Valve COO on Epic's Tim Sweeney "you mad bro?" when launching the Epic Store
Valve COO on Epic's Tim Sweeney "you mad bro?" when launching the Epic Store
In the ongoing saga of the Wolfire versus Valve lawsuit, which is continuing, we've been able to see a funny little look behind the curtain and Tim Sweeney was not happy with Valve.
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.
see Valve give the big players better deals than the indie devs.
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.
If Steam didn't curve developers to sell at the same price, then developers on Epic could compete with Steam on lower fees by passing those cost savings on to consumers.
Right now, there's no reason to buy on Epic: it's just a worse Steam at the same price (aside from the free games, of course.) If they charged 20% less across the board, then that might move the needle enough to get the volume to start to complete with Steam.
The price-match clause is anticompetitive; it should be a revenue-match clause, imho, so developers can sell direct downloads for 30% less (no fees) or on Epic for 20% less (10% fees) and not face any consequences from Steam, for example.
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.