This thread is moving so fast, I apologize if I am commenting on some upstream stuff.
I feel like the gamer/developer relationship on this board is a bit different than real life. Developers should make choices that are best for their business. Consumers should make their choices based what is best for them.
This board is like the farmers market. " I only buy sustainable, locally sourced, cage free, etc." is the bubble of QT3.
Very well said.
Valve doesn’t do exclusives - except their own games. Ever. Nor do they prohibit you from selling your game elsewhere. They even make it easy for you to generate Steam keys, complete with tagging, to sell outside of the Steam store. Where do you think all those stores get Steam keys from? Steam has an entire interface for it.
LOL!! FF to 10:50
Define “best for them” and how it doesn’t include easy to use forums, chat, guides, mod downloads, not having to enter your CC info a zillionth time, etc. Kthx bye.
Yup. Steam doesn’t need to do exclusives - not since the original HL2 (and they were helped along by the fact that all other digital stores were hot garbage back when they launched).
FWIW, I love Valve and Steam and bear 'em no ill will whatsoever. I do think that this pressure from another big player is very very good.
Agreed.
Amazon sold direct software downloads.
For a company that doesn’t care about games being stuck in their ecosystem, they sure have invested a lot of money in initiatives to make sure games are trapped in their ecosystem (including their policies on key generation).
Sure, this could happen too. My point is that while this is a good deal right now, I remain unconvinced it is a game changer in the long run unless the business models are fundamentally shifting (which is possible, of course). In other words, Epic stands a good chance of becoming just like Valve/Steam (or of course, vice versa, if Epic turns out to have the winning formula). Either way, though, it won’t be because Epic or Valve wants devs to have more money. It’ll be because Epic and Valve can make more money doing it whatever way they turn out to settle on.
I was trying make a point that outside these forums the developer/customer relationship is more like a sales transaction. If the interests of the buyer and seller meet then a sale is made, if not, not.
Personally, I require reviews before I make a purchase. My brain works well enough to filter out a helpful on-topic (for me) review vs. “the devs gosh darn nurfed my technomage ninja class. This game sux.”
If the developer would rather I not look at reviews, cool beans. We can go our separate ways and everything will turn out just fine.
I don’t have any problem with user reviews, I don’t have any problem forums. These are good things - and they exist in a multitude of locations (although obviously point-of-sale has a lot of weighting power). I DO like the possibility of having them as options that I control in the event that…
a) I don’t have the bandwidth to manage a forum that is eating itself alive (or I’m just spiritually exhausted by the venom, which is a very real thing), or…
b) a lynchmob is reviewbombing over some perceived slight
I think in that circumstance customers can say ‘huh - they turned those things off. Wonder why? Are they shady? Are they hiding something?’ - and 30 seconds on Google probably tells you - and then they can choose not to trust the dev if they like - it’s a decision that the dev obviously made and they can weigh it as part of their decisionmaking math.
I’m getting a bit tired of all the dismissal of Epic criticism as hysteria or bad faith. Especially with @Brad_Grenz continuing to spread bad faith FUD about Steam’s key generation policy, even though it’s been debunked in this thread by pro-Epic developers.
For me, I use the Steam storefront as my main discovery mechanism. I welcome competition on the cut the digital distribution platform takes, but exclusives make my life worse, so I oppose them.
You’ve decided what you want to do wrt Epic. I can see that the decision makes a lot of sense for your business, and anyone criticising you for going for the Epic exclusive is being naive and unreasonable. I don’t object to your decision. I appreciate how upfront you’re being - especially not throwing FUD at Steam.
But when you hear the reason some of your customers don’t like it feels like you want to put your fingers in your ears and say “My customers are being so unreasonable and irrational.”. I get that we’re not going to change your mind (because you would be stupid to do so.) But you could take the feedback on board and push Epic to fix the issues with their customer experience.
Has anyone used the EPIC return policy yet? I am confused how they keep track of your time played if it doesn’t show anywhere to the user.
I mean what is keeping people from downloading the game, then turning off the Store, playing the game for 13 days straight and then asking for a refund.
(a) The forum is often managed by community volunteers. It should not take much bandwidth to manage. If it is eating itself alive someone has either neglected it or selected people who are unqualified to manage it.
(b) There are over 30,000 games on Steam and there have been scant few cases of actual, unjustified review bombing. It is a scare tactic - a boogyman - that is raised by developers to justify their desires to prevent reviews of a mediocre product. Standard policy is not driven around extreme outliers and Steam already has mechanisms in place to deal with the review scores in the very few cases where it occurs.
Thus I would instantly believe a dev is shady for trying to silence the voices of their customers because there is almost never a good reason to do so. Given the very few number of actual review bombs, it is on the order of Dove soap purity that the reason would be the developer does not like what is being said about their product, even when what is being said is accurate.
Concentrated review bombing is relatively rare. although ask those developers how they feel about the large amount of money they had basically stolen by it, since games that go below that 70% review threshold tank in sales. However, hate speech and other garbage in the reviews is common, and Steam does basically no moderation, not even if users flag the reviews. If the options are “review system where your front page may show racist/sexist/hateful garbage” or “no reviews” I’ll take the latter, and customers can go find reviews the old fashioned way.
Not at all. And I think from Epic’s roadmap it’s pretty clear that most of the features people want are on Epic’s list to implement? What would I encourage them to build?
I’m not responding in this thread to shush people, but to try to present a measured response from someone on the other side.
I’ve heard enough anecdotes to believe that Steam doesn’t handle this well, largely due to their reluctance to have a human in the loop. Holding their feet to the fire to do this better is a good thing. But you are absolutely right that having reviews right there represents real value to the consumer.
Once the exclusive period is over and titles can be sold elsewhere for a different price, what makes you think that the downward pressure on prices won’t simply continue? Or that the surplus cash in developers hands won’t simply increase the overall cost of producing titles by increasing quality demands?
I appreciate that in the short-term, some developers are going to benefit from an increased share of the revenue from their products. I just don’t think that can translate to a measurably different end salary for developers (or positive cash flow for developers) in a market where there are as many products such as in the PC game space.
Unless economics has changed dramatically since I was in school, this split change is going to mean a momentary blip in where revenue is allocated and then prices will adjust to the actual cost of production.
The reviews are at the very bottom of the page. Even the garbage is pretty rare, and you only see it if you are looking for reviews. The consumer experience is much much worse looking for reviews the old fashioned way, as you are straight into what always seems a much less honest and more nasty world.