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All thanks to Epic for spearheading this effort. We do not want 30% cut takers in the age of digital distribution. It's parasitic way of making money. Apple (al

All thanks to Epic for spearheading this effort. We do not want 30% cut takers in the age of digital distribution. It's parasitic way of making money. Apple (also Steam) does not deserve to earn billions from software they have contributed nothing to. They're akin to digital feudal lords and we must fight this.

betaby 1y ago
What is a Steam's cut? Also 30%?
- DylanDmitri 1y ago
  30% on sales up to 10 million, 25% on additional sales up to $50 million, 20% on sales above that.
- Firaxus 1y ago
  Yes, though fwiw steam provides (in my opinion) more benefits to gamers and games than the apple appstore does to generic apps trying to do all manner of things. And additionally steam isn’t a walled garden, there is actual choice, and steam goes out of its way to be usable on multiple platforms. Very different situation to the locked down apple ios ecosystem.
  - BunsanSpace 1y ago
    Agreed. Steam is also a monopoly but it doesn't abuse it's monopoly. E.g. impose terms like games can't release on other stores for a lower price &c. Nothing stopping a competitor from coming in with a superior game store.
    - bluefirebrand 1y ago
      Steam is the clear winner but they aren't a monopoly... https://www.gog.com/en/ https://www.gog.com/en/ https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/ https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/
      - BunsanSpace 1y ago
        With their market share they are by definition of monopoly. Monopoly doesn't mean "only store front", it just means majourity market share to the point they control the market. People forget there's nothing inherently wrong with monopolies. It's only when they abuse their monopoly position that there's issues.
        bluefirebrand 1y ago
        Steam's customers aren't really the end users, though Steam's customers are game publishers. Steam provides a service to connect publishers to their audience. Their business model is not "takes money from customers in exchange for goods". It is "takes a cut of each sale that a publisher makes on their platform" Given that there is no real friction for end users to install Epic Launcher or GoG launcher, is Steam really a monopoly to their customers, the publishers? If Steam tries to muscle a publisher, they can refuse to publish on Steam and still have options. When popular games aren't on Steam, it does seem like people have absolutely no problem installing another launcher/storefront to access it Look at the massive success of Fortnite, which is only on the Epic Launcher
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    Valve even allows you to install GoG launcher and games on your Steam Deck They could probably lock this hardware down to only allow steam games, but they don't
  - fourside 1y ago
    I’m worried that this outcome will be applied too broadly and affect Steam. Sure Steam is not perfect, but its dominance is in large part to them offering a superior product. Admittedly I’m not a game developer so the 30% cut doesn’t affect me directly, but I think it’s fair to say that Valve’s success has been a net positive to PC game devs. Valve remains as one of the rare early tech company successes that has not suffered from enshitification the way so many others have. A key to that is that they have found a way to make a ton of money, and their leadership is happy to be very rich without continuing to expand and grow at all costs. If that business model is threatened, I’m not convinced that gamers and game devs would necessarily be better off.
- 10000truths 1y ago
  Players/studios aren't forced to use Steam as a middleman for installing/distributing games on PC.
- csdreamer7 1y ago
  As far as I know, purchases made through the Steam store is 30%; unless you are a larger publisher and have a different deal.
ransom1538 1y ago
"Mr. Roman did not stop there, however. He also testified that up until January 16, 2024, Apple had no idea what fee it would impose on linked-out purchases […] Another lie under oath: contemporaneous business documents reveal that on the contrary, the main components of Apple’s plan, including the 27% commission, were determined in July 2023." Basically, the current civil court model is 1) go to court with a case 2) demand to read internal memos of the defendants, 3) put people on the stand and walk through everything in these memos. It is coercion. They want you to settle, or all your personal info goes online.
- Firaxus 1y ago
  The article mentions that apple had the opportunity to correct the record and did not. These are multi billion and trillion dollar companies, they should be held to a high standard.
- 10000truths 1y ago
  The demands for internal memos aren't arbitrary, they follow due process of law. Plaintiff serves a subpoena. Defendant can contest the subpoena by filing a motion to quash with the judge, who either approves or denies the motion. But in a case like this where the defendant is a large corporation (or representative thereof) and the subpoenaed information is relevant to the facts of the case, the judge is likely to honor the subpoena.
warmjets222 1y ago
The difference is that Steam isn't the only way to install software on your PC.
foxyv 1y ago
Steam contributes a great deal to the games under their platform. They include all sorts of cool features like achievements, reviews, downloads, DLC distribution, Steam Workshop, user statistics, and other cool features on top of excellent marketing. In addition, Steam does not lock it's users into using just their platform. You can add non-steam games to your library and use other stores on your Steam devices. In addition, Steam happily allows publishers to sell their games on other platforms and does not create 3rd party exclusivity agreements. Personally I would consider Steam to be absurdly democratic in their distribution model.
- csdreamer7 1y ago
  Also Steam keys and Proton. I heard they often don't charge for them. Valve has made Linux gaming into a real alternative to Windows. Much better than MacOS.
  - LucidLynx 1y ago
    So, genuine question here: do companies have to pay full price in order to finance a technology that is used by 5% of their daily users? Of course this is a "devil advocate" question, but I would not consider Valve as "safer" than any other game / tech companies to be honest...
    - foxyv 1y ago
      You are not investing in Steam, you are paying them for something. Whether that is marketing, content distribution, or additional features. When you buy a car and don't use the seatbelt or turn signals, you are not paying for everyone else to have a seatbelt and turn signals. It just comes with the car.
    - csdreamer7 1y ago
      > So, genuine question here: do companies have to pay full price in order to finance a technology that is used by 5% of their daily users? As far as I know; Valve has cut the rate for larger companies. > Of course this is a "devil advocate" question, but I would not consider Valve as "safer" than any other game / tech companies to be honest... I do not know what the point of this comment is. We were not discussing if a company is 'safer'. As one US judge said when an Indie game company sued Valve and lost; the 30% rate is common among digital platforms. The point myself and the above poster made was that Valve does a lot more then most platforms that do charge 30%. Myself as a Linux enthusiast is very thankful for Valve for their work on Proton and Mesa.
eeeficus 1y ago
I don’t think comparing Apple to Steam, is an apples to apples comparison. AFAIK Steam doesn’t ask for exclusivity if you publish on its platform. So it is up to the customer to choose how it publishes its products.
- xsmasher 1y ago
  It's not clear what you mean here; Apple doesn't ask for exclusivity either. You can publish on Apple and on Steam and Android and they won't complain.
  - para_parolu 1y ago
    You can’t receive payments for your app outside ios.
babyent 1y ago
I don’t think it’s fair to count steam. Unlike Apple or Google app stores, where you basically HAVE to be on there to access the user base, a PC game can be downloaded and played without needing steam. A lot have their own “stores” like battle net.
jandrese 1y ago
That's going a little far. Apple and Valve do have costs to operating the storefronts. It's just that 30% is an overly big cut for what services they provide. Between Steam and Apple I think the case against Apple is generally stronger. Steam has competition on PC, but Apple is an effective monopoly on iPhone software. That said, Apple does more work on each release with quality control and software reviews. Valve is much more hands off on each release, but does secondary work like maintaining Proton. This just brings up the discussion of what the cut should be. 20%? 10%? 5%? Or maybe the full 30% is necessary? In a healthy market a business like this that has relatively low barrier to entry should be ripe for disruption, but even companies like GOG take a 30% cut. Why has nobody started a competing business that only does a 20% cut? I get that there is customer inertia with Steam, but it seems like nobody is really trying very hard to win customers.
transcriptase 1y ago
You just don’t understand the Steam business model of “do nothing while your competition keeps shooting themselves in the feet”. Every major publisher has tried launching their own competitor platform to Steam, some going as far as pulling their games or making them exclusive. Despite Steam simply doing nothing in response, they all essentially gave up and came back except Epic because of the Fortnite playerbase.
multimoon 1y ago
I’m a dev who pays the same 30% cut for all the platforms, and I still think that’s a bit of an over optimistic view. Anything is a transaction and someone has to benefit from that transaction or there’s no money to be made and it won’t be worth doing, same reason we as devs charge for software. Apple/google/valve/etc are providing you a service and acting as a publisher, dealing with a bunch of legal and tax crap you probably don’t want to, and providing testing/rollout/apis/libraries and a lot of other features for you to use. You can debate all day long if the cost for their service is fair, but you certainly aren’t getting nothing. In addition Apple obviously has a walled garden, but android has had side loading and alternative app stores since its inception and it’s still not popular, every user wants to just use a centralized place, so every dev releases on the centralized market. Forcing Apple to change their rules may be warm and fuzzy morally, it won’t change the status quo in the slightest. As many users have also pointed out valve and steam is the last of the publisher storefronts you likely want complain about as they do a ton for the gaming community.
an0malous 1y ago
> from software they have contributed nothing to They literally invented smart phones and app stores, and continuously release new hardware with software APIs that enable the apps.
- subscribed 1y ago
  "they literally invented smart phones" LOL! Crawl back to your cult
- mikestew 1y ago
  They literally invented smart phones and app stores... Windows Mobile and Handango[0] would like a word with you. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handango https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handango
  - seba_dos1 1y ago
    Even Openmoko Neo1973 was announced before the iPhone (and released at roughly the same time).
- wolrah 1y ago
  > They literally invented smart phones iPhone was announced in January 2007 and shipped in June 2007. Windows Mobile literally had a version called "Smartphone 2002" which you should be able to guess when that came out. You could buy a variety of devices in a vertical mostly-screen format running Windows Mobile for years before iPhone was even getting hinted at. The main thing the original iPhone did for the smartphone market is popularizing capacitive multitouch screens that work well without a stylus. > and app stores The iPhone not only launched without an app store, Apple (and Jobs in particular) was famously hostile to the idea of even supporting third party native apps at all, insisting that web apps would be all that the platform needed. They didn't change their tune until October 2007 when they announced an upcoming SDK, it was made available to developers in March 2008, and it wasn't actually released to users until July 2008. One could make an argument for Linux package managers being an "app store" in the mid-90s, though if you insist on it needing to sell commercial software then the various carrier-specific software platforms for J2ME feature phones starting in the '99-00 timeframe would be it. Carrier-agnostic third-party stores started to pop up a few years later, and the first official one from a phone vendor seems to have been Nokia Catalogs for Symbian S60 in 2006. Android also had an app store from the beginning, but the launch of the whole platform was delayed long enough that Apple managed to get iOS 2.0 out with its app store before the first Android devices actually shipped.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
tobyhinloopen 1y ago
The big difference between Steam and Apple App Store, is that developers can choose to deploy on Steam, and users actually want to use Steam, while Apple has locked down their stuff and forces you to use it.
musicale 1y ago
> All thanks to Epic for spearheading this effort. We do not want 30% cut takers in the age of digital distribution. I can see why Epic would not want to pay a 30% platform fee to Apple's game store, much like the 30% which they pay to Google Play, Nintendo eShop, Microsoft Store for Xbox, Sony PSN Store, etc. https://www.1d3.com/blog/platform-fees https://www.1d3.com/blog/platform-fees

betaby 1y ago

What is a Steam's cut? Also 30%?

DylanDmitri 1y ago
30% on sales up to 10 million, 25% on additional sales up to $50 million, 20% on sales above that.
Firaxus 1y ago
Yes, though fwiw steam provides (in my opinion) more benefits to gamers and games than the apple appstore does to generic apps trying to do all manner of things. And additionally steam isn’t a walled garden, there is actual choice, and steam goes out of its way to be usable on multiple platforms. Very different situation to the locked down apple ios ecosystem.
- BunsanSpace 1y ago
  Agreed. Steam is also a monopoly but it doesn't abuse it's monopoly. E.g. impose terms like games can't release on other stores for a lower price &c. Nothing stopping a competitor from coming in with a superior game store.
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    Steam is the clear winner but they aren't a monopoly... https://www.gog.com/en/ https://www.gog.com/en/ https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/ https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/
    - BunsanSpace 1y ago
      With their market share they are by definition of monopoly. Monopoly doesn't mean "only store front", it just means majourity market share to the point they control the market. People forget there's nothing inherently wrong with monopolies. It's only when they abuse their monopoly position that there's issues.
      - bluefirebrand 1y ago
        Steam's customers aren't really the end users, though Steam's customers are game publishers. Steam provides a service to connect publishers to their audience. Their business model is not "takes money from customers in exchange for goods". It is "takes a cut of each sale that a publisher makes on their platform" Given that there is no real friction for end users to install Epic Launcher or GoG launcher, is Steam really a monopoly to their customers, the publishers? If Steam tries to muscle a publisher, they can refuse to publish on Steam and still have options. When popular games aren't on Steam, it does seem like people have absolutely no problem installing another launcher/storefront to access it Look at the massive success of Fortnite, which is only on the Epic Launcher
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  Valve even allows you to install GoG launcher and games on your Steam Deck They could probably lock this hardware down to only allow steam games, but they don't
- fourside 1y ago
  I’m worried that this outcome will be applied too broadly and affect Steam. Sure Steam is not perfect, but its dominance is in large part to them offering a superior product. Admittedly I’m not a game developer so the 30% cut doesn’t affect me directly, but I think it’s fair to say that Valve’s success has been a net positive to PC game devs. Valve remains as one of the rare early tech company successes that has not suffered from enshitification the way so many others have. A key to that is that they have found a way to make a ton of money, and their leadership is happy to be very rich without continuing to expand and grow at all costs. If that business model is threatened, I’m not convinced that gamers and game devs would necessarily be better off.
10000truths 1y ago
Players/studios aren't forced to use Steam as a middleman for installing/distributing games on PC.
csdreamer7 1y ago
As far as I know, purchases made through the Steam store is 30%; unless you are a larger publisher and have a different deal.

ransom1538 1y ago

"Mr. Roman did not stop there, however. He also testified that up until January 16, 2024, Apple had no idea what fee it would impose on linked-out purchases […] Another lie under oath: contemporaneous business documents reveal that on the contrary, the main components of Apple’s plan, including the 27% commission, were determined in July 2023." Basically, the current civil court model is 1) go to court with a case 2) demand to read internal memos of the defendants, 3) put people on the stand and walk through everything in these memos. It is coercion. They want you to settle, or all your personal info goes online.

Firaxus 1y ago
The article mentions that apple had the opportunity to correct the record and did not. These are multi billion and trillion dollar companies, they should be held to a high standard.
10000truths 1y ago
The demands for internal memos aren't arbitrary, they follow due process of law. Plaintiff serves a subpoena. Defendant can contest the subpoena by filing a motion to quash with the judge, who either approves or denies the motion. But in a case like this where the defendant is a large corporation (or representative thereof) and the subpoenaed information is relevant to the facts of the case, the judge is likely to honor the subpoena.

warmjets222 1y ago

The difference is that Steam isn't the only way to install software on your PC.

foxyv 1y ago

Steam contributes a great deal to the games under their platform. They include all sorts of cool features like achievements, reviews, downloads, DLC distribution, Steam Workshop, user statistics, and other cool features on top of excellent marketing. In addition, Steam does not lock it's users into using just their platform. You can add non-steam games to your library and use other stores on your Steam devices. In addition, Steam happily allows publishers to sell their games on other platforms and does not create 3rd party exclusivity agreements. Personally I would consider Steam to be absurdly democratic in their distribution model.

csdreamer7 1y ago
Also Steam keys and Proton. I heard they often don't charge for them. Valve has made Linux gaming into a real alternative to Windows. Much better than MacOS.
- LucidLynx 1y ago
  So, genuine question here: do companies have to pay full price in order to finance a technology that is used by 5% of their daily users? Of course this is a "devil advocate" question, but I would not consider Valve as "safer" than any other game / tech companies to be honest...
  - foxyv 1y ago
    You are not investing in Steam, you are paying them for something. Whether that is marketing, content distribution, or additional features. When you buy a car and don't use the seatbelt or turn signals, you are not paying for everyone else to have a seatbelt and turn signals. It just comes with the car.
  - csdreamer7 1y ago
    > So, genuine question here: do companies have to pay full price in order to finance a technology that is used by 5% of their daily users? As far as I know; Valve has cut the rate for larger companies. > Of course this is a "devil advocate" question, but I would not consider Valve as "safer" than any other game / tech companies to be honest... I do not know what the point of this comment is. We were not discussing if a company is 'safer'. As one US judge said when an Indie game company sued Valve and lost; the 30% rate is common among digital platforms. The point myself and the above poster made was that Valve does a lot more then most platforms that do charge 30%. Myself as a Linux enthusiast is very thankful for Valve for their work on Proton and Mesa.

eeeficus 1y ago

I don’t think comparing Apple to Steam, is an apples to apples comparison. AFAIK Steam doesn’t ask for exclusivity if you publish on its platform. So it is up to the customer to choose how it publishes its products.

xsmasher 1y ago
It's not clear what you mean here; Apple doesn't ask for exclusivity either. You can publish on Apple and on Steam and Android and they won't complain.
- para_parolu 1y ago
  You can’t receive payments for your app outside ios.

babyent 1y ago

I don’t think it’s fair to count steam. Unlike Apple or Google app stores, where you basically HAVE to be on there to access the user base, a PC game can be downloaded and played without needing steam. A lot have their own “stores” like battle net.

jandrese 1y ago

That's going a little far. Apple and Valve do have costs to operating the storefronts. It's just that 30% is an overly big cut for what services they provide. Between Steam and Apple I think the case against Apple is generally stronger. Steam has competition on PC, but Apple is an effective monopoly on iPhone software. That said, Apple does more work on each release with quality control and software reviews. Valve is much more hands off on each release, but does secondary work like maintaining Proton. This just brings up the discussion of what the cut should be. 20%? 10%? 5%? Or maybe the full 30% is necessary? In a healthy market a business like this that has relatively low barrier to entry should be ripe for disruption, but even companies like GOG take a 30% cut. Why has nobody started a competing business that only does a 20% cut? I get that there is customer inertia with Steam, but it seems like nobody is really trying very hard to win customers.

transcriptase 1y ago

You just don’t understand the Steam business model of “do nothing while your competition keeps shooting themselves in the feet”. Every major publisher has tried launching their own competitor platform to Steam, some going as far as pulling their games or making them exclusive. Despite Steam simply doing nothing in response, they all essentially gave up and came back except Epic because of the Fortnite playerbase.

multimoon 1y ago

I’m a dev who pays the same 30% cut for all the platforms, and I still think that’s a bit of an over optimistic view. Anything is a transaction and someone has to benefit from that transaction or there’s no money to be made and it won’t be worth doing, same reason we as devs charge for software. Apple/google/valve/etc are providing you a service and acting as a publisher, dealing with a bunch of legal and tax crap you probably don’t want to, and providing testing/rollout/apis/libraries and a lot of other features for you to use. You can debate all day long if the cost for their service is fair, but you certainly aren’t getting nothing. In addition Apple obviously has a walled garden, but android has had side loading and alternative app stores since its inception and it’s still not popular, every user wants to just use a centralized place, so every dev releases on the centralized market. Forcing Apple to change their rules may be warm and fuzzy morally, it won’t change the status quo in the slightest. As many users have also pointed out valve and steam is the last of the publisher storefronts you likely want complain about as they do a ton for the gaming community.

an0malous 1y ago

> from software they have contributed nothing to They literally invented smart phones and app stores, and continuously release new hardware with software APIs that enable the apps.

subscribed 1y ago
"they literally invented smart phones" LOL! Crawl back to your cult
mikestew 1y ago
They literally invented smart phones and app stores... Windows Mobile and Handango[0] would like a word with you. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handango https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handango
- seba_dos1 1y ago
  Even Openmoko Neo1973 was announced before the iPhone (and released at roughly the same time).
wolrah 1y ago
> They literally invented smart phones iPhone was announced in January 2007 and shipped in June 2007. Windows Mobile literally had a version called "Smartphone 2002" which you should be able to guess when that came out. You could buy a variety of devices in a vertical mostly-screen format running Windows Mobile for years before iPhone was even getting hinted at. The main thing the original iPhone did for the smartphone market is popularizing capacitive multitouch screens that work well without a stylus. > and app stores The iPhone not only launched without an app store, Apple (and Jobs in particular) was famously hostile to the idea of even supporting third party native apps at all, insisting that web apps would be all that the platform needed. They didn't change their tune until October 2007 when they announced an upcoming SDK, it was made available to developers in March 2008, and it wasn't actually released to users until July 2008. One could make an argument for Linux package managers being an "app store" in the mid-90s, though if you insist on it needing to sell commercial software then the various carrier-specific software platforms for J2ME feature phones starting in the '99-00 timeframe would be it. Carrier-agnostic third-party stores started to pop up a few years later, and the first official one from a phone vendor seems to have been Nokia Catalogs for Symbian S60 in 2006. Android also had an app store from the beginning, but the launch of the whole platform was delayed long enough that Apple managed to get iOS 2.0 out with its app store before the first Android devices actually shipped.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

tobyhinloopen 1y ago

The big difference between Steam and Apple App Store, is that developers can choose to deploy on Steam, and users actually want to use Steam, while Apple has locked down their stuff and forces you to use it.

musicale 1y ago

> All thanks to Epic for spearheading this effort. We do not want 30% cut takers in the age of digital distribution. I can see why Epic would not want to pay a 30% platform fee to Apple's game store, much like the 30% which they pay to Google Play, Nintendo eShop, Microsoft Store for Xbox, Sony PSN Store, etc. https://www.1d3.com/blog/platform-fees https://www.1d3.com/blog/platform-fees