this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
178 points (97.3% liked)

Games

17615 readers
260 users here now

Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)

Posts.

  1. News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
  2. Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
  3. No humor/memes etc..
  4. No affiliate links
  5. No advertising.
  6. No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
  7. No self promotion.
  8. No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
  9. No politics.

Comments.

  1. No personal attacks.
  2. Obey instance rules.
  3. No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
  4. Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.

My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.

Other communities:

Beehaw.org gaming

Lemmy.ml gaming

lemmy.ca pcgaming

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
nanoUFO@sh.itjust.works
178
Amazon's previous VP of Prime Gaming said they "tried everything" to disrupt Steam (www.gamingonlinux.com)
submitted 4 days ago by RmDebArc_5@sh.itjust.works to c/games@sh.itjust.works
66 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Everything except making a store people wanted to use? Ethan Evans, who was previously Vice President of Prime Gaming at Amazon, has a short retrospective of trying to take on Steam.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Why should we do a thing that's completely unrelated to the question being asked?

Incorrect.

What Epic means by "for developers," is... developers keep more of the money. Walk me through how that, specifically, is bad for you.

I am not interested in general attacks against Epic. I make no general defense of Epic. Fortnite's business model should be illegal. But what you're doing is bad argumentation. You're reaching for ways to say 'Epic bad' as if that's gotta be relevant. As if attacking Epic in general constitutes a defense of one specific thing Valve does. As if promoting Valve in general means this one specific thing can't be wrong.

As for indie support - Valve doesn't need to push big games on their store, because they have a monopoly. There is no sense telling people 'if you're gonna buy it on PC, buy it on Steam!,' because of course you will. Indie games 'don't make Epic money' because Alan fucking Wake barely makes them money. Their market share is garbage. Steam has the freedom and the incentive to push more game sales, of any kind, and there's a lot more little games than big ones.

None of what Valve is doing would suddenly disappear if they took only one-quarter of gross revenue. Or a fifth. Or less. They're shaving straight off the top for nearly the entire PC gaming market. Their war-chest is ridiculous. They have such a "petro curse" that they briefly forgot to make games. Yet they treat the studios that make them all of their money the same way Nintendo and Sony squeeze console developers.

Would criticizing this specific cut be easier, if we talked about Apple's iron grip on the App Store? Because it's the same damn policy. Feel free to talk shit about when Apple does it, if you insist on judging whole entities instead of what they do.

[–] CancerMancer@sh.itjust.works 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Would criticizing this specific cut be easier, if we talked about Apple’s iron grip on the App Store? Because it’s the same damn policy.

Except that it isn't? Apple doesn't let you circumvent their store, while Steam not only allows games to have their own monetization system, it allows off-site sales of the game on Steam. That is significantly more permissive, by a degree of magnitude that makes me wonder about your sincerity.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Two comments ago:

Their cut is so huge that they can afford to let devs sell keys elsewhere, knowing it makes no difference to their immense profit margin.

Largely because their monopoly is self-reinforcing, and the number of off-site sales is a rounding error.

Let's try this again.

How is a 30% gross cut worse for consumers than 15%? Because that policy, that specific policy, is shared by Nintendo, Apple, Google, Sony, Microsoft... and Valve.