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.
I trust a steam monopoly long before I'd trust epic. Epic is run to meet the needs of share holders and valve is run to meet the needs of Gaben.
Gaben isn't going to last forever. But honestly the only other good games storefront is GoG. I'll continue using Steam for as long as it's still good.
I've used GoG once for a game that wasn't on steam but I have done much more. Honestly I acknowledge that this ephemeral moment in time where PC gaming is kept in balance by Gaben can't last. But I really think the lens we should look at PC landscape today is one of appreciation. If EA ran the game in steam's shoes we wouldn't get things like summer sales or games at reduced prices long after their launch.
Don't be sad it will be gone be happy it happened.
Gaben has been hands off at valve for a decade. He's off breaking world records with research submersibles. Playing with his rubber duckies in the bathtub.
Is that not what you want from him?
Just saying that trust in Gaben and trust in Valve are two separate things. Valve has been doing fine without Gaben at the wheel.
The point is that, other than Gabe, Valve doesn't have any shareholders to put before their customers. A publicly traded company, on the other hand, effectively has no choice but to cause as much harm as possible to their customers and to society in general in order to maximize short term shareholder profits, leading to runaway enshittification.
Nobody is talking about public companies here. Both Valve and Epic are private companies.
If you want to complain about profit motives, that's a capitalism problem overall, not an issue with public vs. private corporations.
One of those companies is partly owned and heavily influenced by a publicly traded Chinese company.
are you referring to tennacent (likely misspelled)
No I am referring to Tencent Holdings Limited
https://markets.ft.com/data/equities/tearsheet/summary?s=700:HKG
Both Valve and Epic are private companies. I still trust Valve over Epic, but I think technically Tim Sweeney has pretty much full control over Epic as well (for better or for worse).
He does, but not the stake Gaben has. Sweeny sold 40% to tencent. This still gives him control, but thats a very large shareholder that can push and pull when they want.
They can't "push and pull" anything. With Sweeney owning 50%+1, Tencent and anyone else he sold shares to can literally do nothing - he will always have the final say. And since the company is private, there's almost certainly an agreement/contract in place on those share purchases that if someone wants to dump them they have to offer them back to him/the company first. Since it's not a public company they can't just go sell their shares on an open market. The threat of a large shareholder is gone in a case like this - they can't stage a hostile takeover and they can't dump and run.
You’re thinking of technically taking the decisions in the company. But shareholders can do much more. Like influencing the value of stocks by selling too many at once.
Tell me you didn't actually read my comment without telling me you didn't read my comment.
You’re also assuming there are no other shareholders………..
Sure, maybe those 106 are sharing 10% but I doubt it.
Another point for me at least, I actually put in effort to not getting made in China products where feasible. The same thing applies here, supporting epic is supporting China. I really just prefer not to support China, so no epic games for me.
Ah that’s a fair point. I haven’t paid too much attention to this. Thanks for providing some more context :).
valve might be the closest thing i have ever seen to an actual benevolent dictator, even if said dictator is very lazy and only deigns to do anything significant once in a while.
In Gaben we trust.
When he's gone I assume it will go to shit.
i said valve rather than gabe for a reason, gabe mostly leaves the company to its own devices at this point while he focuses on realizing holodeck technology or whatever the hell he's doing now.
Don't fix what ain't broke.
I mean, the back button has been broken since basically the whole UI overhaul.
There was a recent update that addressed the back button. Since then, I've noticed clicking games in my wishlist and then going back returns me to my scroll position and a few pages that were missing in the back button (like it would back past them) are now there.
I've been told there's been an update for the back button since like a day after the new UI was released. Doesn't matter whether in Beta or Stable, it's still broken for me such that I get sent back to the library.
More like: out of sight, out of mind.
That's because you are not in a position to produce and sell a game.
As a user it sure is the case but as a developer you are in a position that you either have to take their 30% cut or accept that you are selling way less
The fact that pretty much immediately after epic launched their store steam lowered the cut for big publishers tells you that they are fully aware that 30% is too much to be reasonable but they completely could get away with that because Devs just didn't have a choice.
Because of epic that now changed since even if you don't actually sell more games you at least can get a guaranteed profit as if you sold those games that you miss out on by not being on steam.
Sure the way epic is doing it is not good but I really don't see another way how a significant number of buyers would ever come to another store. That didn't work for EA, that didn't work for Ubisoft, that also didn't work for GOG where you actually own the game without DRM and not just a license to play it as long as the server is allowing you.
People are fundamentally lazy and hate changing their routines - that's why forcing them into buying at your store is necessary if you want to get them to switch.
I think you got the whole thing mixed up. Sure Valve takes a huge cut, but if game does poorly Valve earns less as well. So there's an incentive from both parties to make sure game succeeds. But in the end Valve makes sure you as a consumer get your money's worth, hence why they even added no questions asked refund policy. Policy which has resulted in more purchases than before, because risk of not liking the game is non-existent now.
Epic on the other hand is forcing users to buy into their ecosystem by way of exclusives. Developers use this to make sure project succeeds even if it's not good. That is to say they get the money regardless. But this model is not sustainable as Epic has to earn money at some point so number of exclusives will be lower and lower. At the same time they are encouraging developers to not try as hard to polish the game since they get the money regardless.
Fundamentally approaches are completely different and Steam's approach can't fail because they cater to customer while Epic is just trying to force people away while offering subpar service. And whoever holds the money holds the power.
It's a really fascinating market dynamic. Steam is good to consumers, generally speaking, and offers features to that end. Family sharing is the wildest thing imaginable, since it's formally letting customers share one purchase instead of each making one for two purchases. Their refund policy too is really, really nice.
Valve has effectively chosen to be more enticing to the end user than to the seller. They've gathered up so many buyers that it's foolish for sellers to not set up a shop there. A 30% cut of revenue is hefty, but like you said, that sets up a dynamic where both want the game to succeed. I suspect paying a monthly fee to remain listed on steam would end up worse for everyone.
Gaben is one hell of a mastermind.
Indeed. And it's a system where everyone benefits. As opposed to currently popular philosophy of "milk it while you can" from big publishers.
It's a healthy dynamic which could be better, but it being healthy for everyone is what keeps it afloat
Subpar is being generous.
how long do devs think this is sustainable?
to me it seems like devs are trading long term sustainability for short term profitability. sure, your game Cracksnot was profitable because EGS paid out the butt to make it exclusive. now hardly anyone has played your game, how many people are going to get excited about Cracksnot 2 in a few years? will epic still be willing to pay you upfront for Cracksnot 2 exclusivity?
if egs never really takes off (which so far, it hasn't), eventually epic will cut their losses and stop throwing money at it.
That's what everyone is doing nowadays. Trading long term "potential" for short term gains. Let's face it, the earth isn't gonna last forever, it'd be a neverending hellscape in like what 40 - 50 years. Better to enjoy it while you can by getting the most of what you need right now.
I get like 99% of my news about upcoming or newly released games from steam. There have been so many games I'm not even aware exist, like last week I found out Saints Row got a new game a while back but it was epic exclusive so I never knew.
Also being a Linux gamer steam has amazing support for Linux while epic has none.
Rest assured, you didn't miss anything with the latest Saints Row. It was decent fun for about 20-30 hours, but it felt like much less of a game than any of its predecessors. I got the impression that the idea was to restart the franchise back to square one with minimal features so they could sell them back to us in future installments.
Linux gaming has come so far. I don't even run Windows anymore. Especially with how much open source AI stuff I use.
Friends are shocked to hear Kingdom Hearts is on PC. But it's Epic exclusive.
It's surreal that it still is an epic exclusive, must be the only game that isn't just a timed deal.
My biggest issue with Epic is them very clearly doing the classic tactic of selling goods at unsustainably low prices in order to drive out competition before jacking them back up again. Their whole free game shtick can't possibly last forever and they know it.
This and the paid exclusives mean I haven’t, and won’t use EGS out of pure spite.
I've picked up a ton of their free games. I've yet to actually install their client and actually play one
I could always get one of those games off the high seas and pay the same amount. I'm not going to give Epic the engagement numbers to get investors with.
I believe these Indy devs get paid when you boot a game you got for free, so I'm happy to install stuff and boot it once just to support gaming in general
Just install a FOSS alternative to their launcher like Heroic
I believe it used to be illegal to sell things at less than cost because the original monopolists did this too. Why did we make that legal again?
It isn't (at least over here) but the "cost" for a game is really iffy to define because if you want to be pedantic the distribution cost for a digital game are cents and that only if you actually factor in infrastructure costs. So technically they can just price them however they want because technically a single game download has 0 cost.
Technically because we all know that the production costs have to be regained somehow, just that with enough lawyer bs you can ignore that as a product cost on paper (for example if you label the entire production a learning experience or smth)
Steam is a legitimate value add for sellers and buyers/users, that justifies its 30% cut. Other than free games, Epic has a seemingly easy-to-integrate online networking system, that's about it. Steam has a modding platform, broadcasting, remote "parsec"-like controller emulator, Linux support, content sharing, forums and a developer news feed. That's quite a lot.
What makes me stick with them is that they don't preclude Steam and other gaming users from using alternatives but simply compete with their own well-made system... plenty of games have their own cross-platform mod-launchers that aren't workshop for example. Steamworks DRM isn't required and Steam networking services for multiplayer aren't mandatory either.
That said, itch and GoG are great alternatives where they have games available. I'd just like GoG to provide better Linux support.
Gog has support problems on some windows games too. Also they mark games run via dosbox as windows, which is annoying when you specifically want to find an older windows game that also had a dos release. Even with those issues, gog is still my goto because at least my games won't be full of denuvo securom etc. and nobody else seems to remotely care about the really old harder to find games. I'd be scouring ebay for old discs if not for gog.
Epic only has a lower cut because they're leveraging their undoubtedly massive Chinese investments to gain market share. You can rest assured they would charge 30% if they could.
I don't like that Steam or Apple or Google charge 30%. I think it's absurd. But also Valve is basically a saint compared to every modern corporation so I don't think twice about it.
While 30% is high it seems developers consider it acceptable since number of games Steam releases is not reducing. Any one of those developers can decide not to publish on steam and go that way, but in the end I think Valve's service offers so much exposure that it's worth considering.
Getting 100% of 1000 sales is not the same amount of money as getting 70% of 30000 sales, especially when it's a digital distribution where copying bytes costs nothing. Steam also offers bunch of other services as well, things like networking, cloud saves, streaming and similar all of which cost money to maintain.
Yeah that's not how that works. Acceptable or not, if you want to sell your games, they have to be on Steam because that's where people are buying them.
That's the whole point. If people prefer to buy it on Steam, then that's it. Forcing people to move away to other store due to exclusive deals and similar means only making people with money more annoyed and more inconvenienced.
Your "point" is shit. Backing people into a corner and then claiming that your choice is "acceptable" because they didn't go somewhere else is bullshit.
How is it backing them in the corner if they have elsewhere to go? No one is forcing people to publish on Steam.
I've already explained this.
Also their near-infinite Fortnite money.
How does that quote from Douglas Adams go:
I wish we had a branch of government filled with randomly selected people.
Imagine if we filled each house seat by randomly selecting 5 people, having the 5 people debate, and then people could vote for which of the 5 they wanted. We would then have a government filled with normal but likable people.
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 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)
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.
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.
Just release the game on all platforms
💯
Although, I can imagine supporting Epic is annoying. Unlike even GOG, they don't have their own support mechanism like a forum. I can see why someone would release on Steam (and hence stuff like GMG and Humble) and even GOG but not Epic. Example Baldur's Gate 3, which released on everything except Epic. Although in their case Larian commented that the decision to not release on Epic was specifically to not show support for their exclusives-everything stance. Hence on everything except Epic.
That's an EPIC move by Larian.
Developers would for sure do that, if it were possible. Who wouldn't take more exposure to their project as a beneficial thing. Problem is probably in legal part of releasing stuff.
I have 146 titles in my Epic library. I've never given them a penny and don't plan on starting. I can't be the only one.
Oh that's another really good point: Epic trained the consumers to open Epic weekly to get free games, then close it again. It's a weird thing to be known for.
Sure, had them cornering the sellers market worked out - unrealistic as it was in hindsight - then having the buyers already all have the store installed for the free games would have been a genius way of getting more and more people onto the store. But it did not, and now it has just cemented the Epic store as a place you do not spend money on!
I prefer GoG to Steam. I will not install Epic, especially after killing off the Unreal franchise.
Man the thing I hate the most about fortnite is that it killed UT4...
Yup. For some reason some companies seem to think throwing all your eggs in one franchise basket is a great idea. You would think with all the easy money Fortnite is bringing in, you'd diversify your library of games. Angry Birds developers thought they could ride that thing for 20 years. Sanrio is smarter then that. Hello Kitty is their reliable money maker, but they're always trying something new.
I think it was more so that they needed those devs on Fortnite to scale it... Then when they got some breathing room to look at other projects, Quake Champions had already released and flopped ... as has since Halo Infinite and Diabotical (which Epic partially funded) ... AFPS is a genre that isn't getting much love from consumers.
So, I think Fortnite caused the project to get dropped, but it's not the reason it wasn't picked back up. I'd imagine Epic is working on other games, these things just take a while (and they're going to want bigger profits than they expect UT4 could bring in).
I don't think Epic is working on other games. If Fortnite wasn't going to be their only brand, they wouldn't have delisted Unreal and shutdown the master servers.
Same, I always check whether GOG has a game first, and whether it's patched up to par. Sadly, surprisingly often while games release on GOG they then lack features (although personally I do not really care about achievements) or worse, the devs give up on releasing patches for the non-Steam versions.
This is almost always a situation that can be pinned on Steam, actually. The games that end up doing this are usually using Steamworks, which essentially forces them into a sort of soft-exclusivity on Steam since their multiplayer features and such can only exist there.
But Steam doesn't force them to use Steamworks, so I don't really see "steam's fault" fault here. Although, of course, it'd be cool if Steamworks would work for non-steam games at least for modding/multiplayer. Granted.
That's the point. No, nobody's forcing them to use Steamworks (especially since Epic has rolled out their cross-platform, store-and-OS-agnostic free competitor to it), but anyone who chooses to do so (which is a lot of devs) ends up locking those features to Steam (barring a ton of extra work for themselves) simply because of Valve's chosen policy.
Don't think Valve doesn't understand this. They found a way to get devs to all but lock their games to Steam and thank Valve for the opportunity to do it.
It's infuriating to me that only Steam and EA's stores have gifting built in. Most of my games budget goes to buying small-squad multiplayer games like Deep Rock Galactic and Sea of Thieves for people.
Sure you can buy a key anywhere but I love seeing at a glance that an acquaintance has a particular DLC or game to surprise them rather than asking them first. And then there's a small chance they thank you for the key and pass it on to someone else instead of just telling you they don't like game, while Steam has a handy decline button.
Meanwhile GOG...
Epic is on a decline, never forget what they did to unreal. Also I really like when devs give the option to buy on itch.io and get a steam key with the drm free version. They get more money per sale and I get a drm free version and a steam version in one. Zortch and Dwarf Fortress are the only two games I know of to do this but would like to see more.
What did they do to Unreal?
delisted all the unreal and unreal tournament games from all storefronts to reduce competition to fortnite. You can't buy any unreal game legit anymore, either have to pirate or scrounge internet archive. For anyone who doesn't know unreal was epicmegagames first flagship series, the one that printed the money for the foundation they sit on. Very dedicated fanbase and everything, and epic kills it. even the singleplayer campaigns.
this doesn't make any sense, these games were never competing with fortnite.
delisting these games was a very shitty thing to do, but there is no reason for us to go around fabricating nonsensical motives to explain it. the far simpler explanation is that they didn't want to put in the work to keep these games playable on modern PCs.
Meanwhile Quake and Quake II just got awesome remasters..
in these instances the steam version is usually also drm-free
I was reading about the Unity debacle and thought thank
GodGabe that Steam has never pulled shit like this.I think part of the problem is too many companies are controlled by venture capitalists, or private equity, or whatever you call it. The point is that a single entity owns multiple companies from the shadows.
Companies are supposed to compete and the best company win, that's good in theory. But when a single shadow entity owns multiple companies they'll do something like squeeze customers of one company, which drives customers to their competitor, which, surprise, is owned by the same shadow entity.
You seem to know what you are talking about, so this is for those who don't, the "illusion of competition" has become such a staple in the modern world. In the US (and much of the world as I understand it) eyeglass sellers are all owned by the same company. Pearl Vision, LensCrafters, and I think even the Walmart vision centers are all owned and operated by Luxottica. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxottica
It is a vertical monopoly that controls everything from materials acquisition to sales, directly "competes" with itself, and lies to customers every day to make them think they are actually in control.
Then you have companies like 3M, or Nestle, who control most of the entire industries. A good 85% of all food on the shelves in the USA is produced by one of 4 or 5 companies that definitely collude to fix prices and use aggressive tactics to protect their position. They also follow the "compete with yourself" model to make you think you are actually making a decision with your money. You aren't.
Then there is the big Ag companies. In Ohio they have actually gotten laws on the books that make it illegal to do Farm Shares, where you purchase a share of the crops they produce for the year and for about 8 months a year you get a big basket of fresh produce delivered to you. An ex and I got to do it for a year before we split and it was amazing. It was a ton of food and only cost us about $150 for the half-share we purchased. It would be amazing right now with prices and it would help local private farms, which is precisely why they pushed it out.
I can rant for hours... So I cut here. This whole topic just infuriates me to no end.
Illuminatus
Eh, they're all just companies and all just as fallible as one another.
Not sure I get the Valve worship here.
It's not a hard thing to get. Over the years Valve has had relatively low amount of blunders and for the most part they were of the misjudging customer base kind but ultimately they have been very consumer oriented and have provided great value for the money. From universal refund policy to family sharing and similar. Their service consists of many benefits for the consumer but all of that is charged from the developer. Very hard not to like such approach.
Epic on the other hand did the opposite. They catered to developers and inconvenienced consumers. You get to pay the same price as everywhere but you are forced to get exclusives from them and you don't get any of the benefits Steam has. Am in fact surprised it gained as much popularity as it did. Goes to show people will sell their own pride for occasional free game you don't even get to chose.
This is asinine. You pay higher costs for games, and Valve gets to pretend to give you something for free. That is not something to like or admire.
Am not sure I have ever overpaid a game on Steam. It's either same price everywhere or I get it at stupid discounts during sales. There's no pretending. Valve even said it there are things in place should Steam ever disappear you get to keep your games.
Yes, you have, because developers price their games to still make money even after 30% goes to Valve.
Oh, don't mistake me preferring Steam (and GOG, for example, who have an actual value proposition to me as a consumer - unlike Epic!) to "Valve worship". They're simply the least bad option, but of course they're all huge corporations. Realistically though Valve has actually surprisingly little bad given the amount of money and market control they have, so eh... for now, I'm happy buying about half my games there (usually ends up that way, though I prefer GOG for games also releasing on that).
steam is good and egs sucks. it's not worship, just consumers voicing their preference for a better product.
Steam is a better product, but you give less money to the developers of the actual game. Unless it has Steam exclusives (e.g. Steam workshop) I would rather buy wherever I give the devs most money.
features like steam input and steam play benefit every game regardless if the developer actively supports them. i use the latter quite frequently.
Yeah, I understand why people like and buy from Steam. It gives real value.
However, especially for smaller game studios, I believe I get more value if actual game developers get more money than Steam getting it. Let's say a studio gets $1m in revenue after years of work. Having $180k more ($120k Epic fee vs $300k Steam fee) to spend on artists and developers for their next games/DLCs is a big difference.
Those $300k is literally 0.003409% of Steam's revenue (estimated 8.8 billion in 2020). Valve could have an army of over 40,000 developers at a yearly $200k compensation and still be profitable just from selling other people's games.
So I make a big convenience sacrifice when I buy from Epic. I also don't like to support Tencent. But unless the dev is selling Steam keys directly from their web site, that's where they get the most money.
Smaller game studios on Epic are DOA anyway because Epic refuses to implement game discovery features.
So Epic will put your game trailer on their YouTube for 300 views and call it a day.
I remember when Valve and Steam was the great enemy in the early 2000s.
Everyone hated how buggy it was and needing it to play Counterstrike.
it's a big circlejerk, it happens. everyone has the exact same opinion but also wants to feel like they are making a valiant statement in opposition of the bad thing
it's all a massive oversight of course, statisticly everyone here is likely going to outlive Gabe Newel. and when valve goes public someone else will control that monopoly.
What's not to get? I'm genuinely curious.
Why do people just want Steam as one store monopoly vs. Having two companies compete where Steam is one of them.
It's only good for consumers..
I don't think anyone has a problem with their being two big competitors, it's just we don't want it to be epic games. gog games would be a good competitor
Right? I have no issues buying off gog. Epic will never see a penny though.
In Gaben we trust. Epic sold out to Tencent which is evil.
I only buy from gog on the side too since the no drm policy is very pro consumer. And also the porn games are unrated via a free dlc instead of having to download it externally.
Free dlc you say... interesting
I dreamt once that there was a reliable, non-profit yet well funded community that hosted and distributed games with minimal take in an effort to spread gaming as art and history. They even kept a system agnostic achievement system that retroactively added steam, PlayStation and Xbox achievements in one place with community features.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I have weird dreams, y'all!
Maybe if godot gets bigger something like that could spew out of its foundation.
it should be easier to change publisher than engine, you can choose publisher, but Unity will hold your balls forever
Steam's way means no centralized curation bullshit. Developers gotta bet on themselves.
That's a stupid take. "I'd rather contribute to an existing monopoly than a potential one" is just saying you'd rather support a monopoly than any other corporation. Every corporation seeks monopoly. None are our friends, but we should at least try to make them as small and friendly in any particular industry as we reasonably can.
I think the pseudo-quote you wanted to do the other way around.
The thing is, sure, I prefer buying things from say, GOG. But Epic is horrible, and that's even just from my consumer perspective with it's bad client, terrible discoverability and lack of forums or anything. So as a consumer I have no incentive to support Epic, no matter whether I want to give my money to Steam or another place.
You're right, I did get the pseudo-quote backwards.
As far as customer experience, that's one thing, and that's valid. "I prefer to use Steam because it has features Epic doesn't, even if one's a monopoly" though is very different from the quote above, which is distinctly about supporting X company over Y company; not about product difference, but actual support.
Let's be real though, if Epic had literally just released Steam but with a good UI people would still boycott it, referencing xenophobic shit like "because china", angry at tim sweeney, complaining about another launcher, and anything else. The PC market has this really strange and uncomfortable adoration of Steam. It's console-warrior levels, really.
I don't disagree that EGS is a lackluster product in many ways, but it's pretty clear that the complaints about it by and far are simply justification for a pre-existing opinion, both because of predisposition towards steam, and against "the guys who made that stupid fortnite game".
Disliking a company that aids in genocide makes you "xenophobic"?
You realize that Tencent doesn't own Epic. They have a minority stake in them, as they do bluehole, ubisoft, activision blizzard, platinum games, paradox interactive, fatshark, funcom, and discord. They also wholly or majority own supercell, grinding gear games, and riot games.
No discussion of these other companies devolves into saying that these companies personally aid in genocide. Why is that? As far as I can tell, it's just because a small contingency of gamers online don't like how popular fortnite is.
So now its not xenophobia, it's because people don't like the popularity of Fortnite? How about lets not handwave all of Tencent's crimes against humanity with "you're just xenophobic" or "you just don't like Fortnite". Nobody of any good conscious should support that company or any of its owned companies (partially or otherwise).
Both are true. There can be multiple contributing factors, yes.
But yes, we shouldn't support corporations. To that point I wholeheartedly agree.
What... the fuck are you talking about? You are lost in sauce, dude.
I would rather GOG be made the de facto alternative than Epic. The fact that we have approx. 1 grocery store nearby does not mean we should be excited a Walmart is being built.
I'd rather neither, and that companies open up their own storefronts with standalone downloads. Unfortunately we're in the age of Walmarts for games.
They did both things.
Yes, they went after sellers, because they needed something to sell. Nobody's going to go to the new upstart store without some incentive. For sellers, that incentive was piles of money (with the understandable trade off of an exclusivity period - a completely normal thing for businesses to do).
But they also went after buyers by handing out hundreds of free games to build up everyone's libraries (something they're obviously still doing), and by running the best sales seen on a PC store since Valve stopped doing flash deals during their sales.
But nothing they do is going to achieve your statement of "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." They actually tried that at the start, with Metro [Whatever - I don't play the Metro series so I can never keep the titles straight] launching at a reduced price point because of the lowered cut, but everyone just focused on "ZOMG, I HAVE TO CLICK A DIFFERENT ICON TO LAUNCH IT?!?!11". Aside from that example, though, the pricing of the games isn't up to them. Blame the publishers for prices staying the same while they pocket the extra from the lowered store cut - they could easily pass it along to consumers, but they choose not to. Epic themselves did what they could with the coupons during sales (leading to devs/pubs like CDPR maliciously increasing the prices of their games to disqualify them from it just to spite Epic and their potential buyers) and now the not-nearly-as-good-a-deal cash back program they're doing.
The bulk of gamers simply don't want to buy from anything other than Steam, and nothing anyone says or does will budge them from that. Every argument against EGS existing is just a rationalization of that stance. I've literally seen people say "I want every game on every store and then I'll buy it from Steam."
While I can understand the difficulty of trying to come up with competition to a pre-existing and dominant storefront, they went about it almost entirely the wrong way. They underestimated consumers' aversion to change and overestimated the value their own launcher provided.
Everybody and their mother used Steam at the time, and it provided a whole lot more than just a storefront and icons to click. When Epic launched EGS, it offered absolutely none of that. Without any social aspects or significant consumer buy-in to their ecosystem, it had no staying power. People—myself included—would go to it to play a shiny new free game until it stopped being fun, then fuck right off back to Steam to play our other games with friends. If they had spent more time cooking up the EGS ecosystem into something more similar to XBL or PSN before trying to attract consumers en masse, they likely would've been pretty successful. They could've even just decided to partner up with (or buy) NexusMods and integrated a mod manager, and a lot of us would've had a good reason to prefer EGS over Steam for some games.
Instead of doing something to make their ecosystem more appealing, though, they used paid-for exclusives to make other ecosystems less appealing. It was an obvious attempt to herd consumers into their ecosystem, and it backfired spectacularly. Before that, most people were either indifferent or liked them as a company due to their legacy and/or Unreal Engine. These days, I see a lot of bitching about "timed exclusives".
It wasn't really even exclusives technically. It was explicitly Excluding-Steam exclusives. It released everywhere else but not on Steam. And it was further aggravated by games that were already on Steam being taken off in favor of launching elsewhere.
That's not remotely how it would have happened.
Have a read over this article that was posted by Lars Doucet (well-respected indie developer of Defender's Quest) roughly a year before EGS even launched. It lays out exactly what a Steam competitor is going to run into trying to break into that market and provides a blueprint to not fail that is almost exactly what Epic did. And yet, the discussion to this day is still filled with nothing but "REEEEE, EXCLUSIVES!!!1", nevermind the fact that those games all still run perfectly fine on the exact same machine you launch your Steam games from (excepting, now - multiple years on from the whole kerfuffle having begun - the Deck... buying straight from Steam does make that a much nicer/smoother experience). You can even add them to Steam to get the extra features like the controller customization and such.
Basically, even if they built a launcher that was better in every conceivable way than Steam, nobody was going to switch. They had to do something else to bring both devs and players on board. As the article states:
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.
The reason that it's so hard to compete with Steam is that Steam just does what it does so well.
I don't have much desire to change my primary digital storefront because there isn't really much of anything more I want from a digital storefront that Steam doesn't already provide. If the quality of Steam's experience declines at some point, I would welcome competition, but otherwise, why would I bother switching to another service when I don't really have any complaints about Steam?
Besides, the TV/movie streaming service market has already demonstrated what happens when not enough competition suddenly turns into too much competition. If Epic were able to demonstrate that it was possible to overtake Steam, everyone would try to copycat their strategy, and then you likely end up with a balkanized market where no one has the market share or resources to provide the level of quality that Steam does.
Exactly, Steam got where it is because it managed to be more convenient than piracy (as Gaben himself said, piracy is a service problem), as did Netflix before the fragmentation (and rampant enshittification) of the streaming market made piracy once more the most convenient (and better quality) option.
Epic store exclusives don't promote Epic, they promote piracy, as that is the second most convenient option after Steam (it's worth mentioning that Steam also acts as unobtrusive DRM; infect your game with malware like Denuvo and suddenly piracy again becomes the more convenient — even the only reasonable — option, as cracked games perform better and are more stable than malware DRM infected ones; Steam provides a good enough and, more importantly, harmless option for both consumers and developers, something no alternative, including piracy, has managed to achieve).
And, of course, the instant Gaben retires and Valve goes public and begins to enshittify itself we won't be going to Epic or GOG (unless they manage to replicate what Steam has achieved), we'll be back to sailing the high seas.