I did not realize they were trying to compete in the first place.
Steam is a platform that happens to also have a storefront. Other companies are building storefronts and hoping that’s enough.
If you can’t provide fast downloads, cloud saves synced across devices, achievements, mod support, friends lists, and multiplayer support, it’s not a real option. Being cheaper or having some exclusives aren’t attractive. Gog already has the drm free angle to be a legitimate competitor.
Being consistently cheaper would actually be attractive to many people. The thing is, none of these competitors can even muster that. Steam consistently has better sales, more often. And it’s pretty funny seeing Amazon of all things not able to match or beat that. They are known for undercutting the competition, even at their own expense, just to get customers; It’s literally how they got to be as big as they are.
Epic kinda tried that by giving away tons of free games in the Epic Games Store. It didn’t work.
If I want Steam games cheaper, I go buy a Steam key for that game from a separate retailer and activate it on Steam. Save like 50-70% irrespective of Steam sales. It’s remarkable that Steam allows us to even do that in the first place.
Epic also generated a lot of bad blood by scooping up Kickstarter projects and ordering the devs to cancel the Steam releases, releases that had already been paid for by backers. A bunch of potential customers refused to buy from Epic on principle after that.
The timed exclusivity deals are what did it for me
Bringing that bullshit to the PC gaming market guaranteed I’ll never spend a penny on their storefront.
If the carrot they’re leading with is limiting choice, I’m not going to hang around waiting to find out what the stick might be if they get successful
Epic is doing me a favor, I get to keep my money while I play my backlog, then I buy the game on Steam / GOG for cheaper later on.
I’m one of them. For all their trash talk about Steam being a monopoly, Epic Games sure pulled some hypocritical, anticompetitive shit in their attempt to replace one monopoly with an objectively worse, consumer-hostile one.
Epic Games is creating a monopoly in PC gaming - they keep making bad decisions and leaving Steam as the only good option
Look at market shares, Steam is in a monopolistic position, they can turn around and fuck up the whole market whenever they want, and people like you are encouraging it.
You realize that they’re anti DEI over there? I don’t think drag would ever be hired by Valve!
Source?
Yeah that one rubbed me particularly wrong. Valve can be a bit hit and miss sometimes, but they’ve not actively monopolized games from other devs.
Yup, that and pushing “exclusive” bs in general made sure I will never use Epic.
So you want all devs to just play the lottery and hope that some Twitch star picks up their game to make it popular?
He wants games to release on all platforms. Where is the ‘lottery’ rhetoric coming from?
The Epic bros think that businesses shouldn’t have to compete on the market to sell their product, they should just get a big grant from Epic Games for making their game exclusive.
That’s some pretty communist rhetoric coming from a group worshipping a corporation. Epic Games are not your communist revolutionaries.
The exclusivity contract comes with guaranteed funds for the devs. That’s like choosing between a job where you work 100% for commission or one where you’re salaried + bonus, not everyone wants their income to be 100% dependent on sales, especially if those sales will probably be based on the luck of the draw rather than the quality of the product they’re selling.
You can make an awesome game, if no streamer picks it up it will all be for nothing. Last year 18935 games released on Steam, that’s 52 games a day, being successful in that space isn’t just about making a quality product.
Also, you can have the greatest idea for a game but not have the budget to just drop everything and start working on it for the years to come.
I’m still gaining more and more games in my epic library I’ll never use but love wasting Tim Sweeneys money. Lmao
I wouldn’t be surprised if they require a game to be downloaded and played to count. I know on PS , if you have already downloaded, after purchase, a refund is less likely, so downloading likely triggers the sale to be complete, with payment to the seller. It could be similar for free games.
I’ve counted 38 games in Epic Games. I’ve played a couple. I’ve spend $0.
That reminds me, let me see what’s free today.
Edit: nothing good
That reminds me, let me see what’s free today.
Edit: nothing good
I just don’t know how to claim those via web only. I think you have to install the store on Android.
I am an extremely cheap and patient gamer. This is how I look at both the stores.
If I want free games, I’ll go to Epic.
If I want good deals, I’ll go to Steam.
Why would I go to Epic for good deals when it’ll either have a good deal on Steam OR be free on Epic after a few months or a year?
Maybe if they had done that with brand new games and not just a few good but old games and tons of games nobody has even heard of before. It’s not really even in the same league as just genuinely being cheaper than the competition. It’s a gimmick. Steam also sometimes gives games away for free, while still having tons of deep discounts all year long.
I’m the same. I’ll look on Steam first just because I would prefer to keep all my shit in one place, but if it’s not the cheapest price I’ll get it somewhere else. Although 90% of the time, the cheapest price is just a steam key being sold by a 3rd party (I like Eneba, personally).
The one time Epic was cheaper, was when they gave out Civ6 for free. I bought the two major DLC expansions through Epic instead of buying everything on Steam just because I didn’t have to buy the base game and the DLCs were $10 cheaper anyway.
And their $5 off coupons during numerous sales
Yep. I have a bunch of Epic’s free games. Never bought a single game from them and probably never will.
The experience on Steam is just better. And Epics lawsuits look less like they’re fighting for the little guy and more that they are envious of the market that other companies have.
This is something from before 2010, but I distinctly remember not being able to play Borderlands 1 with my friends because the site I bought it from didn’t have a patch yet that Steam did. This was one of the things that sold me on Steam. Prior to that I hated it. It’s nearly two decades ago so it’s hard to really remember why, but it wasn’t always viewed as favorably as now.
This isn’t some dig at Steam, like I said, this was over a decade ago.
I commented elsewhere that I’ve been trying out some classic PC games in their native Linux form lately.
It is so amazing to see my old saves just show up like nothing ever changed. Plus lots of other little things like time played and friend list and all that.
Steam is a platform that happens to also have a storefront.
I would like to see government intervention to break up Steam to remedy this
Though arguably Epic is way bigger of a platform since it goes from developer to end user
No don’t break up Steam. Standardize DRM and make digital games licenses ownable/transferable. I could see the EU eventually doing this.
I say this as someone who loves Steam but wants more ownership, in the games I “own”.
I’d rather see competitors actually try and be better than steam rather than make steam worse.
How did you get “make steam worse” from that?
Everything else still exists, just not controlled by Valve
…Breaking steam up would make it worse.
How? If any feature is necessary then it will be filled by someone else
You aren’t losing anything
Apart from all the non-profitable features divorced from meaning.
The forums would go in the blink of an eye.
And then each section would try to make itself complete in itself to hoard user time, and at least one would start selling advertising space.
How profitable is running a lemmy instance?
Because each independent section would try to make more money and end up breaking things and adding new shit users don’t want but marketing execs think are good.
Then find a different workshop/forum/launcher to pair with the Steam store
In no world is it worse than what we have now
Name an example of a better workshop, I’ve used nexus mods and it’s a complicated mess that requires a subscription to get normal download speeds for content created for free by other people
If steam is a client not a store then whichever steam allows to be built into their client
He literally just said how it’d be worse. Although that’s probably not how it would get worse, splitting up the services of steam would make them inherently worse.
Sounds like a free market proponent.
Can I give the classic example of US healthcare where for very minor benefits, the absolute richest can afford to have great healthcare whilst everyone else seems to be crippled (financially) by even minor ailments.
But the industry is worth billions, the line goes ever up, and the shareholders are happy. Just fuck the customer.
What exactly would you be breaking up? Steam isn’t a mishmash of companies…
forums, store, launcher, workshop
The forums company will be where all the money is at, think of the profit!
If your software is profit motivated then it doesn’t need to exist
Not that it would make any difference for the end user because it should all be modular enough for the user to mix and match any of those services with any other services
Does the dadaist approach to arguments usually work for you?
I thought you would have reference Stallman in trying to dismiss me
… How in the hell could you possibly think this would be a good idea?
And they have plenty of competition. Just that none of the competition tires hard enough to be compelling.
Because they’re trying to compete on a product level, not a service level. They want your money, but don’t want to have to put forth the effort Valve has to get it.
Nobody else has a platform that comes close to competing and most of my games are already on there. From my pov this looks like an awful idea.
It’s a launcher successful on the most popular OS in the world that they don’t even own that anyone can come in to compete at. And had decades to do so when “PC gaming was dead” so was wide open for anyone that wanted to try to reach potential customers over fixating on the console demographic. What more do want.
It doesn’t even come pre-installed with Windows.
Steam is hardly a monopoly.
There are plenty of successfully competing stores. The only real thing Steam has going for it is network effect that every gamer has an account therefore it’s decent for socialising, but even that is being challenged by Discord and a multitude of others.
GamePass is probably the closest we’re seeing to a potential monopoly. The purchase of activation should never have been permitted.
As I noted in the comment you’re replying to “Epic is arguably bigger”
So not sure why you felt like arguing about Steam being a monopoly
Then why do you want to see it broken up? Monopoly seemed a pretty reasonable assumption.
Steam seems to value Unix a lot more than Epic does
Steam’s best feature is Proton.
They offer keys which allows for third party sellers to exist, and there are a handful of legitimate sites that sell keys for steam.
Yeah, but where do you have to go to redeem those keys and then subsequently have to open their program every time you wish to use your purchase (which you don’t own). Steam is very good at promoting itself and locking people into their platform, it’s a constant free advertisement program where they have total control and no competition.
I understand the “Steam is fine” position, but I also wish we weren’t always turning to this ONE supplier for a goods or service because it always hits the hardest when corruption takes over. Would love for these threads to be filled with multiple conversations of all these great different gaming services everyone personally loves for one reason or another, instead of comparing the crappiness between these few huge mega-corporations.
The biggest advantage Steam has over other platforms:
- They’re not publicly-traded, meaning they are inclined to look out for long-term success vs. short term profits.
- Steam is already on their systems, and may have been for 20+ years. Nobody wants a dozen fucking game launchers and Steam already has virtually every game in existence available there. Not to mention the “community” features, friends lists, etc. Every other platform is simply too late.
- They have 20+ years’ experience learning what gamers want and implementing it.
Amazon could probably compete with them if they really wanted to, but that would involve a large, long-term, consumer-centric investment, which probably isn’t a good use of their money.
#3 is the key I think. Valve’s business model is figuring out what their customers want and then providing it to them. Amazon’s model is to capture enough market share so they can start the enshitification process.
Yes but also #3 is closely tied to #1.
I bet the fallout with Vivendi and the lawsuit that almost bankrupted them taught them a major lesson to never be beholden to outsiders and thus never go public.
Steam is already on their systems, and may have been for 20+ years.
since the update to counter-strike that required it. so that’s what? 2003?
my original retail counter-strike was the first thing on mine. retail hl2 was second.
Our Lord and savior has always been gamespy
Heroic is FOSS. They have no money, and still made a better launcher for Epic and Amazon’s games than Epic and Amazon can.
I have held off game launchers on Linux for a long time.
Then I tried Heroic to play Frostpunk and avoid the hassle of setting it up myself.
It is perfect.
Basically only 2
I want a launcher for each game though
do you also keep every single fork in its own kitchen drawer?
I keep all my cds in separate cases as a better analogy
More like you keep different CD players for each CD.
I assure you that I use the same computer for each computer game
But a launcher isn’t something you use for storage, that’d be your file system.
Cd player executes the code on the cd
Computer executes the code of the game
Now you see how different drawers or different cd players don’t work?
The launcher can just be the .sh file included with the game
I recently learned that you get free games with prime. I even got a decent title via that way, I believe. I wouldn’t know where to look it up though…
[email protected] is a great community to get notified. I’ve grabbed a couple thanks to posts from there.
Thanks!
I’ll take all the free Amazon and Epic games. I’ve never bought a game from either one but they are 95% of my collection.
correction you never bought from epic, you’ve paid 15 a month for amazons.
nothings ever free if there’s a subscription fee
Yes, but in my case I pay Prime for the shipping and the shows. Not for the games, I don’t even care about them, I just have a hoarder impulse.
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I’m hoping Valve, a relatively small company that is sitting on what i imagine is gamings biggest revenue stream, will choose to keep the company private.
The reason Valve is so great is because it’s a private company. I hope they’ll never sell out.
Valve is a private company with no debts. No reason to sell to anyone.
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Valve is worth $10 billion and Gabe Newell owns >50% of it.
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The only launcher I use the same amount if not more is gog.com. Give me those good old games.
Maybe it’s nice on windows, but on other systems, got still relies on steam.
GOG + Lutris
GoG is just the best. They don’t have all the nice things Steam has, like workshop for example, but they compensate for it by actually selling you a game, not just renting it out with drm.
GOG providing installers is absolutely amazing.
I went to their website, it reminded me of AWS.
At least prime video looks half decent.
steam pros: a store that always has a sale or big holiday sale right around the corner, a social network, a library for game info and game modding, and a trophy case etc.
what was amazon offering? full priced games, no sales that beat steams (a free game offer now and then only if you give them $140 a year and forget about it), and shitty cloud streaming of few games? so they tried nothing actually meaningful, were all out of ideas, but shocked they lost
oh and also on a platform notorious for making e-books unable to work on pcs, forcing their proprietary hardware for a PDF. and now they’re actually going in and changing/censoring whats written in books without authors consent.
Much like Epic, they also did free games for people with Amazon Prime, but they undercut that by offering free games on other platforms as well.
Not that I’m complaining, but nothing to make themselves stand out.
not like epic, epic offers free games, Prime’s games are paid for by subscription.
Doesn’t Prime give away GoG games?
don’t you have to pay for prime? then its not free.
Yes, but you keep the game even if you cancal prime. As opposed to e.g. PlayStation Plus where you loose access to the free games when you cancel your subscription.
You are twisting it a bit. Amazon is not censoring books (yet). It just made impossible to transfer books from the Kindle to a PC.
It’s weird how gamers see Gabe Newel as “their” billionaire, and valve as “their” corporation, and convince themselves that this makes it ok and ethical to be a billionaire and a massive corporation bordering on monopoly. Stop behaving like these corporations are your sports teams.
Yeah you are totally right, we shouldn’t think of corporations as friends.
There is however a difference and that is that Valve is a private company while others like Amazon are publicly traded and therefore even more profit-orientated. As long as Valve makes enough profit to be able to cope with a couple bad years it is doing alright.
This is the key thing. Publicly traded companies effectively have no head. They are driven by the legal mandate to pursue the profit motive for faceless and litigious investors. Yes the ceo/chairman of the board usually has a controlling share, but some rando who has one share from Robinhood can sue if they think the company is not operating with their interests in mind.
Small businesses and private companies can also be evil, but at least everyone who owns the company knows each other. They may decide to take a loss if they think it would make them look better to the public in the long run. Public companies cannot. They are expected to gobble up as much profit as they can. And when they can’t make more profit they are gobbled up by other more vigorous companies that are owned by the same investors. It’s a sick game that is eating the world and humanity to death.
I feel similarly, but I don’t (often) see people forgiving Steam’s faults. You can like a product and a company for doing good things for you without believing they’re beyond fault. Steam is pretty fucking nice. Saying you like it doesn’t mean you believe it’s 100% good and Gaben can do no wrong.
I think people just ignore and don’t pay attention to them. Also valve is great at hiding them.
It’s no secret that a lot of their ventures are funded by child gambling addictions that valve has enabled
I think reason Valve die hards don’t care about the loot box portion is because they are the type more likely to be using Valve to buy games so spend more of their time buying and playing individual games.
The ones most exposed to loot boxes seem to be the ones who are the type to only play 1 or 2 games, and are fully invested in live service titles and is a majority of their gaming time.
So likely very different demographics when it comes to type of games they play and what they spend. One leaning more towards in game virtual goods than outright buying games. So it’s a group that can be completely unknown to game collectors.
I always forget about loot boxes tbh, because I don’t use them. But you’re totally right.
Their „sports teams” are vessels for billionaires to make more money too. They have barely anything at all in common with sports.
It’s weird that a corporation is able to and continues to offer a good product at a reasonable price, do so in a way that is convenient for the customer, and somehow hasn’t enshitified yet.
People like valve because valve earned that trust.
To add to that, if valve starts going in a direction I don’t like, I may cut ties with them. Gabe and Valve haven’t earned undying loyalty. They have earned the benefit of the doubt for now. We should be skeptical of anyone that is profit driven, but there isn’t anything wrong with enjoying moments where their actions seem to align with our interests.
Ive never heard anyone say that its ethical for someone to be a billionaire if they are Gabe Newel.
Ive heard people say they like steam and would prefer to do business with a non-enshittified private company.
True, we shouldn’t be ‘backing’ them.
Consumerism and capitalism essentially dictate that large-scale gaming can’t exist without publishers. Studios need to get funded, and most developers struggle with tasks like publishing, marketing, analytics, and handling payments. While a company could theoretically manage all of this itself, it demands a lot of specialized talent, which schools only teach to a limited extent in a manner relevant to the gaming industry.
Publishers (almost) can’t help but be somewhat offensive to the public. They are there to make money and (the good ones, at least) put money back into the market so they can make more money.
Valve is less offensive than many/most. Gabe was an underdog story. Valve released some damn fine games before they primarily became publishers.
I don’t see it that way but Steam has never enshittified in way that was noticeable to me and the features they offer along with the games are valuable. They are also a big driver of Linux development for games. That earns them a lot of points. If they flip or something better comes along I have no loyalty to them.
How a corporation uses its money and how it earns its profits should be under scrutiny. Customers can have a “fair” relationship with a company where everyone gets what they want - a good product at a fair price and a fair profit.
However, if a company gets their profits via enshittification, suppressing wages and benefits, using their profits to politically undermine workers and engage in monopolistic behavior, etc. they are just another run of the mill evil corporation.
Yeah, billionaires suck. You don’t get to be a billionaire by not taking as much as you can vs improving the costs to customers or employee benefits.
Your mom was wrong
It’s more people like Valve as a service than liking Gabe. Helps that it is a private company so not beholden to stockholders and has a reasonable amount of employees for a more sustainable business. Not that it can’t all go to shit, but I trust publicly traded companies even less when it comes to having to rake over consumers to keep increasing stock prices.
Amazon who? Never heard of them.
It’s a rainforest, I think.
I thought it was a matriarchal warrior society?
Some book website that thought it would branch out into games for some reason
Easy: Amazon just gotta invent new problems for gamers! And then sell the solution.
You can see why Amazon’s efforts suck just by using it. That isn’t to say I defend Steam, or Epic, or GOG, or UPlay, or Origin, or Battle.net, or Microsoft Store because they all suck. They suck for existing as separate things that all do the same thing but each eating 500Mb of space on my computer.
The ideal situation would be a federated platform where everyone shares a single sign on, everyone shares the same update, backup & restore mechanisms, everyone can join the same lobbies and matchmaking. But that’s too sensible.
Or they stop trying to lock people in with exclusive games and instead attempt to actually compete by the quality of the service. I know it will never happen but I can dream.
Valve wins by doing nothing… it’s a tale as old as time.
Steam’s market share is a huge factor in why their competition never succeeds, but it’s hardly the only reason. Steam is a whole platform, not just a launcher or storefront. And they’re also cognizant that the consumers are not just a revenue source to be milked, but actually long-term customers whose loyalty is important.
It really shouldn’t be a surprise that when you enter an established market, you’re not going to accomplish shit by providing a lesser service while simultaneously treating the consumer worse.
They are reinvesting money back into r&d, and linux. They keep updating everything. Wish they kept making steam controllers. I have seen steam change a lot over the last +10 years.
The loyalty thing is what kept me.
I was wary of another gaming platform, there were so many and they all seemed the same, I never liked one over the other - they were just means to an end.
A few years back I really wanted to play RDR2 with my friends. It was expensive and I never pre-order, but as soon as it came out on (a small) sale I bought it for all 4 of us.
It was a lot of money for me, but I really wanted the story to play with everyone.
All was well at first, until we had each completed the tutorial and met up in open world. That’s when we learned that the game was based on GTA and the devs do not care about hackers.
We had one fucking with us for over an hour, teleporting us into the air and dropping us, setting us randomly on fire, spawning space ships and so on.
I begged in voice for them to just leave us be, to no avail.
We are all older, we rarely have time to play together. I was crushed.
I was an hour over the return time on Steam, one of the other friends took a bit longer exploring and was even more than that.
I contacted steam anyway and tried to get a refund, and they granted it for all of us.
Later I learned this was a thing in RDR2 and there was now the ability to create private lobbies, but I just can’t make myself try it and give Rockstar any money.
Steam however, won a lifelong fan. They didn’t have to honour the refund, and they don’t have to provide personal support that offers more than just the canned responses, but they do.
I hope Gabe lives forever, or finds another like him to carry the torch after he’s gone.
Yeah my loyalty to them comes from the fact that they treat me like they value my business. Every company says they do, but they help when help is needed and get out of the way when it isn’t. The only other businesses I feel that way towards are small restaurants and bars. It’s not an unconditional loyalty but so long as they treat me right they’ll keep my business.
MBAs walk into this arena thinking they’ve got their quarterly agile reports synergized outside the box to the max.
Somehow none of them have learned the concept of long term customers
Gaben and Steam: does nothing, wins
It always baffles me when I see an established company fail to understand long-term customers and still expect any kind of meaningful growth.
It’s because the stock market doesn’t care about anything except the next quarter. Valve can think long term because they’re privately owned.
Us corporate MO is to treated the end user as stupid fucking bitch that you boss around with ToS.
I mean it works, look at EA and sports ball gamers…
But PC gamer has some shread of respect left. Granted a lot of it comes from knowing better from using steam
Do nothing. Win.
Why does every single picture of Gabe look like hedonism bot wrapped in skin?
