No, I'm not saying that anyone is good or bad, but Tim Sweeney is full of shit and definitely is an hypocrite, he really talk like Epic is something good and that they don't have monopoly tendencies despite they bought exclusivity deals andall the other things they do. They give away their Engine "for free" but they charge you 5% for a life time, they obtain more money now than they obtained through license their engine and don't even give you the option to still do it id you have the founds.

Not necessarily. A lot comes down to the volume of sales and the split of fixed vs variable costs on a sale. Unless you're in finance/senior management at Valve or GoG, you have no way of knowing whether 30% is fair, a tight margin or profiteering. The split that the store takes HAS to cover the costs of distributing the game to the user in full (which effectively means an apportioned server/storage space and the average costs of transmission of the game to the user). It then also needs to contribute to the fixed costs of the business - which includes your other SG&A costs, as well as taxes and leave investors with more profit than they would have made by investing their money in a savings account. It's a rational decision to take a lower margin if it attracts enough additional developers to sell enough more units to cover the lower cut that you're taking.

In general, Epic has been a good thing for PC gaming because it's challenging the hegemony of Steam in a way that GoG has been unable to do - yes, it's another DRM platform, but at least it's fostering competition. Remember, exclusivity doesn't mean a monopoly - the games market is wider than that. It's not a monopoly if you can only buy Colin the Caterpillar from Waitrose as other Caterpillar cakes are available in other supermarkets.

In response to OP's question, to my mind it depends on a) whether GoG can make sufficient additional sales for it to be worthwhile - which would mean publishers committing to DRM free and b) whether the trend towards 12% is causing this to be a norm, without which people wouldn't bring games to GoG anymore if they didn't change.

That's all true, but a little competition never hurt anyone. Valve have grown very complacent over the years and Epic may yet shake things up a little. In addition, many of the indie games Epic have paid exclusivity for may not have ever came out (or they would have been scaled down and become lesser games) without the injection of Epic money.

As far as we know, GOG is doing that already.

It's true I don't work in Valve or GOG but I have some clue or how expensive is to mantain a server and I can imagine how expensive it must be to mantain the servers of Steam or GOG, and the back up servers, and electricity cost, secures, and a long etcetera. Plus they don't only offer a place to storage and sell games to developer, but they also help with marketing and support after launch and that helps a lot to AA and Indie Devs. Also they offer the product to a big public arround the world and save devs from a toon of legal stuff. For all that is that I consider that a 30% is not much, and 12% is work at a loss, a big company like MS and Epic can do it, Micorsoft can even gift 1 Billon of Xbox and still will be able to continue operating, but smaller studios and store not, what they are doing is something called dumping and is a business practice that tends to eliminate smaller companies to augment their market share.

I'm for whatever keeps GOG open so we can keep getting DRM free games, and I doubt cutting their revenue share that much would help. At least not unless Steam does it first, then they would have to.

I don't really get this play by Microsoft and Epic though. Consumers couldn't care less about this stuff, so it's not any kind of sales pitch people care about. If they want to compete with Steam then they have two real options consumers care about: cheaper prices and a better store experience. I think they know both those things are near impossible, so they're doing whatever else they can think of.

Based on the recent financial numbers that were released for GOG, dropping the split to 12/88 would put them well into the red, so I can't see any benefit to them changing the split.

Also, something to think about with respect to the Epic and Windows stores- how many of you regularly buy games through those stores? Of those of you who do, how many of you think the user experience of those stores should be what GOG, Steam, and other online stores should aim for? Turns out that putting together and maintaining a good online store actually requires a bit of resources.

GOG should have had a fair & reasonable cut since day 1. MS finally doing so on the Windows store has nothing to do with it though.

Certainly the extortionary 30% cut that GOG takes is extremely ludicrous, given GOG's small size.

In a survey of developers from a few years ago (it was discussed on this board at the time), almost all of the developers who participated said they didn't like GOG, and close to 0% of them wanted GOG to become the #1 game's platform.

One of the main reasons for that, is because from a developer's point of view, it makes zero sense to pay GOG 30% of their money in exchange for GOG's distribution earning them only a very tiny fraction of the sales they will receive from publishing the exact same game on Steam and/or EGS.

In other words, GOG has a very outsized take of the cut relative to the very little revenue that they generate for the dev/publisher, which makes publishing on GOG make little to no sense for many devs/publishers.

And the big ones who do, like Take 2 and Bethesda, they usually only publish on GOG many years after their games have become old & stale & obsolete, when no one is buying them any more, as a last-ditch effort to squeeze a bit more revenue out of their dead games.

GOG lowering it's cut to 8-12% would have a drastic effect on fixing all the problems I mentioned, and encouraging devs to stop hating GOG like many of them currently do (as per the aforementioned survey).