Steam is the most dominant because of their extremely customer friendly policies, their insane price crashes and the ease of publishing and installing games from the platform. If other platforms are able to provide all of that, with a commission below 30%, I'm sure they could easily take over.
But turns out, neither Epic nor EA are interested in serving the customer.
>Steam is the most dominant because of their ... insane price crashes
Are steam deals really better than on other platforms? They might have better deals compared to brick and mortar retailers but publishers generally have price parity across various digital storefronts (eg. epic vs steam), so attributing low prices to steam doesn't really make much sense. If anything steam is actually more expensive if you factor in authorized keystores (eg. greenmangaming), which are occasionally cheaper.
I've never seen any platform go that low on price except for Humble Bundle maybe. And even then, Steam has an EXTREMELY generous refund policy compared to any other platform.
IME they're matched by other platforms. If Cyberpunk is discounted for a steam summer sale, it's similarly discounted on Epic or GOG as well. It's not a Steam exclusive, and therefore can't be cited as an advantage.
A 15–20% fee would be much fairer in my opinion. They’d still be making plenty of money while letting developers keep more of what they earn through their hard work. At the very least, they should differentiate between big players and smaller indie developers.
Taking a larger cut from big players would incentivise them to make them create their own marketplace, where they exclusively publish their own games. Then we're back to square one.
Honestly, I think 15-20% is doable, if they make money in other ways. CS skins, new game releases from inhouse, etc.
Steam is the most dominant because of their extremely customer friendly policies, their insane price crashes and the ease of publishing and installing games from the platform. If other platforms are able to provide all of that, with a commission below 30%, I'm sure they could easily take over.
But turns out, neither Epic nor EA are interested in serving the customer.