Epic bought rocket league and promptly tanked it in favor of their stupid fortniteverse. Maybe steam keeps winning because they’re not actively screwing over their customers.
Or Pheonix Point, where Epic bought an kickstarter game that was funded under the promise of releasing on Steam, GOG and potentially other stores and promptly made it exclusive - and this was in the early days when their launcher/store was in a much worse state too.
I know everyone loves Valve, but it feels super weird to be celebrating a monopoly so much and so ferociously. (I know Steam isn’t a technical monopoly. We don’t need to have that discussion)
Gaben is old, and he’s gonna retire. It’ll likely be a lot sooner than anyone here is comfortable with. When Valve gets sold, or even when gaben isn’t in total control anymore, things are going to start changing, and there isn’t going to be a healthy, diverse marketplace to soften that.
There is a very good chance that the PC platform will be a really horrible place because of the lack of consumer choice in which they can purchase and play games.
Steams biggest competition isn’t another launcher, it’s piracy. Gabe is wise enough to know that, if the next guy to take over is a chode they’ll learn the hard way.
Last year, I pointed out how many big publishers came crawlin’ back to Steam after trying their own things: EA, Activision, Microsoft. This year, for the first time ever, two Blizzard games released on Steam: Overwatch and Diablo 4.
Why is it so hard for companies to build a game launcher that doesn’t suck? Is it just a lowest bidder situation?
I think it’s just priorities, those other companies weren’t interested in making a launcher, they were interested in tying their customers into their eco system.
Steam started out like that in appearance at least, nobody really wanted it and it was kind of forced on you if you wanted to play HL2 but since Valve seemed to understand the value in a platform like steam and actually work at making it good it became pretty good.
At this point it’s actually kind of hard to fully appreciate how much work has gone into steam. Not just the basic stuff like chat and forums and a store with a functioning search, or the banal stuff like inventories and trading cards and points I still don’t understand, but also the stuff most people don’t see like all the stuff for developers launching a game on steam and managing sales and keys and betas. Not to mention all the experiments they’ve done along the way to try and figure out what the best way forward is.
Steam is kind of a huge undertaking and unless a company is really invested in competing with it they’re simply not going to be able to.
IMO my favorite launcher to use out of all is probably Battle.net, even over Steam. This is probably mostly because Steam is terrible unresponsive and its startup is still kinda ass (I just tested the start and noticed its 3 fucking loading screens: Verifying installtion, Logging in and finally loading the page. All as separate windows).
If your goal was only to make a good launcher, it would be easy. If your goal is a lot of DRM shenanigans as if we were still in 1998, it’s really hard.
As always with the Crown Prosecution service in the UK they love to bully and make an example of Autistic people. Only added by corporation running the court system, The CPS' Prosecution barristers are known to enjoy a life of luxury and gifts from them but you cant touch any of it.
Following an assessment by a psychiatrist, however, the judge in the case determined that Kurtaj was unfit to stand trial, and so the jury was asked only to determine if he had actually committed the hacks, but not whether it was done with criminal intent.
He’s not talking about Larian, he’s talking aboutbthe actual D&D team at Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast. Hasbro got a new CEO last year and the way they’ve been operating certain business units like WotC has changed dramatically, coupled with massive layoffs across many Hasbro subsidiaries. All he’s saying is the DnD team at WotC now is completely different to the one that Larian knew as they developed BG3.
spoiler alert though, it’s literally everybody. because everyone else is doing it, it’s not possible to survive as a business in a competitive space without doing, for lack of a better word, the devil’s work. It will take a major social disruption to change this, but it won’t happen in an organized fashion because we as a species are pathetic. The disruption will be the end of the world - North America cracking down the middle due to all the fracking, the Greenland glacier sliding into the ocean all at a go, something like that. FAFO endgame shit, due any minute now anyway.
Thank you! The CEOs’ children need Maseratis, boarding school, college, jet fuel to pedo islands, and so many other necessities! We can’t let them suffer!
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