this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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Being cautious of a corporation is never a bad thing, but remember: Valve isn't a public company. They don't have the same incentives and fiduciary duties that led to the enshittification of most other companies and services.
Ultimately, yes, everything they do is entirely for their own benefit. But, they're also free to focus on their long-term growth and returns. As long as the leadership doesn't get changed to a bunch of shit-for-brains golden parachute MBAs, they're going to want to keep their customers happy. It's good for them, and it's not terrible for us. Everybody wins.
I would prefer they were a nonprofit, but I'm not going to complain when the mainstream alternatives to Steam are mostly comprised of shitty sales-focused storefronts created by companies beholden to their investors.
No, they don't. Literally every single gamer across the world pays 15% more on every single game purchase, for literally no reason except to make the 1% at Valve even richer.
And they don't have to hire MBAs because gamers dick ride them like Gabe isnt a self serving billionaire and keep forking over an extra 15% and then thanking them for the opportunity to do so.
Do you seriously believe that if a developer pays 15% less in platform fees to Valve, that savings will be passed on to us? Epic Games tried that. Guess what: games still cost us the same there as every other platform.
It literally either goes back to the consumer or back to the game developer.
Or, more likely, the publisher. But, that's beside the point.
As it has been demonstrated when Epic tried the "developers pay less fees here" approach, the average Joe Gamer doesn't benefit in any way whatsoever. Your premise of the savings being passed down doesn't exactly pan out.
To be fair, Epic Store was marred by exclusives and having way less features back then. Even now, their (Electron) launcher boots up way slower than (CEF) Steam, and their sales are way worse.
Is it Electron? Someone elsewhere mentioned it was actually an instance of Unreal Engine running for the webview component. Something about the EGS install directory containing the same UE settings file that games use for initializing Unreal
IDK then. spinning up an entire game engine just to do what Electron does seems unbelievably wasteful though.
I just downloaded and installed EGS to a Windows VM.
strings EpicGamesLauncher.exe | select-string "unreal"returns some interesting results:FCommunityPortalManagerImpl::SetUnrealEnginePortalViewModel{USER}Unreal Engine/Engine/Config/User{TYPE}.iniUnrealHeaderToolCannot call UnrealScript (%s - %s) while stopped at a breakpoint.UnrealVersionSelectorCreated with FUnrealEngineFileAssociationServiceFactory at D:/build/++Portal/Sync/Portal/Source/Programs/EpicGamesLauncher/Layers/Domain/Private/UserDomain.cpp:866A search for "electron" only matches the words "Electronic Arts"
...wait, what does it say about EA?
I already killed the VM, but it was something about an EA account if I recall correctly.
Oh really? Please do point me to the study you did where you gave 15% more revenue back to developers and then assessed their output quality.
Claiming that having the store take 15% less cut of revenue will have no effect is a quite frankly flat out absurd claim to make.