Whether you love them or hate them, one thing that cannot be denied about Epic Games is how they have properly opened up the discussion about platform holders in the PC gaming space and how much revenue they take from game sales. For a long time, the commonly accepted standard was Valve’s 30 percent cut, which was then revised to become smaller and smaller the higher the sales of a game went, bottoming out at 20 percent once sales hit 50 million.
Microsoft has entered the battle, announcing today that they will no longer be taking a 30 percent cut of PC sales on the Windows Store, but rather slimming that down to 12 percent across the board. This does not include sales made from the Xbox, but rather PC games bought through the Windows Store. This change puts their revenue split in line with Epic’s and adds additional pressure on Valve who has been set on the higher revenue split since the dawn of time argument of these revenue splits began.
Whether this makes a difference to Valve remains to be seen as the very vocal portion of PC gamers have been vocal about their distrust and disdain for Epic, partly due to the platform’s problematic, buggy past. The Microsoft Store is definitely far from perfect, with a lot of people only using it for Game Pass for PC, or for when exclusives are released that aren’t also made available on Steam.
What are your thoughts on this change? Is it enough to make you choose one of these platforms over Steam? Let us know in the comments or on social media.
Jordan lives and breathes Dark Souls, even though his favourite game is Bloodborne. He takes pride in bashing his face on walls and praising the sun. Hailing from the land of tacos, he is the token minority for WellPlayed.
