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Tim Sweeney - If Steam commited to a 12% take, we would stop buying exclusives
@timsweeneyepic:
@GV_Delchev @riggedforepic @BeegorBucleor @MrAngryBates If Steam committed to a permanent 88% revenue share for all developers and publishers without major strings attached, Epic would hastily organize a retreat from exclusives (while honoring our partner commitments) and consider putting our own games on Steam.
This kinda strikes me as some odd moral judo, considering the big Epic Crunch story, Valve's pissing match with them beginning and ending with "quit stealing our games," and laying down an X-Y ultimatum in public expecting Valve to blink because they're being dragged on Twitter.
This seems like a calculated PR statement to me, to be honest. We all know Valve ain't gonna budge, so in this way Epic can get some good publicity with barely any risk. I don't even know if Valve would be profitable with a 12% cut, the amount of shit they provide for us. I recall Sweeney himself stating that the Epic Store actually isn't profitable with that cut, so this seems even more calculated to me.
EDIT: That tweet is misleading, the 12% cut alone makes them a profit, but they need to pass the processing fee for certain payment methods (sometimes the only ones avalaible in some poorer parts of the world) to the consumer.
I still doubt that with the amount of support Valve provides to developers and consumers, a 12% cut would be profitable for them.
What I don't understand is that, even with Valve's higher take percentage, a game would still get far more buyers on Valve than on Epic. I'd be surprised if it weren't so much more that the developers didn't still get a higher dollar amount even with a lower percentage. How is Epic convincing anyone to go exclusive with them?
Money.
The cut doesn't matter. All publishers can give Valve a 0% cut by selling Steam keys - if a publisher wants to accept PayPal and Stripe on their website and generate Steam keys, they won't pay a dime to Valve for those sales. Humble Bundle also generates Steam keys, and although we don't know if they have to pay Valve some amount since they generate so many keys for multiple publishers, it would certainly be less than 30%. (There are other sites that do the same thing as well, like IndieGala and Green Man Gaming.)
Edit: one-third of Steam game registrations are Steam key activations. That's a fairly large amount of revenue Valve will never see, so publishers see more than just the cut when they make their games Epic exclusives.
Edit 2: Added other sites besides Humble that generate Steam keys.
Signing Bonus is extremely convincing when you are just barely scrapping it, or like a bunch of money at once. Plus it's only a six month delay until it gets to Steam.
Six months? I thought it was a full year.
Yeah, most of them have been a year so far. I think it might be only Borderlands 3 with a six month exclusivity period, but that's such a big-name game that they probably had a lot more negotiating power.