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It’s an open question whether Epic’s limited success is a result of the company’s failure to “press its advantage,” as Pitchford opines, or just a sign that Steam’s massive entrenched network effects have proven more resilient than he expected.
It’s not. EGS doesn’t solve any problems that Steam leaves on the table to be solved. Customers have no reason to shop at EGS when Epic takes its thumb off the scale.
It doesn’t solve most of the problems Steam already solved either.
Not only that but it’s a worse user experience all around.
I fucking hate the EGS and Xbox stores for browsing new games. Most of the time you’ll get an animated video that’s not game footage and two screenshots that don’t tell you shit.
Not to mention that the formatting is so bad that the client requires you to basically be in fullscreen but you’ve still gotta scroll a mile down to get any info.
Not to mention that the formatting is so bad that the client requires you to basically be in fullscreen but you’ve still gotta scroll a mile down to get any info.
For Xbox, that’s because the PC app is literally copy/pasted from the Xbox console app. Hell, it probably is the same universal app since that was a big Microsoft push to have more apps available on the consoles and Windows Phone.
Lol I thought it was just my advanced age of 33 that made it difficult to understand a game from the Xbox previews. A majority of screenshots look like garbage once you’re not in character and the store highlights that.
Even ea’s origin tried to offer more, with the overlay chat, etc. Epic did none of that.
Steam also offers community pages, user reviews, and other features that allows players to discuss their games.
If anything, the only thing that other stores have that Steam doesn’t would be games not on Steam. Even then, half of the time, they’re either itch(dot)io exclusive indie titles or shitty triple AAA titles.
When I buy on GOG, I know I’m getting a game DRM-free. They muddied that a tad with how they handle online multiplayer, but for the most part, I get more value from their store for that. It’s a huge reason why I’d choose their store, because they’re solving a problem for me that Steam does not.
While I normally check both locations and buy from GOG if it’s available there, you would be surprised how many Steam titles are completely DRM free.
I needed some DRM free games for the classroom last year and was pleasantly surprised that a lot of the smaller, indie games I own Steam, the ones I was most interested in bringing into the classroom to begin with, run perfectly well on a machine without Steam even installed just by copying the folder to a flash drive. Some required deleting a Steam.dll or adding a text document that states the SteamID of the game, but most of the games I wanted I was able to run from a flash drive, DRM free, no Internet, Steam or game install required.
Steam offers DRM to devs that want it, but it is not a DRM platform in of itself.
I’m aware, but when GOG takes the ambiguity out of it, I don’t have to do tons of extra research to know that they have an extra feature that’s important to me. I’d really appreciate if some store took the ambiguity out of it when it comes to multiplayer games being playable offline. It’s something that Steam should easily tell you in theory, but there are tons of games that have LAN and such without bothering to report it. Some say they require an online connection and actually don’t. These are problems worth solving for me, a particular kind of consumer.
If only they supported Linux. Proton support out of the box is the biggest selling point for me.
I’m with you, but they’ve got a very generous 30 day refund policy, no matter how many hours played, if it doesn’t work. So far, I’ve only had to use it once, on Phantom Fury, which is Verified on Steam but had issues in the tutorial through GOG; some day I’ll pick up the Steam version and see if it does any better. I also buy my GOG games through Heroic launcher, which has a referral link so that some of the revenue of my sale goes toward the development of Heroic. That way GOG knows that if they want all of the revenue from my sale, it’s clear what they have to do to earn it.
And as a reminder, there are Linux native games on GOG. I just played Duck Detective: The Secret Salami on the native Linux version from GOG.
The funny thing is, I feel like it’s not so hard to navigate Steam for particular problems that consumers would like a solution to, but Valve has been ignoring or considers beyond them. For some people, those individual problems form the root of their buying decision. You’d have to beat them at something before you beat them at everything.
Imagine if Steam and EGS were hotdog vendors.
Steam offers all the condiments; mustard, ketchup, mayo, relish, onions, pickles, tomatoes, bacon, cheese, chili, etc.
EGS is just a plain hotdog. No condiments. You’re lucky to even get a bun.
Both are equal price.
Which hotdog are you getting?
Now imagine that the plain hotdog guy keeps whining that nobody wants his hotdogs.
The hotdog vendor keeps going on about how he’s the good guy because he pays more to the sausage suppliers. As if that’s at all relevant to his customers.
He also tried suing the fruit vendor because they wouldn’t let them sell their hotdogs on their Apple cart.
I’m having a really hard time keeping up with the analogies at this point, haha
I’m just waiting for the fast food to join at this point because I’m Lovin it
To be fair, with regular groceries, it’s not uncommon for consumers to be concerned about whether or not the person who manufactured or processed the good or food you are buying was paid a fair wage. So in that sense, it is kind of relevant to the hotdog vendors customers.
I’m only playing devils advocate though. Fuck epic lol
That, and Gabe’s hotdog stand has spent decades building customer trust by generally acting decently towards its customers, right after it invented the concept of the hotdog stand.
Making the core of your business model revolve around whining about your competitors doesn’t work so great when your main competitor is already significantly better than you are.
Not to mention the gabe stand made the hot dogs at all accessible for some nerds. Hotdogs were really hard to eat for the penguins.
Epic games store occasionally gives you a free hotdog every week. But it also contains no fixings, and you gotta eat it at the counter.
I eat that free hotdog every week, then go across the street and buy another one.
I eat that free hotdog every week, then go across the street and buy another one.
You actually eat it? I put it in the fridge for bad times but only eat the ones from the other side.
To be fair, I also put most of the hot dogs I buy across the street in the fridge too.
I have a bunch of coupons for hotdogs that I got years ago, because the were like $1 for 20 hotdogs.
I have a 100 plus free hotdogs
Sometimes the epic hot dog isn’t fully cooked, or has everything on it because they grabbed it out of steams hands then gave it to their customer
I think I lost this analogy. What are the condiments in this metaphor?
I don’t know so much about EGS, but probably some of the following (most of which I don’t use very often, I hope I recall correctly)
- Refunds
- Family sharing of games
- Sharing games for other local users
- Being able to lend games
- Remote Play (with friends)
- Remote Play (stream for a local machine)
- Linux support through proton
- probably more?
- Workshop, providing mod hosting/browser/framework for API
- controller configuration tools
- Better storefront with decent discovery and better search (Although this wouldn’t be a condiment in the anology)
- Passable social tools (IE voice chat)
- Game streaming to friends
- Cloud saves
- Relatively good review system
- Item marketplace and trading
Free cloud backups of save files is really nice.
Free hosting of screenshots, too.
Free forums (though they tend to suck. I guess that’s like they only have basic yellow mustard or something, in this metaphor)
deleted by creator
yesssssssss, but the second hot-dog vendor wants to offer customers lower prices, and the first says they can’t because otherwise those hot dogs will be banned from their stand, and the second responds by attempting to throw piss water-balloons at any passers by, or something
Nope, you are wrong, this is a common mistake that Epic keeps spreading as missinformation. Valve does NOT enforce price parity on other platforms, there are games that are sold cheaper on other stores, this is up to the publisher to decide, but most publishers find it easier to have the same price across the board. If this was true games that are exclusive on Epic would be cheaper until they come to Steam years later, but they aren’t.
The mistake happens because there is one specific case in which Valve enforces price parity, but for this you need to know three things:
- Valve gives away for free infinite steam keys to publishers
- Those keys can be sold by the publisher elsewhere
- If they do that the publisher keeps 100% of the revenue of that sale
That sale of that free steam key for which Valve is not charging anything is regulated and can’t be sold cheaper than Steam on regular basis, it can be in a sale for cheaper, but the regular price must match Steam and if it goes on sale outside of Steam eventually it needs to do a similar sale on Steam (but not necessarily at the same time).
So one thing that’s amazing that Valve does for people who publish their games with them is getting them hate because of Epic, please stop spreading missinformation.
But when I asked Valve about this plan, they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM.
In that link you have one person making a claim without any backing or evidence. Even if that did happen there are multiple possible explanations:
- The email was not clear about the other stores not selling keys
- The person who answered the email did not understand that they weren’t talking about steam keys
- The person answering the email doesn’t know what they’re talking about
- Etc
And in that same link you have multiple persons in the comments describing the exact opposite experience providing the same amount of evidence, so if the text on that link is evidence that Valve does that, then the comments there are even more evidence that they don’t.
If only there was a way of knowing… Well, they did say they opened a lawsuit, and those are public record so the email would be there since it’s crucial to the case, without it they would have no case, right? Feel free to read the entire complaint here and you’ll notice the email is suspiciously missing, their claims are that Valve wouldn’t give them more keys to resell, which is directly opposite to what the blog claims.
I can do you one better, Overgrowth is a sequel to Lugaru, which is paid on Steam but free if you install via your package manager on Linux, therefore completely disproving the fact that Steam enforces price parity even for games from this company
Um, I’ve read the complaint from top to bottom and it claims way more than just ‘Valve wouldn’t give them keys to resell’ if they’re not at the same price as on steam. It also claims Valve puts a ‘Price Veto’ clause which allows them to delist games from Steam if the publisher gives bigger sales on other platforms, even if they do not using steam keys, which does sound super uncompetitive to me.
Although I’ll agree the evidence listed in the complaint seem a bit on the light side. Do you know if the trial happened yet? And if so, do you know where I can find what resolution they reached?
Yeah, it does, but the only claim for which they present any evidence is the keys thing, showing a couple of screenshots.
I haven’t read it all, but it seems that here is a ruling for most of the stuff.
Thank you for the link! It helped putting things into proper nuance and context (indcluding throwing away that ridiculous notion that the ‘Steam Store’ and the ‘Steam Gaming Platform’ are two completly different things in different markets).
However, reading the whole thing, it sounds to me like while the court dismissed some of the claims (1 to 4 and 7 apparently), they agreed that Wolfire and the other plaitiffs had the right to ‘plausibly allege unlawful conduct’ about the ‘Most-favored-nations restraints’ (the part where Steam forces publishers to set prices on all stores without steam keys being involved) without mentioning anything more on the subject.
I’m not americain so I’m not sure if I understand correctly, but that means the ruling isn’t over and it’ll go into an appeal court, right?
you say valve isn’t doing something, i provide an example where they are, and your defense is that they’re just a big stinky liar?
cool, nice chat
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You provide a link to someone saying “Valve said they would do X” without evidence, I point out that in that same link you have multiple people saying “Valve told me they would not do X” with the same amount of evidence.
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I additionally show you the lawsuit the blog talks about where at no point the supposed email is shown
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Additionally I show you another game from the same company that has lower price outside of Steam
I don’t know how much more evidence do you need.
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the second hot-dog vendor wants to offer customers lower prices, and the first says they can’t because otherwise those hot dogs will be banned from their stand
It’s more accurate to say that the plain hotdog vendor wants to sell the other vendor’s hotdogs at a lower price at his own stand, thereby undercutting the sales of the first vendor for their own hotdogs.
not really, unless you’re implying the fancy hotdog vendor paid for the development of said hotdogs, which they didn’t
games don’t belong to valve
The keys that put the game in your Steam library are. And that’s what those pricing guidelines are about; Steam keys, not the actual game.
But when I asked Valve about this plan, they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM.
It’s false equivalence to claim steam has a monopoly when you’re literally giving epic a monopoly on your games for financial kickbacks between yourselves that in the best case doesn’t impact the user and worst case actively compells them to a much worse platform. What epic and gearbox did is monopolistic, what steam did is just make a good enough product that no one gives a sh*t about EGS. If you want an actual competitive store front, make something your users want, not your business partners. Gog is struggling but it’s still my first goto for games because even if it’s missing all of steams functionality, it gives me ownership of games that can’t just be revoked or broken by publishers. That’s a value add I’m willing to pay for. Paying more so publishers can make more money and sell a worse experience through EGS ain’t moving me.
Steam has exclusive games too. Is that okay?
It’s a little different to have your own games exclusively on your platform than to pay other devs not to release on other platforms, and it’s entirely different if devs just choose not to release elsewhere because no other store is worth the effort for them.
Steam did exactly that for years under the “Steam Greenlight” prism where users voted for games to be released on steam with the condition that they would be exclusive. They only stopped it when they decided to go the Amazon route and sell any old shit with zero curation instead.
And Tim Sweeny made the offer to stop offering Epic exclusivity and even sell their games on Steam if Valve offered to provide their service to developers at the same rate as Epic.
But Steam charges nearly triple what Epic does and can depend on gamers to defend them for some reason.
The cut taken by stores is of little concern to me as a consumer. Greenlight was a mess for a lot of reasons, but they discontinued it years ago, while Epic continues to pay for exclusivity deals. Steam provides lots of services to me that Epic doesn’t, though, as others have listed here. That said, I also like GOG and itch.io.
It makes the cost of developing games more expensive. They have to charge nearly 20% more for games on Steam to make the same money they do on EGS.
It’s also why Valve hardly makes games anymore. They sell 4 games made with other people’s money and they’ll have the same gross income as selling a game they paid to develop. Throw in the cost of development, and they just can’t justify game development as a major part of their business.
The last time they made a full-sized game was Half-life 2, which launched the same day as Steam.
This argument about cost of development would hold more weight if the game store savings were passed onto the users rather than just eaten up by the publishers. Borderlands 3 base game has the exact same price on steam vs EGS atm, £49.99. Clearly those 20% savings are just extra money the publisher wants to pocket rather than actual necessary costs to the game. If their happy to pass it off to steam when sold on the steam platform rather than raise the price to recoup the platform tax.
Yes, but with EGS more money goes to the company making the games. AAA games have never been more expensive to produce, and developers are shutting doors left and right. After the costs of marketing and overhead, more of the proceeds of the game are going to the fucking download service than the people making the game when it’s on Steam.
Alyx was a full game, portal 1/2?
Alyx was a tech demo, and it, Portal, and Portal 2 combined are about the size of Half Life 2.
And Tim Sweeny made the offer to stop offering Epic exclusivity and even sell their games on Steam if Valve offered to provide their service to developers at the same rate as Epic.
Tim Sweeny didn’t make an offer, he tried to make positive PR to EGS while trying to paint Valve as the bad guys; Valve obviously wouldn’t charge the same rate as Epic because they include a lot more value for both user and developers than Epic does: to list a few of Valve services that Epic doesn’t have:
- Steam Workshop (hosting terabytes of content for absolutely free);
- Family sharing;
- Steam Link for game streaming;
- Remote Play Together tech for all the major OSes;
- Linux and Wine/Proton investments (which you could argue was an investment because of the Steam Deck, but that’s an investment that benefits everyone, regardless of whether they own a Steam Deck or not);
- Cloud save hosting;
- Universal controller remapping interface compatible with all the major gamepads;
That’s not to mention the benefits developers can get from Steam’s platform and SDK:
- Steam Input (for not needing to deal with custom implementations);
- Steam Voice API (for in-game voice chats);
- Steam Inventory and Trading Cards, which can result in extra cash for the developers;
- Multiple networking options: Steam Game Servers, Steam Matchmaking & Lobbies, Steam Peer-to-peer Networking, etc.
If you ask me, I think Epic is the one charging way too much
Name any Steam exclusives. I can think of Half Life Alyx; you could get everything up to The Orange Box and even Portal 2 on disc.
The entire greenlight catalog was exclusive. That’s over 100 third-party games, and they only reason it stopped is because they stopped curating products to become the Amazon of online gaming.
Sometimes I wonder if these people understand that no player ever wanted exclusivities on a game store. Instead of providing a decent service, they’re litteraly trying to kidnap customers with a choice between waiting for months for this big release or taking it on a subpar platform.
This is my current dilemma with the new Star Wars outlaws game. Epic has exclusivity on release (or can buy direct on ubisoft), but I have 29 other Star Wars games all on Steam. Do I really want one odd game on a different platform, or do I just accept that I won’t be playing it at release and wait the months for it to come to Steam?
Epic has exclusivity on release
Wait, really? It’s officially off my list now. Screw those guys.
“Famously, Steam does very little to earn the massive cut they take”
Must be why it’s so successful.
I kind of cracked up at “Steam does very little”.
Hell, Epic does not have any social features, didn’t have cart, refund process through support only, very basic search, I am not sure about cloud saves and if they don’t break completely when you play offline (is there even offline mode?).
Steam, on the other hand, is constantly adding and improving features - like the new beta family sharing which is finally what an easy way to share with my GF and sister.
The only things that Epic has are free games, exclusivity, and lower fees - and that’s about it. All three, as you can see, are not really hard to implement for the developer team, but easy to throw large sums of money at for a quick boost so they can boast numbers.
Fuck Epic, seriously. Money can solve lots of stuff, but not by throwing it at the wall. Meaningless.
Don’t forget first party Linux support and Proton to add Linux/Mac support to many windows exclusive games.
Oh, completely forgot about my Steam Deck, it is just that seamless.
I also hate the other side of the coin that is against both Steam and EGS. Citing Steam doesn’t “deserve your loyalty”. Why not? I can’t really pinpoint any particular fuckup in the 15 years I’ve been using it. Sure, some delays in games, updates, and other minor shit - but imagine if like game ratings broke, I am sure they’d get fixed in an hour.
Steam absolutely deserves our loyalty.
EGS is worse than Steam was 10 years ago. Its only useful for piling free games from the store that I’ll never play.
Oh yeah, I don’t have time to play my main Elite:Dangerous profile anymore but I’ll totally have time to use my free Epic license to plaster my name across the galaxy on deep space exploration.
Why can’t you just draw dicks like a normal person?
Not sure if joking… But someone did take advantage of the 3rdgparty heat map and spent a couple dozen hours of game time drawing this dick in the galaxy
https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/jqqwe5/someone_mapped_out_a_giant_dick/#lightbox
I gave Epic’s store a chance but even after all this time it’s still shit and very far from feature parity with Steam. There’s not even proper reviews. No big-picture equivalent. No good out-of-the-box Linux support. No Steam-Deck. The list is very very long. Until Epic starts delivering, the 30% cut Valve takes is more than justified.
I gave it a chance when they took over Rocket League. The damn platform doesn’t even support profile avatars while Steam did. So to get a basic nice feature working all you had to do was… not use their platform.
They still don’t have avatars.
They absolutely slaughtered rocket league. They even put the dumb cyber truck in it lmao
Oh really? I haven’t played since they disabled trading items.
I mean, the cyber truck probably looks better than some of the other cars, and you’ll probably get better FPS due to the lowered polygon count! But yeah… no bueno.
the cyber truck probably looks better than some of the other cars
It’s actually quite close to the real version.
So no.
I haven’t seen it, but I thought it might be better than the Grog or Scarab.
it might be better than the […] Scarab
Surely you jest
I went and played a few games. You’re right, the cybertruck is the worst looking car in the game by far.
I never gave it a chance, as theit practice of paying for exclusivity is infuriating to me.
Make your shit better. Hell, make it comparable, and charge a lower cit (so devs make more), and I’d support then.
Paying to make the market more closed off sucks.
FWIW, my understanding is that the owner of Epic is actively anti-Linux, so your third feature is a unlikely at best. The fourth was only remotely likely due to market share.
Heroic launcher works pretty well to get epic and gog games in the deck. But yes, support could be better, especially since i remember unreal tournament being Linux friendly early on.
Yeah i get and play the free games from there, but they don’t seem to want to do more than the bare minimum for the storefront so I won’t purchase anything through them.
It’s beyond me how they can affors all of these free games and exclusive but not a single capable developer to make this platform beyond just the bare minimum.
I don’t get why anyone pays attention to these wannabe Hollywood producers like him or Todd Howard. The most interesting and innovative things in gaming are NOT happening in the AAA space.
Honestly AAA studios don’t even exist anymore. Is there any gaming studio making multipe $60 games per year you can name where you would vouch for the quality of their games solely on the basis of who made it?
Maybe some first party console games(and even then only some series), but nothing for PC.
I’d like to think Firaxis and Sid Meier still hold water for Civilization at least, but I do get your point. Most of the games I go back to now and enjoy are nowhere near the ballpark of “AAA”.
I’d be very worried if a studio was pumping out several full-scale games a year. Did you mean publisher? I find following publishers to be pretty hit or miss, they usually deal with a multitude of game studios whose output will vary wildly. The days of EA making a bunch of EA games is over, now people care whether it’s Dice, Respawn or BioWare, and what the specific game is like.
Studios still just making games do exist. Kojima Productions, Santa Monica, Guerilla, Remedy, Fromsoft, Square Enix, Larian, Id Tech, Insomniac, Sucker Punch, CDPR…
They’re just relatively fewer and farther between as so many studios have pivoted to spending years and years working on one live service title or another, and the rest of these you only really hear from once in several years, when a game comes out.
For publishers, Devolver and Paradox come to mind.
Devolver is consistent, but paradox has been all over the place lately
I don’t even bother claiming free Amazon games on the epic store.
This is a CEO covering his ass. Nothing to see here folks
do nothing
Win
The gaben method works again
What he really meant to say was that he shilled out for the bags of money
I would love to see reasonable competition to steam which would give consumers and developers better options, but Epic ain’t it
What would a better option look like? Steam user experience is great. Games are cheap entertainment. What more could you ask for?
My only real concern with Valve is what will happen when Gabe passes or retires. Who knows how his replacement will direct steam.
A lower cut. 30% revenue cut means we pay more than necessary for games and we also miss out on some indie games that cannot be profitable with such a large cut.
We already know lowering the cut doesn’t make us pay less. All it does is put more money into the pockets of the publisher.
And I very much doubt Valve’s cut is a reason indie game can’t be profitable. There are asset flips going up on Steam on a daily basis. If asset flipping wasn’t profitable we wouldn’t see them propping up like mushrooms after rain. When asset flips are more profitable than an indie game there’s something wrong with that game.
I would love to see reasonable competition to steam which would give consumers and developers better options
No one’s going to compete with and outdo Steam with Linux support.
GOG exists and has managed to carve out a DRM-free niche for itself for more than 15 years now.
I have some games on GOG. It’s fine.
With his Linux takes I’m starting to think ol Tim doesn’t have a good grasp on computer games
I like the fact they tried to compete with Steam from the begining. I have a large library of games and some real gems that I wouldn’t normally look at.
EGS is ok, GOG is ok and also Steam is just ok too for what I want from a store/launcher.
No digital game store is worth your loyalty.
Steam is just ok to for what I want from a store/launcher.
It’s not just ok, compared to the alternatives. A games library that cannot be matched, regular sales, easy no-frills refunds, cloud saves, beta support, family mode, big picture support, seamless integration with the Steam deck, which in its own right, has pushed right-to-repair and Linux gaming to new heights. The competition doesn’t even have any of this stuff, including the console market, and if they can’t compete, they don’t deserve my money.
No digital game store is worth your loyalty.
I’m fine being loyal to a privately-owned company that actually gives a shit about its customers. As long as Gabe is still alive and they will continue to be privately-owned, the company will stay in good graces.
I’m not going to argue my point any further but I will say, use it all for what you want. Absolute loyalty, which you seem to have, is pointless.
No digital game store is worth your loyalty.
When that store is run by a company that contributes massively to open source and works harder and puts more money into enabling alternate platforms for gaming than all other companies combined; ya, they have my loyalty.
Don’t confuse their initiative for benevolence. At the end of the day it’s all still for their own benefit and their ecosystem.
The contributions to open source are still a nice side effect.
It isn’t even loyalty for me, I just have to real reason to go to the other store with 99% of my games being on steam, mostly purchased during a sale. The only exception is GoG, because they actually offer something the others don’t with their DRM-less versions of games.
No digital game store is worth your loyalty.
A sentiment too advanced for most G*mers.
Find me another company that supports open source and Linux the way Valve does… I’ll wait
You mean completely ignore it until it makes them money?
Bad argument.
It would hold water if their solution was proprietary and closed source. But it isn’t, and anyone else, literally anyone, can take Proton and use it in their project for profit.
Even if they closed shop tomorrow, or even just gave up work on Proton itself, we’d all still reap the benefits at no cost to us.
