re: this article.
The title is a joke. “Free, but you have to make an EGS account” is a bit too rich for me.
That’s not even a little bit what a monopoly is.
Which is obvious. Nobody is out there arguing that signing an exclusivity deal between a first party and a developer is somehow a monopolistic situation. Nobody has argued that in forty years of gaming exclusives and nobody has argued it in a century of television or music recording labels.
So the question becomes why argue it now, right? Why weren’t you mad when Ratchet & Clank could only be purchased an played on a PlayStation or Final Fantasy was only on a SNES? What overzealous, cult-like situation leads to a whole host of people going to bat for this ass-backwards concept on behalf of Steam? Who, I should add, have not argued this themselves or asked for this at all, although thanks to the power of lawsuits we do have a decent indication that they do approve of it.
One has to assume the cart is being put before the horse, given the timeline. People were bashing Ubisoft and EA’s previous competitors for less defined, more ambiguous reasons, and often no reason at all beyond brand loyalty. The whole “exclusives are bad now” argument happens to be the narrative that stuck with Epic specifically because it’s the one thing they’re doing that the previous ones weren’t.
So all of this has been a ton of typing to come back to the only statement this conversation ever needed:
Seeing the console wars play out on the basis of which DRM platform you want to put in your PC is wild.
Why weren’t you mad when Ratchet & Clank could only be purchased an played on a PlayStation or Final Fantasy was only on a SNES?
Why aren’t people angry that you can’t put diesel in a gasoline engine? Why aren’t you mad that a DVD can’t be played in a VHS? Why aren’t you mad that you can’t plug a computer hard drive into a switch and play Civilization?
Do you understand that there is a difference between “This is only compatible with certain hardware” and “You can only purchase this at one specific business”? Because you are once again arguing as if they are the same thing and I’ve already pointed this out to you, which means you are either completely disingenuous or an idiot. Either way this is a waste of time.
If there’s a third option I’m missing please let me know.
They are the same thing on the business side, absolutely. I mean, games are developed on PC anyway, so those are the same thing today for sure. I promise you there is a PC version of Bloodborne in a FromSoft computer somewhere, even though it’s stuck as a PS4 exclusive. Not because there is some mystery technical reason, but because somebody signed a deal to make it that way.
There has never been a technical reason a port of Ratchet & Clank or Uncharted couldn’t work on a PC (or a GameCube, previously), even when there was more porting work to be done, the game would have sold more than enough to make it worth the porting costs. Those games were stuck on their platforms because Insomniac and Naughty Dog had a business relationship with Sony. And then Sony said it was fine for them to be on Epic, Steam and GoG. And then they decided they wanted to have online authentication DRM, so they were only on Epic and Steam after that point.
Hell, if you go backwards, there was an uproar among Nintendo fanboys when Resident Evil 4 stopped being a Gamecube exclusive and showed up on PS2 (and then on everything else). And that, again, was not a technical issue, but a deal that was in place until it wasn’t. Because this conversation has been dumb both ways for a very long time.
The third option is you don’t understand how games are made or exclusivity deals signed and you’re only latching onto them as a backwards justification for your foregone conclusion because you want to root for Steam as a platform.
Which is the wild part.
The third option is you don’t understand how games are made
Right, the devs just need to change the code from “If_On_PC_Do_Not_Run” from TRUE to FALSE and it will work just fine. And I’m the one that doesn’t understand how games are made.
Looks like option #2 was the correct one.
