The article makes some good points, especially about Apple's abusive position (and how they skim profit not just from the hardware, but also the services and app store built in), but the "Valve too" assertion is lazy and poorly-put, as is the argument that the reason Epic is doing 88/12 is to change the industry.
We should also be mindful that the 70/30 split is an industry standard, for better or worse, and that some storefronts can better justify it than others. It's not a clear cut 30% is good or bad, and Fahey does address this to a degree, saying that the 30% and 12% cut arguments are more than likely pulled from thin air. I'm inclined to agree to some extent.
Apple, having a monopoly on the iOS platform, charging a 30% cut when they own and profit from the hardware and baked-in services that put them at a distinct advantage compared to other service providers, is patently ludicrous. They absolutely should not be charging 30% because that 30% cut is not really benefitting the customer or third party developers.
Google, tying critical Android functionality to their proprietary services, commands a huge amount of leverage to pressure manufacturers to pre-load the Play Store onto devices, giving Google an unfair advantage similar to how Microsoft pushed Internet Explorer back in the day. In those cases, the 30% cut again feels unfair as neither customers nor developers are really seeing any benefit. An app launched through the Amazon Store, or F-Droid, is functionally identical to one launched through Google Play. The only reason Google commands a 30% cut there is because they're the biggest fish in the pond.
PlayStation Store, Xbox Marketplace and Nintendo eShop are different from mobile, as the digital stores present a better deal for developers, publishers and the platform holder. Their ~30% cut is definitely more than they'd get from a retail copy sold, but so is the ~70% developers/publishers get, as the overheads of physical copy sales really eats into the margins. We're also potentially seeing a "digital only" console from both Sony and Microsoft that is priced competitively, with that 30% cut helping to subsidise that hardware.
The PC platform is, again, different. Valve doesn't leverage any sort of consumer lock-in to get people to use Steam. People use Steam because, well, they want to use Steam. Because it's good. When I build or buy a new PC, I am in no way coerced to use Steam. Valve doesn't pay anyone to pre-install it (as far as I'm aware), and try as hard as they might, when I start a fresh install of Windows for the first time I don't download apps from their built-in store or browse the web on Edge; I just open it to download Firefox and Steam then forget most of the built-in Microsoft junk ever existed. And Valve's 30% cut gives value to customers and developers, whether they realise it or not. It allows developers to generate keys for free, which they can then sell via third parties or their own ecommerce platform, with Valve taking 0%.
The 30% cut funds functionality which, either at the time or still today, no one else wanted to develop. Big Picture (admittedly now surpassed by third party apps); friends lists, groups and chat (admittedly now surpassed by Discord); retail top-up cards (something no one else but Origin really does) and "exotic" and costly payment methods that Valve eats the cost on (and which Epic will ding the customer for); remote play (something that has some third party competition on, but nothing that is quite as comprehensive as Valve's offering, since the only excellent alternative requires a Nvidia GPU); Steam Workshop (admittedly now matched by EGS's modding support, assuming the community embrace it); and countless improvements and tweaks to the service to aid in discovering and selling games.
On alternative platforms, you are literally on your own to promote your game, whereas Valve has taken its responsibility as the biggest place to buy and sell and worked tirelessly to improve store functionality, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. None of the aforementioned platform holders do half of what Valve tries to do to increase commerce on their store platforms. Steam lets me find amazing games, and it lets good developers sell their amazing games to the right audience, and that process is changing and improving all the time.
Steam has expanded the PC gaming audience from a "dying" platform rife with piracy 10-15 years ago, to a place that people buy and sell games like they never have before. Valve aren't heroes, and they do lots of shitty things (as all companies do), but their contribution to the sustainability of the PC as a platform, and not just in a historical sense but a perpetual and ongoing sense, is immeasurable. But the way some people talk, it's as if we should go back to the days before Steam proved games on PC could sell. The days before indies could find their customers with ease. The days when Japanese developers looked at the PC as a tool, and rolled their eyes at people wanting them to port games to PC because they
knew it was just going to be pirated.
And in the end, Epic are no heroes as some want to paint them. They want to be a gatekeeper too, just in a different way. They feel they can take a hit on an 88/12 split if it means they can leverage their influence over developers to use Unreal Engine and other Epic middleware. It may not be super profitable on PC, but if developers naturally gravitate to EGS on PC, they'll be more inclined to use Unreal Engine and other Epic middleware on that platform (due to it all rolling into the 12% PC store cut), opening the door to Epic taking a slice of every sale on the consoles in the future. For the next big indie hit, that could be a good little earner for Epic. And that's even if Epic allows the next big indie hit onto their store - they may just decide it's a "crappy game" and strangle it out of existence before it even has a chance to shine.
And I'm sure if Epic gets their way, a few years later we'll see the same developers who whinged about Valve now crying about Epic holding too much sway over how they make and sell their games, and how EGS has bullied them into giving Epic a cut on sales for all future platforms in perpetuity.
Edit: Wow, that became a rant. Something about that article rubbed me the wrong way, I guess.
www.gamasutra.com
www.epicgames.com
www.bloomberg.com
