Since Epic Games launched their Epic Games Store, it’s been nothing but a whirlwind of controversy. There’s several reasons for that, but the biggest reason has been the unprecedented move of buying up exclusive titles to their storefront/launcher. One of the rallying cries for Epic Games has been the revenue split they offer over Steam. It’s something that many other developers and publishers have also used to bash Steam to champion Epic Games’ disruption tactic. Now one company has come to step in-between the two giants of the PC ecosystem.
Speaking with Gamespot, Devolver Digital founder and boss Graeme Struthers spoke about both sides of the “fight” going on now in the PC landscape. Unsurprisingly since the publisher has worked with Epic Games, he defended the exclusive deals on the Epic Games Store and said most of the criticism leveled at it doesn’t hold up.
“The rise about developers and publishers going to Epic and exclusivity, it doesn’t really hold up,” he said. “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.”
Interestingly, though, he also stood up for Steam as well. Despite many other publishers pulling out the knives to slice into Valve for the 70/30 revenue cut that’s been a flashpoint in this argument, Struthers says it’s worth remembering that PC gaming wouldn’t be where it is today without Steam, and that Valve has invested a huge amount into their ecosystem, much more than Epic has even attempted to.
“Competition is going to come along at some point. Epic have taken a view that their way of bringing content to their platform is far more generous revenue share and obviously they’ve been pushing exclusives–that’s great,” he explained. “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 have yet to do that. I’m not saying they won’t, and hopefully they will. In terms of the features and in terms of the toolsets for developers, there’s a ways to go. But competition is good.”
Though this may be little more than a developer with vested interest in both platforms paying some lip service to both sides, he does manage to bring up some good points either way. No doubt, the controversy surrounding both storefronts will continue on for the foreseeable future.