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Comment by ScoobleDoodle | Hacker News Reader

Steam doesn’t have a strict monopoly, but it is the most known and used.

Steam takes a 30% cut of all sales. If a game sells over $10 million then the cut is reduced to 25%

There is Epic Game Store: maker of Fortnite and Unreal Engine which also gives away 1 or 2 free games a week. It takes a 12% cut from developers selling through their store. Tencent, which has close ties to CCP, owns ~40% of Epic.

GOG “good old gamestore”owned by CD Projekt Red, the developers of the Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077. Takes a 30% cut from sales. Also advocates for games without DRM.

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EGS also dont have any proper user reviews to begin with. Its by design since Epic Games dont want even give players option to affect game sales. For instance compare how terrible broken The Last of Us Part 1 looks on Steam and EGS:

> https://store.steampowered.com/app/1888930/The_Last_of_Us_Pa...

Reviews are mixed above and a lot of negative reviews from players below.

> https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/the-last-of-us-part-1

Some 3.8 star rating above and tons of praise from press below.

PS: As game developer I think competition is good. But as gamer I personally not gonna use Tencent/CCP Game Store since it's intentionally customer-hostile. This is not Steam competitor I want to support.

GOG and Red are sister subsidiaries of CD Projekt company which itself does game publishing, distribution and localization.

I used to care about this shit, but I don't any more. The experience with Steam is just that much more superior. Cloud saves that allow me to pick up my PC gaming session on my Steam Deck or MBP is something no other platform offers on the scale that Steam does. If I could buy a game on GOG or Steam, I will choose Steam every single time because of the platform benefits unless the GOG game allows a Steam redemption. To me this is the same argument as streaming video content. Steam offers enough content that I don't need to seek other services to supplement my gaming needs. This is very different from the video streaming services where content is so siloed into proprietary buckets.

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