Worked for one of the worlds largest video games publishers for 6+ years. Now I work for the largest games publisher in the world, so, if anyone would get a discount for being big it would be us.
It’s 30% platform fee for sales on the PlayStation or xbox platforms, 70k eur/y developer fee (and you still have to buy hardware which is double sometimes triple price from the consumer stuff).
Valve has the same 30% and the same “non-compete” w.r.t discounts on other platforms.
This is pretty standard, and is one of the reasons why people tend to release on epic or steam and not both.
The Microsoft store takes a mere 5%.
The Epic Games Store is at... 12% I believe. There's also no exclusivity from either Steam or EGS. The only condition is not using Steam to promote a game that will release first on EGS.
Although, while we had good relationships with Microsoft at Ubisoft on a technical basis- I'm not sure about the business arrangement. If Valve is any indication then it was likely incredibly hostile.
Epic does only take 12%, it's an outlier, and is gaining traction because of it.
For publishers/developers getting a special deal, there's just no upside to sharing that information, even internally.
Since I can see total unit sales and total income and it’s broken down on SKU- then it would have been easy for me to see a discrepancy from what I was told our deals were by my masters at HQ but there never was one.
I think you assume too much of executives, they are consumers of our work, they don’t create any reports or such themselves.
I don't believe any of those vendors take anything close to 30% of in-game revenue. And the reason is they compete with each other, quite vigorously, for the same set of users looking for the same set of products (consoles and games).
> or classify iOS as somehow different...
Right, because Apple is leveraging their dominance of an external market (high end mobile phones) to control pricing in the game market that "should" be more akin to consoles. But it demonstrably isn't. And that is a problem.
If you want to argue here, the proper argument is that iOS isn't a monopoly (and that Google charges similar fees). But don't argue that it's the same as a console, that just doesn't make sense.