Remedy and Annapurna announce a strategic cooperation agreement on Control 2 and bringing Control and Alan Wake to film and television
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
Again, what do you do about your multiplayer games that your purchased on Steam if they decide to start charging money for the online services? They actually are stuck there, you can’t take them with you to another platform, you are dependent on their goodwill to be able to download them and there’s tons of people who got banned from Steam and that don’t have access to the games that they paid for anymore.
