Airborne does look like a cool game.
To clarify a misunderstanding: the EGStore is a platform. Multiple games are already utilizing various services with more titles and services to come.
If you want to learn more, I suggest Googling “Chris Dyl” and watch the various videos/announcements on this topic.
I’m sure you know this, but the mod stuff you’re so enamored of has created a situation where those games are Steam Exclusive. It’s likely no money changed hands to get the game on there, but it has created a situation where that game is now exclusive to Steam, is it not? Why doesn’t that bug people, too?
That’s really the root of this, right? People hate exclusives?
Aceris
5538
You can still sell the steam keys through another store. But yes, it’s certainly a commerical advantage for Valve, that’s the whole point. As a consumer, at least I get something out of it.
Eh, perhaps in some cases. Paradox games are now sold on Steam, GOG, and their own Paradox store for example with the ability for the consumer to pick the platform that best fits their needs.
The Steam Workshop makes modding ridiculously easy, but it doesn’t quite tie the game to the platform as an exclusive. It is an added or enhanced benefit.
KevinC
5540
Because it’s an improved customer experience! I started using the Workshop and I thought “Oh man, this has made playing with mods so much better, I don’t want to do without anymore”. You can’t see the difference from that and Epic paying a developer to pull the game from Steam to put it on a platform that has fewer of those QOL features and enhancements? And AFAIK, utilizing Workshop doesn’t make your game a Steam exclusive. Workshop provides an easy way to manage mods, but you can still grab mods from Nexus and other places if you wish, and there’s nothing that says a developer can’t sell the game on their own site, on GOG, or anywhere else. Paradox games have Workshop support but aren’t exclusive to Steam. Absolute worst case scenario, they have a Steam version with all the Steamworks stuff they want to use, and a non-Steam version. Given that Steam has been by far the dominant store I doubt that was worth it for many developers.
And for what it’s worth, what I hate is Epic paying off developers to make their game exclusive to a worse platform. If you go back through my post history you might see me say that I wish Paragon or Fotnite had been on Steam, but I had no qualms about downloading the launcher and playing them there. They were developed by Epic, they want 100% of the revenue, I get it. That, to me, is very different than paying developers for exclusivity. If Epic was funding some startups and bankrolling the development of titles (like a publisher would do) that would bother me less, personally. I would still really miss all the features I utilize on Steam, though, and that would impact my buying decisions as it does now.
You’re wrong. RinWorld pretty handily destroys this argument. Look it up, buy it, play it and it’s many mods all without Steam.
So, if mods are available else where, are you losing anything from having the game on Epic?
Matt_W
5543
I think @legowarrior’s whole point, before the discussion devolved into a ridiculous argument about semantics, is that if I own an XBox, but want to play Bloodbourne, I have to also buy a $400 PS4, or if I own a PS4 but want to play Hearts of Iron IV, I have to buy a $1000 PC. If you have a PC running Steam, for the price of about 5 minutes of your time, you can also have EGS.
You are naive. They’ll make the best decision for themselves, if that even. Developers are humans and prone to all the tunnel vision that includes.
And who cares, I’m a consumer.
Sometimes in really hard to square the generally liberal bent of this forum with the ardent hyper capitalist, “entrepreneur knows best” sentiments in this thread.
Matt_W
5546
You’ve leaped sideways here. Consumerism is as ardently capitalist as entrepreneurism. They’re two sides of the same coin. Liberals generally reserve excess empathy for workers, and that often kind of ends up spilling over into creators of creative content.
KevinC
5547
No, the cost is in platform features.
Okay, but I guess my worry would be mods that make it on the Workshop, but aren’t available to customers that bought the game on GoG?
I guess one solution is to do what Grim Dawn and Age of Empires 2 DE have and not use the Workshop. That way, if Mods are created, everyone can access them through a third party.
Again, only if the developer was going to use those features in the first place.
KevinC
5550
Workshop is an easy way to manage mods. It doesn’t restrict anything. Games with Workshop support have their mods available on Nexus, forums, and other sites. Workshop does not mean mods are exclusively available on Steam.
If that is the case, why doesn’t Grim Dawn do it that way?
Or Pathfinder Kingmaker.
KevinC
5552
Which they obviously WON’T be if they’re exclusive to EGS! You’re just talking in circles in this point because you just can’t seem to accept the simple fact that people have reasons for finding EGS inferior. It’s been spelled out for you dozens of times, but you just end circling back to the same statements that have just been refuted.
You’ll have to ask them. If you don’t believe me that mods can be available outside of Workshop, just look at Skyrim or Fallout 4.
Matt_W
5553
Sure, I’ll submit that there are a few games where the lack of platform features that Steam provides would affect my enjoyment of the game. Tabletop Simulator without the workshop, for instance, would be nothing. But for the vast majority of things I play, those platform features are either entirely incidental or just get in the way. (I hate having to disable the damn Steam in-game overlay, and yay! another trading card notification when I tried out a game demo for 3 minutes. Or goody, a pop-up notification on my phone and email that a game on my wishlist is on sale without telling me which game it is.)
But you can still install and play the games, which is about 99% of what I want to do with video games. So that opportunity cost is–to me at least–fairly minimal. Do you really use Steam’s platform features on every game you play? Has there been a ganked EGS exclusive where you feel you would have used those features if it had been on Steam?
It did, then no one made an alternative, so eventually we moved on. I can extend the courtesy to doing the same with EGS for a few years, too.
Yeah, for PDS games, you can quickly have updates for the frequent game version updates :)
For games that don’t get updated frequently or there aren’t a lot of mods constantly changing (daily, even), it’s not a big deal.
Mods used to be easily downloadable even if you didn’t have the game on steam (no security check), that might’ve killed interest in an alternative.
I’m all for a better way, though, but there isn’t one at the moment. Nexus is trying, and someone else is doing an open source version of the Steam api.
