Dusk Developer David Szymanski: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly
If I'm honest, I don't disagree.
I would love for Steam to have **actual competition. Which is difficult, sure, but you could run a slightly less feature-rich store, take less of a cut, and pass the reduction fully on to consumers and you'd be an easy choice for many gamers.
But that's not what Epic is after. They tried to go hard after the sellers, figuring that if they can corner enough fo the market with exclusives the buyers will have to come. But they underestimated that even their nigh-infinite coffers struggle to keep up with the raw amount of games releasing, and also the unpredictability of the indie market where you can't really know what to buy as an exclusive.
Nevermind that buying one is a good way to make it forgotten.
So yeah, fully agreed. Compared to Epic, I vastly prefer Steam's 30% cut. As the consumer I pay the same anyways, and Steam offers lots of stuff for it like forums, a client that boots before the heat death of the universe, in-house streaming, library sharing, cloud sync that sometimes works.
Thanks for the read. A couple points:
I summarily addressed the inertia issue already, when I mentioned that they underestimated consumer's unwillingness to change.
The article is primarily aimed at startups, who don't have the same amount of money to pour into software development, testing, and infrastructure.
Epic almost did exactly what the article suggested, but it notably did not improve anything over Steam. It didn't even try for parity with Steam. In my opinion, as someone who plays PC games, that removed any chance of me even considering using it in any serious capacity.
I genuinely think they would've had a shot at being successful if they had tried to improve the state of PC gaming. Steam is massive, but it's not without its pain points. The core of the client is ancient, and the fact that it heavily utilizes CEF makes it a bit of a resource hog. There's a lot of bugs hidden in the nooks and crannies, and legacy cruft makes fixing some of these issues take a very long time.
Epic had the right approach to getting their foot in the door by giving away games for free and paying/bribing developers to release non-exclusive games on their platform. They just fucked up everything else.
Some things they could have done to help themselves:
Released a client that worked more consistently than Steam:
Built-in Nvidia GameStream protocol support.
GameStream has lower latency than Steam Link.
Integrated mods.
They wouldn't get developer buy-in for a new ecosystem, but that doesn't mean they couldn't just buy out an existing mod platform and integrate it.
Forums, chat, and social features.
Lacking these, they're basically asking players to go to Steam whenever they need to find comminuty guides or discussions.
Achievements and matchmaking as a drop-in Steam API replacement.
An equivalent to Steam Input for remapping controller inputs on a per-game basis.
A CEO that knows when to stop talking.
The impression I get from him talking is that he thinks he's the messiah of PC gaming. The impression I get from his actions is that he's just like the rest of the publishers trying to grope our wallets at every opportunity. I doubt I'm the only one.