When Steam Changes Revenue Splits, Epic Won’t Do Exclusives Anymore

In a rather strange turn of events, the CEO of Epic Games made some bold claims regarding Steam, revenue splits, and exclusivity deals.

Twitter is like the unholy battlefield where CEOs, celebrities, and other wealthy and famous people go to say questionable things while arguing with complete strangers. Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games, went on a rant yesterday about the 30% that Steam takes from the developers on their platform. Now, all of it is mostly Tim explaining why Steam isn’t good for the industry because they take so much money from developers. All in all, even if we aren’t a fan of Epic Games and Tim, he does make some pretty good points.

But then, all of a sudden, something completely unexpected happens. Scrolling down and reading the tweets will get you to a very specific one. Have you noticed which one we’re talking about? It’s the one that says:

If Steam committed to a permanent 88% revenue share for all developers and publishers without major strings attached, Epic would hastily organize a retreat from exclusives (while honoring our partner commitments) and consider putting our own games on Steam.

Didn’t expect to see that, now, did you?

That’s a pretty daring thing to say. Now, no one can actually trust people’s Twitter ramblings, but on the off chance that this is even slightly true, would Steam do something about it? Would Gabe actually sit down with his company and discuss lowering the amount Steam takes from sales? It’s definitely something that caught our attention as soon as we saw it, but can Tim Sweeney 100% say that they would do no more exclusive deals if that were to happen?

We’re entering the “if” realm now, and that’s somewhere you don’t want to go when it comes to things like this. Did Tim say that in the heat of the moment, or does he really mean it? We can’t say, but let’s hope that Gabe starts considering doing something that will make the PC exclusivity war end before it gets much worse for the consumers.

1 Comment
  1. Anonymous informed says

    There is no exclusivity issue, nor a war of exclusivity since exclusivity doesn’t exist on pc. Monopoly of Steam is instead the most underrated (on purpose since biased pens\mouths are all over the place) and existing thing which damaged not only the market and damages the market but damages CREATIVITY.

    The problem is that most people in public opinion and journos have zero knowledge over market and competition, or business administration, marketing and creative industries or especially cultural management and communication or game design as well as most are donkeys in History and should take more than a class.

    Steam besides the positives has been a killer of creativity of the upgrade rate of PC (pushing FREE TO PLAY and also Microtransaction that totally is polluting the gaming scene).

    So what are people talking about when they aggressively talk about a company which is opening the market thanks to the money made with a game (thing that anyone making a big boom with a game CAN ACTUALLY DO).

    Long life to Epic attitude and success (even if it came “also” through MTX generated cash flow).

    Most of the discourses on internet are totally rants and just for information internet is a place where strangers come together and share things, so where is the surprise when we talk each other on twitter and share views?
    There is not “objective” always true thing, everything is actually opinable. Anyway…

    Good luck with the market\business administration\marketing\ cultural management\ communication and history class (at least).

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