You’re right. But that can only last so long.

Didn’t Ford’s CEO just say they wanted highschool graduates who could do math to be automotive techs making $120K a year?

Plumbers already make ridiculous amounts of money because there aren’t enough of them.

The median age in my field 5-10 years ago was 55 years old and we aren’t getting an influx of new A&P licensed techs still. The main way the Aviation industry gets it’s techs these days is the military and that’s not even a sure fire way.

Like. CEO’s doing trades when? Because he’s clearly mistaken if he thinks that it’s not going to be CEO’s and upper management people who get their jobs replaced by AI.

They keep trying to replace engineers, software devs and so on with AI at all the tech companies and then having to back out of that decision to keep things running.

You don’t own a shovel? If you have hands, you can make a shovel. We will need the shovels for the mass grave after the elite are all gone. You know, so we don’t allow the spread of diseases from necrotizing flesh.

That’s not what you said. You said they never receive updates.

From what I read, that $4BN number could be taken two ways. I don’t know if that analyst excluded the games Valve developed, and that $4BN is games sales of everything else, or if that’s what they made from their own titles. I didn’t want to go through the rigamarole of Xitter to see the direct quote and I haven’t had a chance to find it in the internet archive.

I also kind of want a good run down of what steam offers to developers that makes their platform so attractive because my understanding is it’s more than just e-shop services and that’s one of the reasons I have seen touted as why people feel the service fee is reasonable.

I didn’t want to leave you on read, but I also am still looking up all kinds of random information to put together.

Also, my confusion is because there are two different lawsuits involving the 30% cut of game sales.

There’s a class action lawsuit in the UK involving all of steams consumers there, predicated on the idea that the 30% service fee makes games more expensive to the detriment if those consumers.

And there’s a different class action lawsuit brought by developers Wolfire and Dark Catt representing every developer who uses Steam as an E-Shop platform, also over the 30% service fee and alleged anti-competitve practices (Wolfire say that Steam told them they couldn’t sell their game anywhere else for less than it was available on Steam (even if they didn’t use steams license keys)).

I know I can come off as really terse, and tone is hard via text anyway. But thank you for addressing it.

Sorry about yet another wall of text.

By sold cheaper I meant MSRP price, not sale price.

You’re not being annoying. It’s probably because I lost track and for what it’s worth I am sorry, I’ll try to fix it but probably won’t catch all of them.

I can’t corroborate that Steam’s revenue for the e-shop was $16Bn. The best estimate that I have is that their game sales netted them $4Bn last year. I’m still trying to find a better source for that. However we may both be wrong here.

I’m not reading the Google summary. There is no Google summary for me. That shit is deep sixed. I don’t want it. I love it when people automatically assume that I must be using Generative AI to get some silly answer off the internet.

The fact is any game store front is a money printing machine mostly because of the rampant price fixing, hard to enter markets and abuse from those that hold the lion share of that market (Steam, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo).

If so then Epic should have caught up by now, no?

That money is being sucked out of the companies that are actually making games, and is leading to a reduction in quality, layoffs and bankruptcies.

Please back that up. The game developers seeing bankruptcies are seeing them because of gross mismanagement and a never ending attempt to deliver crap that their consumers don’t want. Pushing the “bleeding edge” of graphics while making games that sell poorly because they want to charge $60-70 for a game even 5 years after it came out.

And that’s with the proliferation of crap like in game micro transactions, season passes, DRM, and internet sanity checks to even play single player games.

Indie developers are caught in the lurch, but that’s generally the case with any small business, and on top of that the regulation will probably harm them more than it will help them because the percentage of sales pays for things that they use to market their game.

What is the limit on what store fronts can charge going to be? How much is too much? What does that 30% pay for? Do you know? Does it scale by user base?

Would other store fronts who charge less be more successful by a meaningful amount if they were charging the same?

It literally doesn’t matter where your products come from. I own more computer games on disc from physical stores than I do from steam. I have paid for more than one game on both steam, switch, PS4, or physical copy. I’m not trying to call Steam the good guy here.

But I do not trust the developer who originally brought the lawsuit because even now most of the other devs who have games for sale on steam have not attempted to make a statement, join the class action, or even make a complaint about what is alleged.

On top of that, why sue only steam if this is a problem. Nobody is suing Nintendo, PlayStation, or Microsoft over this.

I also never said “steam shouldn’t change”, or that steam shouldn’t take a smaller cut.

I feel like you scanned right over half of what I did say so you could be snotty in your response. You have a good day dude.

That’s false. They do not allow steam keys (free to generate steam licenses of games) to be sold cheaper anywhere else for less than the game is sold for on steam. And in exchange, the profits on those game licenses sold elsewhere the developer gets to keep 100% of.

It is alleged by one developer that steam told them they can’t sell their game for less on other stores even if they use a different company to generate the license keys. But that hasn’t been proven. And since only 2 other developers are backing the new class action lawsuit out of literally thousands of devs who would be effected this way if it were true, it logically doesn’t make sense. The dev who brought the first lawsuit that go thrown out? Their game is still up on Steam.

The fact is, Epic is making half the revenue Steam is with 11 times less market share, and not gaining market share because customers don’t want to use their store. Customers don’t want free games they want services that work.

You’re alleging that Valve is doing something anti-competitive to maintain their market share here and you still haven’t given me what I asked for.

What regulations are you expecting to be imposed, and how will that detrimentally or positively effect the consumers?

I never claimed steam was being sued by Sweeney. Sweeney made a statement about the steam lawsuit saying he agreed with it. https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/epic-games-boss-tim-sweeney-voices-support-for-usd900-million-steam-lawsuit-valve-is-the-only-major-store-still-holding-onto-the-payments-tie-and-30-percent-junk-fee/

I was quickly googling market share stuff on break so I misread the Epic e-shop market share vs Epic’s full market share outside that.

The fact that Steam only makes double what epic e-shop makes with literally 11 times the market influence?

What regulations are you expecting out of this? How will that have a positive effect on consumers?

I never said this was about good or bad. I pointed out pros and cons of using each service which extrapolated quite literally to why consumers choose Steam over Epic.

A monopolistic corp who uses anit-consumer/anti-competitve tactics to remain a market leader/? monopoly is illegal. And it’s regulated.

The only reason steam is being investigated at all is because 2 or 3 out of literal thousands of game developers have made a claim that steam is threatening to remove their game if they try to sell it on other game stores for cheaper than steam (not steam keys, but using another stores licensing keys).

That hasn’t been proven and if it is, a further investigation into how wide spread that behavior is would still be needed to prove that Valve or Steam came by their market share illegally.

Also the fact that you brought up Amazon as the foil to your argument at the end is laughable. For multiple reasons.

Why is Epic insignificant?

They launched with a 12% service fee, dropped that service fee to 10%, and then dropped the service fee entirely for the first $1Mn in sales per year.

In June 2025, they released a new feature enabling developers to launch their own webshops hosted by the Epic Games Store. These webshops could offer players out-of-app purchases, as a more “cost-effective” alternative to in-app purchases.

They provide developers with free to generate license keys, and keyless integration with other e-shop stores including GOG, Humble Bundle, and Prime gaming.

They offer a user review system.

They also added cloud saves in July of 2025.

The thing is, they offer none of the other features Steam offers:

• In-Home Streaming
• Remote Play with Friends
• Family Accounts
• Achievements
• Price Adjusted Bundles
• Gifting Games
• Shopping Cart
• TV/Big Screen Mode

Epic launched their service in 2018. It’s been 7 years. The only reason not to offer feature parity (for a company that makes $4.6Bn - 5.7Bn in revenue, and a shop that makes $1.09Bn, you’d think they would be enticing users with the services they want.

What they have done instead is exclusivity deals that plenty of consumers complain about but devs don’t seem to care about so long as they’re getting paid.

So, the excuse that Steam got there first (as if it’s just about that and the reason their market share is what it is is because they have refined, adapted, and improved their service offering over time) doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when steam has a significant percent of the market share (79.5% to epic’s 42.3%) but is only making twice the revenue of their rival store.

It makes sense for GOG or Itch.io who’s market cap is smaller by quite a lot to not offer the same feature parity. Each of those platforms has figured out they can offer other things to devs and consumers to make themselves competitive over time.

Sweeny’s attack is basically just a pity party he’s throwing for himself because he doesn’t want to compete.

Edit This is a sanity check because I wasn’t correct with my numbers by mistake.

So, the excuse that Steam got there first (as if it’s just about that and the reason their market share is what it is is because they have refined, adapted, and improved their service offering over time) doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when steam has a significant percent of the market share (79.5% to epic’s 42.3%) but is only making twice the revenue of their rival store.

These numbers are not correct and I was mistaken. In actuality Valve’s revenue is approximately 16 times that of Epic e-shop. It looks like an estimate of Steam’s game sales is that about $4Bn of their revenue last year was from Steam’s game sales. I am trying to corroborate that from other sources.

I’m still looking into and trying to parse out what percentage of steams sales last year were hardware (epic to my knowledge doesn’t have a hardware arm of their business), and it’s not immediately clear how much they made on the e-shop portion of their business alone so I can get more comparable numbers.

What I have been able to find so far I’ve posted below, and I’ll try to remember to come back and do some math on that after I focus on the first thing.

https://gamalytic.com/blog/steam-revenue-infographic

https://80.lv/articles/valve-earned-over-usd4-billion-on-steam-alone-in-2025-analysts-say

We lived with that because of the technology of the time and cost. An e-ink display of the equivalent size of a TV is gonna be expensive as fuck. And not do better than it’s traditional tv counterpart at video output for viewing. The other person mentioned monitors and those make sense because you’re generally using them for computer stuff which isn’t traditionally movies, television, or games. And if all you want to do is scroll the web and use it for spreadsheets, you’re fine there.

But gamers aren’t going to buy an e-ink display for gaming. And generally people who want to watch TV and movies won’t either.

I’d watch a movie on my phone before I tried it on e-ink.

My TV isn’t going to update because it’s been lobotomized.

It’s funny that you think smart TVs don’t receive updates. It’s got a wifi chip for a reason.

I doubt this. I use an e-ink android tablet as an e-reader. I like that it’s easy on the eyes. For using it to scroll Lemmy or even a web page, it’s fine. But the refresh rate (even on the best settings) makes watching a video or gif on it painful.

I don’t think anyone really wants an e-ink TV unless they want something that’s a hybrid. The things you’d use a tv for are just not e-ink things.

It’s crazy to me that when they sell a steam key on another store front, steam takes none of the profits from that at all, the key is free to generate for the dev, and the only stipulation is that they have to sell if for the same price it is on the steam store front.

They also seem to have replaced their PR team with AI, given all the stuff he probably should have been coached not to say in this interview.

You’re asking them to put their livelihood on the line for your privacy. They’re gonna choose the thing that pays their bills every time.

I agree with you in general, I think the problem is that people who do understand Gen AI (and who understand what it is and isn’t capable of, and why), get rationally angry when it’s humanized by using words like these to describe what it’s doing.

The reason they get angry is because this makes people who do believe in the “intelligence/sapience” of AI more secure in their belief set and harder to talk to in a meaningful way. It enables them to keep up the fantasy. Which of course helps the corps pushing it.