds for this sort of thing over actual cards.
I think one problem is that although ARX packs are pictured on the game’s Steam page, “ARX” doesn’t appear in the text, so you can’t control+f for it.
Tim, something, something about preventing games from being released on other storefronts…
