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Comment by Reedx | Hacker News Reader

This is a great step forward. The extra 15% will make the difference between survival or not for a lot of small/solo developers.

Valve next, please.

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We've already got the Epic Games Store that takes 10%, so no need to have Valve be next.

Valve will eventually align themselves though, this is what happens in an healthy market.

I am not sure if the market is healthy, though. GOG and other alternative stores didn't take off. While Epic has their strategy of giving away some free games to attract traffic, I am not sure how well that translates to actual purchases. If a customer has a choice between buying a game at the same price between two stores, they're going to stick to the one which they already use and have a big library on. And even though Steam's community features are anemic, people do get SOME value from having friends on Steam that own the same game and so on. I think it'll be hard for Epic to crack this one.

Steam has a strong hold because developers can generate as many keys as they want for free. So if indie games sell games in Humble Bundle and the likes, they are distributing Steam keys because it costs them nothing.

This alone puts Steam on the map of many gamers interested in indie games.

Epic Game Store is still invite only as far as Im aware.

Epic launched their store 2 years ago. Steam still very much dominates and Valve is stubborn.

But now Apple has weakened the case that 30% is industry standard, so hopefully they'll budge. And I think you're right that they'll eventually align.

It's unfortunate that Valve could have easily been a leader on this front. Now they'll be a late follower at best.

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