Wait… that math does not possibly check out. In the worst case scenario (Steam), they pay 30% of the revenue from the game in platform fees. If they spend less than that for settlement, simple math tells us that there is at least 41% of the revenue basically unaccounted for.
There’s a bit of overhead in every company, like HR, IT and facilities, so maybe these don’t count for “development cost” (which makes no sense tbh, that’s not how project budgets work). Marketing can eat a ton of money, too, but the numbers still seem bafflingly high.
What? It just means that they spend less than 30% on development. That doesn’t sound too far off, as a lot of the money probably goes to marketing, management, administration or (gasp) profits.
And marketing is a huge part of stupid MTX games, you gotta attract the suckers to your game after all.
It seems like it can make sense. Platform fees aren’t an initial outlay, they’re effectively a cut of profits based on sales.
For the sake of argument using fake numbers, if a studio spends $1m making a game, and then they put it on Steam and it does $10m in sales, then Steam’s cut of that at 30% will be $3m
So, spending more on store fees than development seems possible - especially if your game is selling really well
The percent isn’t fixed at 30%, though. Big sellers lower the cut, and Steam takes literally zero from keys they sell elsewhere.
It’s 30% up to $1m I believe but sure, there are complications. It’s just example numbers to illustrate the point.
Unless I live under a rock I don’t see the point of spending a lot on marketing ads for games. Two big examples of games that sold extremely well that I never saw an ad for were elden ring and boulders gate three. If you just make a good game word of mouth will tell how good the game is not an ad on TV.
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Round about way to say they spend less than 30% on development. Gotta pay big money to the team inventing the latest mtx addiction bs.
So 30-40% profit? That sounds like a lot.
Epic Game Store is focused so hard on making it good for devs but they have also intentionally neutered it for gamers. Does it even run on Linux yet? We all know that’s the direction Valve is taking things and it’s why Microsoft is starting to panic.
Not from Epic, no. But there is Legendary https://github.com/derrod/legendary
It’s (relatively, don’t use the embedded browser) pure Python and runs anywhere. I also use it on my Win7 retro machine because the Epic Launcher sucks. It also supports epic DRM and can log the game in.
It kinda does? You have to use a third party app like lutris/heroic.
You could argue that steam doesn’t fully work on linux either (multiple windows like chat, friendslist or library opened on the same workspace regularly crash on Wayland and I havent had the steam overlay working on any non linux native game) but these features arent even part of the epic launcher
Huh, I’ve never used chat, I rarely use the friends list, and I think I’ve intentionally used the overlay maybe a handful of times. So I don’t think that’s a big loss.
However, they did work fine on xorg (I haven’t used any of them since switching a few months ago).
Regardless, the launcher works for the primary use cases: buying, organizing, installing, and playing games. So I think that qualifies as supporting Linux, even if there are some bugs here and there.
Every platform takes a third off the top.
A third.
I have no love for this company whatsoever. Most of the their revenue streams should frankly be illegal. But I’m not exactly thrilled about every glorified software repository taking a pound of flesh off all revenue, licit or otherwise.
