this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
815 points (97.0% liked)
Games
32970 readers
1948 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Weekly Threads:
Rules:
-
Submissions have to be related to games
-
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
-
No excessive self-promotion
-
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
-
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
-
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It’s confusing to you that manufacturing, shipping, and selling physical copies of a game was more expensive than digital distribution? The world is very different today. Digital distribution is the norm and everybody knows you don’t need 30% to make it sustainable.
That is not what is confusing to me.
I'm not sure I buy this. Epic's 12% is the bare minimum just to cover basic infrastructure costs for distributing modern AAA games. It doesn't even include transaction fees, which vary based on which payment method the user selects (whereas Steam and other storefronts eat these as part of their 30% cut).
Simply sustaining your existing platform is also not enough. Where Epic runs a barebones storefront and client with little in the way of useful features beyond "download game and keep it updated", storefronts like GOG and Steam take their actual profit and re-invest it in improving their platform for everyone. Think of all the time and money that goes into making things like Steam Input, Proton, or even GOG themselves fixing up older games for modern PCs.
The fact that it has been 5 years and Epic still hasn't been able to make their 12% cut break even speaks volumes.
Epic’s 12% doesn’t do much because they’re constantly burning money trying to find more revenue. It’s obvious they’re not doing anything efficiently. They also have far fewer sales than Steam which further hurts their bottom line.
The standard internet payment processors take 3% as their cut.
With modern cloud systems we can quickly distribute files globally for tiny amounts of money.
The truth is that Valve makes a ton of money off of this fee. It’s great that they contribute to open source projects but plenty of companies make similar contributions with a fraction of the resources.