I'd love it if they had a comparable service, because competition is good for the consumer, but they just don't.
Steam has had a relative monopoly for two decades, and we're lucky they've been customer friendly. But if something were to happen to Gabe, or Valve decided to go public or something, we're screwed.
If Epic could actually provide a better service, they would be seeing customers and developers actually want to use their platform.
Doubt
Gog is objectively giving you more value for your money but even cdpr had to release the Gwent standalone on steam eventually because people didn't buy it enough - once it was on steam it sold more than in a year on gog in weeks
People don't look at the alternatives at all - unless it's a AAA game with an exclusive deal
Gog is objectively giving you more value for your money
What value do they give you exactly?
The games are mostly priced the same, they don't have integrated modding support, no input remapping, no remote play, no in-home streaming, no steamcmd for server operators, no VR client, no Linux client and no Steam Deck support.
The only thing they do give you is no DRM, but nothing stops a developer from adding a DRM-free game on Steam.
Epic building a launcher that has equivalent features to Steam would do nothing. Everyone wants all their games in one place, and everyone already has their friends list there.
Getting exclusives and giving away games is probably the only way they could even enter the market. Yeah the launcher kinda sucks, but Valve has decades of development that they've poured into Steam, it isn't simple to just copy everything. There was a time that Steam sucked.
Steam is a de-facto monopoly. They luckily don't really do anti competitive practices, they just focus on having a great product, and that's why people (myself included) love them. But I don't think another company can ever really enter the PC market without a few tricks like exclusives or free games.
It's not free. The point is to get me to make an account on Epic and install their stupid launcher. That isn't free and I'm tired of people claiming things are "free" when in fact they exist to get you to sign up for another service. It's not free-as-in-air.
Oh Sweeney having a tantrum, when hasn't that happened monthly since like 10 years ago? Sweeney if you want more money than what you're already making, then fucking make better products man. Fucking asshole trying to win the game by crying to daddy government and having fits. It would be one thing if he was a small guy being treated unfairly, but this dude is in the elite as well, his company is a big name in the game, but he cries as if he was small potatoes being treated unfairly by big corpos. Fuck off, corpo trash trying to pass as a small boy. If there's a thing more annoying than a corporation being an asshole is an asshole corporation trying to pass as a victim.
You know what I find more annoying then that? Defending a monopoly that's rent seeking to the tune of a million dollars of revenue per employee per year, and that's with most of the employees literally being paid to work on nothing.
Perhaps, but on the other side of that coin: Because valve doesn't have legal obligations to make money snd increase shareholder value, they put a lot of money elsewhere. The products they create are awesome (literally the best launcher on PC, Tim Sweeney is probably upset because his is ass) and invest heavily in things better for gamers:
digital returns were huge when they first rolled out
(IMO) spearheading game streaming with steam in home streaming & the steam link
creating awesome games and not milking them for perpetual profit (other than maybe in game items but i don't want to have this discussion)
investing heavily in alternative ways to play (steam machines, aforementioned steam link, VR/index, steam controller, steam deck)
legitimately spending money to make it possible to game on Linux, reducing gamers reliance on Microsoft/Windows
If you actually think that reduced fees mean lower cost for consumer, you're out of touch with reality.
and developers
They are free to go somewhere else like the EGS utopia where developers are definitively get paid directly an equal cut of each sale and no publisher intermediary like EA and Activision is just taking all the revenue and the developers get paid their usual salary anyhow.
You're right. Giving 30% for really fucking good platform services is way worse than having to find a publisher that takes in 70 to 90% of revenue and pushes devs to release unfinished games.
As petulant and annoying as tim Sweeney can be, I do think he's right that valve's fees are pretty exorbitant at their level of success. They could take a much smaller cut and still be making bank.
No, valves fees are completely reasonable. $100 one time fee, then 30% for any game key sold by valve with something like a million guaranteed impressions. Also it’s 0% if you generate the keys for free and sell them elsewhere like on your own website. All with the benefit of the steam network and hosting. I’m tired of people believing Tim’s lies under the facade of “he’s and asshole but he has a point”. He doesn’t have a point. He’s throwing a tantrum because he doesn’t have what he wants which is hundreds of millions of paying customers and he doesn’t want to put the time and investment needed into building out the infrastructure to achieve the same feat. He’s a greedy little fuck that wants to do the bare minimum to get rich while valve has been coasting as a market leader because they built the whole freakin market!