I bought a valve index to play Half Life Alyx and Boneworks. I was so excited to see what new and exciting games would come next aaaaand… nothing remotely interesting has come out since.

Yeah seriously. As a dev, that 30% cut gets you a lot of stuff with absolutely no additional charges. Trying to roll your own distribution for your downloads could exceed that 30% by itself after you:

• Host the files somewhere that can be downloaded anywhere close to as fast as steam’s servers
• Handle payment processing fees
• Develop and maintain a site with high reliability

And that’s only downloads. With steam you also get:

• p2p networking tools
• game server hosting
• steam community integration
• analytics
• cloud saves
• voip

And like 50 other things. It’s ridiculously good value unless you’re developing some super low rent single player indie title. Even then, just having it available on steam will get you way more sales to make up for it.

Sure, epic charges 10% but you basically only get distribution and some super half baked community features.

OSMC makes some good Kodi boxes under the Vero name if you don’t need proprietary streaming services. I use the jellyfin plugin to read from my JF server, works great. Supports 4k, HDR, audio passthrough, many codecs, all the good stuff.

Between that and my PS5 it covers all the bases

If you want to play every new AAA release on release, sure, something like gamepass/ps plus is cheaper. You can also get gamepass on PC fwiw, so it’s not really a good argument for consoles. I usually just wait for games to go on sale for $10-20, plus it gives time for the games to actually get patched and function properly. I’ve also been dumping thousands of hours into the same 3 or 4 games for the last decade, so really I could have spent nothing on PC gaming other than a few hundo on a new GPU a couple years ago.

And for most people, you need to have a PC anyway. Consoles are not good at doing your taxes or editing documents. So the alternative to a gaming PC isn’t just a console, it’s a console and a weaker PC bundled together. The price difference between a budget laptop and a kickass gaming rig is going to be less than the price of console.

How many games are actually steam exclusive on PC though, not counting 50 cent shovelware crap? A good chunk of the best selling PC games ever (minecraft for example) are not even available on steam.

I just went through the top 10 on steam and other than counter strike, which is literally made by valve, all of them are available elsewhere.

Unreal was obscenely expensive and way more difficult until UE4 though, long after unity had gained traction.