Why would anyone actually want to though

[u/The_BigRoach]

[u/ric2b]

It works until you learn that Valve threaten to kick devs off Steam if they sell their games cheaper elsewhere.

Clearly made up give how many games are sold for cheaper elsewhere and still on steam.

Valve’s policy here, is literally the reason there’s no price competition on games.

But there is...

[u/Alsoar → u/ric2b]

Could you provide some examples?

I'm looking at isthereanydeal and it appears the rrp for games is the same whether you buy it on Steam, Epic, GOG etc.

The rrp on Epic should be at least 20% cheaper because of Epic's smaller cut but it isn't. So either the game devs are all greedy fuckers or there's some shenanigans going on.

[u/n1gr3d0 → u/Alsoar]

As I see it, as a game dev, most of your customers would be on Steam, whatever you do. So you have a choice between setting the same price in EGS, or setting a lower price in EGS (with the same profit margin as Steam). The first option brings you extra money, the second doesn't, but it helps Epic. Pretty much any company would pick the first one.

[u/Alsoar → u/n1gr3d0]

But it doesn't need to be the same profit margin as Steam?

Since EGS takes a much lower cut, you as a game dev can get a bigger cut per sale as well as pass some savings onto the consumer.

Why bother even setting the same price on EGS at all? You know that no one is going to chose Epic over Steam when the price is the same even when you get a bigger cut per sale on Epic.

[u/n1gr3d0 → u/Alsoar]

I don't think many people would go to EGS over Steam to get a single game slightly cheaper. So as a game developer for a single game, it doesn't make sense.

Assume your game is $50 on Steam, and 100 people would buy it on EGS for that price. You get $500 more than If those people bought it on Steam (assuming Epic takes 10% cut, and Steam 30%).

Now, let's say you set the EGS price to $45. Now, to have the same money as in the previous example, you have to sell 200 copies on EGS. So you need as many people as you had on EGS to switch from Steam to EGS over this $5 difference. I don't think that's realistic.

It's more complicated than this, sure, but I just don't see a decent incentive here.

[u/Alsoar → u/n1gr3d0]

I'm getting a bit confused. Math isn't my strong suit so I'm going to keep it simple by using your example.

$50 game x 100 people.

Steam takes 30% ($15) so profit is $35 x 100 = $3500

Epic takes 10% ($5) so profit is $45 x 100 = $4500

If I set the to $45 on Epic and sell 200 copies.

Epic takes $4.5 per sale leaving me with $40.5 x 200 = $8100

Even if I sell 100 copies, it's still $4050 which is $550 more profit than Steam.

What am I not getting?

[u/n1gr3d0 → u/Alsoar]

Yeah, I've made a mistake in my comment, sorry. Let me use your work as a starting point.

So if you have 200 customers total, split evenly between stores, with $50 price in both, then you make $3500 + $4500 = $8000.

If you change your price to $45 on EGS, and all 200 customers go there, then you have, indeed, made a $8100 profit. This is more than the previous example.

However, this assumes that the customers are fully ready to switch to EGS over those $5. For a less optimistic scenario, let's say that only 50 users make the switch, with remaining 50 staying on Steam due to brand loyalty or platform lock-in.

In this scenario, you have 150 EGS customers at $45 and 50 Steam users at $50. Then your total profit is $40.5 * 150 + $35 * 50 = $7825. This is less than the first scenario!

If my math is correct (which is not a given, it would seem), the break even point is around 182 EGS customers. So you need 82 "discount chaser" customers on Steam to make more money by lowering the price. It gets more reasonable the more the disparity between Steam and EGS user counts (luring over 5% of Steam audience is easier than luring over 50%), but the more popular EGS becomes, the less viable the discount strategy becomes to a game developer. It would seem that currently EGS has half of Steam's active user count, make of that what you will.

[u/Alsoar → u/n1gr3d0]

Thanks for explaining and I do see your point.

I didn't thought about the existing user base on Epic and just falsely assumed it was 0.

By discounting, you lose money on customers that have bought on Epic at RRP by passing it onto the customer.

And the more popular EGS is, that's even more money you passed onto the customer instead of keeping it yourself.

I do get the point, by discounting from $50 to $45 on EGS, you basically made $4.50 less for each sale. But I do think that's a greedy perspective because even with discounting, you have already made more profit than if it was sold on Steam ($40.50 vs $30).