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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

Those games are the exceptions that prove the rule. There's some major gaming franchises out there that basically have their own gravity field at this point and can drive people to different storefronts(Fortnite, Minecraft, etc), but outside of those games, forget it, if your new game isn't a AAAA blockbuster and isn't on Steam, most people won't really carea bout it.

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I agree with the thrust of your point, that a tiny handful of games have their own gravity field which lets them ignore the titan that is Steam.

But nit: that's not what "exception that proves the rule" means. An example of that saying is a sign that says "no parking 2-4pm", which proves that there is a rule that you can park any other time. WoW, Fortnite, CoD, Minecraft, those are just "exceptions".

Besides Fortnite (which is a big hit on mobile/consoles) all those examples hit their stride before steam opened to third parties or early in that period. Others like COD or Minecraft may have started on PC but migrated their main focus to other platforms too.

What stands out to me is that while most studios accept that they've got to pay their tithe to valve in order to succeed on PC, for many it seems to begrudgingly so and where they have the capability they investigate using their own or alternative channels to get a better rate. It's an interesting parallel to Valve's moan around 15 years or so that Microsoft could E.E.E. PC gaming and the linux direction was hedging against that.

That's hyperbole at best, especially given that places like itch.io and GoG exist.

CDPR also puts all of their games DRM free from release on GoG - including The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077.

As long as Steam's pricing parity rule of thumb exists, there's only so much those others can do to compete. The only real reason people use alternative stores is to save money, and Valve put a silent hand on that.

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