Epic Games Launches Own Games Store

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.techpowerup.com/254454/steam...e-dev-says
The guy saying this is Richard Geldreich, who is best known for his incendiary rant about the state of graphics driver support for OpenGL in 2014.

However, a former Valve developer has come forth to say that in his view, Valve's 30% cut was already way behind the times, and was actually "killing PC gaming". The train of thought is that Steam itself changed Valve from a software company to what mostly amounts to a service provider, with Steam serving as a veritable digital money printing machine, that stole focus from games to games publishing, due to higher margins and much lower development costs. It's interesting - and logical - to assume that the reason an Half Life 3 never saw the light of day was because Valve had its revenue stream well secured in Steam. Why invest for a game that could be a flop, when you can just take a 30% cut from other developers' efforts?

Of course, the argument does make some sense. At the same time, it's true that Valve's Steam platform did advance gaming for publishers more than is being let on - a 40% royalty on digitally published games beat the usually 50% take that brick-and-mortar stores usually took in order to reserve shelf space for a new game release. However, as times changed and digital publishing became more commonplace (and game development costs rise and rise), it's understandable that a 30% cut was hitting a new sustainability ceiling for developers. And that's where Richard Geldreich's argument makes more sense: a 12% cut will allow for developers to invest more heavily into their games due to the much reduced revenue cut they have to take into account on projected sales.

That, or they'll invest the same amount of money and take a deeper cut for investors. It could go both ways.