Competition is usually always a good thing, but sadly no launcher has ever brought anything new to the table that Steam hasn’t already been doing (they usually just bring headaches).
Epic doesn’t want to compete fairly (by providing a great user experience, etc). They want to compete by paying for exclusives & bribing users with free games. Obviously this hasn’t worked because they are loweri g fees, likely to try to get the growth they just aren’t seeing.
Neat facts, but they don’t justify the awful game store they have created. They can’t even handle a downloads queue that you can change around, which is embarrassing. They have 1% of the features that Steam provides, so rightly they can’t charge the same.
Would be nice if Source 2 was available to anyone, but it isn’t a product they want to sell/support. It’s mostly meant to power their own games (like most game studios, they can have their own inhouse engines). Maybe as it gets more mature they could explore this possibility idk.
Steam has been quietly collecting cheques while their Source Engine has collected dust.
Very innacurate.
Valve create so much great software around gaming. Steam gets updated very frequently with bug fixes and new features (just recently we got game recording).
Source 2 is likely constantly being worked on (featured in 2 of the most popular pc games: CS2 and Dota2). Maybe randoms like us could never use it, but they still work on it unlike your statement would suggest.
Not to mention Proton, which helps every linux gamer run Windows games.
30% may sound steep, but it’s not really when you consider what Steam provides: Game distribution (downloads, forever), community features, steam workshop/marketplace (if implemented), inventory system, game networking, in-game purchasing, achievements, etc, etc. I’m not a game developer, but theres probably a million more things they do. I’m not even mentioning the features they provide just for us, the gamers (mainly family share, thats simply amazing).
I’ve been getting through GoG.
Very awesome, GOG and their goal of preserving video games is great.
My p.s. wrapup is that Epic is barely a launcher when compared with Steam. Yes Epic can launch a game, but it does nothing else (well) at all.
Even with all the years they have had for development, they’d rather try to shove money into game devs faces (or customers with free games) than fix their app. I hope they realise this is a mistake, because you can get game devs to move over with lots of money, but customers who are spending money won’t if they arent treated well. This isn’t a long term strategy they have been using and this 0% fee seems like desparation to me (not to say they are poor, cuz fortnite pays the bills, but they likely aren’t seeing much growth).
I hate defending corporations, but Valve is the one that I hope every other company looks at and tries to mimic because they have only done good for their customers.
This support is provided at no cost, reflecting Akamai’s commitment to giving back to the open-source community.
Sounds like it wasn’t a choice so much as one of the biggest CDNs in the world giving a free hand out to a project it relies on itself.
Anyways a lot of companies use Akamai, I don’t think its odd.
Like Steam is doing?
I don’t think their cut is them being greedy.
Your plan might not be economically feasibile, because companies need money for growth (new products, R&D, etc), so only charging enough to run is not possible.
Steam is probably doing a kindness by not charging an infrastructure fee every year to developers, that shiz would probably really expensive.
The cost of the cloud features they provide is likely, usually, understated. Just the bandwidth costs alone of allowing your game to be downloaded whenever the user wants and however many times they want is expensive enough. Add on cloud saves and all the other niceties…
All that is just to say that Epic is likely losing a lot of money here just to try enticing more developers to move over, and maybe bring some customers too, but it’s not gonna work. They are lucky the fortnite piggybank lets them do this, but it’s not smart by any means.