[foolfoolz]

there’s a huge component to gamers that they are emotional and resistant to change. gamers hated steam when it came out. and now the backlash against epic store is huge. they haven’t done a good job fixing the perception of epic store the way steam did

[PowerElectronix]

I certainly still hold a grudge against tim sweeney for saying piracy made them not release stuff on pc and after a while going back to releasing on pc while whining about valve fees and then launching epic games with similar fees and way worse service for the developers...

[lux-lux-lux]

> similar fees

No? Epic charges 12% (with the first $1m free) vs. Valve’s frankly extortionate (i.e. industry standard) 30%.

[PowerElectronix]

As I understand it, epic charges less but also offers less services that a developer can need like the gamehub and steam's 30% i think is tiered and reduces with sales volume? I'm not sure, though, don't take my word for it.

[johnnyanmac]

1. Those features aren't a la carte, so the share matters if you're not utilizing those extra services. You're basically paying for the audience.

2. Valve does have tiered shares, but it's based on publisher sales. And it's extremely high. I have to check again, but I believe the threshold was 25m yearly revenue for 25% and 50m for 20%.

Innsome ways it's more frustrating. It's basically a tax cut for the rich.

[tcmart14]

Steam will also provide publishers with free activation keys that they can sell direct to customer without the 30% charge.

[npinsker]

If you are a large game, they will not provide you an appreciable portion of your sales as keys. Sales made this way also likely hurt your organic distribution.

Re: value propositions: Steam's 30% reduces to 25% after $10M made, and 20% after $50M.

[applfanboysbgon]

> there’s a huge component to gamers that they are emotional and resistant to change.

This is just wrong. You portray people as being irrational / "emotional", but Steam was actively bad when it first launched. The fact that people changed their opinions on it when it later became actually good is not emotional, that's in fact exactly rational.

The Epic Game Store doesn't need to fix "perception", they need to fix their actual product instead of trying to take shortcuts to gaining users by burning hundreds of millions of dollars per year on exclusivity deals, which are extremely anti-consumer, and will obviously result in rational backlash against somebody blowing money to attempt to force people to use their product for access to a completely unrelated product.

[ecshafer]

Exactly. Steam an launch was some other program you had to have running on your machine, that was buggy, taking up resources when most people were barely running most games (people upgraded computers to play Half Life 2!), and had no point.

Steam with thousands of games, that regularly has (or had) massively deep sales that let you get games for cheap, barely uses resources (most players are not struggling now to run games), and run very smooth. Is a very different beat. Valve earned trust.

[cyberrock]

Without commenting on any other part of this exciting console war, I don't know if this is true. Steam on my machine still always consumes nonzero CPU when minimized, possibly because it opens to the busy animation/video-filled front page then its WebView doesn't detect minimization. It's funny how Steam never comes up in the "stop making WebView/Electron apps" discussion when they were the original sinner (yes I know they were using IE originally).

[dgeiser13]

You are correct. Steam was actively bad at launch when it only had Valve games on it. And they fixed the platform and then started allowing other devs to put their games on it.

EGS is currently bad and trying to position themselves as a Steam alternative when they simply are not even close to the same quality.