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Comment by beerlord | Hacker News Reader

Risky, true, but also one where outsized profits are taken by the platform holders - Apple, Google, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and Valve all take 30%. Whilst the console makers do deliver subsidised hardware to the masses and a lot of technical support, the PC and mobile commissions are pure cream.

If a decent PC store game through which mimicked Steams' featureset and charged only 12%, I think you'd see a renaissance in the industry. Hopefully Epic can deliver this on the back of Fortnite's success.

The good thing about software development is that there are basically no capital costs, mostly labour and rent. I'm surprised there aren't more games studios in Asia and Eastern Europe, where those things are cheap.

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The most obvious success (of the sort you describe) that I can think of is the Polish _CD Projekt Red_, the studio behind the Witcher series of games and the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077. They also operate the GOG.com (good old games) store/platform. Poland can technically be part of either Central or Eastern Europe depending on how you define those terms, but the exchange rate for Dollar and Euro sales of games online (relative to the Polish Złoty) probably makes hiring large numbers of good local developers more affordable.

Sadly this is unlikely to happen for anything above indie/niche games, unless the newcomer has some sort of groundbreaking advantage: first, these platforms also act as ad/exposure for game studios with limited advertisement budget by giving them access to a massive existing audience, which you're just not gonna get at this point from a new platform, and second (and more pernicious) they all have some sort of price matching clause, so if you want to take advantage of lower fees to cut the prices on the new platform and attract more people there, by contract the incumbents can adjust the price of your app unilaterally, cancelling out this move. There is also the fact that not all 30% are equal, so to speak : for example, Steam gets a lot less bad rap than the others due to the amount of tooling/services they provide. There is no easy fix to this situation.

I'm not aware of any price-matching clause. None of the key resellers would exist if that was the case. Retail stores would be unable to offer sales.

For Steam and Mobile, you need to create your own playerbase. Merely launching onto the platform will get you nowhere. If you are putting a huge effort into advertising and PR to generate an audience - you must think, why not direct them to a platform that charges me less than 30%? Android and iOS are effectively closed shops, but for PC I think its simply that no decent competitor has ever come along.

I can't find a source for the price-matching clause (I'm on my phone, sorry) but have read it several times. The lower-priced keys typically come from cheaper markets/regions (e.g. Russia), which AFAIK is kind of a grey area depending on jurisdiction, or from time-limited offers.

I base part of my reasoning on this article, where the author points out there are already cheaper options with good tooling such as itch.io, yet they do not attract a lot of titles: https://www.fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to-compete-with-...

Keys from those regions are almost always region locked.

What about the Humble Store? Those are mostly Steam keys.

Itch.io has even less curation than Steam. It has less of a feature that people want.

> I'm surprised there aren't more games studios in Asia and Eastern Europe

Aren't they?

> Belarus still relies on state-run manufacturers and Soviet-era collective farms. The European Union prefers not to buy food from those farms because one-fifth of Belarus was contaminated by fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine. Video games, however, are another matter, as are mobile phone apps and software products. All these are being produced in a drab industrial park on the northeastern outskirts of Minsk, an unlikely but booming high-tech hub.

http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-belarus-tech-boom-...

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