-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
Discord thinks about developers, 90/10 developers split is coming to its game store in 2019
- Thread starter Rodjer
- Start date
I thought curation was important because you could not find games on Steam?
Man, I can't keep up.
Everything is competing with each other. Stores with other stores. Games with other games. All that's happening here is Steam won't be quite so absurdly rich, and more devs will have more of the revenue from their game sales, which means more devs, more content, etc. And that means more competition. I seriously doubt that's going to stop now.
Greenlight was a publishing program where Steam would actively pass over putting a game on steam because other games would bribe customers with free shit.
Valve hasnt been necessary for the market for ages.
There's any number of platforms smaller devs can publish on and Steam isnt even the best.
Gamers just dont like change.
oh piss off
The discourse on PC gaming in this forum is reaching new lows now
Are you actually insane? Steam fucking revived PC gaming in the mid 2000s due to it being easy on consumers. PC gaming was such a damn mess for consumers and companies doing all this insane DRM just because pirates were (rightfully) pirating games that were either un-optimized garbage, DRM-ridden or overpriced. Steam came in and gave us a non-obtrusive DRM, reasonably sales and higher standards for PC gaming. Guess what company called PC gamers pirates and abandoned the platform? Epic Games. Now they're trying to cozy us with their "new" store. Steam allows me to go to a game's forums, fix problems with the game, check out mods for it all in one easy place. Steam is the reason why we still talk about PC gaming to this day. Without it, it'd be a fucking war zone. Now it has missteps like paid mods, and greenlight. But that shit either gets cleaned up or taken care of. Game quality (meme games, scams, etc.) is an issue but it seems to be something Valve's taking on. Stuff like reviewing, and refunds is extremely pro-consumer. We need more pro-consumerism in our industry.
Steam is not a monopoly. We have GOG. Itch. Humble. GMG. CDKeys.net. G2A. These are all competing for YOUR money. If you buy a game on GOG, you're not giving cash to steam. It's not that hard to understand.
If Steam never came out or improved beyond a Half-life 2/Counter-Strike launcher, I probably wouldn't into games as I am today.
They need to generate some talk and interest, considering their 'exclusives' were complete failures saleswise and no one was talking about the store a few days after launch. I mean how many of you acting excited actually bought something there yet? Be honest (for once).
Man, I now see what developers were talking about.
What does this mean for us consumers? Can we actually expect these platforms to grow into services with valuable features? Or are we just supposed to move to shitty barebones platforms because they offer devs a larger cut?
For what it's worth I trust Discord to become a better platform than Epic, since Epic has made it pretty clear that they don't need money from their store, unlike Discord.
What does this mean for us consumers? Can we actually expect these platforms to grow into services with valuable features? Or are we just supposed to move to shitty barebones platforms because they offer devs a larger cut?
For what it's worth I trust Discord to become a better platform than Epic, since Epic has made it pretty clear that they don't need money from their store, unlike Discord.
Steam is the only reason the PC industry has grown for the last decade outside of a few massive games. There's only indie development today because it started on Steam.
Publishers are jumping ship because they think they can do it and bypass paying anyone else. If they could do it on console they would in a heartbeat (and will once streaming gets big enough). They think people are more willing to use other clients regardless of quality partially because of all the ignorance that gets spread on the internet about Steam, including posts like this. It creates a perception that they're vulnerable even if it's made up of mostly false narratives. As we saw with Trump winning if you can spread bullshit and repeat it enough people start believing it.
edit: I don't even know why I keep wasting my time with these people.
Official Staff Communication
This thread is about the new cut for Indie devs on Discord and the Discord Storefront. This is not a thread about Steam. While comparisons are part of discussion, currently there's no talk about Discord in this thread. Please get back on topic.
You gotta be fucking kidding me, right? I cant wait till the competition will make me pay for p2p multiplayer like consoles.
Big fucking think when you realize Epic is 40% owned by Tencent and Discord is funded by them. Both have game stores now. What the fuck is going on?
I've explained before that markets have to go through transitions. The benefits of competition cannot be evaluated in a vacuum...or at just one point in time.
Moneyhatting developers for temp exclusives isn't a sustainable business model for a platform holder imo. Microsoft figured that out this gen which is why they have decided to expand their own development. Either way, the developer saw a benefit to them. They thought it would help their business. It may show to be a bad business decision based on how they alienated and pissed people off and therefore the market will self correct.
Over the long term, more games will get made as a result of the competition and money being pumped into the industry. There will be new solutions. New investments in technology and platform enhancements. Platform holders will have to find ways to create a competitive advantage and sell their value and much of that will result in new content that wouldn't have otherwise been made, new platform features, pressure to improve customer service and expansions to the market.
Looking at where these new launchers are today based on where technology is today isn't seeing the whole picture and isn't why these companies have entered the market to begin with.
Certainly not needless change. Discord's new policy may be better for developers but someone has to provide customers with some reasons to switch too.
Oh I know, I was just kinda re-evaluating it in my head and thought of anyone who could launch a game store/client Discord actually makes some sense.
Like... my god. What in the actual fuck did I just read.. How can you post about something that you clearly have zero idea with such confidence. You single handedly destroyded my hope for democracy. With a sigle post. Wow...
That's his whole thing when posting in PC-related threads. He knows.
Your best is terribly inadequate then.
Last edited:
I've said plenty. There is a large contingent of #nosteamnobuy at Resetera who believes capitalism is ruining gaming. All their examples are short term and fail to look at the big, long term picture and fail to realize that they aren't the entire consumer market.
The #nosteamnobuy Resetera community is also pretty hostile to those that disagree with them and like to pile on. I'm trying to be as unconfrontational as possible in explaining why many disagree with them. It's not to troll or out of other platform loyalty.
Ghost Trick has made it clear I'm a microsoft shill in other threads and that I'm here to troll a platform I don't currently play on so I'm doing my best to explain this without defending or championing any single company.
And here we go with the pile on and reporting until banned. I wish you guys would actually try to address the comments rather than personal attacks.
... what on earth..? I think im going to start collecting these gems.
Like, the pc gaming market atm is the libertarians wet dream. In the sense that it is literally the closest thing that this world has to a theoretical construct known as "the free market." But for some reason Tencent walling off competition.. increases competition even further..? Just like Monsanto increases competition by increasing its patent portfolio?
Many of us did hundreds of times. Implying otherwise and just rambling on endlessly is the personal attack here.
I'm not Ghost Trick, so I can't comment on the microsoft shill bit, but the post I quoted originally could be boiled down to "the market will fix it." How? "New solutions." "New investment." That means nothing. That's as noncommittal as you can get. There is no guarantee this nebulous new approaches will benefit me personally in any way and offer any meaningful advantage over the current situation. The market being stable can fuck me over just fine.
So until you at least attempt to sketch some of those Brave New Ways that the market will fix itself there is really no need to engage your ideas. Sorry.
Good that we're seeing more competition along this front, at the very least it puts more pressure on Steam to improve their practices.
They have the best practices in the biz doe so idk what you're talking about.
No reason to feel bad OneBadMutha. Honestly, you seem like one of the only people on the forum that has taken an economics class.
The #nosteamnobuy contingent is very vocal. But, it's not like the video game industry hasn't seen this before. There's articles like https://www.polygon.com/2017/5/16/15622366/valve-gabe-newell-sales-origin-destructive that have touched upon some of the market issues before. Some people are very short-sighted in their thinking (and thinking about organizational behavior).
Still citing one of Tim Colwill's two Polygon 'articles' is at this point willful buffoonery.
There is more money than ever being invested into the gaming industry. Where do you think that money will go? It goes towards content creators and platform enhancements.
I can't be specific because there's no way to prove the specifics of what features or content will be created specifically due to the increased investment. It's common sense and general business knowledge that increased investment and better value to customers is the result of competition.
Saying competition will make PC gaming worse ignores the power of consumers and ability of companies to adapt.
For any developer using Unreal Engine, the Unreal Store would still be the better option.
Did I say anything to specifically defend Tencents business practice at the moment? I didn't. That's missing my point.
- Nintendo wasn't able to force the traditional console market to keep cartridges
- Sony wasn't able to force the market to pay as much for a launch console as a good gaming PC
- Microsoft wasn't able to force Kinect or 24 hour check-ins
What you're saying about competition in PC gaming is that it exists in certain areas. It is good for you so we need to reject completion in other areas because that's bad for you. Your stance ignores other potential consumers, potential to expand the market and potential to make developers stronger.
I'm a former PC gamer who games on all 3 consoles who's coming back the day it's viable to stream from my laptop and bounce my saves from device to device. PC gaming is changing.
I also work in technology, have been educated about where it's heading from a banks standpoint and have been excited about the potential explosion in gaming for a couple years. Lot of what's happening in AI, steaming and cloud compute could result in amazing things for gaming. Next 5-10 years, these arguments over Tencents store will seem trivial.
Always room for improvement, competition forced them to lower their cut for larger releases I more then welcome competition to push that number down for indie releases that probably need it more to.
It does if it means more developers are healthy. More developers who are financially healthy competing for your money will result in more flexibility for developers to offer more value directly.
Except for the devs they pulled were already healthy.
Epic is just ignoring the smaller indie devs, leaving them poor souls in the dust.
Epic is just ignoring the smaller indie devs, leaving them poor souls in the dust.
Epic is only charging 7% if you are using certain packages of Unreal engine
I'm perfectly fine with this as long as they don't pull exclusivity deals or something like that.
If games are cheaper on Discord and I can easily purchase, sure why not.
If games are cheaper on Discord and I can easily purchase, sure why not.
Which most indie devs won't be using. Epic don't care about indie, they only care about AA devs.
Pretty sure Tim Colwill's 'articles' are opinion pieces. But, they're opinion pieces that contain fact in them as well. Regardless, as was stated above that was one example, and there's plenty more. You only have to use Google to find them (or Bing if you want those sweet MS freebies).
I don't see Discord's store really mattering without some major overhauls. They have real issues getting anyone to use it, and spend money. Epic seems to be aggressive and likely to be in for the long haul, and they have a clear and sustainable business model. Discord feels a lot more nebulous.
A 2 percent over Epic bump isn't going to matter much when Discord doesn't really offer much to consumers. You can, for instance, buy Pillars of Eternity 2 right now, but you can't buy any of it's DLC yet. You can't buy Nitro games by themselves. Why would anyone bother with their store outside of the community that is concerned with things like the developer cut, which is probably a fairly small audience.
The one thing they have over Epic is that they aren't going to curate the store anymore, but at that point if you're the type of dev that Epic is ignoring, chances are you could have nearly as much success on itch as on discord.
A 2 percent over Epic bump isn't going to matter much when Discord doesn't really offer much to consumers. You can, for instance, buy Pillars of Eternity 2 right now, but you can't buy any of it's DLC yet. You can't buy Nitro games by themselves. Why would anyone bother with their store outside of the community that is concerned with things like the developer cut, which is probably a fairly small audience.
The one thing they have over Epic is that they aren't going to curate the store anymore, but at that point if you're the type of dev that Epic is ignoring, chances are you could have nearly as much success on itch as on discord.
I'm not sure I follow... it's a needed incentive for developers using Unreal Engine because the standard additional 5% royalties are negated on their store and they pay just 12% and it's that same 12% for any other developer regardless of whether they're using proprietary or Unity or whatever. Outside of devs that are using their Engine, it favors nobody in particular since the revenue is exactly the same scale whether they're indie, AA, or AAA.
If they didn't do that, Unreal Engine devs would be giving up more for sales on the Epic Store than anyone not using the engine. Not sure how you can see that as a negative for indie devs.
Last edited: