I'm interested in why you think they are toxic to the gamer base?

Gog doesnt support linux or id look at them. But they also charge 30%

Thought i responded to this, but oh well will do it again. Epic, EA, Microsoft, sony, ubisoft all have a kong history of poor worker conditions or anti-consumer practices. Valve and gog have 20+ years of *decent" history of worker and pro gamer practices. The contention in this thread is from people who think valve cant be trusted because capitalism and those who say as long as they continue good behavior they're a better choice than *any* of the others in the space. Basically gog is their only real competitor and since they dont support linux or provide many of the game featurss valve does for developers its no contest.

From what I've been hearing, their fee is flexible. 30% is uncommon on PC.

So is valves. *Shrug*. Simply using the publicly available information.

I'm not aware of any evidence of Valve's cut ever adapting to a dev's circumstances. It's 30% until they've made $10M, which drops it to 25%, and to 20% after $50M. I'd call that scalability available only to the most successful few, not flexibility.

That is a dynamic rate by definition, not saying its perfect. But its available to any dev whos game hits those numbers.

I don’t disagree that’s a problem, but that is not what I said or implied. That’s the reason Steam has other mechanisms for scoring and scaling reviews. There are plenty of valid reasons for “review bombing” that are organic and natural consequences of developer activity: like adding Denuvo a year after release, adding a launxher or login/account requirement after the fact, etc. Making reviews “invite only” is anti-consumer.

If we dig just a bit deeper, it seems your issue is with the whole concept of not owning games, which is the very nature of Steam and its main policy, aptly called the **subscriber** agreement. Taking that out on game developers, let alone a competitor with more lax DRM practices, is also missing the first for the trees.

That is absolutely an issue I have, but it’s a whole separate can of worms. One I could talk about all day. Right now I’m just comparing Epics meaningless, useless review system against Steam.

And the thing is... Because Steam is better for the user, it becomes better from the developer. 70% of your game's Steam revenue will *always* be bigger than 100% of your Epic revenue. It's probably bigger than *300%* of your Epic revenue. That's why Steam doesn't need to buy exclusives or run loss leaders or try to lock you in with "free!" promos. Epic needs to pay developers up front to get them to *not* go to Steam, because in every case a dual Steam/whatever-else release is better than a whatever-else release. So Epic needs to pay the indie game studio that made a $10 game a million dollars for timed exclusivity, which allows the studio to not worry about losing their Steam revenue from selling 130,000 copies. Then they release it on Steam later anyway.