Not without violating their contracts with Valve.
Additionally, the market has been sending the wrong signal to devs for quite a few years. When Steam started getting bigger, Indies were given the illusion that they could rely on Steam for an income stream with relatively little effort. This accelerated with the introduction of Humble Bundle. Developers who entered the world of digital distribution first, coming up with relatively simple concepts for games, suddenly were making a ton of income off Steam sales. The market has now corrected itself, and only the cream of the crop + the lucky ones make decent money. This isn’t some strange market perversion – it’s the default state given how many people dream of making games, how easy it is to make average games, and how long it takes to consume games. The problem is you now have middle-aged developers who made career choices based on false market signals.
I think the only danger to consumers here is in Epic destabilizing the valud of digital.
During the Wild West days of pre-Steam dominance, e-tailers and stores, even those ran by Microsoft, seemed to greatly begrudge consumer’s ownership of digital content. The number of downloads was restricted and even the ability to download content in the future was by no means guaranteed. The Sony and MS music stores for their digital music players, for example, regularly lost rights (or forfeited rights) to songs and content and which if you hadn’t download a copy beforehand were unable to get. And tons of smaller game stores placed heavy restrictions on digital content, terrified of both bandwidth costs and piracy.
Valve blew that whole model out of the water with a battleship sinking salvo.
Free to download, easy to download, virtually seamless and effortless to download, easy to use (most of the time) easy to buy, easy to transfer between computers or between ISP connections, virtually error free, completely reliable, able to download products even if the publisher went bankrupt. Valve won by and large on the merits, they were willing and able to execute the backend service no one else, not even the largest companies, were willing to do.
Epic threatens that whole model.
Epic more or less abandoned their base building Zombie game (as far as i can tell) when it became clear it was a bomb. To be fair, this was surely the right decision, but it showed that money comes first without a doubt.
What happens when Epic abandons their store? There is little way that an Epic games store will actually dominate the market, but they’re not looking to dominate the market, they’re looking at turning 2 billion into 20 billion. If in the future the kids move away, will they just pull the plug on it?
A world where Steam is declining and Epic Games Store is on the rise is a world where digital products may - and i say may - once again become slightly more second class citizens to physical goods. It will never return to the pre-Steam days, but Epic also will have no problem pulling the plug on the store in the future, and all that money spent there will have all but evaporated. It’s happened many times before with digital store fronts having their own launchers, but this one would be the largest by far.
THat’s the risk, especially because the kids today live in a world where digital content is expected to be ephemeral. That Youtube video you love today might be gone tomorrow. The real risk to consumers is Epic not treating digital with the same reverence as Valve and then passing the difference onto the consumer, like the blue chip companies did before.
I’m not so sure about that. They are fronting a ton of money to developers via guarantees (+ some I bet) but that won’t work as a long term strategy as that makes it impossible to be profitable on their 12% margins. By the time they allow developers in the store without kickback deals the store will lose some of it’s “small selection = better visibility” advantage and there will be no reason for anyone to enter into a deal that keeps them exclusive to the Epic store.
While their strategy of lower platform rates may hurt GMG and others like it, Steam was the one who really started the trend of lowering the price floor for games even before 3rd party resellers were abundant, and the exponentially increasing number of games being released will ensure the trend continues.
If there were an Internet then, I wonder if there would have been a thread like this when Circuit City showed up to challenge Radio Shack.
The joke’s on us, because Steam and the Epic Game Store will one day be in the same place as Circuit City and Radio Shack, so anything you’ve bought that isn’t DRM-free and locally backed up is going to be as tangible as wishes and dreams.
Hey, that’s one way to clear a backlog.
I really hope that isn’t true, but I suspect you may be right. Ultimately, the digital and DRM thing was probably a fad, and only physical will survive.
Speaking of physical copies, I’ve got some games on 5 1/4 floppies any idea what I can do with them? ;)
Absolutely. If you’d said they were on Desura, I wouldn’t be able to help you. ;)
So does something that ran on an IBM PC in 1981 run on anything today?
You’d be hard-pressed to find anything on MS-DOS that WON’T run on literally any computer you could buy today, thanks to DOSBox.
Interesting that you could run it, playable I seriously doubt it. I for example can run the original xcom, but that doesn’t mean I’m willingly going to actually play it because it looks like legos.
And I’ve got CDs that are unreadable after a decade.
So in my experience nothing digital or physical has any permanence to it.
These goalposts keep movin’!!! ;)
You can buy Xcom right now on Steam if you’re so inclined.
If you don’t like the graphics, why would you care, though? :)
I move them because you are making a point for arguments sake that fails to match up with my lived experience, and I’ve been around for the entire PC ride.
In my experience the ability to play games from 30 or 40 years ago is not viable. Hence this permanence thing is a mirage.
Not for argument’s sake. I play old games all the time. I think it’s important to preserve them as cultural artifacts. In my life, this is completely viable and culturally necessary.
Yet, I can still run all the games I bought on Impulse, including Kohan 1 and 2, and the original Baldurs Gate series. I just make sure they are all backed up to the cloud, so I can install them on to different computers if necessary.
That being said, I did eventual breakdown and buy Baldurs gate from Beamdog.
Yup! That’s why it’s important to own DRM-free copies of your games. Many games on Steam are DRM-free, too!
I’m not arguing against preserving them, I’m saying it’s hard verging on impossible to do. And this isn’t even unique to PC games, it’s a problem for everything you digitize.
Okay, but that isn’t due to the store front, but the developer. So, whether the game is purchased from Gog, Epic, Steam, Origin, Desura, or whatever, as long as the game is DRM free, you should have any trouble.
I only ever got one game from Desura, and it was not only DRM free, but also came with a free steam key.
You nailed it! My point exactly.
As I said:
“The joke’s on us, because Steam and the Epic Game Store will one day be in the same place as Circuit City and Radio Shack, so anything you’ve bought that isn’t DRM-free and locally backed up is going to be as tangible as wishes and dreams.”
And as I said the joke’s on us either way because this physical copy thing you’re fond of won’t last either.
Steam has lasted longer than some of my game CDs have.