Ever other platform is just ass. I have played games on Epic, Battlenet, Ubisoft and the EA launcher but they all barely have basic functionality. Meanwhile steam has:
good UI (store & settings)
no forced ads
reviews
discussions
workshop
player stats
a lot more settlings / options
Steam seems to be the only one that actually puts any effort in providing a good user experience. Itās more than just a store / launcher and noone else is even trying to compete.
Donāt forget non-profitable free-to-use features such as:
Steam Link
Cloud storage for saves and screenshots
Over the internet couch co-op (I donāt remember the name.
And thereās probably more that Iām forgetting. These things cost Valve money to make and maintain. Only a small portion of users actually use these features and yet itās not locked behind some subscription or whatever and instead can be used by all users of the platform.
They cost money to make, but the only one of those that costs them a significant chunk to maintain is cloud saves. As far as I can tell their streaming solution is strictly peer-to-peer, in the vein of Moonlight or Parsec.
And all of those are definitely profitable for Steam viaā¦ well, look at this thread. Their technological advantage on the client feature set is worth billions to them. They are in the process of spinning it off into a separate hardware platform and OS. Thatās Microsoft money they stand to make, on top of all the Microsoft money they are already making.
I mean, those are cool, donāt get me wrong, they have by far the best feature set in the PC market, and arguably in all of gamingā¦ but itās not a gift, itās either feature parity with competitors or investment in their market position.
Still think itās a bit different, steam is essentially a store so Iām expecting to see a promotional banner when I walk in. Windows is a āpaidā product that shows you more ads on something you already āownā.
Of fucking course Steam isnāt advertising soda, they sell games. Itās still an advertisementā¦ just because itās relevant to the platform youāre on doesnāt mean itās not an advertisement.
Exactly, I actually go thru this page every so often, just wish it would show me VR titles only, donāt care/have the drive to play flat games anymore. It would be annoying if it were ads for stuff not on steam, promote away steam
These conversations are always so weird. People are here going āyeah, Steam is the best client, but maybe itās fine to have some competition on PC storefrontsā and this army of borderline religious devotees just crawls from under the ground to tell you how when Steam does ads theyāre not ads, theyāre the Good Word of Gaben bestowed upon us.
Yeah, no, thatāsā¦ all consistent with what Iām saying. Yes, they are all DRM platforms. And the reason youād want more than one of them is that a monopoly on retail is bad, whether Epic, MS, Valve or whoever else have it.
One thing being said doesnāt mean itās the only thing being said. This, as always with this subject, is a very bizarre conversation.
no other platform gives as much of a shit as valve does about linux gaming. proton made pretty much every windows game in my library Just Workā¢ (and no, just wine still isnāt enough), meanwhile tim sweeney is actively hostile to linux as a platform.
Steamās DRM is not mandatory to release a game on Steam. Its there in fact to provide a necessary lesser evil than to encourage every developer/publisher to produce their own. They still unfortunately do, which Steam at least warns customers about, but them providing their own minimal DRM is a good thing, given the context.
Valve does not discourage third party DRM at all. I wanna say there are dev FAQs where they actively encourage it, in fact. Let me look for the quoteā¦
ā¦Here we go. They straight up point out that their DRM isnāt enough and recommend making GaaS games and leaning into their platform features to make pirate copies and non-DRMd copies not work or work worse. And they support third party DRM explicitly.
I donāt see how this is consistent with discouraging DRM use. People project a lot on the go-to defenses for this particular argument, and itās weird.
The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy (i.e. copying all game files to another computer) and has some obfuscation, but it is easily removed by a motivated attacker.
We suggest enhancing the value of legitimate copies of your game by using Steamworks features which wonāt work on non-legitimate copies (e.g. online multiplayer, achievements, leaderboards, trading cards, etc.).
The Steam wrapper can and should be used in combination with other DRM solutions. To do so, apply the Steam wrapper in compatibility mode first before applying any other DRM. Apply it first so that it does not interfere with the DRM solution. Compatibility mode will disable DRM capabilities of the wrapper.
The DRM is optional for use by the devs. Rimworld is one game I know doesnāt use it, you can just zip the entire thing up and put it somewhere else and itāll run fine. Itās still a launcher. But the only better alternative to a launcher is plain installers to download and hold onto like GOG provides as an alternative to its Galaxy launcher.
Steam is good mostly because the competition is unbelievably incompetent. I cannot see a single good reason for EGS to be a fucking Unreal app, for starters, and a couple of reasons that it shouldnāt (the store is just web pages, the text rendering sometimes gets blurry, it uses too many computer resources to run).
Even GOG, which I always shill for, has some pretty dumb faults, like how it lists different editions of the same game, like a base/deluxe/platinum, as completely different: if you own the platinum version, you might still see the base game on the store page without the āOwnedā sticker; more than once I added a game to the cart only to double check and realize that I already owned it. This also happens to games that GOG sells in bundles.
Man, I want whatever MiB forget beam they have at Valve. I remember plenty of ātrying to screw us overā, starting with rolling out Steam in the first place.
Maybe you had to be there before all the Gaben memes and the digital distribution.
The thing is, the OPās meme is right, all these arguments always devolve into bashing Valve in a reactionary mannerā¦ but man, itās because the cultish memory holing gets so weird that itās not about whether Epic is successful or good software or about any other store. Whether you want to or not you end up reality checking the Good Guy Valve myth.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to criticise Valve. I still strongly disagree with being forced to update a game before I can launch it. Greenlight and Steam Direct were/are consistently a pit of scum and shovelware. I still havenāt forgotten their attempt together with Bethesda to introduce paid mods to the Workshop. I wasnāt around when Steam itself was introduced (we still traded game CDs on the playground at the time), but I understand it was a horrid service and software. Then thereās the matter of actual gambling in Counter-Strike and TF2 and the massive secondary market attached to them that Valve refuse to acknowledge.
Nothingās ever only one way or the opposite, though. Thereās always a spectrum of what a customer is willing to put up with, weighed against what a customer gains by putting up with a companyās behaviour. For putting up with Valveās bullshit, as a gamer, I get a reliable service, a massive library of games, unparalleled download speed, free cloud storage for saves and settings, content management, community integration, and benefits too numerous to recount. As a Linux gamer, I get all of their work on Proton, on upstream Wine, Gamescope, DXVK and VKD3D, many of which I use even outside gaming, for free.
When Steamās quasi-monopoly was threatened by the EGS, Valve did not try to lock down developers. The only policy change they enacted was requiring games that are advertised on Steam Steam to actually launch on Steam, after people who preordered Metro Exodus were shafted, in order not to become an advertisement platform for their competition. Then they released publicity videos about the Steam Deck that appealed to Linux enthusiasts, handheld gamers, and right-to-repair advocates. Even as a āDRM platformā, theyāve captured that niche.
Iāve said many times that success is not illegal. I was excited and hopeful when I heard that Steam was getting a competitor with a company backing it that had a chance of challenging the status quo. Epic and the EGS were given the best opportunity anyone was ever going to get and they fumbled it. They alienated their potential customerbase when they poached Metro Exodus and early third-party-exclusive titles, showed that they did not have a solid foundation when Borderlands 3 was launched without the ability to preload, gave us reason to question their security practices when a data scraper was found in the installed application, and drew further criticism when they would only accept indie titles if they were made EGS-exclusive while allowing Cyberpunk 2077 to launch on multiple platforms. Since then, itās become a haven for AI and NFT shovelware that Valve have rejected based on legal/moral issues.
I will acknowledge that some good came of their actions. Apple was forced to remove their anti-competitive policy that prevented developers from placing links and buttons that directed users to other payment processors. Still, it is the fruit of the poisonous tree: they intentionally broke ToS and had an eighty-page lawsuit and an animated short film prepared, acting like they were the innocent āfor the playersā party set upon by the evil corporations, rallying children as their uncritical lynch mob.
In conclusion, Valve has done things I dislike, but I have reason to conditionally accept and tolerate them; as I have reason to distrust and dislike Epic and the EGS. My choice whenever possible, though, is GOG, which I didnāt mention as it was not part of the conversation and is mostly doing its own thing.
I rambled too much, and Iām too lazy to proofread, so I hope I make some kind of sense.
And you still missed the fact that yes, it turns out Valve was aggressively locking down developers by forbidding other platforms from competing on price by holding store discoverability hostage. Which may have been illegal, we still have to wait on that particular class action to resolve. And that regulators had to force them to hand out refunds after a lot of the āevilā competition was already doing it.
Look, the fact is these are massive corporations fighting for who gets to milk money from gamers. I have zero need to root for either Fortnite guy or Digital Distribution Inventor Monopoly Haver guy. Steam is undeniably the better software by a mile, but considering their margins I donāt think itās unreasonable for people to ask them not to do the shitty things they do (and they do do shitty things, as you point out).
I do root for GoG, but let me be perfectly honest here, itās because theyāre the only semi-viable 100% DRM-free option. And even then, you can tell they absolutely hate that they are grandfathered into that branding and increasingly unable to compete because of it. I will have no need to root for Cyberpunk guys the moment they cave and/or are forced to drop that policy.
Itās not about āmy billionaire is better than your billionaireā. Epic could gain complete supremacy overnight and my position wouldnāt change.
Which may have been illegal, we still have to wait on that particular class action to resolve.
Can you give me a case number or some other reference? I know of only one class action lawsuit, but that one is concerning the resale of Steam activation codes.
Nah, itās weird how many people missed that during discovery in that one (the one everybody was saying was irrelevant and vacuous and only about code resellers) emails came out where Steam reps were outright telling devs that either they kept price parity on Steam or they wouldnāt get store placement. Not just resellers, but for Humble and UPlay as well.
Itās nuts how long it took me to find the quotes and documents, by the way. Itās all about how few employees Valve has and that one time Tim Sweeny called them assholes in an email for having a 30% cut and they shared it internally with āAre you mad, bro?ā. Barely any specific coverage about the fact thatā¦ yeah, Steam will pressure you to never have the game cheaper anywhere else, resale keys or not.
For the record, my position WOULD change if Epic gained total dominance because I want the gaming market to be competitive. Any of these people having a monopoly is a bad thing in my book, so in our reality thatād be Steam.
My publisher once asked me to remove my game from itch.io, saying it was needed to negotiate some deal with valve. I donāt know how much of it was true though. I had set up that itch.io before signing with the publisher.
I mean, most people would say free games are pretty consumer-friendly, but whatever, these goalposts have been moving for ages.
Steam was threatening game devs with pulling them from the store if they undercut Steam prices just last year (see above). They restated that you donāt own your games and that you canāt transfer them to anybody on your death just last year. They rolled out additional revenue share improvements for big publishers in 2018, keeping the worse conditions for smaller games. I personally saw a Steam rep tell a roomful of indie devs that they should be translating their games to Chinese out of pocket or risk not getting as prominent store positioning well within this decade. Steam also keeps selling loot boxes today, which Iāve always been less concerned about, but most people seem to think is a bad thing. Thatās extra funny in this context because Epic specifically was shamed into removing them from their games a while ago and severely punished for what was seen as selling those to kids just as Steam was keeping that whole thing in place for CS2. Like I said, would kill for the MiB ray Gaben invented.
Look, Iām not here to say that Valve is a dark empire bent on world domination, but they are a money-printing machine privately owned by a billionaire that sure would like to keep growing his yatch collection. I think Valve has been more successful than anybody else at making their platform software and a lot of their money comes from cutting cost via automation and squeezing captive devs while focusing hard on their user-facing feature set. On the big picture, though (no pun intended) I donāt see that much air between them and any other large publisher or first party platform holder.
Most games on steam have no drm. Once youāve installed them, you can do whatever you want with them. Steam isnāt adding drm to everything. The number one best thing about steam is the social integration, the pure simplicity of being able to right click on a friend and hit join game to be able to play with them is amazing. Basically, steam makes things simpler, and other ālaunchersā are simply ad platforms forced in as a layer between you clicking play and the game opening.
i honestly believe the biggest part to this is steam having been around for a long time, and being a kind of the default video game store. people dont like being forced to get another launcher for a game, so whenever a game isnt on steam, they get mad at the whichever launcher its on.
i dont think there is very much critical thinking about drm, expoitative store platforms and capitalism going on.
I think if a Dev decided to only release their game on GoG because they prefer GoGs business practices there wouldnāt be a lot of complaints about it.
That is extremely disingenuous. It wouldnāt be commercially viable to do that (as seen byā¦ you know, CDPR not even doing that). The way to make that commercially viable would be to get paid for an exclusivity deal by GOGā¦ at which point Iām pretty sure people would, in fact, complain.
would be to get paid for an exclusivity deal by GOGā¦ at which point Iām pretty sure people would, in fact, complain.
Yes, Iām sure they would. Note how in your scenario here people arenāt complaining about it but being on Steam, they are complaining about the exclusivity deal.
Man, itās really hard to say this without sounding condescending, so let me say I absolutely am not trying to be, but I donāt really understand what youāre trying to say here. I think something got cut in that sentence somewhere.
I am agreeing with you that if someone signed and exclusivity deal with GoG people would complain.
I am pointing out that in order to get people to complain (in this hypothetical scenario) about something only being available on GoG, we had to introduce an exclusivity deal.
So people arenāt complaining about it not being on Steam, they are complaining about exclusivity deals.
Yes? Because if the game isnāt exclusive then itās on Steam.
Thatās what a monopoly gets ya. Especially if you have policies in place preventing competing storefronts from competing on price.
Exclusivity deals arenāt a particularly bad thing. Nerddom in general also keeps complaining when other first parties donāt have enough exclusives, often at the same time they make the opposite argument when it comes to Steam, which is part of the weirdness.
Itās a weirdly circular argument that youāre okay with Epic exclusives as long as the devs arenāt profiting from it, even if the end result is the same for you. And itās definitely not what people here are arguing. Thatās a very forced, disingenuous stance.
So a Monopoly (you can only purchase from one service) is bad, but exclusivity deals (you can only purchase from one service) arenāt bad. But Iām the one with the circular logic.
general also keeps complaining when other first parties donāt have enough exclusives,
theyāre idiots.
A stance someone else may or may not have is irrelevant to this discussion or the arguments I am making.
consoles are diffrent from store fronts. No one is complaining that a PC game store doesnāt have enough exclusives.
Itās a weirdly circular argument that youāre okay with Epic exclusives as long as the devs arenāt profiting from it, even if the end result is the same for you.
The end result is not the same. Thatās like saying āitās weird that youāre not okay with slave labour to work on farms, when the end result is the same to you.ā How it gets there is relevant, as well as the long term effects of supporting it. Epic has made it clear by their actions that they do not care about the end user, and if they end up āwinningā against Steam they would actively make things worse.
The origin of the term āStockholm Syndromeā comes from a hostage situation in which the police did not seem to care about the well being of the hostages and were actively taking actions that were dangerous to them, while the hostage takers started taking actions to protect the hostages from police.
Instead of running the story āpolice fucked upā news outlets exaggerated the behaviour of hostages that were just trying to survive.
i donāt get the āsteam good, other launchers badā. itās still a launcher and drmā¦
Ever other platform is just ass. I have played games on Epic, Battlenet, Ubisoft and the EA launcher but they all barely have basic functionality. Meanwhile steam has:
Steam seems to be the only one that actually puts any effort in providing a good user experience. Itās more than just a store / launcher and noone else is even trying to compete.
Donāt forget non-profitable free-to-use features such as:
And thereās probably more that Iām forgetting. These things cost Valve money to make and maintain. Only a small portion of users actually use these features and yet itās not locked behind some subscription or whatever and instead can be used by all users of the platform.
They cost money to make, but the only one of those that costs them a significant chunk to maintain is cloud saves. As far as I can tell their streaming solution is strictly peer-to-peer, in the vein of Moonlight or Parsec.
And all of those are definitely profitable for Steam viaā¦ well, look at this thread. Their technological advantage on the client feature set is worth billions to them. They are in the process of spinning it off into a separate hardware platform and OS. Thatās Microsoft money they stand to make, on top of all the Microsoft money they are already making.
I mean, those are cool, donāt get me wrong, they have by far the best feature set in the PC market, and arguably in all of gamingā¦ but itās not a gift, itās either feature parity with competitors or investment in their market position.
Theres also steamvr link to make metaās quest headsets better and also all the steam for linux stuff like proton and gamescope
What do you mean āno forced adsā? It throws up a separate window with store sales every launch?
You can turn that off.
https://majorgeeks.com/content/page/disable_steam_popups_notifications.html
You can turn that off, you know
You can turn that off in Windows as well, yet people still complained. And with good right.
Still think itās a bit different, steam is essentially a store so Iām expecting to see a promotional banner when I walk in. Windows is a āpaidā product that shows you more ads on something you already āownā.
Those are promotions, really. Not advertisements. Steam is showing me relevant video games that are available, not a sale on Coca-Cola.
Of fucking course Steam isnāt advertising soda, they sell games. Itās still an advertisementā¦ just because itās relevant to the platform youāre on doesnāt mean itās not an advertisement.
Turn it off in the settings if it annoys youā¦
I did turn it off. That doesnāt really have anything to do with my comment though.
Go to any other storefront and see if you can turn off the ads
Also not really relevant. My only point was that they are ads.
Exactly, I actually go thru this page every so often, just wish it would show me VR titles only, donāt care/have the drive to play flat games anymore. It would be annoying if it were ads for stuff not on steam, promote away steam
I fail to see the distinction. If I want to just play a game, itās still getting in my way.
Turn it off then and quit complaining about something so insignificant.
Up until this thread, I had tried several times to find out how to disable it. That setting name is obviously obfuscating itself.
ānotify me about promotions and new releasesā is confusing?
I am screaming at the reality distortion field. I can feel my molecules being pulled into a million parallel realities just reading this.
Then stop reading. Some of you people are really aggravating.
Who people? Reality people?
These conversations are always so weird. People are here going āyeah, Steam is the best client, but maybe itās fine to have some competition on PC storefrontsā and this army of borderline religious devotees just crawls from under the ground to tell you how when Steam does ads theyāre not ads, theyāre the Good Word of Gaben bestowed upon us.
I donāt even like the Epic store.
Except what actually was said was:
If youāre going to call yourself a āreality personā then stick to what is actually happening in reality.
Yeah, no, thatāsā¦ all consistent with what Iām saying. Yes, they are all DRM platforms. And the reason youād want more than one of them is that a monopoly on retail is bad, whether Epic, MS, Valve or whoever else have it.
One thing being said doesnāt mean itās the only thing being said. This, as always with this subject, is a very bizarre conversation.
I think there is a toggle for this in the UI settings.
no other platform gives as much of a shit as valve does about linux gaming. proton made pretty much every windows game in my library Just Workā¢ (and no, just wine still isnāt enough), meanwhile tim sweeney is actively hostile to linux as a platform.
Steamās DRM is not mandatory to release a game on Steam. Its there in fact to provide a necessary lesser evil than to encourage every developer/publisher to produce their own. They still unfortunately do, which Steam at least warns customers about, but them providing their own minimal DRM is a good thing, given the context.
(That said, I still respect gog)
Valve does not discourage third party DRM at all. I wanna say there are dev FAQs where they actively encourage it, in fact. Let me look for the quoteā¦
ā¦Here we go. They straight up point out that their DRM isnāt enough and recommend making GaaS games and leaning into their platform features to make pirate copies and non-DRMd copies not work or work worse. And they support third party DRM explicitly.
I donāt see how this is consistent with discouraging DRM use. People project a lot on the go-to defenses for this particular argument, and itās weird.
The DRM is optional for use by the devs. Rimworld is one game I know doesnāt use it, you can just zip the entire thing up and put it somewhere else and itāll run fine. Itās still a launcher. But the only better alternative to a launcher is plain installers to download and hold onto like GOG provides as an alternative to its Galaxy launcher.
Steam is good mostly because the competition is unbelievably incompetent. I cannot see a single good reason for EGS to be a fucking Unreal app, for starters, and a couple of reasons that it shouldnāt (the store is just web pages, the text rendering sometimes gets blurry, it uses too many computer resources to run).
Even GOG, which I always shill for, has some pretty dumb faults, like how it lists different editions of the same game, like a base/deluxe/platinum, as completely different: if you own the platinum version, you might still see the base game on the store page without the āOwnedā sticker; more than once I added a game to the cart only to double check and realize that I already owned it. This also happens to games that GOG sells in bundles.
To be fair, āit just worksā and they havenāt tried to screw us over, which is almost unprecedented.
Man, I want whatever MiB forget beam they have at Valve. I remember plenty of ātrying to screw us overā, starting with rolling out Steam in the first place.
Maybe you had to be there before all the Gaben memes and the digital distribution.
The thing is, the OPās meme is right, all these arguments always devolve into bashing Valve in a reactionary mannerā¦ but man, itās because the cultish memory holing gets so weird that itās not about whether Epic is successful or good software or about any other store. Whether you want to or not you end up reality checking the Good Guy Valve myth.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to criticise Valve. I still strongly disagree with being forced to update a game before I can launch it. Greenlight and Steam Direct were/are consistently a pit of scum and shovelware. I still havenāt forgotten their attempt together with Bethesda to introduce paid mods to the Workshop. I wasnāt around when Steam itself was introduced (we still traded game CDs on the playground at the time), but I understand it was a horrid service and software. Then thereās the matter of actual gambling in Counter-Strike and TF2 and the massive secondary market attached to them that Valve refuse to acknowledge.
Nothingās ever only one way or the opposite, though. Thereās always a spectrum of what a customer is willing to put up with, weighed against what a customer gains by putting up with a companyās behaviour. For putting up with Valveās bullshit, as a gamer, I get a reliable service, a massive library of games, unparalleled download speed, free cloud storage for saves and settings, content management, community integration, and benefits too numerous to recount. As a Linux gamer, I get all of their work on Proton, on upstream Wine, Gamescope, DXVK and VKD3D, many of which I use even outside gaming, for free.
When Steamās quasi-monopoly was threatened by the EGS, Valve did not try to lock down developers. The only policy change they enacted was requiring games that are advertised on Steam Steam to actually launch on Steam, after people who preordered Metro Exodus were shafted, in order not to become an advertisement platform for their competition. Then they released publicity videos about the Steam Deck that appealed to Linux enthusiasts, handheld gamers, and right-to-repair advocates. Even as a āDRM platformā, theyāve captured that niche.
Iāve said many times that success is not illegal. I was excited and hopeful when I heard that Steam was getting a competitor with a company backing it that had a chance of challenging the status quo. Epic and the EGS were given the best opportunity anyone was ever going to get and they fumbled it. They alienated their potential customerbase when they poached Metro Exodus and early third-party-exclusive titles, showed that they did not have a solid foundation when Borderlands 3 was launched without the ability to preload, gave us reason to question their security practices when a data scraper was found in the installed application, and drew further criticism when they would only accept indie titles if they were made EGS-exclusive while allowing Cyberpunk 2077 to launch on multiple platforms. Since then, itās become a haven for AI and NFT shovelware that Valve have rejected based on legal/moral issues.
I will acknowledge that some good came of their actions. Apple was forced to remove their anti-competitive policy that prevented developers from placing links and buttons that directed users to other payment processors. Still, it is the fruit of the poisonous tree: they intentionally broke ToS and had an eighty-page lawsuit and an animated short film prepared, acting like they were the innocent āfor the playersā party set upon by the evil corporations, rallying children as their uncritical lynch mob.
In conclusion, Valve has done things I dislike, but I have reason to conditionally accept and tolerate them; as I have reason to distrust and dislike Epic and the EGS. My choice whenever possible, though, is GOG, which I didnāt mention as it was not part of the conversation and is mostly doing its own thing.
I rambled too much, and Iām too lazy to proofread, so I hope I make some kind of sense.
See, thatās a very even keeled summary.
And you still missed the fact that yes, it turns out Valve was aggressively locking down developers by forbidding other platforms from competing on price by holding store discoverability hostage. Which may have been illegal, we still have to wait on that particular class action to resolve. And that regulators had to force them to hand out refunds after a lot of the āevilā competition was already doing it.
Look, the fact is these are massive corporations fighting for who gets to milk money from gamers. I have zero need to root for either Fortnite guy or Digital Distribution Inventor Monopoly Haver guy. Steam is undeniably the better software by a mile, but considering their margins I donāt think itās unreasonable for people to ask them not to do the shitty things they do (and they do do shitty things, as you point out).
I do root for GoG, but let me be perfectly honest here, itās because theyāre the only semi-viable 100% DRM-free option. And even then, you can tell they absolutely hate that they are grandfathered into that branding and increasingly unable to compete because of it. I will have no need to root for Cyberpunk guys the moment they cave and/or are forced to drop that policy.
Itās not about āmy billionaire is better than your billionaireā. Epic could gain complete supremacy overnight and my position wouldnāt change.
Can you give me a case number or some other reference? I know of only one class action lawsuit, but that one is concerning the resale of Steam activation codes.
Nah, itās weird how many people missed that during discovery in that one (the one everybody was saying was irrelevant and vacuous and only about code resellers) emails came out where Steam reps were outright telling devs that either they kept price parity on Steam or they wouldnāt get store placement. Not just resellers, but for Humble and UPlay as well.
Itās nuts how long it took me to find the quotes and documents, by the way. Itās all about how few employees Valve has and that one time Tim Sweeny called them assholes in an email for having a 30% cut and they shared it internally with āAre you mad, bro?ā. Barely any specific coverage about the fact thatā¦ yeah, Steam will pressure you to never have the game cheaper anywhere else, resale keys or not.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F778bbf05-f937-4f50-a8a5-90de4185172e_1000x677.jpeg
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bwajZMNAof74mSNRMcTAVlF8m0fplHkA/view
For the record, my position WOULD change if Epic gained total dominance because I want the gaming market to be competitive. Any of these people having a monopoly is a bad thing in my book, so in our reality thatād be Steam.
My publisher once asked me to remove my game from itch.io, saying it was needed to negotiate some deal with valve. I donāt know how much of it was true though. I had set up that itch.io before signing with the publisher.
deleted by creator
I mean, most people would say free games are pretty consumer-friendly, but whatever, these goalposts have been moving for ages.
Steam was threatening game devs with pulling them from the store if they undercut Steam prices just last year (see above). They restated that you donāt own your games and that you canāt transfer them to anybody on your death just last year. They rolled out additional revenue share improvements for big publishers in 2018, keeping the worse conditions for smaller games. I personally saw a Steam rep tell a roomful of indie devs that they should be translating their games to Chinese out of pocket or risk not getting as prominent store positioning well within this decade. Steam also keeps selling loot boxes today, which Iāve always been less concerned about, but most people seem to think is a bad thing. Thatās extra funny in this context because Epic specifically was shamed into removing them from their games a while ago and severely punished for what was seen as selling those to kids just as Steam was keeping that whole thing in place for CS2. Like I said, would kill for the MiB ray Gaben invented.
Look, Iām not here to say that Valve is a dark empire bent on world domination, but they are a money-printing machine privately owned by a billionaire that sure would like to keep growing his yatch collection. I think Valve has been more successful than anybody else at making their platform software and a lot of their money comes from cutting cost via automation and squeezing captive devs while focusing hard on their user-facing feature set. On the big picture, though (no pun intended) I donāt see that much air between them and any other large publisher or first party platform holder.
Most games on steam have no drm. Once youāve installed them, you can do whatever you want with them. Steam isnāt adding drm to everything. The number one best thing about steam is the social integration, the pure simplicity of being able to right click on a friend and hit join game to be able to play with them is amazing. Basically, steam makes things simpler, and other ālaunchersā are simply ad platforms forced in as a layer between you clicking play and the game opening.
i honestly believe the biggest part to this is steam having been around for a long time, and being a kind of the default video game store. people dont like being forced to get another launcher for a game, so whenever a game isnt on steam, they get mad at the whichever launcher its on.
i dont think there is very much critical thinking about drm, expoitative store platforms and capitalism going on.
I think if a Dev decided to only release their game on GoG because they prefer GoGs business practices there wouldnāt be a lot of complaints about it.
That is extremely disingenuous. It wouldnāt be commercially viable to do that (as seen byā¦ you know, CDPR not even doing that). The way to make that commercially viable would be to get paid for an exclusivity deal by GOGā¦ at which point Iām pretty sure people would, in fact, complain.
Yes, Iām sure they would. Note how in your scenario here people arenāt complaining about it but being on Steam, they are complaining about the exclusivity deal.
Man, itās really hard to say this without sounding condescending, so let me say I absolutely am not trying to be, but I donāt really understand what youāre trying to say here. I think something got cut in that sentence somewhere.
I am agreeing with you that if someone signed and exclusivity deal with GoG people would complain.
I am pointing out that in order to get people to complain (in this hypothetical scenario) about something only being available on GoG, we had to introduce an exclusivity deal.
So people arenāt complaining about it not being on Steam, they are complaining about exclusivity deals.
Yes? Because if the game isnāt exclusive then itās on Steam.
Thatās what a monopoly gets ya. Especially if you have policies in place preventing competing storefronts from competing on price.
Exclusivity deals arenāt a particularly bad thing. Nerddom in general also keeps complaining when other first parties donāt have enough exclusives, often at the same time they make the opposite argument when it comes to Steam, which is part of the weirdness.
Itās a weirdly circular argument that youāre okay with Epic exclusives as long as the devs arenāt profiting from it, even if the end result is the same for you. And itās definitely not what people here are arguing. Thatās a very forced, disingenuous stance.
So a Monopoly (you can only purchase from one service) is bad, but exclusivity deals (you can only purchase from one service) arenāt bad. But Iām the one with the circular logic.
theyāre idiots.
A stance someone else may or may not have is irrelevant to this discussion or the arguments I am making.
consoles are diffrent from store fronts. No one is complaining that a PC game store doesnāt have enough exclusives.
The end result is not the same. Thatās like saying āitās weird that youāre not okay with slave labour to work on farms, when the end result is the same to you.ā How it gets there is relevant, as well as the long term effects of supporting it. Epic has made it clear by their actions that they do not care about the end user, and if they end up āwinningā against Steam they would actively make things worse.
G*mers are Stockholmed crazy style.
Fun fact:
The origin of the term āStockholm Syndromeā comes from a hostage situation in which the police did not seem to care about the well being of the hostages and were actively taking actions that were dangerous to them, while the hostage takers started taking actions to protect the hostages from police.
Instead of running the story āpolice fucked upā news outlets exaggerated the behaviour of hostages that were just trying to survive.
Seeing the console wars play out on the basis of which DRM platform you want to put in your PC is wild.
Itās like, diversityā¦ but not.