See this right here, I don’t get at all. I would propose that you didn’t really want to play Shadow Complex all that badly if the prospect of using a new launcher and creating a new user ID is enough to dissuade you. Don’t you guys use LastPass or Keepass or something to keep user ids and passwords straight? It’s not that bad!
Sure, annoying, I get that. I spend half my life being annoyed it feels like. But then you get over it in about 20 minutes and it’s your new normal. You guys are too young to be such old farts.
See, and I wouldn’t because ultimately a freebie I don’t particularly care about is not a meaningful incentive.
So if there is an incentive (for Origin, it was Bioware games, for uPlay Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry), sure, I’ll grouse about it and then I will make an account and install the stupid additional launcher and continue to bitch about it any time I have to use it because it’s an inferior user experience to the thing I was already using and I have to have a separate friends list and there’s no screenshots function and who the fuck thought any of this was a good idea, fuck them. Or if I only have one or two games on it, like the Epic launcher, I will forget it exists.
To bring it back around to the pay content: Twitch is offering the same product, at the same price (or likely worse since Steam keys go on sale or are bundled all the time and there’s no indication that’ll happen here at a similar level) and introducing an added inconvenience. The incentive to buy on Twitch (at most a few bucks of commission to the streamer you’re watching) isn’t worth that inconvenience for me and likely a lot of people.
Thank you, you said it way better than I could.
I do that all of the time, rejecting offers for new credit cards. Sign up today and get $50 of today’s purchase - no thanks. Granted a credit card and a launcher isn’t the same, but I’ll reject free stuff if I think it’s a hassle.
Well that’s a whole other thing. If Twitch is expecting to crack the Steam market without incentives like price or whatever, it’ll probably die a quick death. For all the free crap they’ve given me, I haven’t spent a dime on the service. But if they do offer me a price advantage I certainly would buy there.
Yeeeeah, but installing a new launcher won’t have an effect on your credit rating so not exactly the same thing.
Free chat emoticons! Free virtual loot crates! Free spacebux to tip streamers!
For the Twitch audience, it’s entirely possible those would get more adopters than cheaper games. Well great, now I’m the one who sounds like an old fart.
I doubt that is nearly enough. Somehow they are going to have to pull market share, both for devs and for gamers. will be interesting to see how it evolves over time.
It’s not just about usernames and passwords. It’s about having your data be stored in multiple totally distinct silos, with no good way of figuring out what’s where.
I wasn’t going to play it immediately, it’s a nice to have rather than some kind of Holy Grail. Having the game hidden away in some single-game launcher would just mean I’d never get around to playing it; it’d be totally invisible when scanning through the Steam library for something to play. So a copy of Shadow Complex in the Epic launcher is literally worthless to me. It makes no sense to spend even a minute of time to get it. It might be a free copy, but it also carries no value at all. On the other hand, Shadow Complex on Steam might actually get played a some point, so I’ll probably buy it in a Steam sale, Humble Bundle, etc. at some point.
It is interesting how those points of friction vary from person to person.
It takes me all of 2 seconds to play Wildlands through uplay or Witcher 3 through Gog or Elite through its own launcher or the windows store for Forza. I guess I have zero friction, then again I have 20% of my music on Amazon music and 80% on Itunes so I guess I have gotten used to multiple locations.
I totally respect folks who just prefer to have their games in a single place. it just doesnt bother me at all to go through other services.
I think this is really smart of Amazon, because they are coming at things from a different angle. Some of the streamers on Twitch, have huge audiences, and that will only grow now that there is real tangible incentive to stream…or more tangible incentive. It’s funny, but I kind of see the beginnings of steam users being tied to the horse while the car races by. I think a lot of older people “don’t get” Twitch and/or streaming in general. I think it’s largely a generational thing, to kids, it’s really their television. I say this as a really old person lol.
I’ve always thought that Twitch, or something like it, was going to be really huge at some point. It’s the same way I felt about professional gaming in the 90s. I really believed that some day people would watch games like they do sports, I still think that entire market is only at the baby steps stage of where it’s going to end up 15-20 years from now. The more professional coverage gets, and the better looking and more organized it is, with better personalities driving it, the more people are going to be attracted. I think this is especially true for generations that were raised with this as the norm.
If they can integrate the platform with live streaming, hosted E-sports, and commerce, they could have what will turn into the thing that makes Steam look old and tired. If anyone can do it, it may be Amazon, who certainly have the resources to throw at it.
If I was a betting person, I’d bet this is going to be successful, especially 5+ years from now. At any rate, it will be interesting to see how it all shakes out. Something like this is going to require some real commitment.
I was thinking about this last night and arrived at the same general conclusion.
The generation of people who watch Youtubers and Twitch streamers is younger. They don’t have 600 games tied up in an existing platform, and “gaming” for them is partially (or for some, mostly) defined by the social aspect of watching a game played by a particular personality alongside hundreds-to-thousands of internet strangers. If there’s a platform that integrates with that… I dunno. I could see them carving out their own little piece of the market, especially if they get a strategic exclusive or two. And if anyone knows the type of exclusive game that would be popular to stream, it’s Twitch.
Yup. If the timing for this had been better, imagine a game like Battlegrounds being exclusive to Twitch.
You’re probably right, I do enjoy Twitch but I also feel pretty out of touch with a lot of the other folks in the audience. Also music these days is crap.
That’s the specific game I was going to bring up. There are 90 thousand people watching it now, and God knows how many copies it has sold. Something like that would have put Twitch’s platform on the map from day one if, as you say, the timing had been different.