this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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Yes you are defending rent seeking behaviour, which is what rent gouging landlords do.
Its not arguing about shifting money between two arbitrary corporations, it's about shifting money to the people actually creating something, not the people who own the store that sells it to you.
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.
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.
Yeah bro, some developers are not owned by Microsoft, what's a twist!
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.
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 who likes wasting money on hero worship.
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?
The other twist I absolutely, totally, did not expect today was no comment about my paragraph on publishers taking that juicy 15% from devs. Shocking!
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.
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 the only 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 that does nothing for you as a consumer and entirely exists to profit off the work of the actual developers, go ahead and support the one that has no incentive to treat it's customers 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 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, send an email and ask them how to donate an extra $10.
Valve is the city. Indie devs can easily use itch.io or GOG instead.