What’re you even talking about??? Epic takes a revenue share of every game made with unreal engine, plus Fortnite runs exclusively on mommy’s credit card and is still insanely huge. Even if the epic games store doesn’t take as big a cut of every sale, they’re held by daddy Tencent who’ll probably kick em some lunch money if they’re actually desperate.
This. They’ve been burning money trying to give games away for free to entice people to their platform. It’s quite possible they have a cash flow problem. That they just layed off 900 people definitely supports this idea.
I doubt it. Fortnite alone probably covers all of those free games and then some, it’s an insane cash cow. Add to that Unreal Engine revenue and they’re not hurting at all for money.
Layoffs just means they probably finished the bulk of UE5 dev and are seeing softening revenues with the COVID spike being over, so they don’t have as much demand to get that and related projects done sooner. Amazon and other big tech firms have done similar layoffs, and it’s not because they’re losing money, but because they’re seeing an end to the crazy growth in the gaming industry due to COVID-19 demand changes.
So no, I really don’t think Epic is hurting for money, they’re just cutting costs to improve margins now that revenue is likely falling.
Epic Games is a privately owned company, thus we don’t know their financial state. We don’t know which debts they have and what ventures they have undertaken over the last few years. They might have huge debts and Fortnite might not be enough.
Sure, it’s possible, but I think unlikely. This sounds like the normal BS reasons companies give when their investors want better margins. I’m guessing Tencent isn’t happy with profit margins and wants a better short term return for their stake.
But you’re right, it’s all speculation at this point.
Steam’s de-facto monopoly is so strong, Epic can’t break it. Epic made four billion dollars per year on one game. Epic licenses the engine for like half of all noteworthy games. Epic has the only platform not seizing one-third of all revenue from developers, and that platform throws free shit at customers in constant desperation. And they still can’t move the needle.
Monopoly doesn’t mean there’s zero competition. It means the competition does not matter.
PC gamers have alternatives to Steam the way that Android users have alternatives to Google Play. Yes, there are dozens. And that’s how many users each one has.
If it’s even possible it would take years or decades of work building up good will. It’s kinda Valve’s game to lose right now. They just need to not make any enormous mistakes and they win by default. Fortunately for Valve, they seem to be one of the few companies in game dev that isn’t managed exclusively by misanthropes and buffoons.
Would it though? Being a competitor to Valve, not sucking, and not pulling shady anti-consumer shit would result in immediate good will for a decently large (though disproportionately loud) section of the market. Hell, EGS failed at the 2nd and 3rd thjngs in that list and they still got a loyal fanbase
Epic can't make a dent because their product is dogshit.
Customers don't care that Valve takes a well earned cut (that only applies buying directly from Steam); they care that their games are on a platform that's actually fucking useful. If Epic didn't insult gamers shipping that piece of trash and had put work into actually providing a product that could possibly be considered acceptable, they might have been able to make a dent.
You're not going to take market share with shitty gimmicks if your actual product is a crime against humanity no one wants.
For starters, they put so little developments money into EGS that they went two years without a shopping cart, a feature that effectively every other online store has and could be custom coded properly in a day
And every one of them comes back because paying Steam 30% is by far the most profitable way to do business. They absolutely deserve every single penny of it.
30% commission on an all margin product is not even sort of unusual or unfair.
The fact that using their services and paying them their cut is more profitable than not doing so absolutely, in and of itself, proves beyond discussion that their cut is fair.
Yes, sales should cost money. Moving units is a fucking massive value add. Valve deserves every penny they take and more. They're the best thing that ever happened to PC gaming and nothing else is remotely close.
Continued use only proves this is a way to make money. Probably the best available way. But to suggest that, so long as people are doing it, there cannot possibly be problems, is obvious crap.
Especially when you add “and more.” Oh: so this isn’t the exact right amount, as decreed by mighty god himself? We can talk about the middleman’s cut, so long as the rent goes up?
If your complaint is the money they take in exchange for sales, it's literally impossible for anything but the fact that paying them nets you significantly more money to be meaningful.
Valve built PC as a platform. If they never existed, you wouldn't get 10% of the PC sales. That absolutely means they're entitled to their share. Platform development is a massive value add, and useless jackasses trivializing their contribution by pretending that the massive development project of building a platform isn't every bit as important as single products on the platform can fuck right off.
Valve could take a lot less and it wouldn’t kill them. Or PC gaming. Wouldn’t be whatever frothing insult you pretend it is, either. It’s just… less money. They’d still make a shitload of money. Just… less.
The number can be smaller and the sky wouldn’t fall.
The number right now is obscenely high. It’s the most they think they can get away with. And they can only get away with it because of their de-facto monopoly, which should end.
Also key activations cost the dev zero on Steam. And the dev can generate keys for free to sell elsewhere. details here: partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
Weird because I provided actual services and functionality that steam provides in exchange for that cut, and your response was that me mentioning devs do have other options isn’t “understanding criticism”
Your response to criticism of Steam was ‘there’s other services.’
That does absolutely nothing to deflect from criticism of Steam.
Praising their various features comes a little closer, but still doesn’t justify taking an entire third of every game’s revenue. It takes a whole fucking lot of hypothetical work, which you imagine developers would have to do, to amount to the slice Steam takes right off the top.
What Valve offers that makes companies put up with that is their de-facto monopoly presence. They can sell many copies through Steam - or they won’t sell many copies.
Then developers can release games off steam, and some do.
‘There’s other services.’
But steam has many features people want and use that would add development costs if every dev had to make similar tools in house.
’ It takes a whole fucking lot of hypothetical work, which you imagine developers would have to do, to amount to the slice Steam takes right off the top.’
Do you think it’s simple for a developer to create a friends list network, host/moderate community forums, host/moderate a mod website integrated into the game, achievements syncing, ability to share the game with friends, and integrate VR functionality for the above, on their own dime?
These are recurring ongoing costs for server and continued developmental changes, you are severely underestimating the time and money cost to create/host/maintain all those services?
You are asserting without evidence that Valve needs to take all that money. As if they would go broke if they only took a quarter of all the revenue on most PC games.
Valve makes ten billion dollars on Steam, every single year. Their margins are not slim. And being an established de-facto monopoly, people go there because that’s where the products are, and products are there because that’s where the people go. They could slash costs to nothing, do the bare minimum work going forward, and still rake in the money on sheer momentum, for years and years and years.
The only feature that really matters here is adoption. And that’s not a feature you can design. Even Valve didn’t rope people in with a convincing sales pitch. They forced Steam onto everyone who wanted to play Half-Life 2. If you didn’t want to put up with an always-online DRM service aimed to take over PC gaming - you didn’t get to play the most anticipated game of the year. Whatever benefits you ascribe to the service, whatever functionality you argue developers would otherwise budget for, the core was always ‘accept this or pound sand.’
Monopoly doesn’t mean “Largest market share”. It’s a real term with a real meaning.
Monopoly:
the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service.
What, exactly, does Valve control? They don’t require exclusivity, they don’t require their DRM, they don’t require the use of their network system. Hell, they don’t even require you to to give them 30% if you sell your own key.
Valve is also not a publicly traded company, while this doesn’t mean you can fully trust them it does mean they aren’t required to seek profit at all costs. This allows then to do things like, support Linux, make their own hardware (twice after their first attempt was a failure), work on Proton, develope games that make them no money, etc.
Itch.io, GOG, EA, Epic, Windows Store, Game Pass, Humble Bundle, personal websites. These are all examples of places you can buy video games on computers.
Timmy Tencent’s propaganda is working on you if you think Valve is any sort of monopoly.
Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a “monopolist” is a firm with significant and durable market power.
I don’t think Steam qualifies still. There are still plenty of competitors such as GOG, Green Man Gaming, itch.io, Epic, Humble Store, Microsoft Store, and so on.
The “significant durable market power” part is why I went on to explain how they don’t lock you into their ecosystem. How can Valve raise prices or exclude their competitors when they literally do not have any mechanisms in place to do any of those things?
He’s basically asking for information on who he should contact because of that, since he didn’t get any replies from Epic yet. Comments are mostly people being shocked.
Let’s see what happens 'til the end of the day, or next week.
Not to mention family sharing. I'm not sure of another PC store front that does the same, but it's been a bit help with my friends in being able to show games to each other and letting us try things before buying, similar to sharing discs back in the day.
It kind of doesn’t, though. Because you can still launch non-Steam games through Steam, and activate retail Steam keys without Valve taking a cut, there are plenty of ways for things to compete against the Steam Store without needing to also compete against the Steam launcher.
You don’t even need all of that really. A lot of Steam functionality can be utilized just by adding it as a Non-Steam Game. Steam Workshop isn’t the necessary if you have a modding scene, you just need a good mod manager.
The key point on whether I’ll use your storefront or not is whether your plan for success is to buy out anti-Steam contracts (remember that it’s not exclusivity to EGS, its to not release on Steam) to get customers and low revenue cuts to get developers and most importantly, to run a loss leading business for a number of years until you are profitable. If EGS were to ever become profitable, how long until they switch to squeezing out as much as they can? They’ve already rescinded their “curated” catalog.
This is not a good way to look at it. Competition is good regardless. It doesn’t matter how good Valve is today, if a viable competitor comes out, Valve will be forced to get better in order to compete.
All we need is some way to guarantee valve doesn’t become public.
This is wrong. Valve can enshittify without going public. If you think that public corporations are the only ones that are greedy/evil/anti-consumer, then you’ve never heard of the “private equity” industry. Look up the recent fight between the FTC and U.S. Anesthesia Partners in Texas for a clear example.
In capitalism, free market forces are what keep tug of war between produces and consumers fair, and competition is the fuel that keeps those free market forces moving. The fact that the Valve of today is both good and a monopoly is just a temporary rounding error/outlier. Over time, Valve will go to shit and consumers will suffer simply because Valve has almost no competition. This isn’t a question, it’s a fact of the mechanism of the economic system they exist in. It’s like gravity; just because you haven’t hit the floor yet doesn’t mean jumping off that building was a good idea.
Epic games, whether you hate them or not, is fighting the good fight. They are doing shitty things (exclusivity, etc), so maybe they aren’t the chosen one who will take challenge Valve, but they are on the right side of that fight. Hoping that Valve will stay great forever is foolish.
…but I will add that I don’t think Epic alone should be trying to take down Valve. Valve is way too entrenched in this market to be taken down with any realistic competition (probably why Epic is resorting to exclusivity deals). The FTC needs to step in and regulate the market. Idk what that would look like, but it’s possible to do it in a way that makes everyone happy. For example (off the top of my head, so probably flawed but whatever) the FTC could enforce interoperability between digital marketplaces so that consumers don’t need to install 30 different launchers to access their purchased libraries. That relatively small change could lower the bar to entry for competitors by a lot, and not be a burden to consumers at the same time. EDIT: and it would not be anything drastic like forcing a break up of Valve.
“hmm… a well thought out, reasoned response. But I disagree! How should I express my opinion effectively, to both this person and others who wander by?”
What a shittake
“Ah, yes. My masterpiece. Everyone must see this.”
Its funny how you credit the invisible hand of free market forces to keep things fair but acknowledge everywhere else that the only thing that actually intervenes to promote fairness is the FTC as government regulatory body.
If we could drop the obvious bullshit romanticism of capitalism this would be a mostly accurate post.
Unregulated capitalism doesn’t work. I don’t think anyone has ever seriously claimed that it does. The FTC isn’t the only thing keeping the market fair, the free market does that on its own. When a company does a shitty thing, they lose customers and die. That’s true in pretty much every market in the real world, except for a few problematic ones where there are bad actors trying to cheat the system.
Plenty of people claim that it does. That is the entire ideological premise you invoke with the free market fetishism (laissez faire, Chicagoan school, Austrian economics) the “free market” means free to exploit consumers, not free to choose. Consumers do not have enough capital to afford any meaningful check against corporate snake oil. This over simplistic narrative youre spinning doesn’t match up with the track record.
Also, you don’t have to be an authoritarian communist to know that the free market is a crock of shit. Anybody with the ability to look at the past few hundred years would know Friedman hayek rothbard and most all libertarians are absolutely full of shit or just plain misguided
Tankies are specifically defenders of Marxist-Leninist communism and their one party state rule (which is ironically not communism, it’s Stalinism which is a form of autocratic socialism)
So I operate on the assumption that anticapitalist people on Lemmy are tankies. It’s not true in all cases ofc, but without more info, I think that’s a safe default.
That dude calling my post “bullshit romanticism of capitalism” gives a bit more confidence that they’re a tankie with a strong case of grassphobia.
Great example of oversimplification and reaching for conclusions that reinforce your bias. An effective way to shield yourself from valid criticism or any self reflection is to automatically discredit the person who brings it to your attention, whether its true or not is of little importance right?
So I operate on the assumption that German people on Lemmy are Fascists. It’s not true in all cases ofc, but without more info, I think that’s a safe default.
And before you call my flawless reasoning stupid… I don’t really have anything to say.
Epic games, whether you hate them or not, is fighting the good fight. They are doing shitty things (exclusivity, etc), so maybe they aren’t the chosen one who will take challenge Valve, but they are on the right side of that fight. Hoping that Valve will stay great forever is foolish.
My dude… If you’re doing shitty things, you are in fact not “fighting the good fight”. if anyone is doing that it’s someone like GOG.
I meant that they’re fighting Valve, which is “the good fight”. They’re not the only ones doing it, and they’re definitely not the best ones doing it, but they’re doing it. If they do manage to take a big chunk out of Valve’s marketshare somehow, that will be good for everyone, even people who decide to stay on Steam.
Apologies for the confusion when I said to stop preventing steam becoming public. I was just too lazy to write something along the lines of defining some kind of perpetual way to prevent the downfall of steam. Ideally it becomes an open source utopia tomorrow… but that’s not exactly realistic for a game store or as a business decision by valve and without people beying able to fork it we are never safe.
All of the following? Why would you need to be better in every way? There’s a perfectly valid use case for trade offs. Eg, let’s say some competitor had exclusives, no VR, the store interface was a little worse, and it was only roughly comparable on many other points. If it’s simply faster and more lightweight, that’s its competitive advantage. Or if it focuses on being open source and DRM free like GoG, that’s a competitive advantage.
Expecting something to be better in every way (than something with a massive head start) or else it might as well not exist? That’s just unreasonable. I don’t require a clothing store to be better than Walmart to shop there. I mean, the clothing store doesn’t even sell fruit! Why would anyone shop there when you can go to the Walmart and buy some grapes with your jeans?
Except these aren’t two different kinds of stores, they’d both be gaming marketplaces and if one has better features in every regard… Why use the inferior one at all?
If It’s not better in every way why would I swap? I’ll just keep using steam. The only selling point you could use to get me to swap is the promise of feature parity with steam and open source. I would support that even if it hurt a lot along the way, but I doubt it will happen.
It can’t exist. You can’t launch a new competitor to a mature and well-developed platform and hope to come anywhere near its feature set right off the bat. That’s never gonna happen, especially when a lot of the “requirements” you presented there are expensive shit that takes years of hard work to develop. You’re gonna have to give them time. And money, as it happens. They’re not gonna be able to develop that VR you present as a requirement if everybody refuses to use their platform because there is no VR. It’s a catch 22.
I’d be happy to support any kind of platform aiming to do these things even if it doesn’t have them yet, so long as it was open source or had some kind of structure that prevented enshitification. I’d contribute, probably force myself to use it where possible much like I do with other things. The issue is that the current competition trying to do what steam does (epic) is just trying to do it but worse.
As soon as it has linux support for more than wow… people praise valve for proton lots but workshop has also done so much for Linux nmodding which is otherwise a nightmare.
This game really was the buy of the century. It just keeps getting free updates. 8 player multiplayer sounds great but it seems a stretch to hope for couch coop for 8 players.
I saw an interesting comment today regarding Halo Infinite and it’s lack of couch co-op, the user was basically saying it doesn’t matter as much as it used to and I guess it’s true. Even if he got 8 player local co-op working, how many people would get 7 other people to come round and play? It’s hard to essentially do a LAN party these days when you can play the same game online together from the comfort of your own home.
I really wanted at least 2 player splitscreen to work on both mcc and infinite on pc, I’d love to play it with my girlfriend but it’s dumb if she has to not only buy the game again and play on a tiny screen next to me while i play on the big screen (i use my pc a HTPC in a gaming room, more like a console than a PC)
Does split screen still not work? I’m pretty sure it doesn’t for MCC at least, and you can use the home console trick to give two accounts access. That’s how I played MCC on Xbox with my fiancé so I know you can do it, but I don’t know how it would work if you don’t use a console at all.
Well me and my three kids play Stardew Valley. My wife and I take turns, but if we can see what’s happening on 5 player couch coop we would probably play it like that.
Honestly, I doubt it would be a large demographic. It’s hard to get people to even play something splitscreen, why would a bunch of friends huddle around a TV so they can see their small section of screen when they could just play on laptops together even.
I got Minecraft for $10 during I think alpha. I downloaded the demo, spent several hours playing it, then bought it. As someone who never makes decisions that quickly it was a great impulse buy that I used for years.
Almost. Don't get me wrong, I FUCKING LOVE Stardew Valley, got 300+ hours in it, but Terraria was like $2 for ages and it's every bit as good and still getting updates as well
ConcernedApe continuing to be legendary. I’ve not played Stardew for a long time but knowing this game made this game was made by one person… the coding… the story… the graphics… the music. It’s just mind boggling. Absolutely amazing.
I should start a new character and experience all the stuff that’s been added.
That’s the biggest issue I can think of. You can only water so many plants, chop so many trees, and pick so many rocks in the mine before you run out of stamina. I’ve had plenty of times where I would go to bed at 2 PM because there was nothing else for me to do. Having eight characters means 8x the stamina, so you can do 8x more work per day. But even for the things that do not require stamina, there are only so many items for forage, so many villagers to talk to, etc.
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