That is indeed the key question. A platform can be as friendly as anything to participants on the selling side, but if there’s no good hook to draw consumers there…
Will the user discussion and forum aspect be called Kongregate Kartridge Kommunity?
Asked about how Kartridge will differ from market-leader Steam, Greer said, “We’re not coming in just to build another store. No-one needs that. This is about building a platform that is focused on creating a very fair and supportive environment for indie developers.”
”We have a different point of view from Steam on a lot of things,” she said, adding that the new service will focus on “community and social.”
Yeahno, if your consumer-side pitch is a focus on “community and social”, allow me to toss this onto the many-miles-high pile of dead tech pitches and companies that also said they were differentiating from a clear market leader by focusing on “community and social”. (Seriously, when I watch Dragon’s Den or Shark Tank, you used to hear it with every tech pitch; now just every other, but as soon as you hear it, it’s like a code phrase for “You’re not getting a deal here.”)
Not really like that. I do own games on Galaxy, Origin, Twitch, uPlay and MS Store. I deliberately bought Witcher 3 on GOG and not Steam because I enjoy competition.
I remember how bad early Steam was, but now it just works and almost all of my friends are on it, so if you’re going to genuinely compete you can’t just vomit up a storefront and then put a logo on it.
For example, my current experience every time I try to start Forza 7 for the first time in a particular day involves either:
- Downloading a free app on the MS Store (I can then delete it afterwards).
or - Uninstalling one of the Forza DLC packs I have, (usually Hoonigan as it’s the smallest), and then re-installing it.
Or sometimes both of those things.
I didn’t randomly figure out that these steps would fix my issues; I googled “forza 7 pc won’t start” and found several different forum threads saying “for some reason this bullshit set of steps works” because these issues affect a large enough number of people that they show up prominently in search results.
Personally, Galaxy and modern Origin are fine. I don’t really care about the Twitch client because I’m just loading it with free games from my Twitch Prime account. uPlay is bad. The MS Store somehow aimed lower than uPlay.
So my comment could be read as “I like competition but competition requires some level of effort and competence.”
GOG unfortunately rejects an awful lot of good indie games these days. You’d think otherwise but it’s really hard to get indie games approved for sale there. Thea: The Awakening is one good example. They eventually relented but only after a lot of folks pitched a fit about it being rejected initially.
I’m not quite sure what GOG is thinking these days. You’d think they’d be all over good but unknown indie games. But they aren’t.
Did they ever put up Opus Magnum?
In what sense is Origin competition for Steam? It’s the overpriced store and shitty mandatory client you have to suffer if you want to play modern EA games and that’s pretty much it.
On the actual thread topic, I don’t see Kongregate’s pitch competing meaningfully with Steam but it might hang with itch.io and Humble.
I don’t even understand this question. I can get many of the same games on both platforms. What would we call that if not competition?
Oh good. Another client to install.
This is pretty much where I’m at. Pinned to my task bar is Blizzard, Steam, Origin, uPlay, and GOG Galaxy and I don’t feel like I should have to have another damned client installed to launch games. If it was up to me everything would be on Steam (or in one place, at least).
Competition for Steam…lol. I guess if you’re going to dream, dream big. I can’t speak for anyone else, but it would take a major miracle at this point to get me away from Steam. I just have so many games there, it works fine. Heck, if I never bought another game I’d be set really.
I honestly have a hard time even trying to imagine on a “anything you can think of goes” basis what would get me away from Steam. I’d have to be able to migrate all of my Steam titles…but…why would I even do that? It’s not like Steam is cumbersome or difficult to use at this point. I have enough games that I really don’t want another client to deal with/worry about, it’s really that simple.
I just want to click one place, one thing that will show me all my games. When someone can do that, I’d drop Steam. I don’t care about more social media or piles of achievements, but since i have younger family members, I know they care about that stuff so sure you can do that… too.
They were owned by GameStop until last year and have been incredibly active in the mobile-publishing space, so “still around” is a bit of an understatement.
I don’t feel like a new Steam “competitor” is going to take off and be hyper-successful, but I’m sure they’ll be able to draw in devs willing to go exclusive in exchange for some of that sweet advertising cheddar - I can’t throw a stone in a mobile game without seeing an ad for AdVenture Capitalist, probably Kongregate’s biggest publishing hit.
Good point. More than that, though, I learned from the Impulse/Stardock debacle not to trust smaller vendors. I’m reasonably sure EA and Ubi will be around for some time, but I’m very careful to only buy from Gog when their games are on deep discount. Everything else is Steam. I’m afraid Kartridge isn’t even going to get a look-see.
Yeah that sudden betrayal really lead to a mess for any games I had there. I won’t be jumping ship to another platform until they’re well established, no matter what.
Define many. Aside from EA games, I have seen perhaps double digits of third party games on Origin. Maybe not even that. I don’t know, maybe they actually have even 5% of Steam’s selection and their store interface is just so terrible I couldn’t tell. But the idea that the catalog is sufficiently comparable to constitute competition is one I am deeply skeptical of. Furthermore, why would I ever even look on Origin for a game I could buy on Steam or one of the many storefronts that sell Steam keys?
For Christ sake man, I’m not going to count them. I can get stuff like Dead Space, Mass Effect and Dragon Age games in either platform just off the top of my head. And some of those aren’t on Steam at all. If you’re going to skip games, really good games, just because you don’t like the client that’s nobody’s business but yours but it seems like a terribly drastic choice to me.
Those are all EA games, and they are from before Origin launched or they wouldn’t be on Steam. And I never said anything about not using Origin. I do. My argument is that it isn’t competing with Steam in any meaningful sense because it exists purely so that EA can sell their own games directly, and not so that they can try to get a piece of the rest of the PC game market.
Ah, that’s a shame.
Origin has like 5% (edit- given the shovelware on Steam, let’s say 1%) of the Steam library, if I were to guess. Like @malkav11 said it’s almost entirely Origin content (many of which titles cannot be purchased on Steam, and vice versa). Some games are on both, but only the really big titles like Final Fantasy XV or uh… that’s pretty much the only game I see right now on the Origin store front that is also on Steam.