Does Steam need to step up?

**Kenneth** · 04-03-2019

So today there is a lot of drama in the gaming community because Gearbox announced Borderlands 3 would be coming to PC on September 13th exclusively on Epic Games launcher for the first 6 months. This is the latest in the games moving over from Steam after Epic announced the margins they were offering to developers. Now for years companies like Ubisoft and EA have created launchers for their own titles and even Activision's latest Call of Duty was on the Blizzard launcher but none of that seemed to ever really impact Steam. Sure it was a pain having so many launchers but Steam still controlled the indie games market and a lot of AAA titles outside of Ubisoft, EA, Activison/Blizzard. With Epic Games now offering only a 12% cut of revenue compared to Steams 30% a lot of games we expected to be on Steam are now moving over to Epic Games. The Division 2 and Metro Exodus were two that came before this. One has to wonder if this is Steam's biggest competition yet.

What needs to be done?

This is a question I leave to you. I am curious as to what everybody thinks of not only this competition for Valve but also what Valve would need to do to ensure Steam is top dog for years to come. Some ideas I have are:

Start making great games again

This one is kind of broad but Epic is only relevant because of Fortnite right now and Fortnite isn't going anywhere and neither is the cash flow that comes with it. Epic Games is taking this once in a lifetime opportunity to make a power move while Valve has honestly done close to nothing outside of VR for years. If Valve made great games again I feel like that would be a great starting point.

Maybe offer developer loyalty programs

These margins are hard to compete with so maybe make it so if you put content on Steam for X amount of years you get more of the cut. I think most companies realize Steam is a much more popular launcher and would rather use it if the margins were the same so if Valve could even come close with some sort of loyalty program this would probably entice them to keep their games there.