Remedy and Annapurna announce a strategic cooperation agreement on Control 2 and bringing Control and Alan Wake to film and television
We would never had an Alan Wake Remaster without Epic paying for it.
Dear PC gamers, please stop bitching about installing a second games launcher. If you wanted all games to only come out on a single launcher then you should have bought a console. Us console players are getting real sick of the endless bitching about Epic just because they tried to break Steam’s monopoly.
Noone is a fan of exclusives but Epic’s behaviour was explicitly to try and break Steam’s entrenched monopoly and they legitimately offer far more favourable terms for developers. They’ve also spent hundreds of millions of dollars to break other monopolies like Apple and Google’s. They are by no means the evil villains that PC Gamers make them out to be. The tactics they took with EGS were misguided but they’ve genuinely fought to level the playing field at the legislative level, they’re a full tier better than an EA or Ubisoft who only ever try and squeeze as much profit as possible at every turn.
They should have spent those millions to fund development of a store that can actually compete with the competition and studios that produce games, which they then can sell on their own platform.
Instead they snatched up every new release on the way to Steam while still not being able to provide the basic necessities of a modern PC store front.
So why should I bother purchasing something from them? They have nothing to offer and actively make it harder for me to play games through their store with their anti-Steam Deck stance.
I’m not saying you should, I’m saying it doesn’t make them villains or a bad company.
They made a mistake in their approach to the EGS, which they’ve pretty candidly talked about and admitted. But the end goal of EGS wasn’t just to make them more money, they offer every developer more money when they publish there. The underlying motivation for creating EGS in the first place was the recognition that Valve does not need to be taking a 30% cut of every game sale to provide the services they provide.
I’m happy that Remedy can afford to self publish and that Anna Purna is willing to finance the project without publishing it, but I don’t think Epic is a particularly bad publishing partner.
I’m not saying you should, I’m saying it doesn’t make them villains or a bad company.
But it does, paying third parties to not publish on your competitors platform is the oldest anti-competitive behaviour in the book.
It would have been completely fine if they started out with actually funding development of new games and only releasing them on their store.
I would have even given them some slack for their bad launcher since they were new to this.
Instead we are here, almost 6 years later. Their launcher is still trash, their exclusive deals were a complete money sink, EGS is still not profitable, they burned all bridges to Valve and are not one step closer to their claim that 30% is too much and they can do it with 8% 12%.
Yet consumers get more value from Steam as a platform where that 30% cut has helped fund a powerful gaming platform, remote game streaming, driven developers to release builds for macOS and Linux and license users for all platforms with a single purchase, an open source handheld gaming device, an input library that enables practically any input device to be used and for controls to be remapped even if the game doesn’t support it, the best VR headsets and room-scale VR, popularising VR and making it mainstream, contributing to upstream to further gaming on Linux, enabling DirectX games to execute natively on Linux, several of the most popular multiplayer games on the internet, enticed PlayStation to release games on PC, putting indie developers on a level playing field with the biggest studios, enabling developers to release games mid development to help them self fund the game’s development, support the modding scene, and so much more.
Epic may charge developers less but that doesn’t offer me, a consumer, any extra value.
Instead their platform and its lack of investment and innovation make the purchases I have made in their store feel less valuable and cumbersome as their competition increase the value of their offerings.
I’m not saying they’re the bad guys but the argument that developers get more money doesn’t really matter if that 30% cut is felt justified to consumers.
And with the upcoming untethered VR offering from Valve on the horizon, which will no doubt be powered by open source with their improvements upstreamed, that 30% cut feels even more justified when Linux becomes fully capable of VR thanks to my purchases.
I’m not saying you should, I’m saying it doesn’t make them villains or a bad company.
I think it does. Instead of competing they chose to try and force customers to use their platform by buying exclusivity that specifically targets Steam. From the perspective of the customer they took the worst possible approach and, along with how Sweeney has talked about people like us, treated customers like a cattle to be herded, as if we couldn’t think for ourselves and would throw ourselves into EGS if our games went there.
But the end goal of EGS wasn’t just to make them more money, they offer every developer more money when they publish there.
That is the PR they sold that the money goes into the hands of the developer. That is true only if the developer is also self publishing. Actually that extra money goes into the hands of the publisher and then it’s up to the publisher to decide if the developers get any more money. And once again, from the customers perspective, we barely get anything out of that goal. Games don’t get cheaper for us, we don’t really get more games because of it. The publishers simply get more money per sale. They don’t even get more money (except for the exclusivity money that Epic threw their way) because you sell significantly more copies on Steam because unlike Epic Steam doesn’t treat its customers like cattle.
The underlying motivation for creating EGS in the first place was the recognition that Valve does not need to be taking a 30% cut of every game sale to provide the services they provide.
So to prove that Valve doesn’t need to take a higher cut they make a store where they take fraction of the cut Steam would take but also offer a fraction of the services Steam offers? I think that would be an argument if they offered at least half of what Steam offers but they don’t even do that. They made a barebones store for a barebones cut, that doesn’t show anything.
Naive to think epic is offering a lower cut for altruistic reasons as opposed to it being the only method they could think of to try to convince devs to sell there. And that they wouldn’t jack up the rate once they corned the market given how their how strategy has been more reminiscent of Walmart approach of pricing lowering to gain market share. Biggest sign is that the store isn’t even profitable much like how lot of services these days aren’t profitable and burn money then jack up prices and offer less once they corner the market. Hell even Microsoft Store has offered low rates of 12% because few want to use it. Going to argue Microsoft is nice too now? Not falling for it Tim.
Anyways existing doesn’t entitle you to money. Make something people actually want to use and don’t piss off your potential consumer base from the get go.
Dear PC gamers, please stop bitching about installing a second games launcher
No.
Don’t force me to install a garbage dump that runs like shit and isn’t even close to feature complete to play a game.
Or do and I won’t pay, either way works lol.
Edit:
Noone is a fan of exclusives but Epic’s behaviour was explicitly to try and break Steam’s entrenched monopoly and they legitimately offer far more favourable terms for developers.
What a surprise, an epic defender that thinks that monopoly means store do good. There are plenty of competition against steams store, they just don’t get market share because they’re not feature complete or they just suck.
Or both in epic’s case.
That’s like saying that Walmart doesn’t have a monopoly in your little town because there’s this one other store that stays open even though most clients don’t go anymore.
Hell, the first sign that a monopoly exist is that independents that said they wouldn’t deal with the company with the monopoly start to do it because they realise that their sales aren’t up to par because customers won’t buy from them unless their product is available in the bigger store.
https://www.polygon.com/23799285/blizzard-pc-games-steam-overwatch-2-release-date
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/21/23471589/ubisoft-return-steam-2022-assassins-creed-valhalla
It’s not that people didn’t want to play their games (otherwise they wouldn’t sell on Steam either), it’s that people didn’t want to play them unless they were available on a specific launcher and that means Steam is in a monopolistic position.
Lol, your two examples are from companies that have their own shitty launchers that customers hated using because they aren’t very good. That’s a service issue entirely on them, steams MoNoPoLy is a lazy excuse to paper over that glaring fact.
Again, store do good isn’t a monopoly. Steam isn’t a monopoly just because every other competitor doesn’t know what customers want or don’t care because it’s expensive. And you’re kinda proving my point. There are tons of competing stores out there to use, but people don’t use them nearly as much because they suck or they’re not feature complete. Both Blizzard and Ubisoft have their own competing stores, but neither can get market share because they refuse to offer features that customers want. Epic has the same problem.
Steam’s MoNoPolY is 100% a lack of services and features from the competition, and that’s what keeps people coming back to the environment. This isn’t Walmart undercutting sales to drive competitors out of the market, this is smaller hobby stores mad they can’t slap their customers and be entitled to the business the big player has.
Dear PC gamers, please stop bitching about installing a second games launcher.
I’m neither bitching nor installing that shit. I take every freebie, but never install anything other than through Steam, just let 'em pile up. I’m actually not bothered by exclusivity at all, I only exceedingly rarely pay for games before they’re 75% off a few years down the line. Stuff like Synthetik 2 or Shapez 2, where I know what I’m getting and it’s a small team with an uncompromising vision.
Epic’s behaviour was explicitly to try and break Steam’s entrenched monopoly
Steam doesn’t have monopoly on anything, they just have superior service that people prefer, but there’s quite a few stores / launchers. I like Epic’s engine, but their launcher is still crap five years down the line.
You can have a monopoly without abusing it, you’re still in a monopolistic position and in a position where you can start abusing it and people are left without an alternative.
All your games are on Steam and stuck there, tomorrow they decide to start charging users a monthly fee for online services, what then? You purchased multiplayer games telling yourself the purchase price was all you would need to pay but now you need to pay every month to play those games all because Valve can do whatever they want since they don’t have any real competition.
So yes, monopolies are a problem because they open the door to abuse even if it doesn’t happen at the moment.
All your games are on Steam and stuck there
No, that’s the point, I have tons of ubishit and hundreds of Sweeney’s freebies, some on gog, origin or whatever they’re calling it these days, all over the place. What monopoly? I mean they sold me a linux pc in a gamepad that’s fully fledged arch only Valve is maintaining it for me, drivers work with no fiddling or deep lore research. But I can do whatever with it, it’s a personal computer. They didn’t try locking it in any way. Remarkably monopolistic
yawn
If it’s not on Steam or GoG I pirate. Console children should go touch grass or go to school so they understand something other than defending multi-billion dollar megacorps.
Quick google says epic has 13000+ employee while Valve has only 300+, and yet they can’t build a legitimate competitor and have to resort to exclusivity deal to force people onto their platform which is totally anti consumer.
Also for the record console players whine endlessly about Xbox/PS exclusive games, so don’t act like this is some weird thing that PC gamers do.
I can agree that challenging Steam is probably a good thing, but right now Steam just gives so much more value to Devs and publishers. Steam provides:
- a review system
- remote play
- the workshop
- discussion threads
- cards and the points store
and that’s just what I can think of, not including the player specific stuff like library sharing.
Devs and publishers pay more, but get a community and ecosystem in return instead of just a platform.
Reviews > Also available from websites that don’t have a financial incentive to show good reviews
Remote play > Good example
Workshop > Also available elsewhere
Forums > Also available elsewhere on platforms that don’t have a financial incentive to censor criticism
Cards and points stores > Bloat
Yeah, but think about how much money Valve has taken, 30% of virtually every single PC game sale over the past 21 years.
I do understand that there’s more value provided, but that’s the thing with monopolies, they can still provide more value than upstarts because an upstart has to build everything they did, while having none of the market share that they had to do it with.
