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[Retry]

Keep in mind this is mostly just noise - when indie devs actually look at their stats, it turns out most of their sales are on Steam. What they get for that 30% is access to the platform where most of their sales will be. And Steam doesn't stop you from selling anywhere else, and they don't take a cut of that at all.

When a game is available on Steam and off Steam, people will tend to buy it on Steam. That most of one's sales come from Steam is not an indicator that Steam is driving those sales, right? You certainly would have gotten *some* of those sales if the game wasn't on Steam. I'm not saying that it's worthless - it's certainly doing *something* for visibility, especially if one gets lucky and the algorithms smile on them. Just that as an argument for Steam's value proposition, that doesn't quite work. This is what makes Steam's value so difficult to evaluate, you unfortunately just can't compare on/off Steam sales and draw conclusions.

(To be clear, I still think that Steam, as it is right now, is a net benefit in terms of the number of sales vs going only direct.)

I dunno.  I can only speak for myself, but many (most?) of the gems that I either bought or have on my watchlist are from my lazy catalog scanning from the major sales (when my priorities should have been elsewhere, but I digress).  I don't think I'd ever have come across Oxygen Not Included or the Creeper World series otherwise.

This game, I think I came across it from someone in Discord.  Not sure where he came across it himself.  If not for that fluke I'd still never have heard about it.

[Soda Savvy]

Steam has its fair share of issues in regards to finding games, but at the same time, I feel it's just like finding a good book on Amazons store(or any other store). You have to seek the thing out yourself if the author hasn't done any or enough advertising(or if you just haven't seen it yourself). My steam game ignore list is several thousand long(And the thing is, it's not just garbage I ignore, but also otherwise good games that I personally do not care for), but the wishlist is already several paychecks long.

I couldn't play all the games on the wishlist in a year even if I just bought them all, and they're quality games.

The problem is sheer volume, and because of that I personally could not, would not fault Alex for taking any theoretical deal that would set him and his team up for financial stability when they would otherwise be(and sort of are) playing the role of an apple in an olympic  scale bobbing for apples match. It would be incredibly entitled to think otherwise.

It would not however, in the case of Epic specifically, make me want to actually continue playing the game if their launcher with its array of security issues and general kludgery became the only way to access the game. I say this as a Phoenix Point backer, and we all know how that went.