Steam, Valve’s digital distribution, is easily the largest digital storefront on PC. Only Good Old Games and the Epic Games Store really present it with competition. But that doesn’t mean developers like the way it does business. A GDC survey that gathered opinions from more than 3,000 developers found that most developers don’t think that Steam earns its 30% revenue cut.

According to the survey, only 3% think the 30/70 revenue split is justified, which is down from 6% last year. 43% of respondents think that a 10 – 15% cut would be more fair, while 3% strangely think storefronts should take larger cuts. For what it’s worth, many of the respondents to this survey were either North American or European game developers.

30% was the standard revenue cut for digital storefronts for a long time, but things have changed in the last few years. Both Google and Apple are playing with polices that would only take a 15% cut from developers that make less than $1 million a year. By far the leader here is Epic, whose Epic Games Store only takes a 12% cut, upending the industry standard. Microsoft announced that they would be adopting similar policies in August. Valve also introduced a tiered revenue sharing system in 2018, but it has come under fire for favoring bigger games.

It’s that time of year again, the age of witches and ghouls and whatever other frights you wanna insert into that equation. It’s this time of year when storefronts love to discount their horror (or kinda, sorta horror) games. Steam, Epic Games Store and the PlayStation Store all have ongoing sales, and now it’s time for GOG to join the fold.

A big part of GOG’s appeal is its classic titles along with the DRM free approach. In this year’s Halloween sale you can revisit some great horror titles such as Dead Space, The Suffering series and Blood. But it’s not just classics, you can net some newer titles that maybe aren’t quite horror, but close enough like Hollow Knight, Blasphemous, Thimbleweed Park and a good host more.

The Halloween sale will run from now until November 4th, so you’ll get a little time after the witching hour to purchase some spooky games. For a full list of games available for sale, check out the store’s Halloween sale page through here.

The PC gaming scene is in a state of upheaval right now due to the actions of Epic Games and how they’ve conducted their business. It’s been a firestorm of controversy that seems to never end, with most of that aimed at the company’s buying of exclusive rights to third party games for their storefront (though it’s not the only criticism the store has levied at it). Whether or not one agrees with it, in the end it’s the way Epic has seen to try and create market share against Steam. Another company that’s been doing that for much longer is CD Projekt RED with GOG (Good Old Games), and they are seemingly taking a different path.

In an interview with PCGamesN, Global Communications Manager Marcin Traczyk talked about the company’s strategy with the storefront, saying the company won’t be employing exclusives in the same way that Epic has, instead wanting to convince customers their service is a good choice by what makes their store unique.

“We always welcome competition, and as with every business, we are adapting on the go to the market situation, But at the same time with the solutions that we’re offering, we’re giving players the ability to choose.”

Traczyk also doesn’t shy away from a truth that undoubtedly informed this discussion, and that was the company had gotten burned once by trying the exclusive thing with Thronebreaker, a spinoff from the popular The Witcher series, that CDPR released on PC exclusively to the GOG storefront. While not the same situation as Epic Games, since the game was published and developed by CDPR, the game being exclusive to only one storefront did it no favors.

“With Thronebreaker, we started with an exclusive, and decided to share it with a wider audience,” Traczyk said. “It proved to us that exclusives maybe don’t work for us, because we don’t want to limit the number of people who can access the game.”

While it remains to be seen how successful Epic will be in their attempts with exclusivity, it seems GOG is going a different path. The company’s next game, Cyberpunk 2077, is doing well on their storefront, but it also will launch day and date on various others such as Steam and the Epic Games Store next year.

With Epic Games getting more and more bold with their choices of games to grab to be exclusive to their PC storefront/launcher, Epic Games Store, we get a lot of controversy. While they’ve gotten some pretty high profile stuff recently, probably the biggest game of next year won’t be on that list as Cyberpunk 2077 is slated to come out to all major PC storefronts. In fact, right now it’s the developer’s own storefront that’s putting in some extra work.

If you weren’t aware, CD Projekt owns the Good Old Games storefront (often abbreviated as GOG). The main selling point to their store is the fact that games lack DRM, meaning they aren’t tied to any launcher or service when you download them. And today the company was proud to announce that one third of digital PC sales for 2077 were from GOG. Considering that the game will also launch on Steam and Epic Games Store, that’s quite the feat for the company and probably serves as a double victory of sorts.

Cyberpunk 2077 will release on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on April 16th of 2020.

#DidYouKnow — every third copy of the digital version of #Cyberpunk2077 for PC so far has been pre-ordered on @GOGcom! Thank you for your support — it’s breathtaking! pic.twitter.com/Oypidsi6lg

— CD PROJEKT RED (@CDPROJEKTRED) July 8, 2019

Quick, name the first video game RPG ever. If you guessed Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, or Zelda, well, you were laughably wrong, and I am laughing at you. If you guessed something like Ultima or a Dungeons and Dragons adaptation, you were closer to the truth, and I am not laughing at you. I am just telling you you were wrong still.

While there is no way of knowing if it was the first one, one of the games that holds claim to being the first popular video game RPG ever is Akalabeth. The grandfather of all RPGs, the game was created by Richard Garriott, of Ultima fame, for Apple II. And today, it is available to download, for free, from Good Old Games.

I mean, man, these guys are really living up to their name here, aren’t they. I’m not sure how well the game holds up- my guess is it doesn’t at all- but it’s a piece of history, so I say go ahead and get it.

]]> https://gamingbolt.com/broken-sword-trilogy-sale-on-gog/feed 0 50954