Steam is good, but competitors can only make it even better. Worst case it doesn’t change.
Cool
Epic Games store and Tim Sweeney are both still peices of shit.
Steam wins again by doing nothing
Oh hell yeah. This shit crazy good
A lot of Steam Stans here.
Here’s some neat facts:
- Epic Games is the same Source Developers behind Unreal Engine 5. UE5 is arguably the best game engine right now for modern graphics.
- Epic Games Unreal Engine 5 is Free to start developing and only kicks in commission after X% of sales.
- Both Steam and GoG take a ~30% commission on all game sales.
- Steam games aren’t DRM-free (neither is EGS, but 0% + the driving force behind UE5?)
- The Steam Source 2 Engine is proprietary; only their team can develop Source games.
It sucks that EGS is looking to suck up games, customers, data, etc. Their App / Interface also kinda sucks. UE5 on the other hand kinda rules, and Steam has been quietly collecting cheques while their Source Engine has collected dust. Almost all my games are on Steam but the ones I want to keep I’ve been getting through GoG.
GoG I think has a solid business model of DRM free games and game preservation. EGS is leading in one of the industry’s most innovative and developer-accessible game engines for the foreseeable future. Steam is going to have to make some tough decisions I think to compete as time goes on.
None of these are why people hate epic games or like gog/steam.
EG is toxicily anticonsumer. Their platform is assbackwards with no good functional community features. They bombard users with ads for games they already own. They spyware they call a store front has repeatedly been caught snooping through user files without consent and sending unknown amounts of data back to their server without permission to gather that data in the first place.
And the cherry on top is their close relationship with tencent, aka one facet of the propaganda arm of the CCP.
And the cherry on top is their close relationship with tencent, aka one facet of the propaganda arm of the CCP.
I see this a lot and… do they though? From what I can tell, Steam also operates in China. Sure, Tencent invested in EGS, but not in any kind of controlling stake. Tencent does invest in tech and EGS is probably a solid investment.
Operating in China and having 10% of your company publicly owned by an entity of the Chinese government are two different things, and EGS has reportedly been all to happy to give over any and all information they have on identified users to the CCP. One article in 2019 suggesting that Hong Kong activists were being targeted by data in part provided through such means.
Operating in China and having 10% of your company publicly owned by an entity of the Chinese government are two different things
I don’t think it is. Steam operates in China and even allows China to censor the Steam store page and games as needed. Valve doesn’t take much issue bending over for China either in that regard. EGS and Steam are both Corporations and China is a large market.
Not one of those data points justifies their shitty client, which, as a consumer, is all I really care about.
Neat facts, but they don’t justify the awful game store they have created. They can’t even handle a downloads queue that you can change around, which is embarrassing. They have 1% of the features that Steam provides, so rightly they can’t charge the same.
Would be nice if Source 2 was available to anyone, but it isn’t a product they want to sell/support. It’s mostly meant to power their own games (like most game studios, they can have their own inhouse engines). Maybe as it gets more mature they could explore this possibility idk.
Steam has been quietly collecting cheques while their Source Engine has collected dust.
Very innacurate.
Valve create so much great software around gaming. Steam gets updated very frequently with bug fixes and new features (just recently we got game recording).
Source 2 is likely constantly being worked on (featured in 2 of the most popular pc games: CS2 and Dota2). Maybe randoms like us could never use it, but they still work on it unlike your statement would suggest.
Not to mention Proton, which helps every linux gamer run Windows games.
30% may sound steep, but it’s not really when you consider what Steam provides: Game distribution (downloads, forever), community features, steam workshop/marketplace (if implemented), inventory system, game networking, in-game purchasing, achievements, etc, etc. I’m not a game developer, but theres probably a million more things they do. I’m not even mentioning the features they provide just for us, the gamers (mainly family share, thats simply amazing).
I’ve been getting through GoG.
Very awesome, GOG and their goal of preserving video games is great.
My p.s. wrapup is that Epic is barely a launcher when compared with Steam. Yes Epic can launch a game, but it does nothing else (well) at all.
Even with all the years they have had for development, they’d rather try to shove money into game devs faces (or customers with free games) than fix their app. I hope they realise this is a mistake, because you can get game devs to move over with lots of money, but customers who are spending money won’t if they arent treated well. This isn’t a long term strategy they have been using and this 0% fee seems like desparation to me (not to say they are poor, cuz fortnite pays the bills, but they likely aren’t seeing much growth).
I hate defending corporations, but Valve is the one that I hope every other company looks at and tries to mimic because they have only done good for their customers.
Source 2 is closed source, however it’s absolutely available to third parties. There are a couple non-Valve Source 2 games in development right now.
Could you point to these games or any documentation on how a developer may reach out to Valve regarding developing in the Source 2 Engine?
I was able to find sources for the Source engine, but not Source 2 which Valve has been primarily making games on in the last 10 years. In any case, neither are as widely supported or available as UE5.
I would argue UE5 enables and encourages bad development practices that lead to the unoptimized mess that “modern graphics” games are right now. Their work is cool, but so many games rely on temporal aliasing for in-game effects now, and UE5 is the common denominator.
Steam and GOG have a strong history and userbase. 0% commission is nice, but Steam in particular offers a world of more value than Epic Games Store, including but not limited to a usable fucking user interface (I use Rare to play my EGS library because it’s so bad).
Steam games are DRM free unless you consider Steam itself a form of DRM. DRM is implemented by the developers of the game, not by the marketplace it’s sold on.
And I find it strange that you think GOG has a better business model than Steam and will be more competitive long-term. Why do you think so?
I find it strange that you think GOG has a better business model than Steam and will be more competitive long-term. Why do you think so?
Steam is it’s own DRM system. Control (2020) is a perfect example. You can’t run that from your steamapps folder due to Steams DRM to verify a purchase license. GoG on the other hand has the same game, usually cheaper, an runs entirely independent of any platform. Not every Steam game is like this, but most major releases are.
The nice thing about a “Free” Engine is that anyone can pick it up. This means the more people pick it up, the more tutorials, the more docs, the most common issues are found, the more common solutions, etc. So while you believe that performance is an issue, it really is one of the better available engines out there and it can only get better. Again, Steam does not let other people use their Engine - what’s the next best free thing - Unity?
Tim, what are you doing here?
Yet Steam has a history that proves they will not fuck customers over, and if they try new features people hate they’ll not pushing it through no matter what for the purpose of maximizing profits (also not through dark patterns). This is something phenomenally rare and which you can’t buy with any amount of money.
So yeah, not sure what will happen in the future. But competing with Steam always will be just painful unless you got your own niche (like GOG) by the mere fact that Valve isn’t “just another company that will screw you over” <-- the default expectation these days.
You do realize the market share of GOG is about 0.5%, right? That’s despite Projekt Red being a beloved developer, the great launcher features, the fairest DRM practices, many years in the business, and so on. It only proves the point that Steam is a monopoly that cannot be disrupted whether you do it nicely like GOG or aggressively like Epic.
I don’t think the GoG numbers matter, and I do think Steam’s days are numbered if they continue on their current course (like, within the next 50 years, not tomorrow, but in my lifetime). GoGs DRM free and game archive mantra is going to give them longevity. The World continues to digitize, and eventually, society is going to have to grapple with Internet privacy and digital ownership. Steam on the otherhand is catering to the same crowd EGS is at a 30% tax. No doubt Steam has the numbers, no doubt they will for awhile, but I do think they will eventually run out of Steam if they don’t invest in a more sustainable business model.
To be clear, I don’t hate Steam or am in any way rooting against Steam, this is just my PoV in comparing their business model to EGS who has primarily invested in their UE5 engine. Valve on the otherthand does well with hardware, Steamdeck and SteamVR I think are both solid.
I also don’t believe that EGS is as bad as a company as people make them out to be.
I can’t wait to get more games on my Epic deck, oh wait it was Valve who pioneered an incredible platform that can play AAA games on a handheld running Linux and made compatibility a reality for thousands of games.
They didn’t pioneer it, companies like GPD did. Not shitting in the Steam Deck, love that thing. Just wanting to get the facts straight.
I think it still counts, due to all the work they did on the software side.
100% of $0 is still $0.
I’ll spend my money on platforms that have proven to respect their customers.
What’s epics problem? I only log in to get free games but I think competition should work out better for the consumer
Competition is usually always a good thing, but sadly no launcher has ever brought anything new to the table that Steam hasn’t already been doing (they usually just bring headaches).
Epic doesn’t want to compete fairly (by providing a great user experience, etc). They want to compete by paying for exclusives & bribing users with free games. Obviously this hasn’t worked because they are loweri g fees, likely to try to get the growth they just aren’t seeing.
They could literally just copy steam, add their “we take less of a cut” thing, and be in a good place.
Instead, using their storefront sucks, their customer service sucks, they lack features you’d expect of a major platform, and they’re pretentious dicks about it. Instead of fixing these obvious problems, they’re bribing devs for exclusivity, pumping their marketing with bullshit, and litigating apple over their app store (actually that last one is kinda great). The epic store today would be competition to steam if steam was still as it was 20 years ago when everyone hated steam.
They don’t got a problem. Someone on reddit a while ago pushed for epic=bad so now years later people just parrot the same shit over and over like monkeys.
These people in their minds are “friends” with steam. They gotta stick up for their buddies on the internet.
I don’t think “epic bad”. But right now, I don’t see why I should use their platform when all my stuff is on steam. They should bring either: better experience or better value. Right now they don’t really do either. Sure they give you free games but I have 10x the amount on my platform of choice. I’m not married to steam I just want epic to give me a reason to use them.
For the consumer multiple platforms sucks. There’s already competition for selling steam keys as well. Epic doesn’t want to pay other platforms for anything fortnite, anything else they do is to justify why they shouldn’t have to pay like every one else.
At least Valve takes some of the money that they make from Steam and use it for Steam. You cant run an entire gaming platform based on developers alone, you also need to make it at least somewhat bearable for consumers.
Because they have to, because their store is based in bribing developers for artificial exclusivity in an attempt to hurt Valve for proving that Pig Swiney was a moron a decade ago when he said PC gaming was dead.
This is all a vain attempt by a man child to get back at Gabe, and it’s abso fucking lutely a hilarious delight what an abject failure it all is.
Garbage store with no customer services struggles and burns money, because that’s what’s lazy customer fucking cash grabs should do - burn. Fuck epic, fuck Swiney, and fuck you if you defend them.
Care to elaborate further on specific events or even just link some articles for a lazy bones like me?
(I only get free games from epic and then never play them)
Completely unrelated, but is your username a reference to the movie Can’t Hardly Wait?
No just a play on the name amanda
Honestly, I completely forgot I had Epic installed on my PC
Good for them, but until EGS starts being more pro- consumer, I’m not spending a cent there
even if they do become pro-consumer you shouldn’t spend there. because it’d be a temporary affair and soon as they win market share from steam it’ll disappear.
It s a good start ngl.
What about taking a different route altogether and not be greedy? what about charging a flat fee (your costs plus some profits to run the infrastructure like yearly or monthly). What about not being evil?
There is a huge business opportunity IMO to do just that. Have a store, charge a flat fee, add whatever percentage wire transfers take (1-3%). You make money, you out-compete everyone and you are the good guy.
Like Steam is doing?
I don’t think their cut is them being greedy.
Your plan might not be economically feasibile, because companies need money for growth (new products, R&D, etc), so only charging enough to run is not possible.
Steam is probably doing a kindness by not charging an infrastructure fee every year to developers, that shiz would probably really expensive.
The cost of the cloud features they provide is likely, usually, understated. Just the bandwidth costs alone of allowing your game to be downloaded whenever the user wants and however many times they want is expensive enough. Add on cloud saves and all the other niceties…
All that is just to say that Epic is likely losing a lot of money here just to try enticing more developers to move over, and maybe bring some customers too, but it’s not gonna work. They are lucky the fortnite piggybank lets them do this, but it’s not smart by any means.
That would require having a platform worth something. Currently, they sank millions into the community - but in the wrong way. The client still lacks basic features and yet they spend money to buy exclusivity.
Fuck them, they don’t deserve shit - praise or money.
I agree with this. What would make people jump from an evil corporation abusing its users and creators to another evil corporation abusing its users and creators.
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epic can have a seat at the table when they actually start competing with valve in terms of features and customer service.
so they can keep feeding a monopoly that licenses drm keys to them.
I guess I don’t understand Epic’s model. How is Epic different from Steam in this regard?
You can’t tell me that if epic somehow wins this war that they won’t immediately enshittify the platform. Valve has my trust.
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in this case you can.
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I am against monopolistic competition practices and that includes exclusivity deals and predatory pricing.
And as far as I know, Epic does this more than Valve or GOG. Granted, Valve doesn’t need to, because they are already the main player, but they also mostly avoided enshittyfication for now.
Granted it is hard to enter a market that is already dominated by another company, but instead of doing those business practices they could offer a better service.
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Valve is private and already takes a 30% cut.
Yes. That is rather high, but AFAIK the same on Xbox, PlayStation and GOG. Itch.io is on 10%.
It’s not possible for valve OR epic to enshit according to the definition of the word.
What do you mean by that? Enshittyfication is when companies try to offer a good platform first to reach many content producers and consumers and then, once the consumers and producers depend on the platform, it goes bad for them in order to favor profits of the company owners or stakeholders.
Just because a company is private, it can still change to favor short term money extractions from all their customers.
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I don’t really understand what it is I would be wrong about. Is it about the word “shareholders” in the wiki instead of “owners”, what I called them?
Shareholders of a private company is often a small group of individuals or just one person, and they can also be called the owners. “Private” means the shares are not traded publicly.
A shareholder (in the United States often referred to as stockholder) of corporate stock refers to an individual or legal entity (such as another corporation, a body politic, a trust or partnership) that is registered by the corporation as the legal owner of shares of the share capital of a public or private corporation.
Steam is a monopoly because it is the only one of these platforms to actually be good.
no, it’s because they had about a 15 year head start. you think steam started the way it is now? it started as a launcher for steam games and it was worse than ubisoft’s launcher.
Also, folks fucking hated it at the jump. Whats wild to me is that Epic could factor in all the lessons Steam learned over near two decades resulting in a relatively equal product, but instead… doesn’t.
eh it’s currently second only to steam imo. and don’t come at me with gog galaxy, it’s absolutely awful, and feels like it’s also abandoned.
GOG doesn’t need a launcher, because the games don’t have DRM. It is just nice to have, in order to keep games up to date.
Steam, Epic, Origin and the Microsoft thing needs a launcher, because DRM. The non-optional part is what is annoying, it is not a choice, if you buy something there, you have to use their launcher software, that needs to run in the background all the time (Sure it doesn’t need to run all the time, but just having to start it in addition to the game, is annoying).
With Steam being the first one to require a launcher, it was annoying at first, but became useful and people started considering it the standard game delivery solution. Now we need another one for Epic and all other stores that peddle DRMified games.
If Epic would be just another store, where you buy and download games, nobody would complain, but Epic created (reinvented) an additional incompatible game delivery solution that required their launcher, that is what people are mostly annoyed about.
If the industry would come together and create a vendor neutral and compatible software and game delivery mechanism, where people are free to choose where to buy their software and games, and with which launcher they want to keep it up to date, that would be awesome, but sadly capitalism favors short sighted, wasteful and monopoly building competition instead of cooperation.
Epic can even beat them if they just improved their store, but they would rather fight other stores so that it would be worse for everyone.
It’s more than the store they need to improve.
They’re not just playing catch-up either.
Steam fans are a cult lol. Invested too much money they hate to admit so now they sing it’s praises till they die.
Invested too much money
If Steam turns to shit I have no problems reacquiring my collection through Piracy. There is no sunk-cost here. Epic is actively anti-consumer so I refuse to use it.
Can I like and dislike a comment at the same time?
Am just gonna like yours to show my split opinion.
And yet, still, they can go fuck themselves.
fuck apple and their customers btw
