Ubisoft's vice president for partnerships and revenue, Chris Early, has said that Steam's business model is impractical in 2019.

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Speaking to the New York Times, Early said Ubisoft decided to stop selling its latest blockbuster games on Steam because Valve will not budge on its revenue sharing model, where Steam keeps 30 percent of a game's sale price.“It’s unrealistic, the current business model that they have,” he said. “It doesn’t reflect where the world is today in terms of game distribution.” Early explained that the decision to not sell The Division 2 on Valve's platform was made as part of a larger business discussion at Ubisoft in regards to releasing games on Steam.However, certain observations can be made in regards to the fact that Ubisoft has listed its most recent titles - The Division 2 and Anno 1800 - on only the Epic Games Store and its own in-house store Uplay. Both stores allow the company to keep a much larger slice of the profits. Epic Games keeps less than half of the revenue Steam takes from developers - only 12 percent - and even waives the 5 percent royalty fees for games built using its Unreal Engine. Meanwhile, Ubisoft keeps 100 percent of the revenue for any game sold on Uplay because it owns the storefront in its entirety.This matters because how we buy games is in flux: you can currently either buy a physical disc, digitally download a title through a storefront, or stream it. Which one of these revenue streams ends up coming out on top will likely shape game developers' business models in years to come.Other developers told the New York Times that Steam's monopoly on game sales needs to be challenged. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said, "stores extract an enormous portion of game industry profits and are ripe for disruption." The Epic Games Store opened its virtual doors in December using the cash flow from Fortnite, and scored the backing of powerful companies like Chinese tech behemoth Tencent.The creative director of Supergiant Games, Greg Kasavin, said "What’s a Sony without a Microsoft and a Nintendo? The console cycles were always best when the rivalry is heated." His studio - the makers of Transistor - decided to publish their dungeon crawler Hades on the Epic Games store with a year's exclusivity.Last year Steam made the controversial decision to "allow everything" on its storefront, as long as it's not "illegal or straight up trolling." More recently though, it quietly implemented a a new policy on Steam Workshop that requires any new user-made mods to first be approved by a moderator.

Alysia Judge is a writer and presenter. Follow her on Twitter @alysiajudge.