Hey, if Apple released repair videos, device schematics, commit their translation tech and kernel development to upstream, maintained CI/CD pipelines for all major operating systems, built platform-agnostic hardware APIs for third-party vendors and built safe inroads for the modding/enthusiast community, I think their 30% wouldn't be so hard to swallow. All we got were some lame whitepapers instead.

The prescience of doing SteamOS/Steam Machines/Steam Controllers years before EGS seems to have paid off for them. (Eventually, and probably by accident, time will tell but the device seems to be pretty badass so far).

> Its tool for doing that is consumer sentiment.

That is the tool for basically doing anything productive as a business... it isn't as if they've done some about face at the emergence of genuine competition - they've always been unusually well liked (especially considering the industry).

In contrast, a prominent thread about Adobe currently sits on the front page.

Valve already decreased it cut for highest-grossing titles to 25% (after $10 million in sales) or 20% (after $50 million in sales).

And fortunately for Valve even 3 years after release Epic Games Store don't even have half of Steam features. Also Epic is so consumer-hostile (or as they call it pro-developer) that they won't ever implement player-reviews into their system.

So it's not that hard for Valve for keep their mindshare. Far larger danger for them is Microsoft with it's Xbox game subscription model and unlimited amount of money.

That seems backwards. The vast majority of games aren't making $10mm, definitely not $50mm. Why take more money from the small indie developer?

Because they can. Where are these small developers going to go? Itch.io, GOG, Epic, Humble? These are all options but it’s suicide to not list on the Steam store. Too many PC gamers use Steam exclusively.

Meanwhile the large developers, the ones who are making $50M+, those developers have enough pull to make the user install a custom client like Origin. That’s why Valve cuts them a better deal.

Because they can and there are is no real competition. Epic Game Store so far is laughtable attempt at pumping money into user-hostile service that missing tons of features. For now the only good reason to release on EGS is Epic giving your company money.

Disclosure: I work at small indie PC gamedev studio.

I just point out how Valve changed rules for big companies back in 2018. So they have different revenue share compared to both Apple / Google and consoles.

The fixed cost of hosting a game is relatively fixed (providing a storefront, first level customer support, license management), and the part of the cost that scales but is still cheap (bandwidth is larger for bigger titles).

However, there are many times more small indie titles than there are big successes, and it's the big titles that draw users to your platform and bring in the money.

If Valve flipped their model, those indie titles would be even more of a net drain on their profitability, while there would be more incentive for the big titles to release on their own platforms.