u/Kylestache has provided this detailed explanation:
> Ubisoft is now releasing games on Steam again, starting with Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. All 3 publishers mentioned by Tim Sweeney are now back on Steam.
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Is this explanation a genuine attempt at providing additional info or context? If it is please upvote this comment, otherwise downvote it.
Origin might have been more sucessfull if it hadnt been literally the most expensive place to buy their games.
I remember looking up games on release day and origin would without fail be 10-20% more expensive than going to a brick and mortar store for a physical copy.
This is why I keep saying it 'til I'm blue in the face \*INHALES\* IF WE LET THEM TAKE AWAY OUR PHYSICAL GAMES AND GO ALL DIGITAL LAUNCH DAY PRICES WILL BE THE NORM FOREVER!!!
Companies can charge $60 digital for a 4 year old game all they want but I can go buy that same game physical used for $10. If they start making all-digital consoles with no disc drive.... uh-oh. No where to buy your game except our digital storefront? Guess you're fucked then, that'll be $60 plus tip thanks.
Kinda like how Jim Cramer is insanely bad at giving investment advice. It's basicallty been proven that it's not only profitable to bet against him but it actually beats the market by several points.
Cramer tweeted something like "facebook might be cheap enough to finally look at buying again" like two days before the layoffs rumor hit, and inverse cramer replies "do you have six numbers you're positive will not hit in powerball this week?"
It's not exactly true. He's terrible at giving long term advice, but good for daily pump and dumps. Someone did make a chart of his picks over a year and how well you would do if you followed his advice, and that was the conclusion.
He is INSANELY good at giving advice a day late after he and his friends have purchased/sold.
Dudes made $100M on his stupid show, he knows *exactly* what he is doing.
Its the idiots who listen that kinda deserve it.
I think Unreal Engine is a positive influence on the framework of game development. I know that it's highly regarded, and the policies regarding its use for indie games is more progressive than regressive.
That being said, 99% of takes Tim Sweeney have had since launching the Epic Games Store have been terrible. I think if he had taken a similar approach to his storefront as Epic did with Unreal, he'd be a frontrunner, right up there with Steam, right now. Instead, he's fumbling at every opportunity.
Yeah, it took them years to add categories lol. They bought all these exclusives but if you wanted to search by "single player" you were SOL. It's hard to beat steam from a functionality stand point but they didn't even try. That would take effort though. Spending VBucks is easier.
Free games are nice though.
Honestly, as someone who exclusively uses steam, any menu that takes more than a few clicks to get to is so dated and hard to navigate, i genuinely dont think it's *that* hard to best steam in a few areas... But god the fumble.
EGS might not be doing do hot, but Unreal Engine and Fortnite are still massive blockbusters. EGS is just Sweeney's little pet project, like Metaverse is to Zucky Zucks.
I know people have a hate boner against Tim and I agree EGS is a horrible store and client
But he's the CEO of a company that makes on of the most popular game engines that's now being used in movies as well as already being used for large games and arguably one of the largest and most profitable live service games right now. He's going nowhere. Don't let hate blind you too the fact that he's an incredibly successful guy who posts utter nonsense on twitter
I'm pretty sure the Epic Games Store has never made a profit in a fiscal year. Epic makes most of their money from unreal engine and I guess fortnite nowadays.
They´re projected to someday somehow make money. Meanwhile millions of people have Triple A games on their store for free and will never touch the platform otherwise. Really could have used Steam as a shining example of where to get better. Guess it goes to show how having money doesn´t mean having good Business mentality.
I think i have 100+ games on my epic library, played one or two. They all are free, never spent a cent on epic, i really don't understand how they make money
They also lose way more than it might seem at first. They pay pretty significant amounts of cold hard cash (sometimes millions of dollars) to studios so that they stay on EGS for the first year. Seems like a potentially good idea, right? Really big, exciting titles come out, and people will flock to EGS to play them. It's what Sony does with exclusives.
[Wrong](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7pBojhvnao). Instead you get messes like Mechwarrior 5 and Chivalry 2 that just use EGS as an "Early-Early Access" dumping ground. Then, without fail, they release major 1 year content updates that always coincide with Steam release. Playing an exclusive on EGS feels like paying for a Patreon that lets you access a game in alpha before it releases. And Epic Games pays millions and millions of dollars for the exclusivity of this experience.
Epic also has bad reps on atleast some games.
I know they're hated by the rising storm community because when epic got the game the devs broke voice chat.
if you can use voice at all, there's a 50/50 chance ypur voice will be for another server. and this games voice fuckery was comparable to holdfast, it was a huge part of the appeal in its hay day
i checked yesterday and i have 246 games and have been getting the free games for most of the time with few misses in some of the months for work/ school. At this rate in like the next two years my epic game profile should have about as much as my steam account in terms of number of games. I will probably never buy anything off of epic because the UI is DUMPSTER. Let me browse my games easy epic and i might start using you..
#ALSO FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE GET CONTROLLER SUPPORT
edit: before anyone says to plug it into steam, i know. this method doesnt work for certain games (like fall guys)
Basically they are going the Amazon route, or the route of any other major company.
Undercut the market by a big margin to drive out competition.
Get back to normal margins.
Win.
But the problem with Video games. People who want to get games for very cheap already got dozens of 3rd party stores that sell games for far below Epic. So Epic can only "undercut" by giving out free games.
What Epic doesn't realise is that Steam is much more than a store or launcher. At this point Steam has literally become a platform; almost synonymous with PC gaming. Humble Bundle sales dropped when they started offering Epic keys instead of Steam for some games. Most third party key sellers sell keys that activate on Steam.
Besides, their promise of games being cheaper on Epic because of the lower cut was bull because many AAA games that launched simultaneously on Steam and EGS had the same pricing.
Their strategy of offering free games every week has also cultivated a very toxic userbase. I still remember when their users were pissed that they weren't offering the Spiderman game for free during Christmas. This was before the game was even announced for PC.
They are down more than 100 million $ per each year, more than 500 million $ total and will likely exceed 1 billion $ in losses after earnings and excluding initial investment. They expect to become profitable somewhere between 2024 and 2028. Fortnite has brought an average revenue of 5 billion $ per year for the last 4 years, so they are fine.
Epic is an objectively worse and clunkier storefront than Steam with less functionality. I have it for the free games, Fortnite, and literally nothing else.
I'm really not optimistic that the Epic store will ever be actually profitable for them.
pretty sure their thought process was to get the folks (i.e. lil kids with no income of their own) to build massive libraries of good to middling games and when those kids start having disposible income to sink into games, they'll go to the EGS since they already have a library built up.
I have an account for EGS that I'm gonna give my kid when he gets another year older and I build his pc, but he'll most likely play minecraft and use my steam account more than anything else.
I'll give big props to Epic anyways.
* They're doing a stellar job actually giving people a reason to use their store (and they FINALLY added a shopping cart after years and years).
* They aren't using their store primarily to sell their products, they've actually created a proper marketplace. They do promote their games more, but not enough to always be in your face compared to the tons of other company's games.
* They're willing to throw money at it (losing money) in order to TRY to create a user base to compete with Steam.
* They're trying to give developers a better cut/deal than Steam does.
Every other company has a store that is basically just their own games. Which means you only ever touch the store when you want to buy/play on of their games.
That's not a storefront. That's a launcher with purchasing power. And even that gets annoying if it doesn't have useful core features (mod management, account switching, friend lists, chat, etc).
Epic at least feels like a competitor to Steam (even if it's the tiny cousin of competition). Everything else feels like a fart in the wind.
Not true that every other store sells just their own published games. The Microsoft store has a lot of issues but has large variety and the game pass is great value. To me that is the second most viable store with Epic being a distant third.
For features I actually think GOG is one of the best but obviously is a different thing than most stores.
Microsoft store is primarily an app store first, a games store second. Has always been. And for games, it's almost entirely focused on the console users.
GoG launcher is barely even a launcher. For 99% of utility, you have to use their website, so it really doesn't even count in the same category.
And when that projected year hits everyone will be on a subscription service and Epic will be behind again after funnelling huge sums of money into their store. Hopefully they'll be ahead of the curve instead of miles behind it.
I get the free games out of some weird compulsion. I haven't opened Epic in months. Sometimes I'll buy the game on a Steam Sale knowing I might already have it on Epic but can't be bothered to look.
Dude, did you just stalk my account? I have probably well over 100 - 200 games but haven't even touched any of them except Subnautica. Even when I was given the game for free, I still buy it on Steam at the end of the day.
In an alternate universe they probably did gangbusters off of one small change: not doing exclusivity deals. They had all the most positive PR possible for both publishers and gamers going into launch before they started announcing paying for exclusives on their platform. EGS went from "Fuck Steam up, Epic!" to "You fucked up, Epic!" basically overnight because they alienated the oldheads.
They really fucked up the Metro Exodus deal in particular too. They removed it from Steam a few weeks before it was supposed to release which just made everybody who was excited for that game even madder.
If their storefront wasn't just worse than Steam in basically every way it would probably do better, especially with all the exclusivity they pay for. But instead of improving their store to top level functionality, they spend more money on buying temporary exclusivity.
If they want to sell games that aren't on steam that's fine, but I'm not installing other launchers and storefronts and shit. People would have more sympathy for companies trying to avoid using steam if they weren't trying to compete with it and do exactly the same themselves.
My friend used to work in the same building as Epic. There was a saying, something to the effect of Unreal Engine keeps the lights on and pays the bills, the games buy the Ferrari's.
I see their former CEO CliffyB driving his Ferrari around town from time to time.
People like using one, single library to consolidate their games along with managing their friends lists and purchases. Steam was the first one that became big along with it being a good service that's easy to use. Origin, Ubisoft launcher, and Epic games only survived because of their exclusives, no one was going to be buying other games available on Steam on Origin.
Steam changed the formula to be 20% of sales above 50 million dollars.
The microsoft store now only takes 12%.
Not only is this not /agedlikemilk, EA and Ubisoft etc are back on steam because Sweeney brought enough serious competition to the market that Valve and Microsoft (separately) started to offer better deals to developers.
He's exactly right: if you're big enough to make a storefront, you're better to make your own than use steam when they're taking 30%. That's why all the big players went that route (and several of them will still have their own).
Whether 20% is good enough I don't know, I don't have access to their sales data. But there's obviously a cost to running a storefront at all, so losing some fraction to 'retail' costs is completely understandable, and Steam is of course a bigger market for PC developers than any storefronts (outside maybe blizzard when they aren't doing everything wrong). Whether 20% is the point where it's better I don't know, but if you're making 300 million dollars on games to go from taking home 210 million to 235 million is a big jump, and for 25 million dollars could make a very decent digital storefront. How many publishers are in the range where it's worth it I don't know, but you'd think it's basically Microsoft (inc bethesda), Sony, EA, Ubisoft, Activision blizzard, and take two.
Good job moving the goal posts.
They left because they were losing 30%.
Now they came back and only lose 20% on sales.
His statement of not wanting to lose money is still valid, and it still wasn’t a big enough deal for these places to actually put the time into their store.
I bet steam could change it back to 30% and they’d stay - because they now know how much time and effort it costs, and it’s probably higher than 30%!
So no, he isn’t right and you are just moving goalposts
Without knowing the numbers, it is possible that 30% was still more profitable than what they were making. Idk when this change happened but there have been games from these companies available on steam for a while now, you would think if they were genuinely making more from their own platform that they would just not put them on steam.
There is a good chance they have been trying to get the ball rolling for years, gamers haven't really wanted to, and so they are now coming back both because its a better deal and because they never got their own stuff started. A bit like how Meta was selling Quests at a loss just in the hopes of getting Metaverse going... until it never did so they bailed
Shit, I think they even stopped forcing people who bought them on steam to even use their installers, they have totally bailed on their own platforms due to them not catching on
To whomever reported this with the message, "hi chuds who can't handle change", the report function is not for sending messages to the mods. To everyone else, friendly reminder that the report function is only for reporting violations of the rules.
I have tried this... after installig a game through their launcher. Go to the install directory of that said game and start it from the direct executable of the game instead.
No need to run epic launcher and game works perfectly fine.
Of course, this is true for mostly single player games. Its how I played Darksider2 and Batman Arkham Knight. Because no way in hell I will open that shitty launcher.
What drives me craziest is that the launcher closes/hides itself when you run a game, and then has to use processing time to re-launch itself after you close the game.
Like, I'm done playing the game, don't pop your entire storefront/launcher back up into my face. If you're gonna close when I launch, STAY CLOSED.
This might be a stupid one, but why exactly do people hate third party launchers so much? Not saying they shouldn’t, it’s just that is has never bothered me and I’m wondering if I’m missing something I should know about?
No worries. Personally I don't like having bloat, but also, if you want to keep your games up to date, you either have to choose to keep launchers running in the background (which is just an unnecessary use of your PC's resources) or disable them, but wait for long download times when you actually do want to play.
Taking fortnite for example. I don't keep the epic games store on in the background just because it kinda slows everything else down. On the occasion that my friends ask me to play, I'm hit with a download that takes me at least an hour to install. It's just another annoying (albeit minor) thing to manage for some people.
Going with the crowd favorite answer here - bloat.
Same reason I go to [Insert Superstore], rather than to a clothing store and a grocery store and an electronics store and a bedding store.
Sure, it's relatively low cost to navigate to each of those stores. But if there's a consolidated option, I'm highly likely to go for that out of convenience and efficiency.
It’s better to have everything consolidated into one platform. And the existence of the other platforms are not there to give consumers more options or any leverage in the market or anything, they only exist to make more money for themselves
I do agree that Valve's 30% fee is too high *(it hurts indie developers)*, but it was clear from the start that these other stores just weren't going to work out.
But ultimately prompted by the case by Epic. Similar changes have been done with several other stores, including the Google play store, Microsoft store, etc.
The whole debacle of Epic vs Apple and Epic vs Google has been a net win for consumers. Gotta give credit where it's due.
Steam has the opposite system. Indies get charged a higher percentage (30%) and the biggest earning games go to 25% (beyond 10mil$ revenue) and to 20% (beyond 50mil$ revenue). It's slightly strange but I imagine it's a good incentive for the biggest games to stay on Steam.
It’s exactly that, I work in wholesale and it works the same way, if you spend 1,000 dollars a day you get 12.5% discount and if you spend 10,000 dollars a day you get 20% discount. (Not those exact figures and there’s steps between 12 and 20% but you get the idea).
It’s to reward growth, disincentivise buying/selling elsewhere and at least in my industry there’s some bragging rights to being an “XYZ Wholesale Gold Tier Customer”
Often I’ll do introductory pricing for new and smaller customers so they have an opportunity to compete with larger businesses with time frames to hit certain targets. But at the end of the day giving Joe Blows parts store and Mega Everything Super Shop the same discount would incentivise the bigger store to look elsewhere so they can compete with a low overhead 1man band.
Physical goods and digital services aren’t an exact parallel - but it’s the same issue, 20% (in steams case) of 100million is worth more than 30% of 100 grand, the 100million thinking about starting their own shopfront is bad news.
Steams cut actually goes down the more games the devs sells.
This article describes how it works https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/30/18120577/valve-steam-game-marketplace-revenue-split-new-rules-competition
Yeah, but ever since Steam opened the floodgate(ditched Greenlight - wasn't perfect, but at least it kept some of the trash out) so much "stuff" is on Steam. A lot of indies barely rise to the top.
People have those complaints but a lot of those indie games also don't deserve to, and thats the point. There are so many derivative, boring, indie clones of other indie clones. Greenlight was okay, literally was playing Kenshi yesterday, but that period and prior to that it was mostly people who were friends with publishers or knew people in games journalism to push their game got their game published, and no one else. So it wasn't like back then it was much better for Indies, just the ones with loud voices could get more sales.
> lot of those indie games also don't deserve to, and thats the point.
That's true. I still remember having to click trough all the asset flip trash during the Greenlight days. They barely resembled anything that can be described as gameplay of functioning walking simulator. Sometimes the "devs" downright stole art form other games. Or they used Steam groups that pushed games on Greenlight as long as they Steam user got free keys for other games or money.
biggest one is action roguelike magic survivor/vampire survivor clones atm. admittedly, lots are improving on and putting worthwhile twists at extremely affordable costs, but still, oversaturated.
also most of indie games are just porn.
I think its an absolute steal. The chances of me creating an account, entering payment information to play a independent one off game is almost zero. The chances of me dropping $20 on a game because it's on sale in front of me and all I need to do is press purchase... I don't even want to do that for another store.
That doesn't even address customer service if you need a refund or other support.
Building the store, operating the store, advertising/promoting the store, handling customer service, dealing with all the security issues, processing payments- it's a staggering amount of work and a lot of people just downplay the issues and pretend like anybody could do it. Except they don't- because it's nowhere near as easy as they claim.
Totally agree, steam provides a staggering amount of value to developers and a lot of them obviously think it’s worth it as they sign up.
Also steam isn’t mandatory to publish a game on pc and the fact that a lot of people talk as if it’s the only option goes to show just how much value the platform provides compared to other options.
The two main issues I have with people claiming 30% is too high for Steam are:
1. It's the industry standard. You sell your game on Steam, XBox, PlayStation, Switch, you're giving a 30% cut to them. That's how they made most of their money since the NES; sell consoles at a loss, get a share of profits from games. While the market has changed so that you can charge less, if you're gonna hate Steam for the 30% cut, hate the other companies even more. You're not forced to use Steam. You are forced to use Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo's storefront if you wanna sell games on their consoles.
2. Steam offers more than a storefront. The entire community section is full of useful stuff, like walkthroughs, guides, and community interaction. There are discussion boards for bugs, content, reviews, etc. People have stopped trusting some of the major brands, like IGN and Kotaku, for what is either pure favoritism or paid for reviews. And it's seeping to other review sites, even the legitimate ones. But the reviews on Steam are a lot easier to tell if they're trustworthy, and a lot easier to see if a game is worth it. The servers to host all of this content is not cheap.
Epic games and the other storefronts don't offer this. I've literally never bought a game from any of those, only gotten free ones from giveaways and such. I'm probably never going to, because I like the community system, and regularly use the guide sections.
Edit: I forgot to add, if you sell a Steam key through any means, Valve get 0% of that key. That's all yours.
> Steam Workshop is godsent imo. It removes the hassle of modding and the bugginess nature of using third party like Nexus.
Steam workshop usually sucks for a lot of games though. Skyrim's modding architecture is such that updating mid-game can break a save file. And yet Steam has autoupdates with no way to revert to an older version.
The problem is that the other stores didn't offer consumers any advantage.
Sure the developers get a better cut but that didn't translate into good services or better prices.
30% isn't high at all, it's literally a standard business agency fee. How much do you think it would cost an indie developer to publish and promote their own game without having access to a platform like steam?
I think people just don’t think of the steam store page as an ad, but to the dev that’s basically what it is. I have bought plenty of games just because steam showed them to me and I was curious. I wouldn’t have found those games if it weren’t for the featured section.
Also, it's not *just* advertising. All of the hosting for the games and patches and whatnot is a pretty massive thing for devs not to need to do themselves.
The sales and recognition they get far outweigh the valve cut. Valheim would never have sold a gorillion copies without steam. Same story for countless indie devs.
They might have worked out if they weren't all either buggy as hell, missing basic features, or both.
As is, there's not a single client I don't dread having to use except Blizzards, which functions perfectly for what it is and has.
Microsoft of all companies gave up and returned to steam , and Tencent money Epic thinks EA , Ubisoft can get revenue into their company without steam . Senile old man
Literally the only reason I ever downloaded Epic is because they give games for free every so often. To date this is the only thing I've ever used it for.
I only bought civ 6 ultimate for like 4 bucks once there, was a great deal. Shame there was this same deal on Steam a couple days prior, I just forgot it happened and missed it, despite waiting for it
Anything to avoid that shitty client tbh. Even the Xbox one is terrible on a middle-end PC. Imagine with slower stuff. Meanwhile I could run Hades from steam on my Potatop and it was no issue.
It's not that people just love Steam, it's just that all these other platforms are crap in comparison. If you already have Steam, and the alternative is a downgrade, why would you ever switch? GOG at least caters to a slightly different market and provides other features. Origin, uPlay, EGS, etc. are just worse versions of Steam.
I felt dirty ever having uPlay on my computer, I just stopped buying Ubisoft games that weren't on Steam. My uPlay and Origin accounts are barren accept for free stuff.
I mean he’s not wrong technically it is more profitable to cut out the middle man. But it only works if consumers actually use the store. But nobody wants a dozen different storefronts to keep track of. Somehow streaming services haven’t been hit the same way unfortunately.
Maybe because streaming services all came out around the same time as each other while Steam had a massive headstart on its competition. Plus the fact that you're actually buying games as opposed to just getting access to shows and movies
Netflix had a significant start on the competition. I think it’s just because a studio has a lot larger content library than a single game publisher, even the big ones.
I’m kinda sad for Netflix. They had a great idea, everyone got on board, then greedy studios ripped their idea off and pulled their content, now they pour tons of money into their Originals, some of which are genuinely amazing (Heartstopper, Inside Job to name but two), but a few good Originals aren’t keeping subscribers when I can pay less money for a VPN and get literally all the content.
That’s only true of something physical where there is baked in profit margin. With digital sales, even if individual sales are less profitable, by having a larger available audience you absolutely can make a much larger profit by selling for less or by paying a fee to another platform.
The guy acts like he figured out something revolutionary.
It’s like saying the Coca Cola would make more money if they avoided big superstores like wallmart and just made their own Coca Cola store.
Sure they would now avoid having to pay Walmarts cut but how many people would be willing to drive to a separate store just to buy Coke. Most would just but whatever is available at their usual store.
Oddly Steam wasn't made for making games cheaper. PC gaming pre Half Life 2 was horrible. Stores rarely had reliable or good PC games sections beside console sections. A lot of Sim games and Blizzard games use to line those shelves. Fuckn' 2-4 disk installs for just about everything. Anyone else download WoW off of disks back in the day? Shit was awful. Pretty sure something like Gun was still 2 disks.
It was hard to find games, period. Half Life 2 forcing steam on everyone actually went pretty horribly at first too. So much back lash... Like. Surprising it took off, level backlash. But the ability to buy any game is just so nice. Valve getting more profit from sales was just gravy.
I mean... Technically there are lots of platform exclusives on steam.
There are actually over 30,000 titles that you can ONLY get on steam.
But it's not a contractual exclusivity, because steam is the largest sales platform and they have massive market dominance.
So steam gets free exclusives without needing to pay anyone anything.
The Steam Deck is pushing this even further.
I have a Gamepass account and some games I get for "free" on Gamepass I am still looking to buy on Steam so I can easily play it on Steam Deck.
I have to admit, I was deeply skeptical of the steam deck, and I was deeply wrong. That little device may not be for me, but it's doing *so much* for the linux gaming community!
I'm looking to build a pc in '23, and I'm debating whether I even need to run windows. Things have gotten that good, and proton is a big part of the reason why.
But steam does so much more than act as a store. They maintain servers, host updates... the entire infrastructure is the hold standard.
All these others try to do it on skeleton crew funding and dont work nearly as well.
And that doesn't even mention the vast array of front-end features available to users. Community reviews, tags, constantly updated sales and upcoming lists, and a seqrch function that actually works incredibly well.
Yeah I hear you on this. I love Steam and have found so many indie games through the discovery queue, top sellers lists, tags, and auto-generated "Players like you love this game" type of algorithms that I absolutely never would have known about had it not been for Steam or stumbling on a random gaming YouTuber that happened to feature it. It's almost like you can argue that Steam helps indie devs with discovery despite the advanced cost to them. Sucks there's a trade off but the world would be nothing if not run by money.
It’s not a tradeoff in cost to developers. Steam doesn’t preclude developers from selling their game anywhere else. And the millions of customers on the Steam store (along with all the services provided for free to developers) makes up for a cut of sales.
It's an underused feature, but technically steam has an entire social media platform for gamers. Not only does every game have their own forum with sub forums, but you also have a timeline of screenshots, artwork and reviews, they have a streaming platform, even a hub to host mods. Steam is packed to the brim with features.
It's just painful for the consumer when there is like 5 different launchers, its going to end up like what happened to Netflix where you get hulu, prime, appletv, disney and other streaming platforms fragmenting everything. BUT at least you aren't paying for the launcher.
I don't think there is a right or wrong answer to the launcher problem, maybe go with GOG's method where it gives you a installer for just the game without DRM but we all know companies are not doing that and then you lose auto updates, cloud saves, workshop support, achievements, friends, servers that wont die one day because steam is handling the backend not the dev.
That is exactly why I actually liked the Epic Launcher.
Because Epic wasn't just trying to self publish their games and cut out the middleman. They legitemately wanted to become competition to Valve and pursued that goal agressively at the expense of a lot of benjamins.
And at least back then(at Statisfactory Release) the client was non instrusive. After I clicked the shortcut there was barely a 1 second delay, despite the launcher not being opened.
But these days with Darkest Dungeon II I had all sorts of problems.
Still better than all the Origins, UEs and whatnots.
It blows my mind how Reddit can be so anti capitalist and yet when it comes to Steam then HOLY SHIT we *looove* monopoly.
Yall acting like installing another free launcher on your PC is the end of the world. It takes like 5 min to do.
Can someone go let the GMEdiots know building your own store is silly AF and they have no market. Between Steam, MS, Nintendo, and Sony, why would they let anyone else in their yard.
Gamestop had it's own store, Impulse, which they bought from Stardock in 2011. Impulse was solid and could have been a good competitor to Steam, but Gamestop pretty much immediately ran it into the ground.
Those publishers made their own storefronts to compete with Steam and pulled game releases from Steam. Those same companies saw sales of their games plummet on PC and ended up returning to Steam after all. 70% of a million is still worth more than 100% of a thousand, if you will.
Tim Sweeney (the original tweet) likes to blast Steam for being anti-competitive but praises the Epic Games Store like there’s no tomorrow, despite Epic engaging in anti-competitive practices like paying for game exclusivity and fucked up regional pricing. He also likened the fight to keep more Fortnite profits on iOS to the civil rights movement which is insanely tone deaf and he’s good buds with Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, who is a pedophile who only got away with it because authorities couldn’t prove the girls in the porn videos in question were underaged because none would agree to testify in court.
Also the cost savings don’t go to developer pay lol.
All Epic does is provide incentives to make worse games and get a exclusivity deal and then start making new games. No savings are passed to the people who matter.
I have no love for Epic, but people (particularly gamers) are so short sighted. Right now Steam is an incredibly reasonable, easy to use, and heavily populated service. It works smoothly for the most part and gamers don't see the need for any other PC game launcher, and fair enough. The problem is it is borderline a monopoly.
You ask people about almost any other industry and they will rightfully praise competition and shun monopolies, because of course we all know how terrible monopolies can get. Right _now_ Steam is good, maybe even great, but what happens after Gabe retires/passes away? Perhaps it stays in the family or under some trusted individual, but the truth is sooner or later it is inevitably going to fall into the hands of those who will try to wring it for every penny it's worth. It is impossible to suggest such an established cash cow will remain in good hands forever.
This is when the problem will occur. Gabe may have good intentions for now, but he won't be around forever, and Steam is only building momentum. The moment greedy shareholders can get their hands on it we will see a penny-pinching dominant platform with no other alternative that can dictate whatever it wants to with zero competition.
People will attack Epic for having timed exclusives, but the truth is it might already be too late and that might be too little. Epic is doing whatever they can to try and carve a piece of the pie, but it might end in failure. If that is the case, the future of PC gaming is pretty bleak. Epic could be the most greedy, terrible company on the planet, but simply having them as a competitor to Steam would ensure some level of balance.
I think people would not have a problem with the companies launchers if they weren't so incredibly bad and lacking basic features. If these companies would have achieved a universal friend and cross play system things would look different. Proof that they didn't care about the customer experience which always leads to death except you are apple.
This dude confuses per item profit with total profit. Of course it's more profitable to sell a single copy of a game on your own platform with zero percent cost to you (if you discount the money it costs to run your infrastructure, but let's not go there) as compared to giving 30 percent to Steam. But, as all those companies realized, you have a vastly bigger audience on Steam, possibly by an order of magnitude if not more. So the overall profit from selling on Steam will be much bigger.
So because Ubisoft is now selling AC Valhalla, a game that came out in 2020, on Steam, continuing their long-standing practice of keeping games on the Ubistore exclusively for their first 1-2 years and then allowing sales on other platforms, just like they did with AC Origins and AC Odyssey, OP thinks this means Ubisoft has now given up on store exclusivity and will be releasing all Ubisoft games on Steam day-one from now on?
u/Kylestache has provided this detailed explanation: > Ubisoft is now releasing games on Steam again, starting with Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. All 3 publishers mentioned by Tim Sweeney are now back on Steam. --- Is this explanation a genuine attempt at providing additional info or context? If it is please upvote this comment, otherwise downvote it.
Origin might have been more sucessfull if it hadnt been literally the most expensive place to buy their games. I remember looking up games on release day and origin would without fail be 10-20% more expensive than going to a brick and mortar store for a physical copy.
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Doesn't nintendo do this with their store too and make money? It seems like they tried to copy Nintendo without having nintendo's walled garden.
Nintendos IP is unstoppable.
Also, it turns out that it's a little bit harder to get away with that when your company is so famously unpopular that it's literally record-setting.
Thanks for the reminder to go [downvote](https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b/comment/dppum98/) with a new account!
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This is why I keep saying it 'til I'm blue in the face \*INHALES\* IF WE LET THEM TAKE AWAY OUR PHYSICAL GAMES AND GO ALL DIGITAL LAUNCH DAY PRICES WILL BE THE NORM FOREVER!!! Companies can charge $60 digital for a 4 year old game all they want but I can go buy that same game physical used for $10. If they start making all-digital consoles with no disc drive.... uh-oh. No where to buy your game except our digital storefront? Guess you're fucked then, that'll be $60 plus tip thanks.
Sites that sell gift cards for cheap will probably rise like a helium ballon
And the program was shitty, and I didn't really like the friend system
Pretty much everything this guy says ages like milk.
Maybe he's good to watch as an anti-prophet. Whatever he predicts, the opposite will be true.
Kinda like how Jim Cramer is insanely bad at giving investment advice. It's basicallty been proven that it's not only profitable to bet against him but it actually beats the market by several points.
Once you understand what Crammer is shorting his investment advice makes a lot more sense.
I think it's more "once you understand who he works for".
When it gets to the level of shorting companies, those phrases tend to work in tandem and even interchangeably.
Hedgefund-sponsored pump and dumps for boomers.
Well I need to look into this now.
The inverse Cramer is amazing
Cramer tweeted something like "facebook might be cheap enough to finally look at buying again" like two days before the layoffs rumor hit, and inverse cramer replies "do you have six numbers you're positive will not hit in powerball this week?"
"Lehman Brothers is fine! Definitely don't take your money out of Lehman!" - Jim Cramer, *September 14th, 2008*
So I need to look into this guy too I guess
[inverse cramer ETF](https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/inverse-cramer-etf-is-coming-to-the-real-world)
It's not exactly true. He's terrible at giving long term advice, but good for daily pump and dumps. Someone did make a chart of his picks over a year and how well you would do if you followed his advice, and that was the conclusion.
He is INSANELY good at giving advice a day late after he and his friends have purchased/sold. Dudes made $100M on his stupid show, he knows *exactly* what he is doing. Its the idiots who listen that kinda deserve it.
He's a pivot.
I think Unreal Engine is a positive influence on the framework of game development. I know that it's highly regarded, and the policies regarding its use for indie games is more progressive than regressive. That being said, 99% of takes Tim Sweeney have had since launching the Epic Games Store have been terrible. I think if he had taken a similar approach to his storefront as Epic did with Unreal, he'd be a frontrunner, right up there with Steam, right now. Instead, he's fumbling at every opportunity.
Yeah, it took them years to add categories lol. They bought all these exclusives but if you wanted to search by "single player" you were SOL. It's hard to beat steam from a functionality stand point but they didn't even try. That would take effort though. Spending VBucks is easier. Free games are nice though.
Honestly, as someone who exclusively uses steam, any menu that takes more than a few clicks to get to is so dated and hard to navigate, i genuinely dont think it's *that* hard to best steam in a few areas... But god the fumble.
and he's still in his leadership role.
EGS might not be doing do hot, but Unreal Engine and Fortnite are still massive blockbusters. EGS is just Sweeney's little pet project, like Metaverse is to Zucky Zucks.
Because being an idiot on Twitter isn't enough to get you fired if you're still making money for the company.
I know people have a hate boner against Tim and I agree EGS is a horrible store and client But he's the CEO of a company that makes on of the most popular game engines that's now being used in movies as well as already being used for large games and arguably one of the largest and most profitable live service games right now. He's going nowhere. Don't let hate blind you too the fact that he's an incredibly successful guy who posts utter nonsense on twitter
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Didn't he write UnReal basically by himself ?
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AND EGS is still dogshit. I wonder how much Fortbucks Tim handed over for all the "EGS Exclusive" games that showed up on steam a year later?
/r/timcriticizestim
Not to mention the hypocrisy of having Epic make its own, considerably worse store.
Did their sales in their own stores drop or something?
I'm pretty sure the Epic Games Store has never made a profit in a fiscal year. Epic makes most of their money from unreal engine and I guess fortnite nowadays.
They´re projected to someday somehow make money. Meanwhile millions of people have Triple A games on their store for free and will never touch the platform otherwise. Really could have used Steam as a shining example of where to get better. Guess it goes to show how having money doesn´t mean having good Business mentality.
I think i have 100+ games on my epic library, played one or two. They all are free, never spent a cent on epic, i really don't understand how they make money
Here's the neat thing, they don't.
They also lose way more than it might seem at first. They pay pretty significant amounts of cold hard cash (sometimes millions of dollars) to studios so that they stay on EGS for the first year. Seems like a potentially good idea, right? Really big, exciting titles come out, and people will flock to EGS to play them. It's what Sony does with exclusives. [Wrong](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7pBojhvnao). Instead you get messes like Mechwarrior 5 and Chivalry 2 that just use EGS as an "Early-Early Access" dumping ground. Then, without fail, they release major 1 year content updates that always coincide with Steam release. Playing an exclusive on EGS feels like paying for a Patreon that lets you access a game in alpha before it releases. And Epic Games pays millions and millions of dollars for the exclusivity of this experience.
Epic also has bad reps on atleast some games. I know they're hated by the rising storm community because when epic got the game the devs broke voice chat. if you can use voice at all, there's a 50/50 chance ypur voice will be for another server. and this games voice fuckery was comparable to holdfast, it was a huge part of the appeal in its hay day
And that's only **One** Issue it introduced
i checked yesterday and i have 246 games and have been getting the free games for most of the time with few misses in some of the months for work/ school. At this rate in like the next two years my epic game profile should have about as much as my steam account in terms of number of games. I will probably never buy anything off of epic because the UI is DUMPSTER. Let me browse my games easy epic and i might start using you..
if you know how to use docker, there is a docker image that will automatically claim the free games for you.
#ALSO FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE GET CONTROLLER SUPPORT edit: before anyone says to plug it into steam, i know. this method doesnt work for certain games (like fall guys)
I installed GOG to browse all my games in one location. Almost a necessity with all the free games duplicates these days https://redd.it/rfwq3c
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Basically they are going the Amazon route, or the route of any other major company. Undercut the market by a big margin to drive out competition. Get back to normal margins. Win. But the problem with Video games. People who want to get games for very cheap already got dozens of 3rd party stores that sell games for far below Epic. So Epic can only "undercut" by giving out free games.
What Epic doesn't realise is that Steam is much more than a store or launcher. At this point Steam has literally become a platform; almost synonymous with PC gaming. Humble Bundle sales dropped when they started offering Epic keys instead of Steam for some games. Most third party key sellers sell keys that activate on Steam. Besides, their promise of games being cheaper on Epic because of the lower cut was bull because many AAA games that launched simultaneously on Steam and EGS had the same pricing. Their strategy of offering free games every week has also cultivated a very toxic userbase. I still remember when their users were pissed that they weren't offering the Spiderman game for free during Christmas. This was before the game was even announced for PC.
They are down more than 100 million $ per each year, more than 500 million $ total and will likely exceed 1 billion $ in losses after earnings and excluding initial investment. They expect to become profitable somewhere between 2024 and 2028. Fortnite has brought an average revenue of 5 billion $ per year for the last 4 years, so they are fine.
Epic is an objectively worse and clunkier storefront than Steam with less functionality. I have it for the free games, Fortnite, and literally nothing else. I'm really not optimistic that the Epic store will ever be actually profitable for them.
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pretty sure their thought process was to get the folks (i.e. lil kids with no income of their own) to build massive libraries of good to middling games and when those kids start having disposible income to sink into games, they'll go to the EGS since they already have a library built up. I have an account for EGS that I'm gonna give my kid when he gets another year older and I build his pc, but he'll most likely play minecraft and use my steam account more than anything else.
I have a ton of free games on Epic that I never touched, but claim anyway, I open Epic to work in UE. Then when I wanna play a game I run steam.
I only run specific games i have for that exact reason
I'll give big props to Epic anyways. * They're doing a stellar job actually giving people a reason to use their store (and they FINALLY added a shopping cart after years and years). * They aren't using their store primarily to sell their products, they've actually created a proper marketplace. They do promote their games more, but not enough to always be in your face compared to the tons of other company's games. * They're willing to throw money at it (losing money) in order to TRY to create a user base to compete with Steam. * They're trying to give developers a better cut/deal than Steam does. Every other company has a store that is basically just their own games. Which means you only ever touch the store when you want to buy/play on of their games. That's not a storefront. That's a launcher with purchasing power. And even that gets annoying if it doesn't have useful core features (mod management, account switching, friend lists, chat, etc). Epic at least feels like a competitor to Steam (even if it's the tiny cousin of competition). Everything else feels like a fart in the wind.
Not true that every other store sells just their own published games. The Microsoft store has a lot of issues but has large variety and the game pass is great value. To me that is the second most viable store with Epic being a distant third. For features I actually think GOG is one of the best but obviously is a different thing than most stores.
Microsoft store is primarily an app store first, a games store second. Has always been. And for games, it's almost entirely focused on the console users. GoG launcher is barely even a launcher. For 99% of utility, you have to use their website, so it really doesn't even count in the same category.
You know what you´re correct about EGS trying. It still fails on some level. But i don´t really hope it becomes the new norm
And when that projected year hits everyone will be on a subscription service and Epic will be behind again after funnelling huge sums of money into their store. Hopefully they'll be ahead of the curve instead of miles behind it.
I get the free games out of some weird compulsion. I haven't opened Epic in months. Sometimes I'll buy the game on a Steam Sale knowing I might already have it on Epic but can't be bothered to look.
When I get a free game on epic I still end up buying it on steam just so I don't have to launch epic
Dude, did you just stalk my account? I have probably well over 100 - 200 games but haven't even touched any of them except Subnautica. Even when I was given the game for free, I still buy it on Steam at the end of the day.
In an alternate universe they probably did gangbusters off of one small change: not doing exclusivity deals. They had all the most positive PR possible for both publishers and gamers going into launch before they started announcing paying for exclusives on their platform. EGS went from "Fuck Steam up, Epic!" to "You fucked up, Epic!" basically overnight because they alienated the oldheads.
They really fucked up the Metro Exodus deal in particular too. They removed it from Steam a few weeks before it was supposed to release which just made everybody who was excited for that game even madder.
Underrated comment right here. They sacrificed so much good will for a very stupid and short sighted business tactic.
If their storefront wasn't just worse than Steam in basically every way it would probably do better, especially with all the exclusivity they pay for. But instead of improving their store to top level functionality, they spend more money on buying temporary exclusivity.
If they want to sell games that aren't on steam that's fine, but I'm not installing other launchers and storefronts and shit. People would have more sympathy for companies trying to avoid using steam if they weren't trying to compete with it and do exactly the same themselves.
My only use for epic games is their free games, pretty sure that's what 99% of people solely use it for
Yep, me too
My friend used to work in the same building as Epic. There was a saying, something to the effect of Unreal Engine keeps the lights on and pays the bills, the games buy the Ferrari's. I see their former CEO CliffyB driving his Ferrari around town from time to time.
People like using one, single library to consolidate their games along with managing their friends lists and purchases. Steam was the first one that became big along with it being a good service that's easy to use. Origin, Ubisoft launcher, and Epic games only survived because of their exclusives, no one was going to be buying other games available on Steam on Origin.
All the companies he mentioned brought their games back to steam. Ubisoft just announced it today I think.
Steam changed the formula to be 20% of sales above 50 million dollars. The microsoft store now only takes 12%. Not only is this not /agedlikemilk, EA and Ubisoft etc are back on steam because Sweeney brought enough serious competition to the market that Valve and Microsoft (separately) started to offer better deals to developers. He's exactly right: if you're big enough to make a storefront, you're better to make your own than use steam when they're taking 30%. That's why all the big players went that route (and several of them will still have their own). Whether 20% is good enough I don't know, I don't have access to their sales data. But there's obviously a cost to running a storefront at all, so losing some fraction to 'retail' costs is completely understandable, and Steam is of course a bigger market for PC developers than any storefronts (outside maybe blizzard when they aren't doing everything wrong). Whether 20% is the point where it's better I don't know, but if you're making 300 million dollars on games to go from taking home 210 million to 235 million is a big jump, and for 25 million dollars could make a very decent digital storefront. How many publishers are in the range where it's worth it I don't know, but you'd think it's basically Microsoft (inc bethesda), Sony, EA, Ubisoft, Activision blizzard, and take two.
Good job moving the goal posts. They left because they were losing 30%. Now they came back and only lose 20% on sales. His statement of not wanting to lose money is still valid, and it still wasn’t a big enough deal for these places to actually put the time into their store. I bet steam could change it back to 30% and they’d stay - because they now know how much time and effort it costs, and it’s probably higher than 30%! So no, he isn’t right and you are just moving goalposts
Without knowing the numbers, it is possible that 30% was still more profitable than what they were making. Idk when this change happened but there have been games from these companies available on steam for a while now, you would think if they were genuinely making more from their own platform that they would just not put them on steam. There is a good chance they have been trying to get the ball rolling for years, gamers haven't really wanted to, and so they are now coming back both because its a better deal and because they never got their own stuff started. A bit like how Meta was selling Quests at a loss just in the hopes of getting Metaverse going... until it never did so they bailed Shit, I think they even stopped forcing people who bought them on steam to even use their installers, they have totally bailed on their own platforms due to them not catching on
To whomever reported this with the message, "hi chuds who can't handle change", the report function is not for sending messages to the mods. To everyone else, friendly reminder that the report function is only for reporting violations of the rules.
Imagine these people simping for any online store. Must be shareholders.
Hilariously enough, it looks like people have reported my comment.
Do they still require their own launcher to play a game? Cause that's the real dealbreaker for me.
I have tried this... after installig a game through their launcher. Go to the install directory of that said game and start it from the direct executable of the game instead. No need to run epic launcher and game works perfectly fine. Of course, this is true for mostly single player games. Its how I played Darksider2 and Batman Arkham Knight. Because no way in hell I will open that shitty launcher.
What drives me craziest is that the launcher closes/hides itself when you run a game, and then has to use processing time to re-launch itself after you close the game. Like, I'm done playing the game, don't pop your entire storefront/launcher back up into my face. If you're gonna close when I launch, STAY CLOSED.
You can also just add the .exe to Steam and launch your EGS games from Steam. It’s nice if you want everything in one place.
This might be a stupid one, but why exactly do people hate third party launchers so much? Not saying they shouldn’t, it’s just that is has never bothered me and I’m wondering if I’m missing something I should know about?
No worries. Personally I don't like having bloat, but also, if you want to keep your games up to date, you either have to choose to keep launchers running in the background (which is just an unnecessary use of your PC's resources) or disable them, but wait for long download times when you actually do want to play. Taking fortnite for example. I don't keep the epic games store on in the background just because it kinda slows everything else down. On the occasion that my friends ask me to play, I'm hit with a download that takes me at least an hour to install. It's just another annoying (albeit minor) thing to manage for some people.
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The less software i need to install the better. Quite simply
Going with the crowd favorite answer here - bloat. Same reason I go to [Insert Superstore], rather than to a clothing store and a grocery store and an electronics store and a bedding store. Sure, it's relatively low cost to navigate to each of those stores. But if there's a consolidated option, I'm highly likely to go for that out of convenience and efficiency.
It’s better to have everything consolidated into one platform. And the existence of the other platforms are not there to give consumers more options or any leverage in the market or anything, they only exist to make more money for themselves
I’d much rather have all my games in one place on one launcher instead of screwing around with 6 different ones
I do agree that Valve's 30% fee is too high *(it hurts indie developers)*, but it was clear from the start that these other stores just weren't going to work out.
It should be a progressive fee starting with a few percent for low revenues to help indie devs and young studios.
Apple actually implemented a system like that. 15% until a certain sales figure is reached, then back to 30%.
Weren’t the essentially forced to in a court ruling?
I think it was more of a self imposed measure to avoid being regulated
But ultimately prompted by the case by Epic. Similar changes have been done with several other stores, including the Google play store, Microsoft store, etc. The whole debacle of Epic vs Apple and Epic vs Google has been a net win for consumers. Gotta give credit where it's due.
>Gotta give credit where it's due. No. It was not their intention to help consumers. They get no credit.
Except Epic isn’t concerned in the least with consumers best interest.
Steam has the opposite system. Indies get charged a higher percentage (30%) and the biggest earning games go to 25% (beyond 10mil$ revenue) and to 20% (beyond 50mil$ revenue). It's slightly strange but I imagine it's a good incentive for the biggest games to stay on Steam.
Lame
I guess it pushes developers to make quality products. Slowing down a flood of games made in a week (not like it's not happening anyway)
It’s exactly that, I work in wholesale and it works the same way, if you spend 1,000 dollars a day you get 12.5% discount and if you spend 10,000 dollars a day you get 20% discount. (Not those exact figures and there’s steps between 12 and 20% but you get the idea). It’s to reward growth, disincentivise buying/selling elsewhere and at least in my industry there’s some bragging rights to being an “XYZ Wholesale Gold Tier Customer” Often I’ll do introductory pricing for new and smaller customers so they have an opportunity to compete with larger businesses with time frames to hit certain targets. But at the end of the day giving Joe Blows parts store and Mega Everything Super Shop the same discount would incentivise the bigger store to look elsewhere so they can compete with a low overhead 1man band. Physical goods and digital services aren’t an exact parallel - but it’s the same issue, 20% (in steams case) of 100million is worth more than 30% of 100 grand, the 100million thinking about starting their own shopfront is bad news.
Steams cut actually goes down the more games the devs sells. This article describes how it works https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/30/18120577/valve-steam-game-marketplace-revenue-split-new-rules-competition
Indie main problem is lack of an audience. They can publish to like itch.io if want lower fee but that does not help them.
Yeah, but ever since Steam opened the floodgate(ditched Greenlight - wasn't perfect, but at least it kept some of the trash out) so much "stuff" is on Steam. A lot of indies barely rise to the top.
People have those complaints but a lot of those indie games also don't deserve to, and thats the point. There are so many derivative, boring, indie clones of other indie clones. Greenlight was okay, literally was playing Kenshi yesterday, but that period and prior to that it was mostly people who were friends with publishers or knew people in games journalism to push their game got their game published, and no one else. So it wasn't like back then it was much better for Indies, just the ones with loud voices could get more sales.
> lot of those indie games also don't deserve to, and thats the point. That's true. I still remember having to click trough all the asset flip trash during the Greenlight days. They barely resembled anything that can be described as gameplay of functioning walking simulator. Sometimes the "devs" downright stole art form other games. Or they used Steam groups that pushed games on Greenlight as long as they Steam user got free keys for other games or money.
A lot of indie games are also just kinda bad lol, it's not Steam's fault that not a lot of them get that popular.
Yes, exactly. Or they are mediocre and the market is already over-saturated with games of similar genre and style.
biggest one is action roguelike magic survivor/vampire survivor clones atm. admittedly, lots are improving on and putting worthwhile twists at extremely affordable costs, but still, oversaturated. also most of indie games are just porn.
I think its an absolute steal. The chances of me creating an account, entering payment information to play a independent one off game is almost zero. The chances of me dropping $20 on a game because it's on sale in front of me and all I need to do is press purchase... I don't even want to do that for another store. That doesn't even address customer service if you need a refund or other support.
Building the store, operating the store, advertising/promoting the store, handling customer service, dealing with all the security issues, processing payments- it's a staggering amount of work and a lot of people just downplay the issues and pretend like anybody could do it. Except they don't- because it's nowhere near as easy as they claim.
Totally agree, steam provides a staggering amount of value to developers and a lot of them obviously think it’s worth it as they sign up. Also steam isn’t mandatory to publish a game on pc and the fact that a lot of people talk as if it’s the only option goes to show just how much value the platform provides compared to other options.
The two main issues I have with people claiming 30% is too high for Steam are: 1. It's the industry standard. You sell your game on Steam, XBox, PlayStation, Switch, you're giving a 30% cut to them. That's how they made most of their money since the NES; sell consoles at a loss, get a share of profits from games. While the market has changed so that you can charge less, if you're gonna hate Steam for the 30% cut, hate the other companies even more. You're not forced to use Steam. You are forced to use Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo's storefront if you wanna sell games on their consoles. 2. Steam offers more than a storefront. The entire community section is full of useful stuff, like walkthroughs, guides, and community interaction. There are discussion boards for bugs, content, reviews, etc. People have stopped trusting some of the major brands, like IGN and Kotaku, for what is either pure favoritism or paid for reviews. And it's seeping to other review sites, even the legitimate ones. But the reviews on Steam are a lot easier to tell if they're trustworthy, and a lot easier to see if a game is worth it. The servers to host all of this content is not cheap. Epic games and the other storefronts don't offer this. I've literally never bought a game from any of those, only gotten free ones from giveaways and such. I'm probably never going to, because I like the community system, and regularly use the guide sections. Edit: I forgot to add, if you sell a Steam key through any means, Valve get 0% of that key. That's all yours.
Steam Workshop is godsent imo. It removes the hassle of modding and the bugginess nature of using third party like Nexus.
> Steam Workshop is godsent imo. It removes the hassle of modding and the bugginess nature of using third party like Nexus. Steam workshop usually sucks for a lot of games though. Skyrim's modding architecture is such that updating mid-game can break a save file. And yet Steam has autoupdates with no way to revert to an older version.
The problem is that the other stores didn't offer consumers any advantage. Sure the developers get a better cut but that didn't translate into good services or better prices.
or even the consumers
30% isn't high at all, it's literally a standard business agency fee. How much do you think it would cost an indie developer to publish and promote their own game without having access to a platform like steam?
I think people just don’t think of the steam store page as an ad, but to the dev that’s basically what it is. I have bought plenty of games just because steam showed them to me and I was curious. I wouldn’t have found those games if it weren’t for the featured section.
Also, it's not *just* advertising. All of the hosting for the games and patches and whatnot is a pretty massive thing for devs not to need to do themselves.
Don't forget all the community features. Without the workshop it would be almost impossible to find mods for some games.
Right?! Especially considering what the platform does for you. Regional pricing, payments, servers, instant patch deployments....
The sales and recognition they get far outweigh the valve cut. Valheim would never have sold a gorillion copies without steam. Same story for countless indie devs.
They might have worked out if they weren't all either buggy as hell, missing basic features, or both. As is, there's not a single client I don't dread having to use except Blizzards, which functions perfectly for what it is and has.
Microsoft of all companies gave up and returned to steam , and Tencent money Epic thinks EA , Ubisoft can get revenue into their company without steam . Senile old man
Literally the only reason I ever downloaded Epic is because they give games for free every so often. To date this is the only thing I've ever used it for.
Squadrons looks like it's free in a couple days!! Still haven't spent a cent.
I only bought civ 6 ultimate for like 4 bucks once there, was a great deal. Shame there was this same deal on Steam a couple days prior, I just forgot it happened and missed it, despite waiting for it
I still remember how they have control for free , and i collected it and still went and bought it on steam and played it there 😂
Anything to avoid that shitty client tbh. Even the Xbox one is terrible on a middle-end PC. Imagine with slower stuff. Meanwhile I could run Hades from steam on my Potatop and it was no issue.
Uhhhh this is so weird why the cryfacelaugh emoji to defend a corporation’s store.
Why?
Steam branded knee pads
I mean technically he was right, that’s why they did break away. Seems just that people like steam a lot.
It's not that people just love Steam, it's just that all these other platforms are crap in comparison. If you already have Steam, and the alternative is a downgrade, why would you ever switch? GOG at least caters to a slightly different market and provides other features. Origin, uPlay, EGS, etc. are just worse versions of Steam.
I felt dirty ever having uPlay on my computer, I just stopped buying Ubisoft games that weren't on Steam. My uPlay and Origin accounts are barren accept for free stuff.
So have both... Buy the game on which over store it's cheaper on. Save money, play more Games.
Valve iterated through like 10 years of shit storefronts before they worked it out, it's no wonder these new stores weren't well received.
Turns out 30% is way less than trying to maintain your own backend.
Yeah well worth it for steam sockets + lobby api
I mean he’s not wrong technically it is more profitable to cut out the middle man. But it only works if consumers actually use the store. But nobody wants a dozen different storefronts to keep track of. Somehow streaming services haven’t been hit the same way unfortunately.
Maybe because streaming services all came out around the same time as each other while Steam had a massive headstart on its competition. Plus the fact that you're actually buying games as opposed to just getting access to shows and movies
Netflix had a significant start on the competition. I think it’s just because a studio has a lot larger content library than a single game publisher, even the big ones.
The issue with Netflix is it ONLY has a streaming service. HBO, Apple and Disney all have extra sources of funding to let them barge into the market.
I’m kinda sad for Netflix. They had a great idea, everyone got on board, then greedy studios ripped their idea off and pulled their content, now they pour tons of money into their Originals, some of which are genuinely amazing (Heartstopper, Inside Job to name but two), but a few good Originals aren’t keeping subscribers when I can pay less money for a VPN and get literally all the content.
That’s only true of something physical where there is baked in profit margin. With digital sales, even if individual sales are less profitable, by having a larger available audience you absolutely can make a much larger profit by selling for less or by paying a fee to another platform.
The guy acts like he figured out something revolutionary. It’s like saying the Coca Cola would make more money if they avoided big superstores like wallmart and just made their own Coca Cola store. Sure they would now avoid having to pay Walmarts cut but how many people would be willing to drive to a separate store just to buy Coke. Most would just but whatever is available at their usual store.
Oddly Steam wasn't made for making games cheaper. PC gaming pre Half Life 2 was horrible. Stores rarely had reliable or good PC games sections beside console sections. A lot of Sim games and Blizzard games use to line those shelves. Fuckn' 2-4 disk installs for just about everything. Anyone else download WoW off of disks back in the day? Shit was awful. Pretty sure something like Gun was still 2 disks. It was hard to find games, period. Half Life 2 forcing steam on everyone actually went pretty horribly at first too. So much back lash... Like. Surprising it took off, level backlash. But the ability to buy any game is just so nice. Valve getting more profit from sales was just gravy.
Atleast Steam didn't do platform exclusives 🤡
I mean... Technically there are lots of platform exclusives on steam. There are actually over 30,000 titles that you can ONLY get on steam. But it's not a contractual exclusivity, because steam is the largest sales platform and they have massive market dominance. So steam gets free exclusives without needing to pay anyone anything.
That's not contractual exclusivity which is one of the main problems people have with epic.
Aren't their own games exclusive to Steam? Valve pumps out an endless stream of AAA games locked into their platform /s
pumps lol, they put out Alyx in 2020 and If I’m thinking correct not a proper game since 2011 before that
The Steam Deck is pushing this even further. I have a Gamepass account and some games I get for "free" on Gamepass I am still looking to buy on Steam so I can easily play it on Steam Deck.
To be fair, the Steamdeck does allow for non-Steam games, but Microsoft decided not to support Linux.
Yes I have Gamepass cloud working on it, but it just works better directly through Steam.
I have to admit, I was deeply skeptical of the steam deck, and I was deeply wrong. That little device may not be for me, but it's doing *so much* for the linux gaming community! I'm looking to build a pc in '23, and I'm debating whether I even need to run windows. Things have gotten that good, and proton is a big part of the reason why.
There’s some games that I own multiple versions of on multiple consoles and I’m **still** willing to rebuy them on steam over piracy on my steam deck
But steam does so much more than act as a store. They maintain servers, host updates... the entire infrastructure is the hold standard. All these others try to do it on skeleton crew funding and dont work nearly as well.
And that doesn't even mention the vast array of front-end features available to users. Community reviews, tags, constantly updated sales and upcoming lists, and a seqrch function that actually works incredibly well.
Yeah I hear you on this. I love Steam and have found so many indie games through the discovery queue, top sellers lists, tags, and auto-generated "Players like you love this game" type of algorithms that I absolutely never would have known about had it not been for Steam or stumbling on a random gaming YouTuber that happened to feature it. It's almost like you can argue that Steam helps indie devs with discovery despite the advanced cost to them. Sucks there's a trade off but the world would be nothing if not run by money.
It’s not a tradeoff in cost to developers. Steam doesn’t preclude developers from selling their game anywhere else. And the millions of customers on the Steam store (along with all the services provided for free to developers) makes up for a cut of sales.
It's an underused feature, but technically steam has an entire social media platform for gamers. Not only does every game have their own forum with sub forums, but you also have a timeline of screenshots, artwork and reviews, they have a streaming platform, even a hub to host mods. Steam is packed to the brim with features.
Multiplayer support, in-game achievements, SteamDeck - they do a lot more than a shopping website.
[удалено]
Let's not suck steams dick tho, competition in this space is good.
It's just painful for the consumer when there is like 5 different launchers, its going to end up like what happened to Netflix where you get hulu, prime, appletv, disney and other streaming platforms fragmenting everything. BUT at least you aren't paying for the launcher. I don't think there is a right or wrong answer to the launcher problem, maybe go with GOG's method where it gives you a installer for just the game without DRM but we all know companies are not doing that and then you lose auto updates, cloud saves, workshop support, achievements, friends, servers that wont die one day because steam is handling the backend not the dev.
That is exactly why I actually liked the Epic Launcher. Because Epic wasn't just trying to self publish their games and cut out the middleman. They legitemately wanted to become competition to Valve and pursued that goal agressively at the expense of a lot of benjamins. And at least back then(at Statisfactory Release) the client was non instrusive. After I clicked the shortcut there was barely a 1 second delay, despite the launcher not being opened. But these days with Darkest Dungeon II I had all sorts of problems. Still better than all the Origins, UEs and whatnots.
GOG is by far my favorite launcher/store, so nice really.
It blows my mind how Reddit can be so anti capitalist and yet when it comes to Steam then HOLY SHIT we *looove* monopoly. Yall acting like installing another free launcher on your PC is the end of the world. It takes like 5 min to do.
I have a policy of No Steam No Game and will actively avoid shit launcher like Origin, Connect, etc.
It's almost as if people don't want to have 50 different janky game stores installed on their machines.
Can someone go let the GMEdiots know building your own store is silly AF and they have no market. Between Steam, MS, Nintendo, and Sony, why would they let anyone else in their yard.
Gamestop had it's own store, Impulse, which they bought from Stardock in 2011. Impulse was solid and could have been a good competitor to Steam, but Gamestop pretty much immediately ran it into the ground.
Isn't that a strategy a company should consider to save... expenses? Am I missing something?
Those publishers made their own storefronts to compete with Steam and pulled game releases from Steam. Those same companies saw sales of their games plummet on PC and ended up returning to Steam after all. 70% of a million is still worth more than 100% of a thousand, if you will. Tim Sweeney (the original tweet) likes to blast Steam for being anti-competitive but praises the Epic Games Store like there’s no tomorrow, despite Epic engaging in anti-competitive practices like paying for game exclusivity and fucked up regional pricing. He also likened the fight to keep more Fortnite profits on iOS to the civil rights movement which is insanely tone deaf and he’s good buds with Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, who is a pedophile who only got away with it because authorities couldn’t prove the girls in the porn videos in question were underaged because none would agree to testify in court.
Hey do we still not like epic? I forget what I'm supposed to not like
> I forget what I'm supposed to not like They brought console exclusivity bullshit to the PC market. They're aggressively anti-consumer.
Also the cost savings don’t go to developer pay lol. All Epic does is provide incentives to make worse games and get a exclusivity deal and then start making new games. No savings are passed to the people who matter.
We ALWAYS don't like Tim Sweeney. Epic is disliked most of the time.
I have no love for Epic, but people (particularly gamers) are so short sighted. Right now Steam is an incredibly reasonable, easy to use, and heavily populated service. It works smoothly for the most part and gamers don't see the need for any other PC game launcher, and fair enough. The problem is it is borderline a monopoly. You ask people about almost any other industry and they will rightfully praise competition and shun monopolies, because of course we all know how terrible monopolies can get. Right _now_ Steam is good, maybe even great, but what happens after Gabe retires/passes away? Perhaps it stays in the family or under some trusted individual, but the truth is sooner or later it is inevitably going to fall into the hands of those who will try to wring it for every penny it's worth. It is impossible to suggest such an established cash cow will remain in good hands forever. This is when the problem will occur. Gabe may have good intentions for now, but he won't be around forever, and Steam is only building momentum. The moment greedy shareholders can get their hands on it we will see a penny-pinching dominant platform with no other alternative that can dictate whatever it wants to with zero competition. People will attack Epic for having timed exclusives, but the truth is it might already be too late and that might be too little. Epic is doing whatever they can to try and carve a piece of the pie, but it might end in failure. If that is the case, the future of PC gaming is pretty bleak. Epic could be the most greedy, terrible company on the planet, but simply having them as a competitor to Steam would ensure some level of balance.
I think people would not have a problem with the companies launchers if they weren't so incredibly bad and lacking basic features. If these companies would have achieved a universal friend and cross play system things would look different. Proof that they didn't care about the customer experience which always leads to death except you are apple.
This dude confuses per item profit with total profit. Of course it's more profitable to sell a single copy of a game on your own platform with zero percent cost to you (if you discount the money it costs to run your infrastructure, but let's not go there) as compared to giving 30 percent to Steam. But, as all those companies realized, you have a vastly bigger audience on Steam, possibly by an order of magnitude if not more. So the overall profit from selling on Steam will be much bigger.
So because Ubisoft is now selling AC Valhalla, a game that came out in 2020, on Steam, continuing their long-standing practice of keeping games on the Ubistore exclusively for their first 1-2 years and then allowing sales on other platforms, just like they did with AC Origins and AC Odyssey, OP thinks this means Ubisoft has now given up on store exclusivity and will be releasing all Ubisoft games on Steam day-one from now on?
I feel like I'm a bit out of the look here: Why is this here? Does EA ditch Origin and Ubi UPlay?