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 also think the problem is how they executed some of their exclusives. There have been multiple games, mostly in the past now, that announced launching on certain platforms, including Steam, then had to backtrack and reveal that Epic bought their exclusivity and that gamers that were already expecting to get the game from one platform, now wouldn’t be able to.
Even though that doesn’t change the end result of what you’re getting, the feeling that the timing and method of the exclusivity deal left you with was… a surprise that forced the buyer to reevaluate their expectations and have to consider the purchase all over again on a different storefront, because of that storefront’s direct monetary intervention.
It came off as a corporate bribe that lessened the consumer’s options, for no benefit to the consumer. The pure taste that actions like that left in my mouth got me to never even claim any free Epic games and to wait an entire year for Hitman 3 to drop on Steam even though the reboot trilogy are some of my favorite games of all time, and I won’t even get into the snafu that game particularly had with transferring trilogy content paid for on Steam to Epic.
If they hadn’t gone about purchasing exclusivity deals in that fashion, I may have bought some things on sale from them, or at the least claimed some games allowing their launcher to live on my machine, but instead it drove me away.
Valve did a similar thing to this. I don’t know if you remember the original state of Half-Life and Counter Strike, but they originally didn’t require any launcher. Then, one release, Valve announced that the old version was going to be shutdown and they would require Steam for now on. People had already purchased the game and been playing it outside of Steam, so they were pretty pissed that all the sudden they needed this launcher / account to keep playing a game that didn’t require one out of the box. I was especially pissed, because I think I was the only one in my group of friends that realized that they had unilaterally removed the option to resell / give away your game, and that seemed like bullshit to me, because I occasionally gave my old games to my friends when I was tired of them. The boxed copies of Half-Life and CS allowed for resell/transfer of the game, but they forced everyone over to Steam with an update and the Steam terms removed the option to transfer the game to someone else. Plus, Steam was an absolute awful piece of software at the time, and that made everything worse.
I’m guessing this also happened to other games as well. There was a period there where people would pre-order a game assuming it would work as a traditional, standalone boxed game. But then they’d get the game and it would unexpectedly require Steam, and the buyers would be pissed. Nowadays you just assume a launcher will be required, but it came as a shock / infuriated / disappointed people back when it first started being a thing that PC games were tied to launchers / accounts (and people hated Steam / launchers). Lots of people felt duped.
Anyway, I’m of the opinion that it’s bad for software to ever require or be tied to any launcher, even worse if it’s a third party launcher. It makes the future of games access muddy (What if Steam shuts down? What if there’s a court injunction against Steam requiring it to cease operations? What if my country blocks access to Steam?) and also adds extra layers of insecurity (last time I looked, there was at least one security issue in Steam that remained unpatched since around 2012).
So, to me, switching from Steam to EGS just meant consumers were getting punched in the nuts by a different company. I’d be happy if they weren’t getting punched in the nuts at all.
Interesting, that was before my time. I remember getting on Steam for when Half Life 2 released, but I believe that was required right out the gate, and I was already enthralled enough by the game to just give in to it, I was a kid anyway.
I take it you prefer getting games from GOG in that case? They’re almost the last bastion for PC games in that way.
I’d say of the current players, GOG is among my favorites since they make the launcher component optional.
In general, I’ve just been disappointed that all the launchers have taken off. I get the convenience factor, but consumers also had some rights that were taken away with the move to launchers. Plus the fact that some of the launchers have terrible security practices, as I mentioned, and that makes it so even a game with great security has unnecessarily increased attack surfaces. And launchers also screw over people with limited internet access, which is admittedly fewer people throughout the world every day, but there are still military personnel, etc. that just cannot reasonably be expected to access the internet on the whim of a launcher.
I suspect we’ll see the same thing happen with Epic that happened with Steam, where people end up forgetting all about the early fucked up stuff and, in the end, just rolling with it. Some years down the line, people won’t even remember how much people were pissed off about the early days of Epic. As an example, any time I mention that I’m not a huge fan of Steam, based partly on remembering the forced move of existing / new games in the early days, people just shrug it off and act like it was fine for Valve to do that since, years later, we got the current, well liked iteration of Steam.
And that’s kinda how I feel about Epic. If Steam can ultimately get a pass for completely ruining the experience of a few games by forcing people to use it against their will in the early days, why shouldn’t Epic get a chance at a pass in the end too? Maybe it turns out to be great years down the line? The only reason we have the Steam that’s well liked today is because consumers put up with it in the early days. Would we be better off if Steam failed early on? If consumers had held their ground when they hated it and forced it to close down? I kinda doubt it. I hate launchers, but, if Valve didn’t make the dominant one, someone else would’ve, and I probably wouldn’t be any happier with it.
Maybe in 20 years EGS will be fucking amazing, and when you tell someone you don’t like it because of what they did with Metro, etc., they’ll look at you the way people look at me when I talk about Steam now, lol.
There was one game that happened to. Metro. And anyone who had already pre-purchased on Steam had it fulfilled through Steam at launch.
The rest of the games people claim this happened to were Kickstarter projects in which the backer reward promised a “digital key”. Now, at the time of those Kickstarter campaigns, the only stores that existed were Steam and GOG, so there was an assumption made that the keys would be to one of those two. But by the time the games were getting ready to launch, another option came into existence and devs who clearly needed money (or they wouldn’t have been going to Kickstarter to begin with) made a deal.
Well, I also count Hitman 3 since it delayed my ability to complete the trilogy I’d been playing for years at that point by another year without having to deal with the storefront content transfer issues that weren’t guaranteed to be handled by IOI as well as they ended up being after some struggle.
For me, the one time with Metro and the deal with Hitman were two distasteful deal executions too many.