I’m not quite sure about this statement. A lot of people have expressed strong desire for games to appear on GOG or other platforms (here on QT3 and elsewhere). When major studios like Stardock, Paradox, and Firaxis moved their games onto the Steam platform there was a lot of gamers that were upset by the move and voiced how they preferred the choice of downloading and installing independently of the Steam middleware. The broader widespread acceptance of Steam we see today has been anything but a smooth transition.
I believe I stated just one or two posts down that I was joking and that I didn’t mean Apple any ill. Also, that I didn’t want to derail the thread.
Yeah, I mentioned the “regardless of whether there was a bag of money involved” bit for a reason. Those games weren’t Steam “exclusive”, in the sense that money changed hands - but from an end user perspective, and from a CHOICE perspective, it made no difference WHY they were on Steam and only Steam. They were “exclusive” on Steam because Steam controlled the overwhelming majority of the digital PC game marketplace.
Suddenly Epic comes along, and we are lamenting the curtailing of “choice”, which is really just code for “the choice to buy it on Steam”. Not the choice to buy it on uPlay, or Origin, or GOG.
There are perfectly valid reasons to find Epic’s strategy for acquiring market share distasteful, but I think the “choice” argument is disingenuous for this reason.
This is not true. We’ve had several discussions about GOG here, and how they just don’t have several of the games. uPlay and Origin are different. Those are primarily first party titles there.
It is absolutely not true that everyone in this discussion that dislikes the EGS approach requires Steam and only Steam as a or the only storefront.
Really? When we have long-running and active threads dedicated to GOG here on QT3.
And multiple people here whose default position is ‘I buy it from GOG if it is available’
Yet I don’t recall much heat between Steam preferential and GOG favoring members.
Oh I don’t deny that those people with consistent principles exist, in some small number. But I’ve definitely seen a swell in the number of people waving the “choice” flag since the EGS came along.
Ultimately this is all informal and anecdotal, of course. It’s not like I can marshal any charts showing mentions of “choice” on gaming comments sections or whatever. Just attitudes I’ve come across discussing this stuff in other places.
Sorry, when I said “we”, I wasn’t referring to this community specifically. I meant “we”, as in the overall discussions going on within “gaming” at large.
That was clumsy rhetoric on my part.
I find QT3 to generally be more thoughtful, mature and restrained than the average comments section at IGN, haha.
It’s like politics. As long as your preferred candidate is on the ballot and winning, then the system must be working.
If this is the more thoughtful restrained version of this conversation, jfc do I not want to see others.
Well, death threats seems far from unknown. So, there is that. We haven’t done those, so, that does Head and shoulders above Twitter and other forums.
Understood.
I think one of the missing points in this discussion is there are a lot of people, including gamers, who don’t appreciate some of the things Valve and/or Steam does. They don’t really have to be convinced to leave Steam. That group has been there a long time.
Steam makes things easy, so when several of us were forced to go to Steam, not because of Steam but because the developer or the publisher forced us there, we stayed.
GOG is probably the better choice. I don’t have 2.0, but just having them focus on their application is a big plus. In addition, they don’t force exclusives. Steam does not force exclusives. They do not tell developers if you list here you are not allowed to sell anywhere else on PC. They don’t do that. So to say a game using their Steamworks or parts of their service makes that game exclusive is simply not true. They are still free to have other versions of the game. Thea 2 is doing that… right now. They have it on GOG and they have it on Steam, and you can play between the two of them with other people. That’s a real choice. When they launched, GOG was not a choice. It became one later, and they didn’t have to rip it out of Steam to do it.
And don’t forget, there is a graveyard of storefronts that are behind us, and several of us used them. We weren’t forced to but boy does it get not fun to have our hands slapped repeatedly when they go belly up.
In fairness, I didn’t really read back very far into this thread, haha.
But yeah, go check out the average IGN comments section. It’s an absolute trash fire.
Along with what others have said, there’s also two choices from different entities. The developer/publisher also gets to pick a platform, assuming the product is accepted as fulfilling some criteria. Other than providing better infrastructure and a bigger audience, Steam has not interfered (yet) with either choice.
And even after choosing the platform, Steam doesn’t restrict the choice of using another store to access the platform, as long as every client is treated equally *. I barely ever give money to Valve since the end of the EU2 price zone.
* I’ve agreed somewhere above that this could probably be restrained in some fashion without being unfair.
Depending on how long it’ll take to go from Steamworks to any other solution, EGS exclusivity might end faster.
Maybe. I know for a fact that there are titles released on Steam and also on other storefronts, and not just with Steam Key access. Those versions are not tied to Steam; Valve does not demand exclusives.
And it is absolutely untrue to claim that everyone that is against the EGS’ current plan of demanding exclusives from devs does not use or has not used or may even not prefer other stores than Steam. In order to believe something like that, that person would have to ignore years, years, worth of discussions that have taken place right here. And yes, those discussions included discussions about choice, DRM, and GOG.
There are open-source drop-in replacements for parts of it now, at least. That should cut down on dev time (although devs might have to get creative if they want to avoid sharing their changes code, due to the license).
Well said.
I could be totally wrong, but I have seen some attempts (not in the recent comments today) to frame this debate as a binary Steam vs. Epic where everyone picks a side then draws a line in the sand. I think that oversimplification is not helpful and not supported by evidence, but that framing is put forth to serve a certain perspective…or to allow glib convenient dismissal.
I think it also happens since Epic seems to be laser focused on Valve/Steam and doesn’t really care about the other platforms at this juncture despite them still being impacted. The criticisms in this thread are heterogeneous.
If you say “we can’t compete with the market leader unless we offer big bags of cash to developers to incentivize them to be exclusive with us”, you might as well stop at “we can’t compete”.
That’s the major problem I have with their strategy…they’re really not capable of competing with Steam on features or audience…anything other than buying exclusives with their Fortnite cash. They haven’t put in the last decade-and-a-half remaking the PC games industry. They’ve come in with some fat stacks and are making it rain on some poor developers who are going “yeah, why shouldn’t I get to have all my sales!” despite the fact that Epic doesn’t offer anything to the end-users other than a bare-bones game store and a friends list.
They’re years behind, and they don’t show any signs of catching up anytime soon. Epic should have starting tossing their weight around when they actually had something to show.
Well, except maybe their engine. Or their games. Or other things that you casually ignored because it doesn’t fit your overall point.
Seriously, this has been discussed to death, why drag it up now?
And as has been said, it’s not good to have the market so shaped by a single store. Developers, as much as consumers, need competition to get the best prices for themselves.