> I definitely want Steam to lose some market share I want them to have *some* competition...

Yeah. I mean, same thing. The point is you ideally want multiple players in the PC market competing with each other on features and approach that are all viable, sustainable and give users and developers a better deal as middlemen. I don't want Steam to go away, it's an insanely good client and a great piece of software. But I don't want every game having to be on Steam no matter what and only doing GoG or Epic or Xbox if they are being given a deal or for ideological reasons.

Steam takes 30% at first, and there is a discount after tens of millions of dollars in sales. Steam offers a ton of benefits for game companies through steam, such as the Friends list, reviews, having a way to show live play from the store page, and a bunch of other things. There is a reason that everyone is flocking to steam, and that 30% cut isn't keeping anyone away.

Epic only does it because they know they're the underdog. If that were to one day become untrue they would never do anything like this again.

You have given money laundering via making terrible games a suspicious amount of thought. I mean, one could argue that this is on Steam to manage, and that the way to manage it shouldn't be "we'll just keep 30%". It was Steam who spent an inordinate amount of effort and terrible half-assed attempts automating game curation so they could have fewer people looking at approving games the way other first parties do. If Valve wants to Uberify game distribution they have an onus on moderation and on protecting the developers using their platform. But that's irrelevant because nobody needs them to lower their cut to 0%. 20% would be great. 10% would be fantastic. Flipping the current order of things to give more money back to smaller games and keep more money from bigger games would be more than good enough. Whatever arbitrary bar you think would stop this entirely imaginary scheme they could meet and it'd still be an improvement. Hell, I have never laundered money, but from what I hear out there 30% may not be enough to put a stop to that. That may be a decent return for some squeaky clean money out of Unreal asset flips. Should Valve set their cut to 50%? You know, in the interest of international security? That was a serious reach, friend.

And steam doesn't do it at all. One approach is objectively better for the little guys than the other.

User base and brand loyalty Nothing about what Valve does but you can’t afford to not be on Steam

Here's a different take, as a game dev: Epic actual employs quite a few people who work with Linux. The Unreal engine (and even, to a certain degree, editor) has native support for Linux. The reasons they're not including Linux support in their store front are two fold: 1) There aren't enough pure Linux users to matter - 0.1% of an already small user base is negligible. 2) The only serious Linux user base in gaming relates to the Steam Deck, a product that pushes a rival (and the dominant) store front. While Valve's move to push Linux gaming is brilliant for us gamers, it also kind of cements us in their camp. There is absolutely no reason for Epic to support Linux in anyway, and it absolutely supports their bottom line to attack it. And, no, it isn't because of any David v. Goliath tale of a little guy standing up to a brute: it's because a fellow giant has decided to ally itself with Linux, and all of us have - invariably - been shuffled into their camp. I think the Epic Games Store has a place in this world as a niche storefront with limited visibility but higher access to sales profits as a result of that. They'll never grow to the size of Steam, and that's okay. The largest storefront in the world supports Linux not just on its platform, but by developing tools for everyone that makes Linux gaming viable. That is enough, IMO.

Reminder that the world's biggest money makers in PC gaming are not on Steam. Minecraft isn't (it's on Microsoft Store and a stand-alone web store), Fortnite isn't (it's EGS exclusive), Roblox isn't (its own store), League of Legends and Valorant aren't (Riot Launcher and EGS),...

Until it doesnt and your entire game library is done...

I like GoG but they don't support Linux, they don't take a smaller cut, and developers are free to submit their games to Steam without DRM.

I mean, they don't need to support Linux, you can get an offline installer right from their web app. Even if Heroic didn't solve that problem entirely (which it kinda does) you could still work around it. And I hear this "DRM on Steam is optional" a lot of the time, but it's... kinda not? Even Valve admits their Steamworks integration is a soft form of DRM. Plus the point of GoG is not that you *can* have games with no DRM in it, it's that you *have* to. You buy a game, it's yours to keep. That's a massive paradigm shift. Steam exists *specifically* to avoid that.

Where are you getting 0.1%? According to [Steam Hardware Survey](https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey) Linux is over 2% of Steam Users. This puts Linux way ahead of Mac which supported by Epic

> Even if Heroic didn't solve that problem entirely (which it kinda does) It actually doesn't. Half the apps I install through Heroic don't work. Meanwhile Steam games work 100% of the time. That's the problem. > Plus the point of GoG is not that you can have games with no DRM in it, it's that you have to. Don't really see the practical difference except that it has like 1% of Steam's library for that reason.

Valve is the only one in PC gaming to push an alternative operating system to Windows. EGS, GOG,... all enforce a Windows hegemony. GOG Galaxy isn't even available on Linux, despite the fact that it's built on cross platform frameworks that make porting easy. Proton by Valve is open source and GOG Galaxy would be free to integrate it. Heroic Launcher is a community effort that shows that it would be possible without massive investments. Epic and GOG/CD Project just chose not to.

Yeah, well, I've had better luck with Heroic than Steam proper, even if Heroic is using Proton and Gamescope as well. I guess that's the nature of Linux gaming (still) despite what people like to say. As for the practical difference, it boils down to my GoG library being safely backed up in storage media and preserved safely. If that doesn't matter to you... well, I can't help you, but you're wrong. Either way, if the market broke a different way and GoG had a bigger share (or if Steam matched its policies) that library would not be impacted nearly as much.