Almost 600 posts in a few days. Few times this has happened in QT3.
So obviously people feel passionate about. I’ve been skirting a bit the polemic for now, but I will give now my two cents:
-I don’t have anything against the concept of Epic launching a new store. The more adjusted profit share ratio is good for developers.
-In general, I just buy games wherever it’s cheaper. I already have accounts (and games) in: Steam, GoG, Origin, Uplay, Blizzard and Humble Bundle, hell, even I had a few in Impulse. Hell I have FH3 in the windows Store, now that I remember. My steam collection dwarfes the games I have in any other store, and if a game is in several stores I will choose Steam. But I’m a cheapskate and if a game is, let’s say, 5€ cheaper in another place than in Steam, I will use that. Always supposing the launcher has a minimum of compentency. So I guess I value all the features Steam have by an ammount of… 3-4€. Hell, the ‘feature’ I’m paying mostly here is ‘having the game appear together other hundreds of games’, it’s neat to have all of them there.
-The other features?
Cloud saving is nice, but in practice 95% time I don’t really use it, with the way I play games.
Forums? As everyone knows the Steam forums themselves aren’t very good, but it’s nice to have the security of having a dedicated forum where you can query technical or gameplay doubts of any game you have.
Achievements? I ignore them.
Steam cards? I actively dislike them.
Linux? family sharing? BPM? Don’t use them.
Regional pricing? Hah I would like for Steam to use regional pricing here in Spain and have cheaper prices, but we are classified as ‘Western Europe’, even if in reality we have much smaller salaries than in USA or Germany :/. Coincidentally the piracy rate is higher here, almost in the same proportion, I wonder why…
Steam Workshop? Ok, integrated user content browsing and downloading is good, it’s one of the few features that I’m positive to, although rarely it’s going to be a deciding factor. The convenience is nice but I won’t complain if I have to download two mods for a website in zip files and modify a .ini file. I work in IT, for me it’s as effortless as breathing.
-So if I’m a cheapskate, I guess the most convenient thing to me is for every game to be in all stores, that way it increases the chance there is a sale somewhere at any given moment, or even the stores compenting between them.
-That said, I’m not against the concept of exclusivities. They are free to do them, the same way people are free to ignore the game if they don’t like the exclusivity. Exclusivity or not, I’m still going to use the same parameters to decide if I buy a game, its quality, the price, the genre, etc. I guess the store’s quality also influence that purchase decision, but that only affects the Windows Store, the rest are imo good enough: they open fast, don’t consume too many resources, download the game without problems, and launching the game is just a click.
-Speaking of this temporal exclusivity Epic is doing with indie games, I suspect the fact most people are not taking in account, it’s how appealing can be for an indie dev to be paid a fixed amount of money, be from a publisher or from a store owner. The moneyhat, in other words.
In case you didn’t know, the amount of revenue generated by the average indie game in Steam has been fallen for the last two years. It’s a so risky business now, even more than it was before, and it always was a risky business from the start lol.
In that business climate, I imagine being paid x amount upfront, even if in exchange they lose in potential total profits, is very appealing right now.
Read this https://www.goldenkronehotel.com/wp/2018/08/26/the-indie-post-apocalypse/
Don’t you think that after reading that, it isn’t so strange?
Mind you, the indies being moneyhatted right now are the bigger, more known devs, in truth that article applies more to new, unkown indies. But it’s my guess is that even the established indies are starting to feel the pressure…
-I suspect this issue with the Epic store and exclusivities is so hot, so discussed in the forums, because people know deep down that it actually can work, they may not use if they can, but the day a favorite game of their is released first on the Epic store, they will fall in line. In a way that’s people are complaining so loudly. If they truly believed they are going to limit themselves to Steam and that’s it, there is no need for this so lengthy discussion, that would be their stance and that’s enough said.
But… remember the MW2 boycott?
It’s so easy to to play the hardass on Internet, seated in your comfy chair, but when push come to shove…