this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
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“They charge developers too much!”
“Ok, Tim, so how exactly do you make money for your company, then? Because giving away all the free stuff seems like awfully bad business.”
Never thought I’d be defending a company charging a lot of money but since Steam actually does provide an excellent, stable service with bonuses like Linux development and the Steam Deck I mean, I really ain’t that mad, especially they still offer really good sales.
I think you're missing the point that Epic's store is only not profitable at their margins because of scale. If they had even half of Steam's user base they would be profitable. Their problem is that gamers insist on backing Valve's monopoly because it's what other gamers tell them to do online.
And Epic provides Unreal Engine, the gaming engine that powers the majority of modern games, with free and extremely cheap tiers for indie devs, and they provide explicit Linux support for their engine and dev environment. They've also used a substantial amount of their Fortnite money to break up app store monopolies on Android and iOS.
They are not the villain that the gaming community thinks they are.
Well, see, here's your first mistake; you think Valve has a monopoly. But they're just one store out of many, including game console stores. The difference is they're actually providing a good service.
Yes, it's shocking; people tend to gravitate towards the service that's actually good!
And what a total shite of an engine that is. It's actively destroying the gaming industry by emphasising all the worst development practices gamers have complained about for the past 8 years.
Just like with their service fee, they're doing this to completely undercut competitors, to ensure the Game engine everyone used is Unreal.
This isn't a good thing.
No they don't. They barely support Linux with some elements. But Unreal Engine runs like absolute shit on Linux, if at all, and Tim Sweeny infamously hates Linux with a passion. He has some personal grudge against it.
Because they want Fortnite to be the one game young people play. The One Live Service To Rule Them All. The only way they can do that, to reach the maximum amount of the youngest generations to squeeze them and their parents for all their money, is to be as widely available as possible.
Valve got skin gambling. Epic got Fortnite. The latter involves children and is massively more profitable.
Lmfao, you're so brain dead that you think Unreal Engine is a bad thing.
Jesus fucking Christ learn how to think critically and not just suck Gabe's billionaire dick.
Unreal Engine is a bad thing. Or maybe you haven't noticed how every game that's made with Unreal Engine, all the way back since UE4, requires far more resources than is necessary to run what it's running.
If you support UE5 and Epic you support actively destroying gaming as an industry, and game creation as a multi-faceted art.
We'll all wait for you to cite your source on that one, because, no Unreal does not perform particularly worse then any other game engine.
Unreal is broadly available and not just hidden behind AAA walls so a lot of A and AA devs won't have time to optimize their games with it, but they wouldn't have had time to optimize regardless of whether they published with Unity or Godot or any other engine. Unreal is certainly a vastly more efficient engine then Unity, which is its main competition.
Also, how are you squaring away the idea that Unreal is ruining games as art? There are two options:
be a creative game designer and spend all your resources on engineers to build you a custom game engine, then spend more resources training everyone at your company on how your specific niche engine works
be a creative game designer and use an off the shelf engine like Unreal to run and render your game so you can spend your resources on artists, writers, and designers, and everyone comes in knowing how to use it
Do you really think that number 1 leads to more artistic games? The literal entire reason we're in an indie game mecca right now is because of the widespread proliferation of third party game engines, that let small dev teams focus on the game and not the engine.