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by fakedang 221 days ago
How much do you think they should take?

Steam is the most dominant because of their extremely customer friendly policies, their insane price crashes and the ease of publishing and installing games from the platform. If other platforms are able to provide all of that, with a commission below 30%, I'm sure they could easily take over.

But turns out, neither Epic nor EA are interested in serving the customer.
2 comments
gruez 221 days ago
>Steam is the most dominant because of their ... insane price crashes

Are steam deals really better than on other platforms? They might have better deals compared to brick and mortar retailers but publishers generally have price parity across various digital storefronts (eg. epic vs steam), so attributing low prices to steam doesn't really make much sense. If anything steam is actually more expensive if you factor in authorized keystores (eg. greenmangaming), which are occasionally cheaper.

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fakedang 221 days ago
Three words, Steam Summer Sales.

I've never seen any platform go that low on price except for Humble Bundle maybe. And even then, Steam has an EXTREMELY generous refund policy compared to any other platform.

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gruez 220 days ago
>Three words, Steam Summer Sales.

IME they're matched by other platforms. If Cyberpunk is discounted for a steam summer sale, it's similarly discounted on Epic or GOG as well. It's not a Steam exclusive, and therefore can't be cited as an advantage.

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mrzool 221 days ago
> How much do you think they should take?

A 15–20% fee would be much fairer in my opinion. They’d still be making plenty of money while letting developers keep more of what they earn through their hard work. At the very least, they should differentiate between big players and smaller indie developers.

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fakedang 221 days ago
Taking a larger cut from big players would incentivise them to make them create their own marketplace, where they exclusively publish their own games. Then we're back to square one.

Honestly, I think 15-20% is doable, if they make money in other ways. CS skins, new game releases from inhouse, etc.

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mrzool 220 days ago
You take the same cut from big players and give the smaller ones a break. I think Valve could afford that without any issue.
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