I had another lengthy discussion about EGS with the Rebel Galaxy devs today. I strongly disagree with their opinion that Epic's moneyhats are the only way to make their store popular, and even more with their opinion that Valve did the same with HL2.
This said, they keep repeating that they are doing it to push Valve into lowering their cut. They even believe that 12% is perfectly possible for Steam, even with key reselling. I'm not sure if they are being honest here.
I will obviously not buy Rebel Galaxy Outlaws, and I think it's a bit sad to brag about "we're fighting for a lower cut for indies" when they've signed a contract with Epic that offers them a minimum revenue guarantee.
Then they're bad devs, despite their pedigree. They evidently don't know the costs of Steam nor the innerworkings of the platform, the backend, SteamWorks or their bizdev.
You should link the Bizdev conference Tom G from Valve hosted.
(Notable parts include their gargantuan growth in the CIS & Asia, both of which
almost* exclusively use payment methods that charge 18% or more. In the case of Asia, it's notable that less than a quarter of payments are even done through traditional payment methods, but through SteamBanks (yes this is a thing in Asia; ATMs that support converting your cash to SteamWallet monies) and SteamWallet Cards.)
*They're so predominant that "traditional" payment methods are statistically irrelevant.
All of these payment methods are impossible to do at a 12% cut, and most aren't going to be supported by EGS. The ones that are (like, one or two?) push the costs onto consumers.
The TL;DR for the dumbo dev is that over a third of the most active consumers on the PC platform
wont touch EGS as they're not
able to buy the sodding games
(SteamWallet Cards cost ~26% of each unit it's used for)
Mind you, I've already spoken with 'em on Twitter. They've got a hard on for the cut, and little actual knowledge of Steams dev-facing backend (despite... Using it for their last game, surely?) and NO clue of the cut.