Inacurate
Gawd
- Joined
- Aug 25, 2004
- Messages
- 520
The idea of turning a "bigger profit" simply because of an 18% difference between Epic and Steam's store fees is a mushroom hallucination that requires ignoring the basic math found in 2nd graders as long as there's a 10,000% userbase (market size) difference in Steam's favor. These stores are never going to be on equal footing in marketshare, but Epic is trying to focus the narrative on store fee as if all other factors are equal.
Selling exclusively on Epic's store and ignoring Steam = stepping over a ten dollar bill to pick up a penny, because for the 1000x more copies a game could have sold on Steam, instead of getting 70%, the developer gets 0%.
Hell, if Epic's store fee was 0% and they hypothetically had 70% of Steam's userbase, it would still be financial suicide to ignore Steam and sell exclusively on Epic.
One of several reasons lead that sentence with an "If".
I do believe developers should sell on all available platforms, but if they also sell on Steam..where most PC gamers have their games and are most comfortable, why would they purchase at Epic?
There would need to be a sizable price discount at Epic for me to buy personally, and at one I'd be willing to pay for the "hassle" (#FirstWorldProblems!), the developer would not make a profit at all.
What makes you think Steam is on a decline? We haven't see any concrete user base figures for years.
Got any kind of facts that back that up? I'm seeing a brief peak and stabilization higher than last year, not so much a "decline" looking at the charts: here.
Common sense tells us they are in decline due to various factors, but "the proof" is that major publishers have stopped using Steam.
We literally need to look no further.
Is the biggest game of the year on Steam?
Is Battlefield or Call of Duty?
WoW, Diablo?
There are of course several factors as to why none of these games are on Steam, but they all stem from publishers thinking they can make more money off Steam.
There's no reason that trend will not continue unless Valve makes changes to keep them on board.