Real answer is branding. Steam has cultivated an absolutely stellar image of being the "good guys" of gaming, and it's super hard to counter that. Epic came on the back of publisher-specific launchers getting a bad reputation for both legitimate and illegitimate reasons, so you end up with a weird, paradoxical defense of Steam's quasi-monopoly.
I guess tehcnically GOG is exempt, in that they also have a good reputation and they're objectively more radically pro-consumer than Valve by a huge margin, so the lines get blurred there.
Steam has cultivated an absolutely stellar image of being the "good guys" of gaming
How are they cultivating this exactly? I mean other than just doing consumer-friendly moves like free updates, supporting open source, etc. This makes it seem like Valve is out there pushing out pro-Steam propaganda or something, but does Valve even market Steam at all? They don't do interviews or put out commercials or buy billboards. They put up a few silly YouTube videos to advertise a sale or new product and then it's radio silence for the rest of the year.
Exactly. Steam didn't invest in marketing nonsense and gimmicks to get people on their platform. For consumers it is simply the superior product, DRM not withstanding.
They got their issues, no doubt. But I have never seen a quasi monopoly be more consumer oriented than steam.
I have this conversation weirdly often around here. Steam launched under a TON of pushback. They effectively did what people criticise Epic for doing and locked down Half-Life 2 under Steam, and in turn under always-online DRM. People were very angry, nobody wanted that crap and it was pretty controversial. As I recall, Valve didn't react much. They just kept going, adding more first and third party content until they were the de facto storefront. They targeted their publishing and purchasing strategies to keep content first and consistently avoided controversy via the silent treatment, outside of having Gabe talk in public here and there and keeping his persona out there, along with a couple of select employees, although once they phased out game development for pure publishing even that went away.
They are very careful to not demistify themselves and to keep that semi-accidental conflation of being the de facto monopoly with being pro-consumer. It's kind of insane how resilient to speaking publicly or being perceived as speaking publicly they are, especially with how much they had to let go of that in regards to the scandals related to CS gambling grey markets, game greenlighting processes and a few other key snafus. But it works. The brand is sticky and they know if they don't say anything the community will do the job for them, so they just... shut up, avoid constructed corpo PR when they can and favor having their content makers handle communication whenever they can, including product launches.
By the numbers Valve is a fairly standard tech upstart: comes from Microsoft vets, uses traditional disruption tactics, throws everything against the wall to see what sticks, fixes broken things later. Their branding is up there with Coca-Cola, though. Hell, Disney wishes they looked as squeaky clean as the "we had kids gambling on gun skins" guys. It's kinda nuts.
I mean, good for them. I don't know why they aren't more of a mainstay in PR and marketing degrees. It's kind of amazing.
As someone who bought Half Life 2 when it was released ..
I only remember people being excited about Steam, Web stores weren't a thing back then and they were the future! (It was the following years of audio and ebook stores locking stuff down and evapourating that taught us to hate it).
Game/Audio CD DRM hacking the kernel and breaking/massively slowing down your PC was pretty common back then and Steam' s DRM didn't do that.
The HL2 disc installer didn't require you to install Steam, once installed it asked you to setup Steam and there was a sticker under the DVD with the Steam code for you to enter.
You were then rewarded with a copy of HL2 Deathmatch and Counterstrike Source.
Steam wasn't always on DRM, back then ADSL/DSL was relatively new and alot of people were still stuck on Dial Up modems.
Steam let you sign in and authorize your games for 30 days at which point you would need to log into Steam again. This was incredibly helpful feature for young me.
I was there, I was an adult. I was mad and I was online enough to know I was not alone. In fairness, some of the being mad part was from people being locked out by login and server issues, which is a slightly different kind of mad.
But I personally did not play HL2 for a while because I was boycotting Steam. I remember so distinctly holding the box in my hand and going "hell no" at seeing the "Steam mandatory" sticker on it and putting it back.
You're technically right that I wasn't always online, though. It required you to go online to authorize it, as you say, but that was more than enough. I already had a standing veto on anybody attempting it.
I pirated HL2 when it came out entirely in protest of Steam. I don't know how long it took me to relent, because I don't have my Steam account on hand at the moment, but I think it was a couple of years at least. Honestly, to this day I still default to GOG, so I'm still a bit testy about it.
This image you are painting of Valve is just... funny to me. Anybody who plays Valve games could tell just how oblivious they are to PR or marketing. This is a company composed almost entirely of engineers that basically only communicates in patch notes. If they are trying to cultivate an image, they are doing a hilariously bad job at it.
That's a hilarious thought. Valve is primarily an online storefront company that runs organized sales events multiple times a year. Their marketing arm is ruthlessly efficient. They invented maybe half of the GaaS strategies in the books and are arguably still one of the best at deploying them.
And they do have at lest one more vector of PR. Normally you'd think third party relations is a different category, because it's a business-to-business thing, but when you get as big as Steam and have effectively removed or crowdsourced all greenlinghting and discovery you're in a different space. Like Unity, Valve has a small ninja army of dev relations guys they send around the world to events and gatherings to deliver the good word of our lord Valve and ensure that indie devs know what they're supposed to be doing to fit within their strategy. I assure you you haven't heard more refined PR-speak in your life.
But again, they're amazing at being quiet and keeping up that image of "just a buncha engineer underdogs in a room fixing the games industry, ya know?" I don't hate them, or even dislike them. I don't hate any game publisher. Games are games, it's an entertainment industry, it doesn't warrant love or hate of companies or corporations, beyond the larger questions of how copyright and IP work in an online world. But this idea that Valve is a magic wonderland with no agency on how their image is handled or moneymaking strategy or community management is... a lot.
Valve is primarily an online storefront company that runs organized sales events multiple times a year. Their marketing arm is ruthlessly efficient.
"Their marketing arm?" So... Kaci? The person they hired about a couple years ago to film silly minute-long YouTube videos about 5 times a year? Yeah she's really ruthless...
Just look at the guys they send out to do Steam Deck interviews and tell me Valve has PR people working for them full-time. No offense to Pierre-Loup Griffais but there's a reason companies hire good-looking celebrities to push their products.
Valve has a small ninja army of dev relations guys they send around the world to events and gatherings to deliver the good word of our lord Valve and ensure that indie devs know what they're supposed to be doing to fit within their strategy.
jfc lmao does this "ninja army" sneak some shurikens pass the TSA so they can take out employees of rival PC gaming stores!? This doesn't even sound remotely nefarious, just sounds like Valve sends out some guys to consult companies on how best to use their products and do a little salesmanship and networking. The horror.
But this idea that Valve is a magic wonderland with no agency on how their image is handled or moneymaking strategy or community management is... a lot.
So give me some proof of Valve's "ruthless" marketing arm then? So far most you can say regarding Valve's "image handling" is that Valve sends some devs out to talk up Steam to developers. Meanwhile, most companies spend BILLIONS UPON BILLIONS on marketing and PR. Can you not see the insane difference between these?
We already know a little how Valve works (here's an old employee manual). Note the line "There are not different sets of rules or criteria for engineers, artists, animators, and accountants." So yes, even Valve's marketing team (which so far as we know consists of one person) has a flat structure. So it's a little hard to see without any sort of management apparatus how "Valve" (as a whole) makes any concerted efforts towards these things.
Hey! Somebody brought up the "leaked" employee manual, I think I have bingo now.
The guys they have doing dev relations aren't talking development, they're talking business.
And just so I'm clear on how you think this works. You believe that Valve sets up what? Five sales a year? Plus the International. Plus coordinating and financing the CS Majors. Plus actually negotiating all the distribution deals for store placement with third parties. Plus shipping multiple hardware and software products, including setting up preview events and sending out review samples. Plus all the press relations for both games and press queries...
...with zero sales/PR/community management staff.
Am I getting that wrong?
Man, messed up as it is to refuse to put proper credits in games, you certainly see how that feeds into their, again, very carefully curated public image.
EDIT: To be clear, it's hard to know what anybody does at Valve if you don't work at Valve, or at least routinely with Valve. I'm not gonna stand here and say that all of the guys working on that don't also... I don't know go build 3D models or code store features when they're not doing that. But they absolutely do that. And they absolutely have a PR strategy, which is mostly "shut the hell up, keep the black box a black box". Again, so much to learn from them about how to handle PR, especially in tech and gaming.
I'm making a best effort guess based on the evidence to understand how the company works but yes, you can't prove one way or another. All I can really say is
Valve's website doesn't average any position related to PR, marketing or community relations
I've never seen a marketing position advertised on glassdoor for Valve
Valve's public-facing communication is legendarily poor, almost entirely buried in patch notes
So I'm just putting 2 and 2 together here. If Valve actually has a community relations team, please God let me work there because that must be the easiest job on Earth.
I think you're misunderstanding what sorts of roles a brand, sales, PR and community management teams actually have, beyond... I'm guessing you're thinking traditional advertising stuff. But also what sort of role they would have under Valve's extremely opaque strategy.
At the absolute least Valve has a ton of third party relations to handle, which I know for a fact they do because I've physically seen the people doing it. So there's that.
They also run one of the biggest esports organizations in the business, or at least they manage it, which is effectively its own standalone thing on the side. They fully run The International, as far as I can tell, and they at the very least fund and organize the CS majors circuit.
They run one of the world's biggest digital service platforms, with an absolutely insane amount of third parties involved worldwide. They have comarketing deals all over the place. Every time you see a game show up on a Steam banner somebody had to have a conversation about that, sign deals, source art, get it cleared... it's a whole mess.
They run everry bit of branding, marketing and community management on Steam. Every sale, every ad, every bit of written copy you see on Steam that is not uploaded directly by a game maker? Somebody made those.
They ship and sell games and hardware. All those Steam Deck OLED reviews and previews you saw? Somebody went and set those up, signed NDAs and embargos, shipped test units, provided review guides, handled questions from the press, got the right info to the right places.
Every campaign, loot box, piece of cosmetics, seasonal event in CS2 or DOTA 2 or any other Valve game? Somebody put those together. Not just the content, the in-store materials, copy, go-to-market plan, the whole deal.
Valve are intentionally obtuse about what they do. They don't put roles next to names on credits. They don't put in credits at all, sometimes. They don't advertise job positions or share what the jobs actually are. They don't easily provide points of contact or names or have roles or tell anybody what they do or how, with very few exceptions. Because it helps their image. It helps sell that one of the biggest online marketplaces in the world (we're talking Netflix big. Amazon big) is somehow an upstart of engineers coming up with ideas on the spot. And that is what we call "a carefully cultivated image".
I absolutely believe that they run lean and flexible. I have no question. But I'd be less suprised to find out that Valve has no cleaning staff than to find they have nobody working on brand, comms or event organization.
Your post and further explanations are excellent. Don’t let the down vote fool from people with parasocial bonding to their game launcher fool you. Valve introduced account bound DRM, unregulated lootbox gambling, skin gambling and for the better part of a decade their UI was crap, there were no user reviews etc.
Epic’s current approach to reviews is arguably better anyway. There’s no toxicity, incentive to troll to farm points, and it’s randomized, so it doesn’t enable review bombing.
Kuoiłem w koncu w Ikei, a potem jeszcze w jakims markecie. Wiec nie wiem, czy bym polecil, raczej nie bylem szczesliwy dokladajac sie do zarpbkow korporacji.
I refuse to patronize Epic until they continue working on UT4. I’ve been playing their games for 25 years and they make fortnite then decide to just drop all of their long term fans.
My dad got me that game on his old laptop when I was a kid. It barely ran, but boy was it exciting ❤️.
The Plasma gun was my favourite 🫡. Especially in that space level… The one where you could jump outside the windows.
I have a bone to pick with Epic regarding Unreal Engine as well. Terrible optimisation. Any game I play, if made using UE, is terrible.
I’ve played the first two of the Tomb Raider trilogy on medium on my 4GB GTX 1650, i7 9th Gen, 16GB RAM laptop. This device has pushed me through my engineering and still continues to run most of my work. It also runs Forza Horizon 4 and Red Dead Redemption 2 good enough.
Yet I install Deliver Us Mars, a game with a much smaller scale, and my beautiful beast starts to stutter. 🫠🫠🫠
Yeah. They had an alpha out for a while and just deserted it after fortnite took off. I really enjoyed playing it, too.
The optimization is kind of up to the devs. It’s fairly accessible to all sorts of people with varying levels of skill, but you still have to identify bottlenecks and move to c++ sometimes. Making it easy to implement in the editor means some people will make shit they can’t optimize or support.
For me it’s entirely self-centered and I’m dispensing with all the aspirational and political feelings that people have about the way businesses operate.
Quite simply I recommend Steam because it is a product with so many killer features, it’s really hard to take anybody else seriously.
It’s just shy of 2024, and Epic is still a non-realized alpha product. Their website, store, and launcher/library is a perfunctory effort at best. The most recent feature they added that I even consider to be an improvement would be the ability to look at my own games library - that should sound like a pretty funny joke but it’s said deadpan. They don’t even have proper controller support for PC, whereas Steam for example recognizes that PC gamers come with a variety of input hardware.
I mean it’s so simply that steam is such a mature product that offers so much to the gamer, and epic just wants money and they’re not really doing anything to compel me to want to use that platform.
GOG is great, it’s a simple system that gives you the power to own your own games and I very much appreciate that. Personally I don’t like to splinter my collection across different services so I’m mostly avoid them but I can’t say anything really negative.
Anyways this is just my opinion, I feel like steam has tons of killer features, the otherS simply don’t. There’s lots of valid discussion in other areas about ethics and things like that but really I’m just looking at it from the perspective of what do I want from my money. Steam gives me the most, and the others don’t even hold a candle.
I try so hard to be a rational consumer and not an emotion-driven zealot for any company or product. I just look at Epic and what they tell and show gamers/devs/publishers about who they are as a company. They don’t hide it.
Epic doesn’t seem to add any killer (and at times rudimentary) features while they focus their pitch down to more money for publishers now but we own your soul; By comparison Valve says here’s a robust and trusted, feature-rich platform you can deploy upon and we’re improving it constantly.
Valve engages in continual expansion of their Steam ecosystem (look at the Deck alone and how much value that added overnight); Valve does continual short-lived research projects like the Steam Link / Steam Controller, which don’t survive as stand-alone products but pound one novel killer-feature after the next into the platform; Epic treats their product like an afterthought and their customers as wallets.
This is really what is at the crux of it. I am not sympathetic to Epic’s way of doing business where the customer is last, the developers and their art are the pawns, and publishers are plied with sweet, predictable short-money in exchange for souls.
I’ve seen enough enshittification to know at this point that doing business with a bean-counting, value-wringing company hurts us all, and perhaps I’m out on a limb here but I feel like this sentiment is becoming highly solidified among many.
The whole idea of digital licenses are stupid and risky. If you can find it on GOG, it’s preferable to get it there. The games are DRM-free, and you can directly download the installers and make an offline backup of them.
What if Steam went bankrupt, or start playing less nice?
Thankfully, there’s not too much reason to worry about this yet. Steam is a money-printing machine, and it’s not a public company or beholden to investors who demand increasing profitability every quarter. As long as Gabe Newell is still alive and doesn’t sell out by taking Valve public, things probably won’t change much.
It’s important to note that just because you got it on GOG does not guarantee it is DRM free but they do try. (Unless things have changed since I last looked)
This is where I’m often torn. My sentiments lean fully to the principle of the user owning his/her purchased software.
But I want Valve to have my money and I trust them, because their entire business model is giving me the power to play my games in the most ways possible, and in ways that having the OG installer on my Desktop can’t do.
I can stream my entire 900 game Steam library to my phone and when my Deck gets here I’ll have access to it all there as well. Muahahaha. Take my money. No GOG RAR Installer is going to give me that, ever. This doesn’t seem to get talked about enough. Valve adds so much value, they make it so I don’t even want to pirate.
Exclusives suck for everyone. Especially when Epic started out, they only had payment processors in certain countries. This meant that some people literally had no legal way to play the Epic exclusives. I'm not sure where they stand today, but that annoyed me enough, along with other shenanigans by Epic and Sweeny, that I avoid the whole ecosystem.
I’m pretty pragmatic. While I appreciate what Valve has done for PC gaming, I like the idea of them having some legit competition in the space. So when the Epic store started, I bought a bunch of games there to give it a shot. Outer Worlds, Control… And of course I grabbed up a bunch of free games, too!
…and then, over time, I’ve repurchased all of the games I liked on steam anyway.
Edit: for the downvoters - as OP, I officially congratulate Kecessa on their sick burn. It made me lol. So… If you were feeling conflicted here, go with the upvote.
Epic is not a competition to Valve. They are long ways from that position. If Steam ever was afraid of competitor it was from Windows Marker Place or whatever the name of built-in windows crap is.
I posted about this in another thread, but Epic also bought exclusivity for games that were crowd-funded then had the option to have the game on Steam removed or you’d get the Steam key after the exclusivity period expired. This pissed off a lot of people.
Yeah, this caused A LOT of controversy back then. As far as I know, Epic has stopped doing this and has pivoted a bit more into funding game development (i.e. Alan Wake 2.) That being said, that gave Epic a terrible reputation when they initially launched EGS.
I meant with crowd funded games. I’m aware that they still buy exclusivity. Though from what I know they pay indies less compared to what they used to pay.
I don’t actually know all the games that did this, but the most famous examples are Phoenix Point and Shenmue 3. I already read that Outer Wilds was another one that took the exclusivity deal.
aside from what everyone else said, they killed the beloved Unreal Tournament series, which is a huge sour spot for older gamers who fondly remember those. Then there’s the excessive microtransaction demand inside Fortnite, a game with a large playerbase under the age of 18. That alone led to two major lawsuits that they both lost
Aside from TF2–and even that I got a bit bored with–most all of my interest in multiplayer FPS died along with Unreal Tournament. Doesn’t feel like having fun is the goal anymore.
Epic doesn’t play nice with Linux, and lemmy is a Linux-centric place - that’s nearly all of the hate. I find Linux to be a pain in the ass because everything else I use, and am of my games, are Windiws native. I click the install button and never have to worry about which version of proton will work. It’s the second worst thing about my Steamdeck (the first is, of course, that atrocious keyboard).
You will be able to tell how rabid the Linux continent is here by the number of down votes I get for saying that windows is simply a better gaming platform and Epics nose-thumbing at Linux causes me exactly zero worries because I play on the OS these games were made for.
My main issue is that Tim Sweeny has repeatedly shown that he really doesn’t know that he’s taking about when it comes to Linux and how it works. Like if you’re gonna diss something at least have valid reasons. Windows is a better gaming platform right now, but that’s only because companies like epic refuse to pay any service to it. Hopefully that changes soon.
This has nothing to do with Linux. Gamers in general, the cast majority being in Windows, hate EGS. It makes contracts for exclusivity, the launcher is apparently atrocious and there’s an almost inherent bias against any launcher/storefront that isn’t Steam. You’ll find those three reasons in just about any conversation about EGS.
And, to actually address your Linux theory, all I have to do is to open Heroic, sign in if I haven’t already, download the game and run it through Proton, in exactly the same way I do on Steam. Epic’s hate for Linux isn’t really that much of a problem.
No. Gamers in general aren’t on gaming discussion platforms to see the minority complaining about the things that bothers them, the vast majority of gamers are playing games wherever they are.
What do gaming forums have to do with it? Anecdotally I know plenty of people who would never be on a gaming forum who also hate EGS. I mean it's no secret the store hemorrhages money, there must be some reason for that. The UI is slow and the feature set is basically non-existent, it's pretty obvious spending 5 minutes with it that it really doesn't have anything to offer over Steam.
The opinions shared in gaming media and on gaming social media doesn’t matter to the vast majority of gamers that doesn’t look at them. Fortnite is one of the biggest video games success story ever, these players don’t care about the opinion of a minority that’s mad that a company is trying to break the Steam monopoly.
The opinions shared in gaming media and on gaming social media doesn’t matter to the vast majority of gamers that doesn’t look at them
It's self-evident to anyone that uses it that the software is severely lacking, they don't need social media to form their opinions.
Fortnite is one of the biggest video games success story ever
About 80% of Fortnite players are on console, and it's not like those playing on PC have much of a choice in the matter. Fortnite's success doesn't magically make EGS not shit, but it does imply...
Steam has a monopoly blah blah
...that Steam doesn't have a monopoly. Fortnite, Minecraft, ROBLOX, League, Valorant, WoW, Genshin Impact, Crossfire, Freefire, DNF, Ragnarok Online, Sudden Attack, FIFA Online? All of these are not on Steam and most of these games have playercounts that completely dwarf anything on Steam. Remember the top PC gaming market by users is Asia and Steam has a very limited presence there. Shit, League of Legends alone has a higher MAU than all of Steam (132m to 152m). How can you have a monopoly and not even beat one singular game in MAU?
Steam as a game store has a monopoly, just like Google as a search engine has a monopoly, other options exist but their reach is small enough that Valve and Alphabet can decide what happens with the market.
“They have a very limited presence in Asia”… Yeah, just like Google, we’re not talking about Asia.
EGS is perfectly fine and I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks it’s Steam that’s bloated and has a load of useless stuff that’s only there to monetize whales (cards, tradeable items…)
Of course we are talking about Asia, lmao. Why would we just arbitrarily leave them out, because it makes your argument look bad? Their money is just as green as any other place. And considering the multitude of extremely profitable Asian PC gaming platforms, no: Steam as a game store does not have a monopoly. Not even close. They are not even the market leader! The Riot launcher is also a PC gaming store/platform, and has higher MAU than Steam. Just calling Steam a monoply over and over again doesn't just magically make it true.
Well then no monopolies exist if we look on a global scale for everything, thank you for fixing all of the world’s market!
You only have a single option for an internet provider where you live? Well they don’t have a monopoly because in the next town over they have another option!
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