With a better revenue split and a focus on communication, Epic’s new storefront makes a compelling offer to developers—and where developers go, players will have to follow.
We’ve seen plenty of Steam competitors over the years, but this is the first one I’d call a true threat to Valve’s dominance. I’m going to take a bit to recap the story as it stands, but if you want to know how this affects you feel free to skip ahead to “Part 2” where we lay out what this means for the future.
Which is to say: Revenue share has been a touchy topic with Steam for a while now. For years Valve’s taken a flat 30 percent cut of all revenue earned on its platform, leaving developers with 70 percent.
This made sense (of a sort) in the old days. It was a better cut than developers generally earned from physical retail, and Valve also worked to curate Steam, to make sure only the “best” games made it onto the store. Between that, server costs, customer support, and so on? 30 percent seemed justifiable.
But then Valve stopped curating Steam. Steam in 2018 is a lawless deluge of garbage mixed in with a few fantastic games, and trying to distinguish between the two is like using a tennis racket to separate salt from the ocean. Discovering new and interesting games on Steam these days, especially indies, is nearly impossible, and the question arose: What exactly is Valve doing to earn that 30 percent revenue cut?
But there might be somewhere for them to go soon.
