I’ll happily pay these 30% if it means I get quality services for them:
high speed download servers
reliable cloud saves
automatic, non intrusive updates
discussion forums
easy mod management
friend networking, multiplayer services
responsive and uncomplicated support
(using Steam as an example here)
People always act like those are to be taken as granted, but if you have ever worked in dev/devops, you would know that there’s a lot of work maintaining each one of them.
Also, you can use these services for as long as you want, despite paying for them with a single one-time purchase.
Of course, if the platform doesn’t provide any services or benefits, your point stands. In that case just avoid it.
Apart from the forums, Epic offer all those things and take only 12%. Microsoft offer most of those things and also take 12%.
Hosting a forums platform costs almost nothing. Moderating them like Valve, expecting the game creators to do the work and doing an extremely poor job, with each big game hub filled with toxicity and people earning points for racism and other forms of bigotry, is certainly not worth 18%.
Yeah, I still remember that I completely lost access to my Steam account in the early days. I forgot the password, and the password reset feature didn’t work. I contacted support and they never responded. I eventually just gave up and lost the games in the account. I guess if I had waited long enough they probably would’ve fixed it, but, holy fuck, Steam was really shit in the early days.
To Valve’s credit, my understanding is that the support situation has improved marginally over the 20 years since my incident.
I’ll happily pay these 30% if it means I get quality services for them:
(using Steam as an example here)
People always act like those are to be taken as granted, but if you have ever worked in dev/devops, you would know that there’s a lot of work maintaining each one of them.
Also, you can use these services for as long as you want, despite paying for them with a single one-time purchase.
Of course, if the platform doesn’t provide any services or benefits, your point stands. In that case just avoid it.
Responsive support? On Steam?
Apart from the forums, Epic offer all those things and take only 12%. Microsoft offer most of those things and also take 12%.
Hosting a forums platform costs almost nothing. Moderating them like Valve, expecting the game creators to do the work and doing an extremely poor job, with each big game hub filled with toxicity and people earning points for racism and other forms of bigotry, is certainly not worth 18%.
Yeah, I still remember that I completely lost access to my Steam account in the early days. I forgot the password, and the password reset feature didn’t work. I contacted support and they never responded. I eventually just gave up and lost the games in the account. I guess if I had waited long enough they probably would’ve fixed it, but, holy fuck, Steam was really shit in the early days.
To Valve’s credit, my understanding is that the support situation has improved marginally over the 20 years since my incident.