I would love for Steam to have **actual competition. Which is difficult, sure, but you could run a slightly less feature-rich store, take less of a cut, and pass the reduction fully on to consumers and you'd be an easy choice for many gamers.

But that's not what Epic is after. They tried to go hard after the sellers, figuring that if they can corner enough fo the market with exclusives the buyers will have to come. But they underestimated that even their nigh-infinite coffers struggle to keep up with the raw amount of games releasing, and also the unpredictability of the indie market where you can't really know what to buy as an exclusive.
Nevermind that buying one is a good way to make it forgotten.

So yeah, fully agreed. Compared to Epic, I vastly prefer Steam's 30% cut. As the consumer I pay the same anyways, and Steam offers lots of stuff for it like forums, a client that boots before the heat death of the universe, in-house streaming, library sharing, cloud sync that sometimes works.

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[–] Silverstrings@lemmy.blahaj.zone 58 points 1 year ago (2 children)

My biggest issue with Epic is them very clearly doing the classic tactic of selling goods at unsustainably low prices in order to drive out competition before jacking them back up again. Their whole free game shtick can't possibly last forever and they know it.

[–] Viper_NZ@lemmy.nz 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This and the paid exclusives mean I haven’t, and won’t use EGS out of pure spite.

[–] phx@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I've picked up a ton of their free games. I've yet to actually install their client and actually play one

[–] CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I could always get one of those games off the high seas and pay the same amount. I'm not going to give Epic the engagement numbers to get investors with.

[–] YeastInspection@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

I believe these Indy devs get paid when you boot a game you got for free, so I'm happy to install stuff and boot it once just to support gaming in general

[–] zeekzag@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Just install a FOSS alternative to their launcher like Heroic

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I believe it used to be illegal to sell things at less than cost because the original monopolists did this too. Why did we make that legal again?

[–] neshura@bookwormstory.social 9 points 1 year ago

It isn't (at least over here) but the "cost" for a game is really iffy to define because if you want to be pedantic the distribution cost for a digital game are cents and that only if you actually factor in infrastructure costs. So technically they can just price them however they want because technically a single game download has 0 cost.

Technically because we all know that the production costs have to be regained somehow, just that with enough lawyer bs you can ignore that as a product cost on paper (for example if you label the entire production a learning experience or smth)