I'll put it simple: there is a big difference between "revolutionizing content delivery" and cock-measuring contest.
From everything I've outlined earlier it's easy to see that customers are their last priority. As a typical consumer I don't really give two shits about who makes what percentage of revenue. All I care about is the final price, how easy it is to use, and how appealing it is to use long-term. So far EGS haven't ticked a single box out of it, including their glorified lower prices.
I'll admit to not paying much attention to this, but is EGS supposed to sell games cheaper? I can't say I've noticed that at least. Nor do I see that as any part of the point. The point is establishing a relevant competitor to Steam.
As for dick-measuring contests, I really don't give a damn, but I do have a vested interest in seeing overblown egos getting brought back to reality. And Gaben is quite possibly the biggest one in PC gaming. I'm not saying Tim Sweeney is better by any stretch of the imagination, but it's better for everyone if those two wear each other down rather than letting Gabe sit on his throne and be adored by gamers for eternity.
As for you only caring about those things: congratulations, you are by your own admission part of the core problem with the gaming industry. A short brief: the games industry is dominated by publishers and platform holders, who - while of course having not insignificant monetary needs due to platform and infrastructure development, marketing, etc. - capture a grossly disproportionate share of revenue, leaving developers seriously struggling. How many developers do we hear of who go bankrupt every year? How many studios are bought out by a publisher or similar gigantic corporation, either after going under or to avoid going under? Pretty much all of them. This is a market that breeds conservative game development, crushes creativity, upholds horrible working conditions (crunch has been a focus for a decade or more, yet is still prevalent across the industry, just to mention one example), and treats developers - the ones who actually
make the games we play, after all - as tenant workers with pretty much no rights. This is why EGS's choice of taking a much smaller cut of revenue is a big deal (though of course not any kind of ultimate solution) - it betters the chances of studios staying afloat and making what they want to make, rather than them being forced by their publisher to make the next
dirt-brown shooter me-too open-world game neon-colored battle royale (or whatever is the hot new thing in a couple of years). Few studios self-publish, so of course developers still get a disproportionately small part of the pay for their work, but you have to admit it's more fair that the people making the game get, say, 60% out of 90% of the sales price, than 60% out of 70% of the sales price? Right?
For a well-functioning games industry that actually produces interesting and good games, we need workers with stable and healthy working conditions, we need fair compensation for their work, we need an industry that values creative work much more than it does today, and we need gamers to quit their silly fanboyisms for things that aren't even games in the first place. Consolidation and monopolization hurts the quality of the games made just as much as it hurts those involved in making them.
Are you smoking the same shit that Vayra86 has?
Steam sales are on an opt-in basis. That's why you have different discount rates for different games, or some games not being discounted at all. Once again - voluntary, not mandatory.
partner.steamgames.com
They might have changed their tune in recent years, but there have been plenty of stories of developers effectively being strong-armed into taking part in Steam Sales, with the entirety of the price cut coming out of their portion of revenue. There's also
heaps of other shady practices such as detailed
here. EGS is by no means perfect, but competition breeds better practices (as they then actually need to have arguments for why developers should come to them), which is better for the industry overall. I would obviously
far prefer someone more sympathetic like GOG to be the real competitor to Steam, but that simply isn't realistic - they don't have the kind of power to convince a critical mass of people to choose them over Steam. EGS's use of exclusives is one of the very, very, very few ways of overcoming such an obstacle, as you need to force people out of their habits in order to break them. Never underestimate the power of convenience in terms of making people not only accept being treated poorly, but to like it. Steam and its deification by gamers is a perfect illustration of this.
If I have to choose I like GOG best as I don't actually need their launcher. I am not a free-game hunter, but I still accumulated a lot of free titles in my library and to be honest I might have never picked them up and it wouldn't matter as I will probably never play them any way. But getting the free games you have to visit their page and when you have some much traffic, someone will buy something I guess. If that's the general idea they are going for.
