this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
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Are you joking? I’ve saved thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, by waiting for Steam Sales and buying games at a reasonable price for me(I’m poor) rather than paying $60 a game. Nobody else does this(When was the last time Nintendo put Mario Kart on sale?)
The statement “Steam overcharges gamers” is self-defeating and hilarious.
Totally agree, steam is one the big players that stills offers a quality service both for consumers and for developers
Would said competitor be the one who successfully trained their users to only look at their store once a week for a free game or two then close the store again? 😉
I recently got my first current-gen game console a couple of years ago (Nintendo switch) and was floored at how expensive all of the games are and how meager the sales are. PC gaming is shockingly cheap when you get down to it
FYI go walk your local target from time to time. They'll sometimes have random sales on the big switch games with no online listing of the sale. I got the last pokemon game 6 months or so late for $20 off
Nintendo doesn't reward super patient gaming though like other consoles where I didnt pay more than over $20 for any PS4 first party exclusives. It is actually on the weird side where sometimes physical prices actually go up with Nintendo seeming to be more conservative about number of physical copies they make to keep prices high compared to Sony where brick and motor stores look to offload physical inventory. So leads to used market for Nintendo games going crazy compared to downward trend of other consoles.
Oh that's good to know! Too bad my nearest target is 20 miles away and a very annoying drive over a poorly designed arterial road
Right?! Having moved off of consoles entirely this generation, I’ve hoovered up amazing games during the countless Steam sales at prices CEX can’t even beat.
I hope this gets thrown out as hogwash.
I mean literally everything could be cheaper. Welcome to a capitalist society.
the solution to that is taxes, not suing successful business one at a time.
And you want to start with Valve, which is one of the smaller game companies and is one of the few players not guilty of buying up their competition, instead of Sony, Microsoft, other Big Tech players, media conglomerates like Disney, ISPs like Comcast or AT&T, or meat distributors who are price fixing algorithmicly?
Why even buy games period? Why risk giving money to any of them since things that become popular risk making the people selling them to become wealthy? Not like indies are immune to it looking at Minecraft becoming too popular that too many people wanted to buy it making one person then a corporation wealthy, so why not just not buy period to prevent the issue from even becoming a possibility?
The best solution is prevention. Don't buy anything.
bruh, don't lump me with this idiot.
What would be the solution here that could drive the prices down? Limit profit levels per company?
I feel like it's not even capitalism itself being the problem alone, but also the entry cost for all these services. Building a competitor to Steam is pretty much equal to building a competitor to Youtube which means it's almost impossible due to the running costs of the service AND you would have to be somehow wildly better as in not gather as much money from your customers. It would be lovely to see some resolution to these problems without going full communism first.
Okay, but who gets to decide what's the maximum profit margin allowed? How would it be determined so that it wouldn't also prevent new competition from growing up because that 30% is the only thing that allows the companies to make some money from their service and use that money to develop said service.
If there was no method by which people could ever profit from a system like Steam, why bother building it?
They absolutely could. If only there was any serious competition and not just some quick cash grabbers like EA and others. As long as Steam is providing most value to users (=players) without even restricting competition like other tech companies do in other areas (cough Apple), they are able to take the 30% cut without a complaint.
The only reason EA and others aren't serious competition is because of their lack of effort.
Every time the topic comes up, PC gamers don't bother with their services because they're shoddily written and slow. The complaint of "They don't have millions of games on there to amass in one library" is a minority one.
Exactly. Why should they succeed if they don't even try to win the competition?
Streaming platforms for TV series and movies went into the direction of every large movie company running their own streaming platform and only limiting their own content to their own platform which lead into a bad customer experience when you just wanted to see the latest Disney or HBO or whatever thing. I think it's a good thing EA and others didn't succeed doing the same in gaming industry and only limiting their games to their own stores even though they did try really hard. That's not even competition, it's just being greedy.
A true competitor to Steam would try to sell and serve games of their own and also made by others. I guess Epic tries to do that in a sense but they also lack the actual effort of making a good product and instead tries to win some market share by just throwing lots of money at it. I know it's hard to build an actually good software product (because I work in the industry) but I also know it's not impossible. Somehow the companies that have the means to compete just aren't able to get their shit together and for some reason that's the reason why we shouldn't like Valve either?
I mean, if Epic actually did what shills like @[email protected] promote - that is, reflect lower cuts in a cheaper price to consumers, then we would all be flabbergasted how big their market percentage is.
But they're not doing that, that's the thing. Because Tim Sweeney does not want storefronts to take a smaller cut. Quite the opposite. His problem is that the cut is only 30%, and worse, does not go into his pockets!
But there is always an excuse. Epic tried that. Companies complained.
Their sales used to give you a reusable $10 off coupon. That didn't change the amount the companies got when someone bought their game. It only changed how much they paid. When one of the Witcher games had that coupon applied to it, the developer got pissed off and changed the price of the game so that it was a cent or two below the threshold to activate the coupon, and then fans of the dev were excusing it claiming that they couldn't let the price be lower because it would 'devalue' the game.
if a game was $30 on Steam and $25 on Epic (as a regular price), or some other service, you'd undoubtedly hear the same rhetoric.
Epic's cut is 12% not 30%. They also waive the 5% royalty fee over $1 million for sales on the Epic Store if you use Unreal. Epic doesn't control the prices. Devs set the prices. They leave the price the same on Epic so that they can actually get a little more for each sale.
What the should do on a $60 game though is to set the price at like $56 on Epic, it would encourage people to save a couple bucks there, while still getting them more than steam after the cuts.
I do, and I feel like the real intent is something completely different here than what is said out loud.
E: So Epic Games Store is actually giving out games for free and they still can't gain traction because their platform sucks so bad otherwise. My guess is someone just wants to try and get a tough competitor driven out of one country so that they could bring their own, worse, service there instead and take the market share without actually competing.
As evidenced by games costing less on stores where the cut is lower!
Oh... wait...
In a world where Sony and Embracer are running around saying we need to be paying $70+ for games (while tipping the devs and buying micro transactions like a good like wallet)... You're mad at the storefront?
Yeah, go into Walmart and demand they take less of a cut so... The publisher can take more from the devs?
Gabe is rich because he spearheaded a good service (which I'll admit I thought was a scam back when I was forced to make an account way back when I had dial up) but... 30% is standard. For the price of games? Be mad at Embracer. Be mad at EA. You're free to not like or use Steam but they let the publishers set the price. Their cut is a drop in the bucket. The whole 'cut' debate is just EGS propaganda.
You're poor but have possibly spent hundreds of thousands on games?
No, I’ve saved hundreds of thousands. Between Steam sales and Humble Bundle, always being a patient gamer, I’ve amassed over 300 games id like to play but haven’t spent more than $500 on Steam over my entire life. I’m poor but $500 over a couple years I can do.
For comparison, at $60 a game, that would buy me 8 console or Nintendo games at full price plus a little DLC.
It’s the best price, bar none.
You've saved hundreds or thousands, but you've not saved hundreds of thousands.
Is that in American dollars?
If those 300 games were even US $70 each which is exceedingly generous, you'd only scratch $21,000 as the cost of everything. Unless Steam was literally giving you $180,000+ for using their store, you've not saved hundreds of thousands.
Unless you're referring to hundreds of thousands of pennies.
yen
Playstation and Xbox regularly put games on sale. And their base prices almost always go down over time. I assume Steam is more steep discounts. But you can absolutely get by without paying full price on consoles if you wait.
You can usually snag items for 75% or more off about 1-2 years after launch on Steam (and by extension all other PC game sales platforms) and it's consistent enough that you can count on it (and I do!). I've never seen discounts go that deep on consoles, at least not for games I actually play.
Also GOG will just decide at random that a game is infact 1 dollar for no reason.
Nintendo doesn't tho