And how’s that going for them?
Excellently, Unreal Engine makes a huge amount of money for them.
Have they stopped running at a loss yet?
You're probably thinking of the Epic Games Store, not Unreal Engine, and it would be grossly profitable at 12% commission if it had the established infrastructure and sales numbers that Steam does, it's only not profitable because they are still developing and building infrastructure and they basically just sell Fortnite and Rocket League.
No it doesn't. It leads to Valve wasting money enriching themselves to the tune of millions of dollars per employee per year while independent game developers making normal salaries continue to have to lay people off and be underfunded.
What about our economy makes you think that multiple industries can't be corporate controlled monopolies / oligopolies?
Epic charges you 5% of revenue after a million dollars to use the entirety of Unreal engine. 30% for a store with an add on market is not reasonable.
EGS would be profitable if they had the sales numbers that Steam does. Theyre not profitable because they're basically just a fortnite and rocket league store.
On PC, Microsoft takes a 0% cut of apps distributed through it's store and 12% of games, so EGS isn't really the outlier there, but regardless 30% being average in an existing anti-competitive industry doesn't really prove anything about whether or not it's a fair cost. That can easily be oligopoly collusion / price signalling which happens all the time.
Console makers like Microsoft and Sony are also funding building the hardware and maintaining the platforms since they lose money on up front hardware sales. I'm not saying I agree that this should be a legal business model, but they have more of an argument for charging 30%.
And regardless of all of that, when I'm talking about a fair price, I'm talking about a fair price in an economic sense, as in, does Valve provide more back to the economy then money they take out of it, or are they rent seeking? Given that Valve made more revenue per employee than literally any other tech company (pushing $1million/employee/year), all during a period where their employees literally were allowed to work on whatever personal projects they wanted (virtually none of which went anywhere or made Valve any money). In that context, I can't see their fees as anything other than rent seeking. Yes make a profit, yes pay your employees well, keep a nice cushion, and invest in R&D, but Valve has been able to afford to do all of that and just burn / hoard cash at a ridiculous rate, all money that would be going to the actual game designers and developers if we had competitive markets.
You can always change your region in settings though, and Microsoft is not removing that ability as that would cause much much bigger problems. But their DMA checking only cares about the region selected at set up, whereas everything happening at runtime only ever gets the current region as the set up region has never been available before.
If you're talking about the Source Engine, they're really, really not comparable. The Source Engine hasn't even been updated since 2013.
How would you convince gamers to use your store instead of Steam? There are reasons that anti-monopoly laws don't care how you got your monopoly, once you have one it's problematic because it makes nearly impossible for competition to form against you.