Steam comes under fire

Competition between digital stores on PC has been growing immensely in the last few weeks. While as of now it doesn’t provide any advantages for consumers, all the clients are aiming to attract developers to their store by offering lucrative revenue share schemes and in some cases, signing exclusivity deals.

Steam has come under fire in recent times for the 30 per cent cut they take on all sales. While this is standard on all major platforms including Xbox Live, PlayStation Network and Appstore; the biggest difference is that Valve is not the hardware manufacturer. In addition, PC is an open platform with a lot of clients, which led people to believe that the 30 per cent cut was way higher than it needed to be. Major developers have been moving away from Steam in the past year. EA built its own store long ago, Activision has started to sell their games only on the Blizzard launcher and Bethesda released Fallout 76 only on their own launcher. As a way to court these developers back to Steam, Valve had introduced new revenue share tiers — if a game makes more than $10 million in total sales, including DLC and micro-transactions, Valve will reduce their cut to 25 per cent. For games that make more than $50 million in total sales, it would switch to 20 per cent. While this was exciting news to major developers, it wasn’t beneficial to creators of less popular games.

As a way to counter this, Epic Games announced their own store where they would take just 12 per cent cut on all games irrespective of sales. Furthermore, if the game was developed using Unreal Engine, Epic will cover the 5 per cent royalty fee for the engine out of the 12 per cent cut. In a shocking turn of events, they started locking down games like Hades, Ashen and Super Meat Boy as exclusives to their store. The competition kept growing as just a few days ago, Discord announced that they will take a mere 10 per cent cut on all sales, irrespective of the size or popularity of the game.

I highly doubt that these moves will somehow cause the downfall of Steam. A large majority of PC gamers prefer using it, and they will not abandon their massive library of games that has been building up for many years, to use a new store as a primary launcher. In most cases, they will download the new client to play any exclusives they are interested in, before going back to Steam as the main client.