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Comment by CursedSilicon | Hacker News Reader

I'd question the idea that they treat developers poorly. Epic Games Store exists and Famously beats Steam (and others) over the head by charging only a 12% fee

Hell, they even buy timed exclusive access to certain games

And yet. Steam persists

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I lack an informed opinion on the matter but I have to wonder what you think the one thing has to do with the other? Developers have very little choice but to go where the customers are.

Why aren't the customers going to Epic Game Store? It's the PC, after all. It's explicitly not a walled garden

Who knows? Presumably because Steam hasn't done anything to drive them off, they've generally been satisfied with the service, and the titles they want are available. At least that would be my guess based on my personal experience but I assume Valve has a much better grasp of their audience than I do.

The Epic Game Store is just kind of mid. The app feels spammy, the game selection is less, and it doesn't really offer anything over the existing options beyond the monthly free game gimmick. If they want customers to head there it needs to be better, not just good enough.

EGS has yet to reach the feaure parity of Steam from 15 years ago.

As a user of both EGS and Steam, the one thing that EGS doesn't have that Steam does is multi-threaded downloading. Steam can saturate any connection I've thrown at it, whereas EGS gets a few-hundred mbit/s and saturates a single CPU while doing it.

Perhaps game devs get a whole bunch of "gee whiz" features from the Steam Platform that Epic Games doesn't provide, but I -personally- couldn't care less about those.

You don't need multiple threads to saturate a gigabit connection. Even many embedded SoCs can do it.

That said, Steam has a rather absurd CDN.

> You don't need multiple threads to saturate a gigabit connection. Even many embedded SoCs can do it.

What I've observed is

* when Steam downloads are in progress, between four and nine logical CPUs worth of processing power on my 32-way Threadripper are being used and zero logical CPUs are running at 100%

* when EGS downloads are in progress, exactly one logical CPU on that Threadripper is pegged at 100%

It's true that you can do gigabit downloads without having a multithreaded downloader. [0] But it seems to be true that the two biggest PC-game-store clients absolutely cannot... for whatever reason. Given the prevalence of gaming machines that have CPUs with four or more logical CPUs, I expect it's not really worth the effort to make whatever Steam is doing single-threaded, or whatever single-threaded thing EGS is doing fast enough to saturate a 1gbit+ download.

[0] One widely-deployed example would be SSH/SCP.

I go to EGS once a week or so just to see which free game is on offer, and the experience is only barely tolerable.

If you're giving away free games and can barely manage to attract people to your storefront, you might be doing something wrong.

In their defense I suppose, most other competitors weren't much better. I don't think anyone misses Origin, and you'd have to pay me to spend any amount of time on Ubisoft's storefront. Only GOG comes close, and they earn a lot of good will in other ways.

> Epic Games Store exists and Famously beats Steam (and others) over the head by charging only a 12% fee

https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-developers-will-soon-...

Unless you're inside Fortnite, where Epic takes a 63% cut of any 'in game item' you sell, and you don't have a choice of storefront inside the game.

Rules for me, but not for thee, so sayeth Timmy Tencent as he collects his next ten cents of revenue from a twelve year old.

The epic games launcher that famously takes 46 seconds to launch. It’s cost them 100s of millions and they refuse to fix it.

Having worked in the games industry for long time, everyone is constantly trying in vain to escape the 30% tax.

It’s fascinating how (mostly western liberal) game developers argue in favor of 99% taxes for general population “for maintaining infrastructure” and yet cannot fathom paying a fee for maintaining actual infrastructure that is necessary for their business to function.

I'm not familiar with whatever strawman you're invoking here.

By "everyone" I mean game studio owners. They're desperate to not pay 30% to Valve / Sony / Apple / whatever.

The vast majority of people that work at game studios don't really care about that, they see a shrinking fraction of the profits of their employers and worsening conditions.

It makes a lot of sense for businesses to seek to reduce their costs wherever they can. But, from what I've heard about brick and mortar distribution, you used to pay quite a bit more and get a lot less than what Steam gives you.

From what I can tell, that 30% cut gets you -for the rest of forever-

* distribution for both the current version of the game and some number of older versions you choose to make available [0]

* a place in their searchable games index [1]

* "cloud" storage for your players' savegames

* basic forum and blog hosting for discussion of and news about your game

From what I could tell as someone who used to buy games in retail stores, in a bricks and mortar distribution unless you were -like- the Starcraft/Diablo/Warcraft boxed set, you got like maybe a half year of time on the shelf. I've heard folks say that you had to pay a 50->80% cut for that.

[0] Valve will even distribute games that don't work anymore. This is both good and bad, but Steam's no-hassles refund policy combined the existence of unofficial patches that make games work on current versions of Windows make me generally fine with charging for and distributing games that no longer work as-is.

[1] ...at least until the wrong horde of pearl-clutching busybodies demand that credit card companies require your game be erased from the commercial world because it is art that discusses those busybodies' bugbear du jour

The Epic store is horrendously slow though. I bought a few games there but in practice the client is just so slow that I avoid it if I can.

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