Last year, they all came crawlin' back to Steam, and this year was another strong one for Valve.

From the opinion piece:

Last year, I pointed out how many big publishers came crawlin’ back to Steam after trying their own things: EA, Activision, Microsoft. This year, for the first time ever, two Blizzard games released on Steam: Overwatch and Diablo 4.

  • Carighan MaconarOPEnglish
    27•1 year ago

    If Epic had required developers to, say, sell games 15% cheaper (they only take a 12% cut instead of 30%, so the devs would still win out!) then they could have had a really cool argument on their hands. “Look how much Steam costs you as the consumer just from them enriching themselves!”. Then the dearth of features would have been excusable, sure the shop is shit and does ˜nothing but hey, 10% cheaper in return!

    Instead, as you say, they wanted to completely brute-force consumers onto the platform by putting their big fortnite money dick on the table, and it backfires and they spent a ton of money on a fat load of nothing.

    Plus they’ve nicely trained their consumers that all the EGS client is for is launching it once on Thursdays to get your free game. Not the thing you want customers to associate with your supposedly money-making scheme.

    • @Rose@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9•1 year ago

      If Epic had required developers to, say, sell games 15% cheaper

      Epic cannot do that because

      In response to one inquiry from a game publisher, in another example, Valve explained: “We basically see any selling of the game on PC, Steam key or not, as a part of the same shared PC market- so even if you weren’t using Steam keys, we’d just choose to stop selling a game if it was always running discounts of 75% off on one store but 50% off on ours. . . .”

      (source)

      However, Epic regularly offers coupons out of pocket. Right now you can get 33% off any game above $14.99 or the regional equivalent, as many times as you want, even if the game is already discounted by the publisher. You also get 10% as cashback.