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.
You know you made a really interesting point that they marketed to the sellers not the ultimate customers. I hadn't really picked up on that before, but it does mitigate what should be a healthy dose of competition by altering the target audience a bit.
That's what I always said, why use Epic store? As a user you get worse treatment. Sure price is the same or they give you some discount but number of services offered is far from being on par with Steam. No family sharing, no refund policy, no cloud saves, no networking system, no streaming, no card collecting, no steam play. I might not use or desire all of those but some people do.
The fact Epic had to resort to extremes like timed exclusives just meant I dropped those developers off of my list of wanted games as it only went to show they are willing to sacrifice your inconvenience and happiness for some extra money. For them it was probably making sure project succeeds but in the end I don't care about them if they don't care about me.
I use so many of steams features it's unfathomable to use any other launcher or even pirate anything because steam is so streamlined. Cloud saves, automatic local file transfers instead of redundant downloads, family share to my friends PC so half the time when I visit she'll have already downloaded and played my new games. When I get there they're just ready to go. Remote desktop to make any tweaks on my PC or casual gaming over stream. Big picture mode so I can lay back with a controller and chill, no futzing with m+kb UI. Steam input means I can easily drop in and out with any controllers.
I just got a steam deck and while I could install another app store on it, I've entirely stuck with steam just for the UX. I don't want to fuck with extra launchers and touchscreen bs.
I just played a coop Windows game on a Linux based portable PC on a 4K TV with a $24 USB hub for video out, using an Xbox and ps5 controllers over Bluetooth. This was completely seamless and controller navigated. Steam is insanely good.
If I priate anything I still end up adding it to Steam as a non-steam game just because I am dependant on Proton working. Even then the ootb experience is better since Steam handles actually setting up the Proton environment for me when I actually buy the game.
Last I tried using a Bluetooth controller it didn't go very well, has the experience gotten better?
I didn't have any issues. We did notice some input lag but disabling vsync helped a lot. Not sure if that was controller related
I tried to play Halo reach over Bluetooth a long while ago and when the rumble went off it would stop taking my input. Glad to hear your aren't having any issues.
I'm pretty sure they have the same refund policy as steam. They also do have a networking system (which I think even has interop with steam -- the Bigfoot game tried to use it but it was very unpopular since it required steam gamers to link an epic account but it exists).
Also pretty sure there are cloud saves but less confident on that one.
And yeah, steam streaming and card collecting aren't really all that important to me in particular, but I get that some people really like them.
Similar refund policy, but not the same. Epic refund policy marks all the games with in-game currency and purchases as non-refundable. Am not sure about the rest and whether developer can set a game to be non-refundable. It seems they have worked on adding a lot of features, however they are still lagging a lot behind Steam and there are many more things than just cloud saves and refund although those are big features. Steam Play for example which allows Linux users to play any Windows game and by extension makes SteamDeck a possibility. That one is huge. Family sharing is also a big thing. Chat and voice communication, etc. There are plenty of those not implemented yet.
Not only the same, but better. Epic will automatically just refund you the difference if a game you bought goes on sale within a certain period of time after your purchase (allegedly even beyond the two week refund window, although I haven't been able to find any definitive statement of how long they watch it for). Just flat out, you get an email one day telling you they've credited back X amount of your purchase.
There are. For more than four years now. The problem is that, just like with Steam, they can only put the option out there - it's up to devs to actually implement it. And there are a lot of devs who haven't done so, which lots of people interpret as EGS not having cloud saves at all.
it's the paypal problem
sellers everywhere fucking hate paypal
but they all still use it because buyers fucking love paypal
I'd say PayPal problem but in reverse, customers hate Epic but still have to put up with it to get to the exclusives.
sort of. the fact that egs is still not profitable on its own merits and that developers still shuttle their games over to steam once exclusivity is up tells me that not enough customers are taking the bait.
if being on egs didn’t mean taking a huge hit in total sales, developers would be putting games exclusively on it without uncle tim slapping them over the face with a bag of money
I mean that's the same side that steam is using their monopoly for, too
For the users it's definitely the most relaxed option - but as a developer if you choose to not put up with steams 30% rule you are fucked.
The fact that pretty much immediately after epic gained traction steam announced cheaper rates for bigger publishers tells you that they definitely are aware of how 30% is too much
Personally that's why I buy all my games on gog if possible even though I have a Steamdeck and that makes stuff more complicated.
People denying steam has a monopoly are probably also denying other fundamental truths that would imply that they had to change their lifestyle (climate change anyone?)
Yeah, GOG is my preferred store if there's feature parity, too. On that note, anyone here got AoW4 from GOG? Are all mods available through Paradox, or at least all you'd ever need? Or is most bound to Steam like back in the AoW3 days?
I don't really think it is. Steam hasn't really tried that hard to get developers to use their platform because their users already demand their platform. They've made concessions on their preferred way in a handful of cases with very large gaming companies like Activision.
I regret gog purchases now that I own a steam deck. I don't see gog directly getting my money if I can get it on steam anymore.
Valve really understands how to get people to stay. Proton is an absolute life saver for gaming on linux and Steam currently offers the best experience with it. You just click play and most of the times that's it, game works. I have no idea how VR works without Steam but I can only imagine it being a giant pain in the ass given how easy SteamVR is to use (a couple of Linux Bugs aside)
You say that as if Steam has unreasonably high rates. Sony, Microsoft, Apple as a standard all have the same rate.
Yes, those are all unreasonably high, which is why they have so many billions of dollars in profit. The cost of running their services is a pittance compared to their revenues.
Is it surprising to you that Valve is a for-profit company, not a charity? Of course they profit from the 30%. Just like with any other product, you charge based on what people are willing to pay. If you charge too much, people won't pay for the product and you have to readjust the price. Obviously since companies are willing to pay the 30%, it must not be too high. Somehow I doubt if the people complaining about this woke up as the CEO of Valve, they would be willing to massively cut their companies profits because... why? Just to be nice to a bunch of other corporations?
No, of course it's not surprising that they're not a charity. Sure, the big app stores exploit their near-monopolies with exorbitant fees.
Good for Apple, Valve and Google, but I think it's better that game dev studios and app developers get money instead. However, devs don't currently have a real choice but to pay up.
Competition can change that, so we should support technically worse stores like Epic so developers will not have to pay their unreasonably high fees.
"Exploit their near-monopolies". Except Valve doesn't "exploit" their near monopoly, I don't see Valve buying exclusives do you? They just provide a better product. Most importantly, they provide a better product then piracy. That is the bare minimum a games store on PC needs to reach and Epic does not reach that. Epic isn't failing because of Steam, it's failing because why buy a $60 game on a featureless store that launches an .exe for me when I can just download the .exe directly for free? If Epic wanted to provide a better product, they have billions of dollars and hundreds of devs to make that happen. They just choose not to.
This tired old argument... There's absolutely no evidence that the extra money these companies get from the Epic cut doesn't just go straight into a Bobby Kotick yacht or some shit. There's a lot of grubby hands in-between the store platform and the actual dev teams and maybe I'm cynical but this "trickle-down" model of economics seems kind of far fetched.
Steam only has a monopoly because they have the absolute feature advantage. There is no other launcher that offers all of the features Steam does. Steams Monopoly is a natural one, it formed because every other choice was worse and developers don't want to put the game on another 30 stores where it won't sell anyway. Epic is trying to create an artificial monopoly where everyone uses Epic because the developers literally cannot sell the game anywhere else (at least for a time).
Steam: Developers voluntarily restrict themselves to that single store out of convenience (99% of the customer base is there, why bother with another store). The customer base is there because the store is feature rich. Epic: Developers are artificially restricted to that single store. The customer base is there because they can't get the game anywhere else.
Given the above I predict that, unless Epic gets their Store feature equal to Steam (which won't happen imo), Epic will have to continue forcing exclusivity indefinitely. The moment they stop forcing people to use their store their customers will migrate back to Steam for a better experience.