Yeah people consistently forget this, and will say things like ‘Valve isn’t even doing any marketing for me!’

No, they are.

Its just that its on their platform.

Via their categorization and recommendation snd review systems.

As opposed to… other pay to win ad platforms that shove ads in peoples faces depending on how much money you throw at them.

Also, while this is more of a minor point, Valve’s cut drops to 25% for games sales past $10 million, 20% for game sales past $50 million.

Been that way for 7 or 8 years.

I’ve now lost multiple entire weekends to trying to figure out how to just download assets from FAB, on linux.

Finally, they just made a direct option on the website to just download files, you know, like a normal download.

Prior to that, you basically had to install or compile and install UE5, to be able to download some asset.

… This doesn’t work well, because as you say, UE 5 is horrifically borked and improperly documented on linux, they can’t even figure out how to list all the dependencies you actually need, and thats on the linux versions they claim to support.

TIL that Tim Fortnite does not consider Sony or Nintendo to be ‘major stores’.

TIL that the video game industry has never had nor currently has titles that are priced exclusively on certain platforms.

(Where ‘its only available for purchase on one platform’ is an effective price of infinity on other platforms)

Just… from the article:

“Steam’s rules do explicitly prohibit games from steering players to competing purchase methods, forcing everyone to pay 30% to Valve,” he [Sweeney] recently tweeted. “Apple and Google did the same until the court explicitly found this practice to be unlawful. Now they don’t!”

It’s not clear exactly what rule Sweeney’s referring to here, but Steam’s own guidelines state that “it’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.” Though Valve would also prefer that developers “don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam key purchasers.”

It’s almost like this guy is malding, crashing out even, and has just… departed from the realm of even trying to make sense.

What is happening here is that Tim is losing his mind because Unreal Engine 5 only runs on GPUs (mostly from Nvidia) that cost as much as an entire PC did 2 or 3 years ago, and so many AAA studios that used UE 5 to make a pretty but hollow and buggy game are now collapsing or seeing a dramatic consumer pullback.

See how this is all connected, and these idiots did this to themselves?

Nvidia decides that Real Time Ray Tracing is the new paradigm for gaming graphics, and Unreal is the primary way people will experience this, by having all the lighting be done ‘auto-magically’ by UE 5, from the perspective of game devs.

Fastforward 5 or so years, half of everything computer hardware is too expensive now, hugely funded AAA games are routinely failing and causing financial disasters for publishers, Unreal Engine 5 is a hugely stigmatized joke because its not any kind of optimized for hardware people actually have, and outside of AAA games, is notorious for low quality UE asset store flips and actual scam games…

…this paradigm doesn’t work.

Compare that to Valve pretty close to singlehandedly developing its own VR hardware, and showcase AAA tier game for it… and well hey shucks, yeah, its too expensive for wide adoption, but that didn’t ruin their entire business’s financials.

They just actually properly accounted for the costs of trying that paradigm shift, and are today still iterating on and improving it, ala the upcoming SteamFrame and new software layer for translating ARM to x86 calls.