re: this article.
The title is a joke. “Free, but you have to make an EGS account” is a bit too rich for me.
Not on Steam? No direct release? Steam released, but with a bunch of bolt on EULAs/Denuvo/3rd party launchers?
The seas will provide.
i don’t get the “steam good, other launchers bad”. it’s still a launcher and drm…
Ever other platform is just ass. I have played games on Epic, Battlenet, Ubisoft and the EA launcher but they all barely have basic functionality. Meanwhile steam has:
- good UI (store & settings)
- no forced ads
- reviews
- discussions
- workshop
- player stats
- a lot more settlings / options
Steam seems to be the only one that actually puts any effort in providing a good user experience. It’s more than just a store / launcher and noone else is even trying to compete.
Don’t forget non-profitable free-to-use features such as:
- Steam Link
- Cloud storage for saves and screenshots
- Over the internet couch co-op (I don’t remember the name.
And there’s probably more that I’m forgetting. These things cost Valve money to make and maintain. Only a small portion of users actually use these features and yet it’s not locked behind some subscription or whatever and instead can be used by all users of the platform.
What do you mean “no forced ads”? It throws up a separate window with store sales every launch?
Steam’s DRM is not mandatory to release a game on Steam. Its there in fact to provide a necessary lesser evil than to encourage every developer/publisher to produce their own. They still unfortunately do, which Steam at least warns customers about, but them providing their own minimal DRM is a good thing, given the context.
(That said, I still respect gog)
Valve does not discourage third party DRM at all. I wanna say there are dev FAQs where they actively encourage it, in fact. Let me look for the quote…
…Here we go. They straight up point out that their DRM isn’t enough and recommend making GaaS games and leaning into their platform features to make pirate copies and non-DRMd copies not work or work worse. And they support third party DRM explicitly.
I don’t see how this is consistent with discouraging DRM use. People project a lot on the go-to defenses for this particular argument, and it’s weird.
The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy (i.e. copying all game files to another computer) and has some obfuscation, but it is easily removed by a motivated attacker.
We suggest enhancing the value of legitimate copies of your game by using Steamworks features which won’t work on non-legitimate copies (e.g. online multiplayer, achievements, leaderboards, trading cards, etc.).
The Steam wrapper can and should be used in combination with other DRM solutions. To do so, apply the Steam wrapper in compatibility mode first before applying any other DRM. Apply it first so that it does not interfere with the DRM solution. Compatibility mode will disable DRM capabilities of the wrapper.
The DRM is optional for use by the devs. Rimworld is one game I know doesn’t use it, you can just zip the entire thing up and put it somewhere else and it’ll run fine. It’s still a launcher. But the only better alternative to a launcher is plain installers to download and hold onto like GOG provides as an alternative to its Galaxy launcher.
Steam is good mostly because the competition is unbelievably incompetent. I cannot see a single good reason for EGS to be a fucking Unreal app, for starters, and a couple of reasons that it shouldn’t (the store is just web pages, the text rendering sometimes gets blurry, it uses too many computer resources to run).
Even GOG, which I always shill for, has some pretty dumb faults, like how it lists different editions of the same game, like a base/deluxe/platinum, as completely different: if you own the platinum version, you might still see the base game on the store page without the “Owned” sticker; more than once I added a game to the cart only to double check and realize that I already owned it. This also happens to games that GOG sells in bundles.
To be fair, “it just works” and they haven’t tried to screw us over, which is almost unprecedented.
Man, I want whatever MiB forget beam they have at Valve. I remember plenty of “trying to screw us over”, starting with rolling out Steam in the first place.
Maybe you had to be there before all the Gaben memes and the digital distribution.
The thing is, the OP’s meme is right, all these arguments always devolve into bashing Valve in a reactionary manner… but man, it’s because the cultish memory holing gets so weird that it’s not about whether Epic is successful or good software or about any other store. Whether you want to or not you end up reality checking the Good Guy Valve myth.
Most games on steam have no drm. Once you’ve installed them, you can do whatever you want with them. Steam isn’t adding drm to everything. The number one best thing about steam is the social integration, the pure simplicity of being able to right click on a friend and hit join game to be able to play with them is amazing. Basically, steam makes things simpler, and other “launchers” are simply ad platforms forced in as a layer between you clicking play and the game opening.
i honestly believe the biggest part to this is steam having been around for a long time, and being a kind of the default video game store. people dont like being forced to get another launcher for a game, so whenever a game isnt on steam, they get mad at the whichever launcher its on.
i dont think there is very much critical thinking about drm, expoitative store platforms and capitalism going on.
I think if a Dev decided to only release their game on GoG because they prefer GoGs business practices there wouldn’t be a lot of complaints about it.
Fun fact:
The origin of the term “Stockholm Syndrome” comes from a hostage situation in which the police did not seem to care about the well being of the hostages and were actively taking actions that were dangerous to them, while the hostage takers started taking actions to protect the hostages from police.
Instead of running the story “police fucked up” news outlets exaggerated the behaviour of hostages that were just trying to survive.
