Industry standard for ALL game sales, not just PC. Steam did not invent this. PlayStation charges this. Xbox charges this. Retail in general charged this before Steam even existed.

But you’re clearly unwilling to see anything but “Steam bad! RAH RAH RAH!” So I’m just gonna block your dumbass self now.

Yeah. GoG used to have regional pricing, but they weren’t able to keep up with the costs of it and had to stop or go under.

I think the issue is, realistically, what CAN we do about it. They didn’t come by their position through shady or abusive practices, but by simply making the best platform. Customers feel Steam treats them well. Even if you tried to break it up, customers would just glomp onto one of the shards and we’d be right back here again. Would be like taking the rifle away, but society just being like “No, we WANT them to have a rifle” and giving them another one every time you take it away.

Part of Epic’s problem is also their leadership pretty publicly showing they hate their potential customers on a regular and ongoing basis. If someone keeps screaming at me to eat shit and die, I’m not going to be particularly motivated to buy anything from them.

As far as GoG, they are actually my preferred storefront. I look at GoG for games before Steam, and am even willing to pay a slight premium to get them on GoG. Their DRM free stuff is a big thing for me. Being able to archive my games has value to me.

Oh no. Most of us are pretty much expecting the apocalypse whenever Gaben is gone.

So like most stores? What do you think MSRP is? A lot of places will pull their product from stores who undercut pricing outside of occasional sales.

Is it worth the 30% cut they take? Absolutely not. Gamers don’t realize the amount of money valve is making off them.

The same cut that is industry standard and they could ABSOLUTELY jack up by abusing their market position and choose not to? Especially given how much extra infrastructure they supply for that 30% vs literally anyone else?

If you want to sell your product in a store, your product has to abide the stores rules. This is nothing new. You don’t get to whine about how you can’t sell enough anywhere else because customers prefer buying from the store, that’s asinine.

30% is the standard cut for game sales across the industry. Epic has a smaller cut, but customers don’t want to use it. As someone offering a product, you have to sell where your customers are. Steam COULD abuse their position by taking a higher than standard cut, but they choose not to. Steam isn’t a bad guy here. They made a good platform that customers prefer, and have made no attempts to stop competitors from competing and despite having the market position to abuse it, still only charge the industry standard for selling on their platform. If anybody would bother actually trying to compete with them, then you might see the cut come down, but all their competition seems content to just whine instead of actually making a platform worth using.