Graeme Struthers, one of the founders of Devolver Digital, told GameSpot at PAX Australia that it’s time to reset the conversation about the two stores.
„I feel like this conversation needs to be reset. The conversation never really took place properly in my opinion. Every month we were getting paid, and you were being paid accurately. We’ve all got our horror stories about doing audits on our publishers and finding huge discrepancies about what was being reported in sales. Here’s Steam–every month, accurate, straightforward, and transparent.
To come out of a model [before Steam] where we were, as a games publisher, maybe making 25 per cent, and that’s if you were successful. To be in a 70/30 relationship, it was transformative in every sense. And that led to realignment with relationships with developers. If there is more money and it’s more frequent, you can have better terms with developers.
Competition is going to come along at some point. Epic has taken a view that their way of bringing content to their platform is far more generous revenue share and they’ve been pushing exclusives–that’s great. And it’s giving developers and publishers a choice. You can’t compare the two things however as like for like. Steam has invested I don’t know how many hundreds of millions of dollars in their platform; Epic has yet to do that. I’m not saying they won’t, and hopefully, they will. In terms of the features and terms of the toolsets for developers, there’s a way to go. But competition is good.
The rise about developers and publishers going to Epic and exclusivity, it doesn’t hold up. I play games on PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch, and Devolver–we’ve done console exclusives with Sony, with Microsoft–I think it’s good, but I think we have to respect Steam for what they’ve done. Without them, none of this would have been a conversation in the first place,” Struthers said.
Indeed: we shouldn’t ignore Steam, as it has been with us for over a decade, and it’s been on stable foundations (plus it started to massively grow in 2012 worldwide). Epic Games Store hasn’t even launched a year ago…
Source: WCCFTech
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