this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
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“They charge developers too much!”
“Ok, Tim, so how exactly do you make money for your company, then? Because giving away all the free stuff seems like awfully bad business.”
Never thought I’d be defending a company charging a lot of money but since Steam actually does provide an excellent, stable service with bonuses like Linux development and the Steam Deck I mean, I really ain’t that mad, especially they still offer really good sales.
So you should be able to undercut them, right? Right?
Exactly. Epic doesn’t even appear to really provide a particularly good service so you’d think a more bare-bones company could get away with charging less, and yet.
Not when the Steam Terms of Service prevents them from charging less on other stores.
Apparently the epic games store isn't feeling so good, Mr. Stark .
I think you're missing the point that Epic's store is only not profitable at their margins because of scale. If they had even half of Steam's user base they would be profitable. Their problem is that gamers insist on backing Valve's monopoly because it's what other gamers tell them to do online.
And Epic provides Unreal Engine, the gaming engine that powers the majority of modern games, with free and extremely cheap tiers for indie devs, and they provide explicit Linux support for their engine and dev environment. They've also used a substantial amount of their Fortnite money to break up app store monopolies on Android and iOS.
They are not the villain that the gaming community thinks they are.
Have you considered maybe Valves monopoly is natural? That is convenient to have all the games in one place and their customers like what they're selling?
Yes that changes literally nothing.
All monopolies, be they natural or otherwise, need to be heavily regulated or else they can:
a) easily do stuff to prevent competition. Stuff like preventing developers from selling their game for cheaper on other stores.
b) charge exorbitant markups, markups like 30% of all revenue for a listing in a store.
I do not understand why gamers have such a hard time grasping that Valve taking a massive cut off the top of every single game sold, just enriches the already rich for doing nothing, at the expense of consumers and creators.
I think the problem you're running into is that Valve isn't doing nothing with that pay.
Like valve is actively making my gaming experience better by developing cheap hardware and a good system for gaming on Linux.
All the games I've ever bought, regardless of if they still sell them are in my library.
My save files are cloud synced for free.
I as the end user am having a good time.
I also have a sunk cost thing going on. I've been trying to buy and play more GOG games but I just have so much that works already on Linux without any work that it's hard to justify the tinker time to get it working otherwise.
They provide such a good service I think we've all forgotten about the children casinos for CSGO2 skins, but even that they're fixing (kinda).
Maybe its just nice to not be mad about something. Like its just video games, I don't really care if Valve has a monopoly on that since 1) Experience is good 2) they're not trying to have like a monopoly on water or something important. Bad take maybe, but there's enough going on that I just don't know if I could make myself care that valve is like 90% of videogame sales. Or whatever it is.
Heroic games launcher basically makes gog stuff click and play but even that isn't enough for me to really use it over steam.
What I need is a good launcher that makes the process of using different stores seamless, that works well on all my devices (heroic's controller support is infuriating to use and doesn't support steam)
Maybe when playnite finally gets ported to Linux
They may want to work on their marketting, then. I won’t lie when I say that I’m surprised to learn that Epic Games not only developes Unreal engine but that Tim Sweeney seems to have actually created it and not just be a CEO who buys stuff and puts his name on it.
There do, however, seem to be a few points really not working in their favour. Sketchy policies around reviews and a lot of forcing exclusivity(Steam’s monopoly? Ok buddy) are big ones I found.
Look, I’m sure there’s plenty of learning to be done as far as the Epic Games store is concerned but seriously, why is Steam so bad and why is Epic Games especially good? Sorry that I’m happy to use Steam and not switch to a new store with fewer features? Like, what’s the point being made here?
Forcing exclusivity? They force exclusivity for the games that they make (just like Valve does for theirs) and otherwise Epic offers developers cash deals for exclusivity, the developers are under no obligation to take them.
And the overall point is not that the Epic Launcher is amazing, but that Tim Sweeney is right about Valve's exorbitant 30% fees, but whenever that comes up gamers just go haha Valve=Good, Epic=Bad.