The Steam store’s business model is outdated. So says Chris Early, Vice President of Partnerships and Revenue at Ubisoft.
Tom Clancy’s The Division 2
In an interview for The New York Times, Ubisoft’s top manager called Steam’s current methods of working with games “unrealistic.”
In his opinion, the business processes in Steam do not meet modern standards of game distribution.
This fact was one of the reasons why Ubisoft took The Division 2 from Steam and released it in the Epic Games Store. The latter offers the authors of games 88% of the income from them. Steam still requires 30%*.
* With a reservation. Last year, the store changed the rules for the distribution of shares exclusively for the creators of large titles. You can find out more about this here.
Obviously, Earley’s opinion is shared by other major publishers. A number of publishers switched from Steam to their own launchers or third-party stores even before the launch of the Epic Games Store. Some, however, later returned to the Valve store (for example, Bethesda).
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