This coming from game journalism, which has just turned into a mouthpiece and constantly been used to lie about how good games are.
Funny how the date of this article comes out around the time that Amazon is failing, Epic is failing, Ubisoft is failing, and they’re failing because they hate the people that they sell their products to, and they refuse to be user-friendly and user-focused.
Steam isn’t perfect, but the reason why they’re a monopoly is they actually give a shit about gamers, unlike all of their competition.
Gamers aren’t a product, they’re a user, and Steam understands that offering the voice to those people makes their product what it is. The more users they have, the more money they make. They don’t need to nickel and dime and squeeze.
This is something that every single competitor they have had has just blatantly ignored.
The likeliest explanation is that games press lie about how good games are and not that they just have a different opinion than you? Also, this isn’t even a major outlet. It’s just some guy’s blog, not even exclusively about games.
It’s definitely happened before, though I couldn’t say to what extent. The reason has been that if they rate games from major developers too poorly they stop getting access to their new games before release.
I care very little about critics these days though, and it’s mostly for the reason you suggest, differing opinions. If they don’t like the same types of games I like, what good is their rating to me? I’m not taking the time to try to find a critic that has similar tastes as me.
This coming from game journalism, which has just turned into a mouthpiece and constantly been used to lie about how good games are.
Funny how the date of this article comes out around the time that Amazon is failing, Epic is failing, Ubisoft is failing, and they’re failing because they hate the people that they sell their products to, and they refuse to be user-friendly and user-focused.
Steam isn’t perfect, but the reason why they’re a monopoly is they actually give a shit about gamers, unlike all of their competition.
Gamers aren’t a product, they’re a user, and Steam understands that offering the voice to those people makes their product what it is. The more users they have, the more money they make. They don’t need to nickel and dime and squeeze.
This is something that every single competitor they have had has just blatantly ignored.
This is by a Apple fanboy who is disgruntled that Valve broke up with Macs (Steam is still available but updates like the HL1 remaster aren’t any longer). Yeah, send thoughts an prayers for a cult who buy overpriced computers with weak iGPUs that only recently learned to do some raytracing but understand no Vulkan or somewhat modern OpenGL.
Apple has decided that gaming on Macs is about iPhone games on bigger screens and not about supporting cross-platform APIs and frameworks. Don’t blame any but Apple that your beloved platform is shit for gaming.
Steam’s 30% cut on each purchase has been criticized over the years, especially with Steam’s market share being too large for many developers to ignore.
With all what they offer, 30% IMO is fair. It gets lower when you reach a certain amount too
Steam’s position in the market is a functional monopoly, but there have been challengers. The greatest example is the Epic Games Store, which started as just the launcher for Fortnite, then became a full-blown store in 2019 for third-party games. The Epic Games Store was light on features at first, and still doesn’t have many of the community-centric features in Steam, but it has a Steamworks-like multiplayer framework and other core functionality. Epic also doesn’t take as much money from game developers as Steam’s 30% cut.
Epic a challenger? LMAO “The greatest example is the Epic Games Store” yeah sure, they have nothing, quite literally.
It’s not like the games are cheaper on other stores with lower cuts. Why would customers care if the lower cut just results in publishers pocketing higher profits.
True. Not praising steam as the god digital store on PC because it has its own problems but it saved me from 🏴☠️ and now I do it for devs that deserve it (Looking at you Sony and PSN requirement) or as demo damn I wish more games had a demo
The problem is: Epic is shit and does nothing. What does it has more than steam? Free games? Eh can get them for free anyway without a launcher sooo without the games, what does it has?
The problem is a second launcher or library is a pain in the ass for a user. I already avoid GoG unless it’s massively cheaper, and there’s the no drm benefits there. I’m not even interested in free games on epic.
GoG is not bad (for me) but I used steam for years so I buy games there. Did you know their launcher is, according to some people, made with unreal engine? ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I was like that until Epic released free games that I decided to claim just in case my tastes changed or I was with a friend who enjoyed that game, but that I myself was very uninterested in playing. And then I got busier, and bought games I have high confidence I’d like but did not have the time to play just then past maybe a demo or a short while to check if I did actually like it—I’d get to it sometime later when I had more free time. My tastes tend to expand to include more things, but not to reject more things as well, so I thought the risk of tastes changing was an okay risk to take in order to capitalize on the sale of a game I am interested in now, even if I would play it much later. So far I have proven pretty good at guessing future me’s tastes.
Maybe I’m not seeing the whole picture, doesn’t steam host the game data? Push updates? Promote? Host Workshops if applicable? Use their bandwidth? Sync saves when applicable? Provide a community forum for the game? Allow players to connect easier?
I think 30% is fair too, thats what I was asking. I don’t know the industry, but steam takes on a lot of responsibility hosting a game and handling what I listed.
The piece about Mac makes no sense. That’s purely a result of Apple’s decision to drop support. In general, if you are interested in older games, MacOS is not a viable platform.
Most the article makes no sense, but the Mac stuff is really weird. This 18 year old YouTube video is still accurate about the Mac part. youtu.be/2B-ekl_cEWk?si=xWJ43QEO48O9t2oY
It’s the opposite tbh. If you want to play emulators or old (as in 2015) PC games via Wine/VM, mac has you covered. It’s newer games that are tougher because 80% of them don’t get ports and Wine/VM will have to turn down the graphics to run well.
Even so, I can still run most modern games at medium settings with a low-tier, 2 generations old mac. Small price to pay for avoiding windows’ godawful UX, ads, tracking, ai spam, onedrive spam, monthly subscription for solitaire, etc.
Can you provide one real world example? An older Windows game that works better on Mac than on Windows?
I will also add that 2015 is a random number. Win10 easily handles anything after 2005 or so. It’s the pre 2005 games that often require some deal of research.
I’ve heard of some edge cases where Wine is now a better option than native windows for really weirdly built 2000s era games. But overall most won’t run better since they have to use a compatibility layer. The point is they do run and my computer isn’t just for gaming. Windows has gone deep into enshittification for ten years now, and it’s worth trading some FPS to Wine to not have to live with that.
Also this only matters for new games. If you’re a HoMM3 addict or only care about emulators there’s no downside.
Macs also lack GPUs suitable for gaming. The modern ones are remarkably efficient, partly because they didn’t jam a 4060’s worth of graphic silicon into them. Why would they? Macs are for web browsing, media creation, productivity if you’re in the C-suite and making other people think you’re cool if you’re in a coffee shop. Their users do not expect to run AAA games at 4k60fps.
To be fair to the author, I knew the AAA game publishers were ticking time bombs too, and it took like 6-8 years longer than I thought for them to start seeing major declines in their increasingly homogeneous offerings.
The article author honestly made a very valid point, but wrapped it up with a terrible headline.
I even feel like the PS4 and Xbox One currently serve the use case of being “the cheap consoles”. There are a number of games they cannot run or would run poorly - but for their price point they’re much more of an option for the non-wealthy, primarily in other countries. It’s like it’s all one console generation with no signs of ending, and a varying range of specs.
I figure we're coming to the end of discrete generations sooner or later. We're 4 years into the PS5's lifespan and plenty of games still launch on PS4 because they don't need PS5 hardware, and PS5 will run them anyway.
It doesn't make sense to upgrade to a PS5 Pro if you've already got a base PS5, just as it doesn't make sense to buy a new smartphone every year. But I can see the idea being that whenever you feel due for an upgrade, you buy whatever the current model is.
It is. I really like the direction of the steam deck. A PC that’s very open, but still is able to hide most complexity from users that don’t care for that.
It’s not quite the same thing… Mid generation refreshes are, generally, due to changes in technology outside of gaming.
Look at the first mid-gen refresh… The Sega CD and NEC Turbo CD for TurboGrafx (released as a separate machine called the Turbo Duo).
CD technology changed gaming, but the console makers at the time weren’t ready yet for a new generation.
Sega and NEC refreshed the current gen with CD technology, Nintendo explored it with Sony, and abandoned it (as Nintendo is generally always a generation behind), which led directly to the Playstation a few years later.
We saw it again in the Xbox 360/PS3 era. Those machines launched in 2005/2006. A global financial crisis took all the air out of the room and made financing R&D for a next generation impossible just when it needed to start ramping up in 2008/2009.
So what Microsoft and Sony did was pivot to try to enter the casual market that the Wii dominated by releasing Kinect and Move respectively in 2010, when a new console SHOULD have launched but did not.
The next true generation was still 3 years away at that point, but Kinect and Move let them limp along until they got there.
The same thing happened with the Xbox One and PS4, television technology greatly advanced after they launched in 2013 and it became apparent that all these 4K television owners were looking for 4K content.
Nobody was prepared to launch a new console, so we got the Xbox One S without 4K gaming, but with a 4K Blu Ray drive, the PS4 Pro, which had no 4K drive, but kinda, sorta on a good day, could almost do 4K gaming, and the Xbox One X which ran 4K games, 4K movies, and massively upgraded older non-4K games.
For the PS5 Pro? There is nothing demanding the refresh. Sony says they’re doing it because players want better frame rates, but those 3/4 of players choosing performance mode are already showing they don’t care about fidelity.
Moreover, the latest thinking is that for GTA6, the promise of increased frame rate STILL won’t be a reality.
Are you saying that phones have good backwards compatibility? I do still remember the big iOS cleansing of 32-bit games and apps alongside older Play Store apps being hidden from you due to being developed for "a previous version of android"
better practical compatibility for sure. Of course not literally the entire back catalog of old legacy smartphone apps are still supported but probably like 99.999% of apps people still use are supported on 99.999% of phones people use. 32-bit app devs have had 10 years to update to 64 bit, and most managed it within the first couple. Also the kind of major compatibility jump as with 32bit>64bit should be fairly infrequent, not like every console hardware generation.
compare that to game consoles where the last gen could be cut off from new games at any given time, and next gen is a crapshoot whether the manufacturer will support backwards compatibility.
compare that to game consoles where the last gen could be cut off from new games at any given time, and next gen is a crapshoot whether the manufacturer will support backwards compatibility.
But that isn't the case anymore, and I expect it never will be again. This generation's transition period has been so heavily reliant on backwards compatibility. Hell, plenty of titles still just launch on PS4 since PS5 can run it anyway.
The only exception has been the Switch, and that's because it was necessary just this once to break away for a new architecture. I can almost guarantee Switch 2 will be an evolution of Switch 1.
At this point the big three are locked into their current architecture. They need backwards compatibility, if a new console ever tries to break from that it will flop as a result.
If devs have to actively maintain software to support new versions, I would argue that is not better than how consoles handle backwards compatibility. Especially since games tend to be tend to be treated as finished products that devs stop updating once they move on to their next project.
Modern consoles are pretty great about backwards compatibility. There’s room to improve for sure, but an Xbox Series X/S can play all Xbox One/Series games, plus hundreds of 360 and original Xbox games. PS5 is a bit worse with only PS4 backwards compat. The Switch is in the roughest shape, because PowerPC emulator or hardware compatibility wasn’t practical with the design or hardware of the original Switch.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but enshitification seems like a problem entirely contained to publicly traded companies. Valve is a privately owned company and doesn’t need to grow, thus they can just enjoy the millions if not billions of dollar revenue.
Nothing stops a private company from becoming shitty. They still enjoy profit. Valve isn't your friend, despite whatever image they try to project.
Approaching this from a developer point of view, let's talk about how Valve has changed and what they do.
Many people will point to how Steam removed Greenlight and made it easy for indie developer to just put out whatever they wanted. The problem is Valve tends to treat indie developers like the dirt on their shoe and let well known devs skate on their requirements and policies. A lot of people don't know that one of Valve's requirements for screenshots is that they be of actual gameplay. I can't count the number of store pages I've seen for unreleased games from well known studios that contain screenshots, or are entirely made up of screenshots, that clearly aren't gameplay. Things that are either cinematic shots, or simply from angles that wouldn't allow any gameplay at all, etc.
Meanwhile indie devs get their pages and games rejected for absolutely trivial reasons. A couple of great things I can highlight is them rejecting some library assets because 'the UI can be seen'. The library assets were generated from screenshots using Unreal's Hires screenshot tool. It's incapable of capturing the UI. That's kind of its thing. Another rejection came from them saying 'You claimed the game has full gamepad support, but when we tried it in local multiplayer the first player had to use the keyboard and mouse while the second player used a gamepad'. I sent them back a screenshot of the start button which had a checkbox beside it which said: "First player uses keyboard and mouse", because I wanted people to be able to play local multiplayer even if they only had a single gamepad. I could give a dozen more examples of absolute nonsense from Steam support in getting that game released, but it was was all of that type. Their support is inconsistent and abysmal.
Most recently trying to get taxes figured out with them because I moved from one country to another. I went back and forth with them went through a bunch of steps only to be finally told 'oh we can't actually update your account fully to the new country, you'll have to make a new account for the new country with the new business information'. So I did that, but oh.. the only way to do that was to buy an app credit. And I'd already bought the app credit on the original account because it was supposed to work. Took 2 more days of back and forth before they'd let me transfer that to the other account.
Steams in-game purchase support is laughable. Yes they technically have it. But as a developer, it makes no sense to use it. They take 30% to do nothing more than maintain a transaction record. You still need to keep a server on your own that matches that transaction to unlocked content the user has. Looking at that, we questioned why even use Steam for that? We now have a system set up on our own website where players can purchase things, we use a payment processor that only costs like 3%, and now players have a completely portable DLC account. When we release on other platforms later, players can just use the same content they've already bought.
From a consumer point of view. There are things they do, that I don't particularly like. The trashy meme 'curators' they tried to shove down our throat for the longest time. Trying to label any concentrated negative reviews a 'review bomb' regardless of whether or not it was related to legitimate criticism of the game, the march towards mediocrity with the sales.
But they gave us refunds! Only because it started as a legal issue in one place and it was just easier for them to just roll that out worldwide with the absolute bare minimum of effort.
There is no way you could look at the state of Valve sales in the early 2010s, compare them to now and think that they haven't gotten shittier. They used to be an event. The flash sales kept people coming back all the time, they had things going on on the website, the scavenger hunts, the mini games, etc. But they can't have refunds and flash sales at the same time! Sure they can. You're entitled to a refund. There is no law requiring they sell you a game over and over again. Absolutely nothing prevents them from saying 'If you refund a game during this sale, you can't buy it again until the sale is over'.
People were engaged. now the Steam sale is just 'meh'. This hurts developers as well. Especially smaller developers. People flood the website the first hour of the sale, check what's on sale, and then put the sale out of their mind for the next 2 weeks until its over. Because it never changes. Smaller devs greatly benefited from the high engagement and the 'event' of the sale. Users kept coming back. The more they come back the greater the chance there was that some of them might come across your game.
You’re right, nothing stops them from becoming shitty. However, unlike public companies, a private company isn’t encouraged to prioritize short term profit over long term profit. Doing something blatantly stupid to bolster your short term profit only makes sense for your shareholders or if you want to extract as much money before jumping ship - neither should happen anytime soon with steam.
Your pain points from the developer side all seems valid, and they should absolutely be improved. They probably treat unknown indie devs like dirt because for every good game they get thousands of submissions with blatant lies in them. E.g. your typical asset flips. Of course, that’s no excuse, but at least I can kinda get where that could be coming from. Have you experienced the old system? I simply cannot tell whether they have truly become worse for indie devs or just traded some problems for others.
Regarding the sales, I have mixed feelings. Sales were a lot more exciting, that’s just true. However, because of flash sales, I mostly never bought anything but those, at least until the very end of the sale. While it is boring in comparison, as a consumer, I also quite enjoy the ability to only check the sale once, get what I want, and be done with it. Seems way more convenient.
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