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Comment by Hikikomori

3 hours ago

How about charging for services rendered based on cost to produce them rather than some arbitrary number. Some effective competition would be good, but likely outcome is publishers taking more.

7 comments

Hikikomori

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bitmasher9  2 hours ago

I never understood people who argue steam doesn’t have real competition.

The number of fully funded attempts to compete with steam is impressive. Steam has more competition than any other of the major app stores. Steam also had to provide additional value over pre-existing methods of installing games on the PC in a way the Android Play Store or the PlayStation Store did not have to.

  • 0cf8612b2e1e  2 hours ago

    It is incredible how much the other stores fumbled the implementation. As a rule, Epic, Origin, etc apps were terrible. Laggy, bad UI, sometimes difficult to even complete a purchase.

    You would have thought that close relationship with the games industry- someone must know how to make a high performance native application. Yet it always felt like web developers pumping out another half assed Electron platform. The Steam store must generate billions in revenue -put some real manpower behind the engineering.

    • ahartmetz  1 hour ago

      What's more, Epic spends order of magnitude a billion dollars per year on free games on the Epic Store. People still don't want the Epic Store because it's crap. Like Jesus H. Fucking Christ, do these assclowns ever get a clue?

      I'm very fine with them not getting a clue though, Valve spends money and effort on promoting Linux and Epic (Tim Sweeney) kinda does the opposite. With all the shit Microsoft is pulling, he still prefers Windows while complaining about it.

Forgeties79  3 hours ago

I feel like that just becomes another situation where bigger organizations get more bargaining power and get better deals, so you’re just kind of shifting problems. I’m not saying a flat percentage like they have is necessarily the best solution, but I’m not sure trading problems is a good idea either. Just seems like a different way for smaller developers to get screwed.