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Valve COO on Epic's Tim Sweeney "you mad bro?" when launching the Epic Store
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this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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Valve has been nice to Linux users, but Sweeny has excellent points. What Apple does is ridiculous, and it's disrespectful to see Valve give the big players better deals than the indie devs.
Epic contributing to Linux would be real nice, but they can't seem to piece together where the vocal minority hold out is coming from.
I don't totally disagree with you, and I don't totally disagree with Tim's points here, but then we (gamers) see Epic pulling exclusivity agreement bullshit, which is annoying as hell to consumers. Isn't it possible that Valve's cut is actually worth it? It's the superior store from a consumer perspective, they have good customer service, easy refunds, helpful review scores, and a hundred other things. There are many, many reasons that Steam is on top.
I don't see indie devs telling people "buy my game on Epic instead of Steam because Epic takes a smaller cut". Many devs actually do say that when their game is on Itch.io, but I haven't seen many indie devs defending Epic here. The only ones going exclusive to Epic are the ones that Tim literally paid to do so.
Isn't it just better % cut if you sell more than X? That's pretty standard and ensures the bigger games that people demand stay on a platform. It may not be "fair" but when has business ever been fair?
Until epic actually has a store that is profitable and self sustaining all of it means nothing, since without fortnite cash flow it would have closed. And even with fortnite cash their features are still lacking that it makes you wonder how even more bare bones the launcher would be without fortnite money. They can't even afford to justify putting resources to Linux anticheat support for fortnite for example.
They don't curently have a working business money that proves their percentage can actually bring in money to provide a feature rich launcher, and fund other projects in the process if Fortnite didn't exist. It's like the equivalent right now of some rich kid being given some antique store to run nobody goes to so their parents can brag that their kid is a business owner.
I generally have to disagree on it being disrespectful. There's an inherent cost in any business relationship that has to be accounted for with low volume partners. Every company that offers volume discounting does it for this exact reason -- the price per piece doesn't change, but the other costs can be spread over more pieces.
Could Valve eat some of this cost to promote indie development? Absolutely. But it's not disrespectful to price your product with volume discounts.