Ever heard of royalties? You know, that type of agreement where the creator earns X% of gross sales.

Or considered that publishing agreements can be made to include publishing costs (aka platform fees) as part of the publisher’s fixed cut? I’ll let you in on an obvious secret: if Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all take 30%, the publisher is going to use 30% as the deduction for platform fees regardless of where the sale comes from.

I stand by my opinion that the most likely outcome of lowering platform fees on Steam is the publisher finding a way to vacuum an extra 15% into their own bank account.

That being said: Please tell me what drugs you’re on, because I would love to also live in kumbaya la-la land where unchecked late-stage capitalism isn’t a problem and corporations don’t exist to enrich the 1% by infinitely increasing growth through screwing everyone below them.

like Microsoft with Apple in 1997

https://wccftech.com/microsoft-invested-150-million-in-apple-27-years-ago-today-on-august-6/

Google with Mozilla today

That’s funny because this is the opposite of what you seem to be suggesting. This is not helping their competition, this is paying another company hundreds of million dollars to be anticompetitive against their competition. They paid Mozilla (and dozens of others) to be the default search engine. Its the exact anticompetitive behavior that caused them to be legally classified as a monopoly.

Google has multiple ventures: advertising, search engine, email, web browser, cloud storage, cloud infrastructure, etc.

I’m not saying they don’t get any other benefit from paying Mozilla. I’m saying that one of the reasons Google shovels money in their direction is to stop regulators from having a reason to take a closer look at Chrome’s dominance.

In terms of browser engines, we have: Blink (Chromium), WebKit2 (Safari), and Gecko (Firefox). WebKit2 is exclusive to Apple devices, which leaves Blink and Gecko as the only two browser engines available on Windows and Linux. If Mozilla went bankrupt and stopped developing Gecko, Google’s Blink engine would have no competition on non-Apple platforms, which would invite some regulatory scrutiny.

While I disagree with the other commenter’s approach and attitude, he/she/they are partially correct with the comment they left next to this one.

There is no legal obligation for a company to fund or assist its competition, even if it holds a significant marketshare. The companies that do help their competition, like Microsoft with Apple in 1997 or Google with Mozilla today, begrugingly choose to do it so their lawyers can make the argument that they are not a monopoly because they still have competition.

Thank you. You get it: the whole system is just broken.

Trying to shift that 15% away from Valve is effectively putting it into the pockets of publishers, as the overwhelming majority of video game sales are either developed by large publishers like Activision, or stuck with a third-party publisher that isn’t just going to voluntarily pass the savings on to the consumers or developers.

If I buy a game on Steam, I know that 30% of my money is going to end up in someone other than the developer’s hands. Support the devs by buying the game directly from them or on a lower-fee platform like Itch* wherever possible. Or, if it’s only available on Steam and my money it going to go into some corporation’s pockets, Valve is at least not legally incentivized to milk its consumers for the sake of shareholders.

*But never Epic. For as much as they preach about monopolies, their hypocritical actions demonstrate a clear desire to become one.

,False. Literally just objectively false.

If I self publish my game on steam, I get every dollar from it except for the ones that valve takes.

Congratulations, you poked a hole in my argument by agreeing with me that indie devs are the only possible people who would benefit from lower fees! Do you want a medal, or do you want to actually finish reading before trying to pull off a “GOTCHA!” moment?

Yeah bro, some developers are not owned by Microsoft, what’s a twist!

The other twist I absolutely, totally, did not expect today was no comment about my paragraph on third-party publishers taking that juicy 15% from devs. Shocking!

No dumbass, it’s just fundamentally more efficient. Your premise of giving Gabe Newell 15% of every game sale and then deep throating him while you thank him for the opportunity, for literally no benefit or reason, is just asinine.

Have you never ever heard the phrase “the devil you know is better than the one you don’t”? If my $10 isn’t going back into my own pocket, but into the bank account of one of two corporations, which do you think it will be:

A private company that doesn’t have a track record of fucking me as a consumer, or a corporation legally obligated to inflate its own share price that sees the consumer as a means to an end?

Don’t worry, take your time. It’s a tough question.

No. It doesn’t. Your position is that you want to waste 15% of every gaming purchase on enriching Gabe Newell instead of the developers who actually made the game. Congratulations, that makes you a dumbass.

I’m going to assume you read my previous comment and are willing to acknowledge that self-published indie devs would be the only demographic of developers who would actually get that 15% instead of the game’s publishers.

Do you know how many self-published games I purchased through Steam in 2024? Exactly one: Hades 2. And that’s only because my only legal options available were through Steam or Epic Games, and Epic Games is a wannabe monopoly employing anticompetitive practices with an egotistical and hypocritical manchild as its CEO. Everything else indie gets purchased directly or through Itch, then saved to a NAS for permanent ownership.

But hey, between enriching Valve and enriching some other company whose business model is also to profit off of developers, but does nothing for you as a consumer, go ahead and support the one that has zero incentive to treat you as anything more than a one-time sales figure.

Sarcasm aside:

At the end of the day, what I’m trying to explain and that you keep stubbornly refusing to hear, is that: way the way industry is currently, someone other than the developer is going to get that hypothetical 15% when it comes to 99% of total sales revenue.

It’s better for us as consumers to have that 15% go towards the company which does the modern-day equivalent of “bread and circuses” and hasn’t yet screwed its users. The most likely alternative to giving them the money is giving the money to yet another corporation, but one with zero reason to give a shit about the consumer other than as a way to make the line go up.

For that 1% of indies and self-published developers, you don’t have to accept that they lose 15% of the sales price. If you care that much (and you should), buy the game directly and give them 96.5% of MSRP. Or, if you can’t, buy it on Itch. Or if that’s not an option and they only sell on Steam, send an email and ask them how to donate an extra $10. Shit, buy the game twice (preferably on another platform) if you must.

Just don’t expect that reducing Valve’s profits by 15% is going to make life better for everyone and not mostly just investors and executives. In the best realistic case, nothing improves except the bonus that some C-suite gets at the end of the next quarter. In the worst case, Valve chooses to compensate for that lost revenue by cutting down on their FOSS contributions or experimental hardware projects.

It’s about shifting money to the people actually creating something. Every dollar Valve gets, is one less that a game developer had to spend on staff and creatives to make a better game.

You’re just not getting it. That hypothetical money isn’t going anywhere but the pockets of the people a level above the actual developers.

Are the developers a studio owned by a large publisher like Microsoft? Microsoft is funding the entire project and studio operating costs, and all the revenue is going back to them. They set the budget, and anything above the projected sales figures a nice bonus for Microsoft execs and shareholders.

But hey, maybe it’s not Microsoft—maybe it’s a couple friends in a garage who went with a publisher to help fund development and set up distribution for all the major platforms. In exchange for their services and marketing, the publisher will take 60% of the sale price. Valve or whoever takes their 30% cut from them before it hits the publisher’s bank account. The guys in the garage still only get the remaining 40%, even if the sale came from EGS with its lower fees.

Your premise of lowering platform fees leading to better games is only ever going to happen for early-access indie games where the devs quit their day job. Those devs are a tiny minority of gross PC game sales, and while it would be nice for them to be paid a bit more, it’s not going to change anything for the average Joe Gamer consumer.

My point still stands: you’re proposing something that doesn’t actually benefit the typical consumer, but merely shifts the profit ratio between two profit-driven corporations.

I used the term “indie” a bit loosely. I had games like Stardew Valley in mind, where it started as a solo project but became popular enough to warrant porting to other platforms.

I’m not defending landlords or rent gouging. I’m pointing out that when production or operating costs become lower in a for-profit entity, they increase their profit margin instead of passing their savings down to the consumer. Welcome to capitalism.

If you can’t see how that connects with the hypothetical scenario of having Valve to take a 15% cut instead of 30%, let me do it for you:

Ubisoft makes a new Assassin’s Creed game. They publish it on Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox. All of them currently take a 30% cut, so they sell the game for $70. Now, suppose your petition to Valve works, and they lower their cut to 15%. Ubisoft is still going to charge $70 to buy the game on Steam, and the only thing changing is that they now make an extra $10.50 from Steam purchases compared to the others.

But, that’s Ubisoft. What about an indie dev? Absolutely nothing different. Microsoft and Sony’s distribution agreements make it a contract violation to have a lower MSRP on a competing platform.

In our current reality, that 15% more-than-necessry fee will never go into the hands of the consumer. You are not being a champion for the consumer by rallying against 30% platform fees, you’re literally arguing to change the ratio of money going between two corporations.

I already killed the VM, but it was something about an EA account if I recall correctly.

I just downloaded and installed EGS to a Windows VM.

strings EpicGamesLauncher.exe | select-string "unreal" returns some interesting results:

• FCommunityPortalManagerImpl::SetUnrealEnginePortalViewModel
• {USER}Unreal Engine/Engine/Config/User{TYPE}.ini
• UnrealHeaderTool
• Cannot call UnrealScript (%s - %s) while stopped at a breakpoint.
• UnrealVersionSelector
• Created with FUnrealEngineFileAssociationServiceFactory at D:/build/++Portal/Sync/Portal/Source/Programs/EpicGamesLauncher/Layers/Domain/Private/UserDomain.cpp:866

A search for “electron” only matches the words “Electronic Arts”

Is it Electron? Someone elsewhere mentioned it was actually an instance of Unreal Engine running for the webview component. Something about the EGS install directory containing the same UE settings file that games use for initializing Unreal

Or, more likely, the publisher. But, that’s beside the point.

As it has been demonstrated when Epic tried the “developers pay less fees here” approach, the average Joe Gamer doesn’t benefit in any way whatsoever. Your premise of the savings being passed down doesn’t exactly pan out.

Lock-in != Monopoly.

The fact that you can’t transfer your purchases […] to other platforms

This is ridiculously unrealistic in a capitalist society.

It costs the platform money whenever a user downloads a game, and a user who didn’t buy from their store isn’t a user that they make money from. No other platform would voluntarily accept a recurring cost like that unless they profit from user data.

Also, it’s not like they stop publishers from doing that themselves. Ubisoft and EA use the cd-key generated by steam to associate the game with your U-Play and Origin accounts.

At the expense of literally every single game player

How is it at the expense of the game player? Even if they paid less, the publisher and developers aren’t going to pass the savings on to the consumer. That’s wishful thinking in the same vain as hoping Starbucks would make their drinks cheaper because their rent went down.

If anything, one can argue that the 30% fee shelled out by the publisher pays for the various nice-to-haves that players get on Steam, like: a functional review system, free cloud save syncing, the workshop, game discussion forum, friends system, family sharing, game streaming, Steam input (which is a godsend for accessibility), etc.

No, they don’t. Literally every single gamer across the world pays 15% more on every single game purchase, for literally no reason except to make the 1% at Valve even richer.

Do you seriously believe that if a developer pays 15% less in platform fees to Valve, that savings will be passed on to us? Epic Games tried that. Guess what: games still cost us the same there as every other platform.

Being cautious of a corporation is never a bad thing, but remember: Valve isn’t a public company. They don’t have the same incentives and fiduciary duties that led to the enshittification of most other companies and services.

Ultimately, yes, everything they do is entirely for their own benefit. But, they’re also free to focus on their long-term growth and returns. As long as the leadership doesn’t get changed to a bunch of shit-for-brains golden parachute MBAs, they’re going to want to keep their customers happy. It’s good for them, and it’s not terrible for us. Everybody wins.

I would prefer they were a nonprofit, but I’m not going to complain when the mainstream alternatives to Steam are mostly comprised of shitty sales-focused storefronts created by companies beholden to their investors.

In reality, it’s likely a self-preservation move. Microsoft made what appeared to be a monopolistic move to control the entire Windows ecosystem when they added their own app store and the locked down S edition of Windows. If Valve both hadn’t invested in Linux and Microsoft hadn’t halted going down that path, they would have been screwed.

Comment OP appears to have drank the Epic Games Kool-aid.

They have a monopoly on video game distribution.

They have a massive marketshare, but that doesn’t make them a monopoly. Developers are still free to distribute their games through any other storefront/launcher, and Valve isn’t going out of its way to engage in anticompetitive practices like exclusive publishing deals with third-party studios.

He lacks the warmth and depth to be one.