Some interesting industry news for you here. Epic Games have announced a change to the revenue model of the Epic Games Store, as they try to pull in more developers and more gamers to actually purchase things.
the vast majority of the money that valve makes comes from indie games, not big studios
This is definitely not the case. Big studios price their games higher and sell more copies. There are only a handful of indie games like Stardew Valley and Terraria that come close to being in the same spot of the bell curve. Most of Valve’s money comes from microtransactions in the longest-running live services and the biggest games of the year.
Ah yeah my bad its the number of sales where indie games win. In terms of money its almost 50/50 tho. People are sick and tired of expensive garbage games and that shows in the drastic changes in revenue from 2023-2024.
Ofcourse if you include in game costs, then it probably changes again.
People are sick and tired of expensive garbage games and that shows in the drastic changes in revenue from 2023-2024.
Be careful not to make the data fit your conclusion. Anecdotally, I’ve observed a similar sentiment, but for one thing, AAA releases have slowed down due to long development times, so there just aren’t that many of them in a given year. For another, we know that, by a wide margin, most time spent gaming is only on a handful of mainstay games that first debuted years ago, like Counter-Strike 2, Grand Theft Auto V, Fortnite, Minecraft, etc. Plenty of those aren’t on Steam, but the same concept applies to the games that top the Steam charts.
My go-to is GoG, but I definitely want Steam to lose some market share in favor of literally anybody else. I will worry about moving that extra share towards GoG when the market isn’t a full on monopoly.
But hey, yeah, stop using Steam and go to Gog whenever you can. You heard it here first. DRM-free software should be your first choice.
GOG and Itch are both great services. Epic is run by a psychopath and working hard to create the walled garden they themselves have been railing against. That’s why EGS can go to hell but I’ll gladly buy from the others.
I do not know or care about the personality or intentions of any of the executives in these corporations. Pick your variety of libertarian tech billionaire, I don’t intend to root for any of them.
This is a Godzilla “let them fight” moment where in my ideal scenario none of these people would have this amount of money or control over other people’s work, but since that’s the world we live in, them being in competition benefits me down the line, so I don’t want any one of them to get away with the whole thing.
Reminder that the world’s biggest money makers in PC gaming are not on Steam.
Minecraft isn’t (it’s on Microsoft Store and a stand-alone web store), Fortnite isn’t (it’s EGS exclusive), Roblox isn’t (its own store), League of Legends and Valorant aren’t (Riot Launcher and EGS),…
And that’s a fantastic showcase of the bar you need to hit to not be effectively toiling in the Steam mines. Assassin’s Creed, FIFA, Call of Duty? Not big enough. Still have to deal with Steam.
It takes being significantly bigger than the entire Epic store to even consider not doing Steam on PC. And none of those is even close to having a viable platform for third party releases outside of Epic, which is perhaps the last one standing on that front and currently not managing to get a foothold. And judging by the rabid fanboy backlash anytime they try to do something nice to attract devs, not even finding a path towards one at any point in the future, either.
That’s a bad look for competition on the PC market. There aren’t that many Fortnites or Minecrafts coming in the future. Gaming investment is drying up and gaming is becoming a cash business, rather than an investment business. And the cash flows to Valve.
Assassin’s Creed, FIFA, Call of Duty? Not big enough. Still have to deal with Steam.
They don’t have to. OK, maybe Microsoft has to because they are the actual monopolist and making the Activision Blizzard franchises available on storefronts other than Microsoft’s own is to keep the watchdogs away.
Also, none of the franchises are exclusive to Steam, so Steam has no monopoly.
It takes being significantly bigger than the entire Epic store to even consider not doing Steam on PC.
That sentence makes no sense. Fortnite is exclusive to EGS, therefore it cannot be “significantly bigger than the entire Epic store”.
Steam has no policies that forbid offering games on other stores, Epic has policies that makes certain games timed exclusives to EGS.
What makes EGS unattractive compared to Steam is the simple fact that Epic chooses to most prominently display their own games on EGS. Valve does front page banners, fests, that window that opens with every Steam launch, etc. and goes out of their way to make everything from big launches as well as solo dev indie games discoverable.
Epic has it in their own hands to make EGS more than the Fortnite launcher. They could promote other EGS games inside Fortnite but they don’t. They host concerts inside Fortnite but nothing to promote 3rd party EGS games, for examle.
That’s a bad look for competition on the PC market. There aren’t that many Fortnites or Minecrafts coming in the future. Gaming investment is drying up and gaming is becoming a cash business, rather than an investment business. And the cash flows to Valve.
USD 45 billion overall PC gaming revenue and all of Steam combined is 8.6bn. “And the cash flows to Valve”? Sure…
Oh, yeah, they have to. All of those examples are from publishers that tried to have their own platforms and then could not sustain that option and had to come back to the Steam platform.
So they’re not big enough.
As for Fortnite being bigger than EGS… well, yeah, it is. So much so that Epic themselves report on the two separately. And Fortnite makes more money than every other game in there put together.
10 Bn for Steam revenue this year, by the way. They are the only thing growing in the space. Everything else pulling money is aging games, 5-10 years old, that have a fossilized playerbase mobile-style. The money flows to Valve because Valve doesn’t need to make ANY games at all, pay for exclusives or do anything else. Especially since the fanboys paint any attempt at competing against a monopolistic actor as an anticompetitive act, somehow.
So still far off anything resembling >50% market share on PC. Good to know they’re still not a monopoly.
The money flows to Valve because Valve doesn’t need to make ANY games at all, pay for exclusives or do anything else.
So Valve is not engaging in any anti-competitive behaviour as well as pumping resources into Linux support to break the Windows hegemony? Great!
Especially since the fanboys paint any attempt at competing against a monopolistic actor as an anticompetitive act, somehow.
Yeah, these people are very strange. I mean, it’s a fact that Microsoft is the convicted monopolist because of the grip Windows has on the industry, the same Microsoft that bought Minecraft, Bethesda, and Activision Blizzard King to become the world’s single biggest games publisher and their Windows-exclusive PC GamePass is also growing (surely at least partially thanks to Microsoft “continuing to misuse its Windows operating system monopoly” to promote their other services).
And yet, there are people who put the sole Linux supporter in the same corner, as if that company had anything approaching Microsoft’s market power. Not even the EU thought Valve was important enough. Microsoft, Apple, Google, ByteDance, and Meta are Digital Market Gatekeepers, not Valve.
But nobody is complaining about Steam OS having a monopoly on PC OSs, the issue is with Steam having control of the PC gaming market.
I am exhausted by humanity’s ongoing inability to hold more than one idea in their heads at once. The world isn’t made of good guys that play for your team and bad guys that play for the other team. Can people be adults for one moment at some point this century? Holy crap.
Steam can ABSOLUTELY have a dominant position in one market while attempting to erode a competitor’s dominant position in another market.
Microsoft has a dominant position in the OS market that should be eroded by both competitors and regulators.
That dominant position includes having about 75% of the PC OS market.
Steam has about 80% of the PC digital distribution market for new releases.
One of those facts isn’t tolerable just because you’ve decided to make supporting a specific alternative in the OS market your entire personality. That’s not how that works. Microsoft should be held back from the areas where it has dominance (and that includes keeping them on a very tight leash when it comes to aggregating more studios under their gaming division) and Steam should be kept on a tight leash when it comes to their dominant position on the gaming digital distribution space. Ideally by having other competitors not only survive but thrive and grow to prevent regulators having to intervene in the first place.
Those two ideas are, in fact, entirely consistent with each other with no contradiction. I am imploring social media dwellers to stop treating every issue as a football match or get off the Internet.
Steam has about 80% of the PC digital distribution market for new releases.
So it is a bad thing now that Steam makes new releases more discoverable than the other storefronts that have a larger installed base than Steam?
Microsoft’s store has a close to 100% penetration of home installation of Windows 10 and newer.
Opening Microsoft Store: Boom, top spots for Microsofts properties (Activision Blizzard sale, Minecraft, Candy Crush).
Switching to the Games tab: PC Game Pass, more Activision Blizzard sale, COD Black Ops 6 with a dedicated banner, more Minecraft, more Candy Crush.
Visiting one of Microsoft’s other game stores, Battle.net: 100% Microsoft exclusive. Not just Blizzard games but Doom, Avowed, Sea of Thieves, PC GamePass. That’s unregulated Microsoft on full display. Not a single 3rd party game even available but the rest of the Microsoft catalogue integrated after the takeover of Activision Blizzard.
Compare that to Steam: Huge banner advertising the sale promotion of EA.
Scrolling a bit further down, Microsoft games advertised, some convention for narrative games.
Nobody but Microsoft and Epic are to blame for their huge installed bases not converting to sales of 3rd party games. Mostly advertising their own properties and paid exclusives.
The point is you ideally want multiple players in the PC market competing with each other on features and approach that are all viable, sustainable and give users and developers a better deal as middlemen.
I don’t want Steam to go away, it’s an insanely good client and a great piece of software. But I don’t want every game having to be on Steam no matter what and only doing GoG or Epic or Xbox if they are being given a deal or for ideological reasons.
Valve is the only one in PC gaming to push an alternative operating system to Windows.
EGS, GOG,… all enforce a Windows hegemony. GOG Galaxy isn’t even available on Linux, despite the fact that it’s built on cross platform frameworks that make porting easy. Proton by Valve is open source and GOG Galaxy would be free to integrate it.
Heroic Launcher is a community effort that shows that it would be possible without massive investments. Epic and GOG/CD Project just chose not to.
They also chose not to have their own layer of controller translation or their own game recording backend.
Linux is 2% of the market even on Steam with official support. DRM-free means DRM-free for everybody.
I would like more official Linux support, but I’ll take good unofficial support in the meantime. There’s no workaround for monopolistic positions or mandatory DRM-free policies.
I’ll take good unofficial support in the meantime.
And that unofficial support is brought to you by Valve’s contributions to Wine, DXVK, RADV, LibSDL,…
There’s no workaround for monpolistic positions
Considering that the only monopolist in PC gaming is Microsoft, the workaround for that Windows monopoly is to spend money on products that make non-Windows PC gaming better and currently that’s almost exclusively Valve.
I don’t need Valve to be a moustache-twirling cartoon villain to not like them having a monopolistic position. They make a great platform, I generally like their hardware and, much as it is a byproduct of them trying to cut Microsoft out of the loop, I think it’s great that they are basing their efforts on Linux.
They still shouldn’t become the sole platform for PC gaming, though, and that means they should lose some market share.
You really, really, really don’t need to pick a side between multibillion dollar corporations and support it like it’s a sports team.
They still shouldn’t become the sole platform for PC gaming and that means they should lose some market share, though.
So CD Project could take a tiny fraction of their massive Cyberpunk earnings and make GOG Galaxy with Proton integration available on Linux.
You really, really, really don’t need to pick a side between multibillion dollar corporations and support it like it’s a sports team.
No, it has nothing to do with sports. Picking the vendor that invests into making an open source alternative to Windows viable is pure egoism. Their contributions will have a positive effect long into the future of PC gaming.
I mean, they don’t need to support Linux, you can get an offline installer right from their web app. Even if Heroic didn’t solve that problem entirely (which it kinda does) you could still work around it.
And I hear this “DRM on Steam is optional” a lot, but it’s… kinda not? Even Valve admits their Steamworks integration is a soft form of DRM. Plus the point of GoG is not that you can have games with no DRM in it, it’s that you have to. You buy a game, it’s yours to keep.
That’s a massive paradigm shift. Steam exists specifically to avoid that.
Yeah, well, I’ve had better luck with Heroic than Steam proper, even if Heroic is using Proton and Gamescope as well.
I guess that’s the nature of Linux gaming (still) despite what people like to say.
As for the practical difference, it boils down to my GoG library being safely backed up in storage media and preserved safely. If that doesn’t matter to you… well, I can’t help you, but you’re wrong. Either way, if the market broke a different way and GoG had a bigger share (or if Steam matched its policies) that library would not be impacted nearly as much.
For generic SteamWorks integration, there already exists a open source DLL called Goldberg Emulator. If publishers opt for real DRM, the games are not available on GOG anyway.
Also, downloading and backing up the games have to be done by yourself before the storefront goes bust. Distributing GOG games outside of GOG is a copyright violation, unless the copyright holders explicitly allow it.
So, to sum up: You can backup DRM-free Steam games and make them work with little effort.
Not me, but i do want steam to stay the main game platform, if the alternative is epic games. That means you want to keep big studios on the platform.
On the other hand the vast majority of the money that valve makes comes from indie games, not big studios.
This is definitely not the case. Big studios price their games higher and sell more copies. There are only a handful of indie games like Stardew Valley and Terraria that come close to being in the same spot of the bell curve. Most of Valve’s money comes from microtransactions in the longest-running live services and the biggest games of the year.
Ah yeah my bad its the number of sales where indie games win. In terms of money its almost 50/50 tho. People are sick and tired of expensive garbage games and that shows in the drastic changes in revenue from 2023-2024.
Ofcourse if you include in game costs, then it probably changes again.
Be careful not to make the data fit your conclusion. Anecdotally, I’ve observed a similar sentiment, but for one thing, AAA releases have slowed down due to long development times, so there just aren’t that many of them in a given year. For another, we know that, by a wide margin, most time spent gaming is only on a handful of mainstay games that first debuted years ago, like Counter-Strike 2, Grand Theft Auto V, Fortnite, Minecraft, etc. Plenty of those aren’t on Steam, but the same concept applies to the games that top the Steam charts.
My go-to is GoG, but I definitely want Steam to lose some market share in favor of literally anybody else. I will worry about moving that extra share towards GoG when the market isn’t a full on monopoly.
But hey, yeah, stop using Steam and go to Gog whenever you can. You heard it here first. DRM-free software should be your first choice.
GOG and Itch are both great services. Epic is run by a psychopath and working hard to create the walled garden they themselves have been railing against. That’s why EGS can go to hell but I’ll gladly buy from the others.
I do not know or care about the personality or intentions of any of the executives in these corporations. Pick your variety of libertarian tech billionaire, I don’t intend to root for any of them.
This is a Godzilla “let them fight” moment where in my ideal scenario none of these people would have this amount of money or control over other people’s work, but since that’s the world we live in, them being in competition benefits me down the line, so I don’t want any one of them to get away with the whole thing.
Reminder that the world’s biggest money makers in PC gaming are not on Steam.
Minecraft isn’t (it’s on Microsoft Store and a stand-alone web store), Fortnite isn’t (it’s EGS exclusive), Roblox isn’t (its own store), League of Legends and Valorant aren’t (Riot Launcher and EGS),…
Yeah.
And that’s a fantastic showcase of the bar you need to hit to not be effectively toiling in the Steam mines. Assassin’s Creed, FIFA, Call of Duty? Not big enough. Still have to deal with Steam.
It takes being significantly bigger than the entire Epic store to even consider not doing Steam on PC. And none of those is even close to having a viable platform for third party releases outside of Epic, which is perhaps the last one standing on that front and currently not managing to get a foothold. And judging by the rabid fanboy backlash anytime they try to do something nice to attract devs, not even finding a path towards one at any point in the future, either.
That’s a bad look for competition on the PC market. There aren’t that many Fortnites or Minecrafts coming in the future. Gaming investment is drying up and gaming is becoming a cash business, rather than an investment business. And the cash flows to Valve.
They don’t have to. OK, maybe Microsoft has to because they are the actual monopolist and making the Activision Blizzard franchises available on storefronts other than Microsoft’s own is to keep the watchdogs away.
Also, none of the franchises are exclusive to Steam, so Steam has no monopoly.
That sentence makes no sense. Fortnite is exclusive to EGS, therefore it cannot be “significantly bigger than the entire Epic store”.
Steam has no policies that forbid offering games on other stores, Epic has policies that makes certain games timed exclusives to EGS.
What makes EGS unattractive compared to Steam is the simple fact that Epic chooses to most prominently display their own games on EGS. Valve does front page banners, fests, that window that opens with every Steam launch, etc. and goes out of their way to make everything from big launches as well as solo dev indie games discoverable.
Epic has it in their own hands to make EGS more than the Fortnite launcher. They could promote other EGS games inside Fortnite but they don’t. They host concerts inside Fortnite but nothing to promote 3rd party EGS games, for examle.
USD 45 billion overall PC gaming revenue and all of Steam combined is 8.6bn. “And the cash flows to Valve”? Sure…
Oh, yeah, they have to. All of those examples are from publishers that tried to have their own platforms and then could not sustain that option and had to come back to the Steam platform.
So they’re not big enough.
As for Fortnite being bigger than EGS… well, yeah, it is. So much so that Epic themselves report on the two separately. And Fortnite makes more money than every other game in there put together.
10 Bn for Steam revenue this year, by the way. They are the only thing growing in the space. Everything else pulling money is aging games, 5-10 years old, that have a fossilized playerbase mobile-style. The money flows to Valve because Valve doesn’t need to make ANY games at all, pay for exclusives or do anything else. Especially since the fanboys paint any attempt at competing against a monopolistic actor as an anticompetitive act, somehow.
So still far off anything resembling >50% market share on PC. Good to know they’re still not a monopoly.
So Valve is not engaging in any anti-competitive behaviour as well as pumping resources into Linux support to break the Windows hegemony? Great!
Yeah, these people are very strange. I mean, it’s a fact that Microsoft is the convicted monopolist because of the grip Windows has on the industry, the same Microsoft that bought Minecraft, Bethesda, and Activision Blizzard King to become the world’s single biggest games publisher and their Windows-exclusive PC GamePass is also growing (surely at least partially thanks to Microsoft “continuing to misuse its Windows operating system monopoly” to promote their other services).
And yet, there are people who put the sole Linux supporter in the same corner, as if that company had anything approaching Microsoft’s market power. Not even the EU thought Valve was important enough. Microsoft, Apple, Google, ByteDance, and Meta are Digital Market Gatekeepers, not Valve.
But nobody is complaining about Steam OS having a monopoly on PC OSs, the issue is with Steam having control of the PC gaming market.
I am exhausted by humanity’s ongoing inability to hold more than one idea in their heads at once. The world isn’t made of good guys that play for your team and bad guys that play for the other team. Can people be adults for one moment at some point this century? Holy crap.
Steam can ABSOLUTELY have a dominant position in one market while attempting to erode a competitor’s dominant position in another market.
Microsoft has a dominant position in the OS market that should be eroded by both competitors and regulators.
That dominant position includes having about 75% of the PC OS market.
Steam has about 80% of the PC digital distribution market for new releases.
One of those facts isn’t tolerable just because you’ve decided to make supporting a specific alternative in the OS market your entire personality. That’s not how that works. Microsoft should be held back from the areas where it has dominance (and that includes keeping them on a very tight leash when it comes to aggregating more studios under their gaming division) and Steam should be kept on a tight leash when it comes to their dominant position on the gaming digital distribution space. Ideally by having other competitors not only survive but thrive and grow to prevent regulators having to intervene in the first place.
Those two ideas are, in fact, entirely consistent with each other with no contradiction. I am imploring social media dwellers to stop treating every issue as a football match or get off the Internet.
So it is a bad thing now that Steam makes new releases more discoverable than the other storefronts that have a larger installed base than Steam?
Microsoft’s store has a close to 100% penetration of home installation of Windows 10 and newer.
Opening Microsoft Store: Boom, top spots for Microsofts properties (Activision Blizzard sale, Minecraft, Candy Crush).
Switching to the Games tab: PC Game Pass, more Activision Blizzard sale, COD Black Ops 6 with a dedicated banner, more Minecraft, more Candy Crush.
Visiting one of Microsoft’s other game stores, Battle.net: 100% Microsoft exclusive. Not just Blizzard games but Doom, Avowed, Sea of Thieves, PC GamePass. That’s unregulated Microsoft on full display. Not a single 3rd party game even available but the rest of the Microsoft catalogue integrated after the takeover of Activision Blizzard.
Compare that to Steam: Huge banner advertising the sale promotion of EA.
Scrolling a bit further down, Microsoft games advertised, some convention for narrative games.
Nobody but Microsoft and Epic are to blame for their huge installed bases not converting to sales of 3rd party games. Mostly advertising their own properties and paid exclusives.
All your emotional outbursts do not change facts.
I want them to have some competition…
Yeah. I mean, same thing.
The point is you ideally want multiple players in the PC market competing with each other on features and approach that are all viable, sustainable and give users and developers a better deal as middlemen.
I don’t want Steam to go away, it’s an insanely good client and a great piece of software. But I don’t want every game having to be on Steam no matter what and only doing GoG or Epic or Xbox if they are being given a deal or for ideological reasons.
Valve is the only one in PC gaming to push an alternative operating system to Windows.
EGS, GOG,… all enforce a Windows hegemony. GOG Galaxy isn’t even available on Linux, despite the fact that it’s built on cross platform frameworks that make porting easy. Proton by Valve is open source and GOG Galaxy would be free to integrate it.
Heroic Launcher is a community effort that shows that it would be possible without massive investments. Epic and GOG/CD Project just chose not to.
Sure.
They also chose not to have their own layer of controller translation or their own game recording backend.
Linux is 2% of the market even on Steam with official support. DRM-free means DRM-free for everybody.
I would like more official Linux support, but I’ll take good unofficial support in the meantime. There’s no workaround for monopolistic positions or mandatory DRM-free policies.
And that unofficial support is brought to you by Valve’s contributions to Wine, DXVK, RADV, LibSDL,…
Considering that the only monopolist in PC gaming is Microsoft, the workaround for that Windows monopoly is to spend money on products that make non-Windows PC gaming better and currently that’s almost exclusively Valve.
I mean, cool.
I don’t need Valve to be a moustache-twirling cartoon villain to not like them having a monopolistic position. They make a great platform, I generally like their hardware and, much as it is a byproduct of them trying to cut Microsoft out of the loop, I think it’s great that they are basing their efforts on Linux.
They still shouldn’t become the sole platform for PC gaming, though, and that means they should lose some market share.
You really, really, really don’t need to pick a side between multibillion dollar corporations and support it like it’s a sports team.
So CD Project could take a tiny fraction of their massive Cyberpunk earnings and make GOG Galaxy with Proton integration available on Linux.
No, it has nothing to do with sports. Picking the vendor that invests into making an open source alternative to Windows viable is pure egoism. Their contributions will have a positive effect long into the future of PC gaming.
I like GoG but they don’t support Linux, they don’t take a smaller cut, and developers are free to submit their games to Steam without DRM.
I mean, they don’t need to support Linux, you can get an offline installer right from their web app. Even if Heroic didn’t solve that problem entirely (which it kinda does) you could still work around it.
And I hear this “DRM on Steam is optional” a lot, but it’s… kinda not? Even Valve admits their Steamworks integration is a soft form of DRM. Plus the point of GoG is not that you can have games with no DRM in it, it’s that you have to. You buy a game, it’s yours to keep.
That’s a massive paradigm shift. Steam exists specifically to avoid that.
It actually doesn’t. Half the games I install through Heroic don’t work. Meanwhile Steam games work 100% of the time. That’s the problem.
Don’t really see the practical difference except that it has like 1% of Steam’s library for that reason.
Yeah, well, I’ve had better luck with Heroic than Steam proper, even if Heroic is using Proton and Gamescope as well.
I guess that’s the nature of Linux gaming (still) despite what people like to say.
As for the practical difference, it boils down to my GoG library being safely backed up in storage media and preserved safely. If that doesn’t matter to you… well, I can’t help you, but you’re wrong. Either way, if the market broke a different way and GoG had a bigger share (or if Steam matched its policies) that library would not be impacted nearly as much.
I don’t believe you.
You can do the same with DRM-free Steam games. If you don’t understand that, I can’t help you but you’re wrong.
Naw, each time I buy on gog over steam I end up regretting it for some reason, usually related to modding or portability.
Gogs great, but has limitations. With steam everything works better.
Until it doesnt and your entire game library is done…
For generic SteamWorks integration, there already exists a open source DLL called Goldberg Emulator. If publishers opt for real DRM, the games are not available on GOG anyway.
Also, downloading and backing up the games have to be done by yourself before the storefront goes bust. Distributing GOG games outside of GOG is a copyright violation, unless the copyright holders explicitly allow it.
So, to sum up: You can backup DRM-free Steam games and make them work with little effort.