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this post was submitted on 12 May 2025
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Maybe it's just me but I can't recall any occasion where Valve said "hey devs, here's a pile of money but you're not allowed to sell your game outside Steam", have any examples in mind?
Valve purchased the rights to Counter-Strike in 2000, transitioning it from a community-made mod to a retail product. Similarly, Day of Defeat, initially a third-party Half-Life modification, was acquired by Valve, leading to a standalone retail release in 2003. In the case of Dota, Valve hired the mod’s lead developer and secured the intellectual property rights, culminating in the release of Dota 2 in 2013. These games remain exclusive to Steam.
These are all Valve not selling their own games outside Steam, their own storefront. Does Epic sell Fortnite anywhere else?
Metro Exodus' publisher is Deep Silver. Epic, a storefront, paid through the nose to get exclusivity on distributing someone else's product. At the last minute.
They are not the same.
What is the distinction for the player? Both Counter-Strike and Control were funded by Valve and Epic, respectively. Both ended up with exclusivity. To the player, what different do the intro logos make?
It sounds like you’re trying to win by technicality.
Had a gamedev from a respected studio tell me that same rumour about Steam pushing exclusivities. All it takes is a little digging to find out that's false. Some people were upset when Steam was installed with Valve's own games as a launcher, and later more and more devs launched their games on Steam as a store because they wanted to. The alternative, Games For Windows Live, was lame and unstable. It was just the a smart choice for those that didn't want to make their own launcher. Also, don't feed that other troll who's been posting nonsense everywhere. 🤣 And yeah, even if some good came from milking tons of cash from spoiled kids (I was glad for Oddworld Inhabitants to name one), as a consumer it's best to just delete your EGS account. If you got a game there for free that you wish to keep just copy its files elsewhere ASAP before deleting your account. Epic Games is known to have randomly deleted games from accounts because of server issues and their customer support will reject complaints about this by default, so getting attached to it's library is not a good idea.
Oh! One more thing. Epic Online Services. If it's optional in a game just disable it. You'll have less connection issues and in some games you just won't be able to play online at all if you don't disable that crap. Same goes for Epic's Easy Anti-Cheat, some mods let you disable that in a few games and doing so fixes some stutters it causes (night and day difference in Elden Ring). You're welcome. 🫶
Valve never had to because they established a monopoly so developers did that on their own without Valve paying them. Meanwhile Valve has ripped off the entire gaming industry for its entire existence, charging absurd fees to gamers and developers and you guys are all so bought into their monopoly that you blindly praise them for it.
Gabe Newell is a billionaire. No billionaire earned their money. Every billionaire exploited people for it.
Right, and GOG also "had to" purchase exclusive rights to the games on its platform and force DRM. Oh wait, that didn't happen.
Oh yeah, let's all repeat the playbook of GoG, first you just have to spend a decade establishing yourself as the only publisher able to get former Soviet gamers to pay for games rather than pirate them, then turn that trust that you built with two third party developers into a storefront selling their classic titles for them for 6 years, then use your established customer base and goodwill to try and transition into being a proper AAA storefront.
Totally viable business strategy /s
Epic has fortnite and the FUCKING UNREAL ENGINE THAT REPLACED THE QUAKE 2 ENGINE FOR BEING USED IN EVERYTHING.
I think they're on an even ground.
If you're building a game, and you build it on Unreal engine, so it's handling literally all of the rendering, development tooling, animation engine, game logic engine, etc. etc. you'll pay Epic a smaller percentage than you'll pay Valve for hosting your exe file in cloud storage with some reviews and comments.
Think 5% vs 30%.
Yeah, sure. Epic recieved 5% of basically 90% of games being released from about 2003 to fuck knows when.
Yeah, for building most of those games. Valve has recieved 30% for doing fuck all. Why are you so adamantly defending them?
Valve literally hosts petabytes of game data and allows any user to download them at any time. That's not nothing, data storage is very expensive, and users are charged nothing for it. They provide a service to not only the customers, but also the developers. Steam has so many backend features that allow devs to skip so many networking steps that can otherwise be a huge nightmare. Not sure why you think they are literally just a webpage that has a purchase button next to a game.
No, it's really not. Azure and AWS storage is dirt cheap, especially if it's cold storage and you can have a second or two delay when retrieving the file. If it was expensive, they wouldn't be the most profitable tech company per employee.
No, it doesn't. It provides a small handful of APIs around friends and matchmaking, which Xbox and Epic also provide for half the fees, in addition to the generic Azure and AWS versions.
I'm a software engineer whos built both an app store and 3d rendering engines. I know exactly how little work it took Valve to build Steam and how much work it took Epic to build Unreal.
They are not remotely comparable. Gamers are just lemmings who love Valve cause everyone loves Valve and talks about Valve, when in reality Valve has overcharged and ripped them off for decades.
providing an engine does not build the game.
I'm not defending valve, I'm attacking epic
Well good thing I said "most" of a game. Go ahead and write your game logic and then tell me how you get it to render graphics on a screen without any engine code.
Yeah, in the context of a discussion about whether or not Valve is overcharging customers.
Jesus Christ, keep up.
Because per employee, Valve is one of the most profitable tech companies ever. That means they charged far higher fees than their costs.
So is your solution to have Valve hire more people and be less profitable? That would justify their fees? Or are you mad that the best market place with the most features is beating the pants off the last second cash grab platform that is just an extension of Ten Cent and the giant money pits sucking up actual developers?
You talk like a shill. Valve doesn't need to charge less for the services they provide. They know what they have, which they have earned through good will and listening to feedback. Epic has nothing but money to pay people to shit talk Steam.
No, they should have charged lower fees.
You're literally defending a billionaire who made his money overcharging gamers for decades.
If they camharge lower fees they would be getting allegations of pricing out any competition and get a lot of bad will. It's a lose lose situation with the solution you are proposing
Lowering fees would have resulted in everyone liking them even more.
You're thinking of revenue, not profit. Profit is revenue minus costs.