I'm generally on the side of more competition being good, and thus don't hate the Epic store
Bribing third parties to sell solely through you is not "competition", it's what the Mafia does when it wants to get
rid of a "competitor".
I feel like this is a question where if you have to ask it you'll never understand why, so I dunno what to tell ya. Like I said above, one company having total control is bad, but you don't care or see that. So fine. Rinslin is doing that thing above where he assumes I'm a fan of Epic in some way (I'm not) because I think competition is good
Mindlessly regurgitating "competition good" to excuse every business move and statement Epic makes like you're Tim Sweeney and that's apparently the only reason you can fall back on to defend what you're trying to do to the PC gaming market and ecosystem, including and worst of all outright bribes for exclusivity, but also trying to remove established customer feedback methods like forums and reviews, Sales and many other established features and things is pretty stupid.
There's a reason why a monopoly position on the market is bad, and that is usually because a company in such a role abuses their market position to gain ever more profit and turns anti-consumer. Steam/Valve sure had its dicey moments like when they
tried Paid Mods in conjunction with Bethesda which they ultimately backed off of after backlash or when they
tried to turn into taste-makers and morality police by banning games like Hatred they've mostly backed off of, or the introduction of
Trading cards and Microtransactions in some of their games, but has overall been much more benevolent than many/any of the other big platforms. But what have they done overall? They've opened their market
to almost every dev with Steam Direct after complaints by journos/Indies and allowed even porn games at the risk of personal reputational damage and mainstream backlash. They've introduced regular Sales, Sweeney and Galyonkin apparently don't
believe in Sales since they "devalue" games and "train customers to wait for discounts". They've introduced Linux and Mac support, developed their own Linux distribution and even tried to back it with a hardware initiative without double-dipping, while Sweeney
doesn't really care about a small open market. They haven't bought or tried to run competitors aggressively out of the market in the decade or-so they've been at the top.
They've even allowed devs to generate keys for nothing and sell them on their own sites, third-party sites and retail for which they don't get a cut or simply use competing stores at personal expense. They've generally shouldered the costs for specific payment methods while Epic wants the customers to bear them. They've
helped some VR devs financially and never demanded Exclusivity (they outright allowed them to release their games on other platforms and consoles) when
Oculus first started engaging in the practice of trying to buy off devs for their Store and while Oculus hardware-locked their store and only allows their own products to work, SteamVR supports all existing VR hardware within reason, even that of their main competitor Oculus and Microsoft's WMR:
“We don’t think exclusives are a good idea for customers or developers,” said
Newell in response to Redditor
elpollodiablo187. “A lot of the interesting VR work is being done by new developers. There is a triple-risk whammy – a new developer, creating new game mechanics on a new platform. We’re in a much better position to absorb financial risk than a new VR developer, so we are happy to offset that giving developers development funds (essentially pre-paid Steam revenue).”
“There are no strings attached to those funds – they can develop for the Rift, or PlayStation VR or whatever the developers thinks are the right target VR systems. Our hope is that by providing that funding that developers will be less likely to take on deals that require them to be exclusive.”
There's a reason people prefer Steam over the Alternatives, and it's exactly the business practices they engage in and that they're
generally consumer friendly and listen to feedback. Saying "Steam bad" doesn't make you clever if you don't really have a reasoning behind it. Google and Facebook for instance aren't considered "bad" lately just because they're big, but because they're increasingly abusing their market position in the same (and other ways) Epic is trying without having first built up the required market share. Most companies at least try to pay lip service to customer interests before they gain the required foothold to turn on them and dictate terms. Epic is openly and enthusiastically anti-consumer from the very start of their "platform" and using monopolist tactics without being in a position to do so, it's in their DNA. And they're making most of their revenue off of Microtransactions from teenagers in a fad game, but what happens when that runs out? If they're doing this stuff
now when they're trying to gain market share, what do you think they would do if they would ever get into a dominant market position? Look at the first few pages of the thread and see that most people were at first curious and open-minded before it became clear what kind of business practices Epic would engage in. Fuck their retarded console mind-set.
Devs are moving from Steam because 30% of cuts is too much.
Some devs are moving from Steam (for a specified time period at least) because they're being bribed with cold hard cash and promised guaranteed Sales (a practice that may benefit the first few that take the deal in the short term, but isn't sustainable long-term and damages their reputation), the cut barely has anything to do with it and they didn't move to other stores previously that allowed an even lower cut than Epic takes. It'd be pretty stupid for Steam/Valve to knee-jerkingly cut off 60% of their revenue (although, they had already cut their share to 25/20% based on Sales performance a few weeks before the Epic store went Live and
there are enough exceptions like third-party stores/keys and cash payment that indicates their realistic cut is lower than 30% overall to begin with) as long as Epic keeps engaging in this practice.
If the retards genuinely cared about the 30% cut they'd have been whining about it for the last 20 years, not the last 20 weeks.
Or they'd at least whine about Google Play, Apple App Store, Nintendo eShop, Xbox Live, PlayStation Network and all other players taking the same cut (and also cuts from retail sales), you know to stay consistent.
