Personal insults don’t seem like a good direction to take this thread.
Because it’s yours. I used an coffee example. I could’ve used a salon or any number of widgets or wadgets or anything, physical or digital. It’s your stuff. You can sell it directly if you want. But when you choose a third party to become a third party yourself, that choice is exactly that, a choice, and I’m going to question why you made that choice knowing that I, the customer, made a choice years go to pick my preferred shopping experience. And that choice wasn’t in a void or a bubble, there are other choices, some have come and gone, some are still just biking along, but I made a choice and you’re not asking me to make a choice anymore, you’re trying to force me to make a choice and then you want to know why I and others don’t like it.
I don’t want console garbage in the PC sphere. PC has a level of freedom console’s don’t. And at the end of the day, if you’re exclusives don’t matter to me, you’re store isn’t going to matter to me. Why not try and get me in the door whether or not I think the handful of exclusives are worthwhile.
Epic is in the position to do better, and they should do it while they can.
Steam Fanboyz? what the hell have you been smoking? What did you do spend five minutes looking at a valid conversation and then decided to personify one of the problems with the Steam Community?
Personal insults? I didn’t name anyone… But sure, it was snippy and I agree, it’s not a good direction.
Having said that, this thread is becoming a broken record with a lack of data or quality posts from the criticisms. I still think the Epic Store benefits gamers and devs and don’t see anyone providing much data that says otherwise.
I feel like I’m talking in circles with you here, but 1st parties made that choice. They CAN offer their product on other stores. Some do. But in most cases they are forcing you to do it in their preferred spot. And it’s no different. Whether they own the store or not they are ‘forcing you’ to buy it in one place when they don’t have to.
Yeah, I think I probably have said my piece and I got spaceships to make blow up. :)
They didn’t make the same choice you did. It’s a different choice.
Ok - agree to disagree, I gotta get back to work :)
I think the only real reason is a first party should not be obligated to contribute to the success of a competing third party’s platform if it makes no business sense to do so. That’s the root of the justification. But what’re you’re trying to get at, and what I am also arguing, is that a developer, as a third party, is likewise not obligated to support or contribute to a storefront if it makes business sense for them not to.
I respect your view here. From my perspective consoles are not nearly fragmented or open enough.
It may not be visible from the outside but the fact that Sony (or Microsoft or Nintendo) have banned any competition for selling games on their platforms is a point of friction for developers.
If you want to make a console game you have no choice to go through the console makers system for censoring of content including mandatory use of “voluntary” ratings plus massive amount of TRC and other sillyness almost always to support whatever random internal strategy the console maker has this week… Thats even before you get to the business terms.
There is no doubt in my mind that consoles would have more games which are far better & cheaper than they currently do if they allowed different stores.
What sort of data would you want from people who are unhappy with the Epic Store? A few of us have provided feature lists of things that Steam currently provides that are nowhere to be found on Epic - either as a conscious decision or because the store hasn’t been built out to include them.
How do you feel the Epic Store, in its current state, benefits gamers? From my perspective it’s trying to force me onto a worse platform with the stick of exclusivity.
And I don’t see any data, or even an anecdote, on how the Epic store benefits gamers in any way. All we know it will benefit developers at least for a while, but that’s about it.
Actually, I thought of a benefit for users: if your tastes happen to align with their curation, you don’t see stuff you don’t want. I doubt that’s a significant amount of people, but I can see it being a thing.
I feel like trickle down economics is coming… some future undefined benefit gamers will just have to wait for and if you can’t see it more personal insults to follow.
Some benefits for gamers, in no particular order, off the top of my head:
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Free games! If more stores come online with free awesome games (Subnautica!), bring it, gamers win!
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Competition to Steam from a deep pocketed, long-time industry competitor will eventually force Steam to improve (not just in terms of pricing and quantity of games.)
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More money to dev studios provides tons of benefits (beyond fattening dev salaries), such as increasing the capabilities of a studio to expand, stay in business, etc.
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Innovation. Even if it’s not evident at the start, competition fosters innovation unlike anything else.
I would add.
How does Steam benefit gamers?
This notion that somehow Valve is the good guy and everyone else who sells games are the bad guys just seems odd me.
Its happened before of course, I remember gamestop was regarded in a similar light years ago. You dont hear that so much any more.
Yep, I say bring it on. In practice, I mostly use Steam, but I’d rather have a healthy competitive marketplace with different stores competing for my business than a locked-down monopoly, even on a service I like.
And if Epic wants to spend some of the crazy profits from a game that I don’t care about to keep indie developers I do care about in business, and to give me free games in the process, so much the better.
I like cheap games centralized in one place. However, I recognize the disadvantages of that too, as the thought of Steam shutting down and losing access to said games gives me significant pause.
Oh me too. But at this point Steam doesnt really benefit me much more as a gamer than any other service where my games are.
I have spent more on Steam than anywhere else so i am invested. But the benefits of Steam are of the same kind as GOG or Itch or Play Station etc. Thats where my purchases are for re-download.
Beyond that? Nothing much really. Steam is another games storefront. And its a good one. But its not particularly pro gamer vs Epic or anyone else imho.
But yeah we are of the same mind so I guess, go us :)
Features that Steam offers that benefit me as a gamer.
Housing
They keep all my purchases in one place, including my access to them. This means I can download, redownload essentially an unlimited number of times.
Speed.
They’re one of the fastest download services I have access to. I am sometimes amazed at how slow other services are to send me content
Sync / Cloud Saves
Not only can I download my games/account to any machine I have, I can play the same game on several titles, right where I left off
Streaming
If I have a machine, say a TV or tablet or streaming device, that can’t run my game on directly, Steam allows me to stream to the service with relative success
Friends List
There is no effort at all to find out right now only what games my friends are playing, when they’re playing but for any drop in and drop out game, I can be playing with them in a matter of seconds
Community
Even for games essentially abandoned, there seems to be a community presence for almost every game there. Troubleshooting, mods, questions… it’s all there for even ancient games
Mods
Workshop is amazing. It not only gives me easy access to Mods, but simple click methods to add, remove and update them at my leisure
News
I find out the release of some games and what the devs are up to by just a quick glance right before playing an actual game
Sales
I remember when there seemed to be no sales… ever.
They made refunds a thing again, and I’ve never used it but I like it’s there.
The list is longer and none of this is wholly proprietary, but it’s not minor. It’s also a list that has built over the years and keeps building.
Note, even without the sales, I still find these features worthwhile. And they keep adding to the list. I don’t think Valve has sat around and just let things settle. They’re still innovating.
Again? Ok, to be fair, it’s a shit ton of posts.
For me, nearly seamless mod support, above and beyond support for Linux gaming, ability to buy keys in a bunch of other places, almost every niche game under the sun, occasionally the forums/guides/reviews. For others, cloud saves, streaming or family sharing. For you, maybe it doesn’t matter, but it’s more than something for many.
Are the the holy grail? Fuck, no.
Thanks for the list. Some of those I regard as negatives but I respect they have value for others. Oh and for sure Steam keeps on innovating. No question. I would add that many of these features also get implemented by other stores or Valve took the idea from other stores so competition once again helps.
Agreed on your other points but this is really all I was getting at. So yeah. We cool :)