Epic Games has been clear about seeing Steam as a direct competitor, and has done everything from giving away free games to paying for timed exclusives to entice players.
Yup, that’s everything. Those are their only options. Yup. Nothing else to be done. It’s an unsolvable problem if those things don’t work.
This is supposed to be how competition in the marketplace works
In case the above sarcasm wasn’t clear, no, this is not how competition in the marketplace is supposed to work.
If you want a preview of an uncaring and anti-consumer Valve, look no further than the company’s efforts on Mac.
This is an example of Apple making life difficult for its customers, not Valve.
There’s no excuse for Steam on Mac to be a far worse experience than on other platforms, though.
There is, because Apple wanted to control their entire hardware pipeline, which meant breaking compatibility with the entire history of PC gaming when they did so. If this is your smoking gun, author, try harder.
Eventually, the bomb will go off, and the full ‘enshittification’ of Steam will commence.
I hate this enshittification term so much, because all it means is that they got complacent, and competitors can pick up the slack. You just spend your money elsewhere, whether it’s Xbox vs. PlayStation or Steam vs. GOG. It is a problem that Steam has so much control of the marketplace, but they got there because their competitors aren’t truly competing. I finally found a reason to shop on GOG again, despite the fact that they don’t support their Linux customers as well as their Windows customers, and definitely not as well as Valve treats them, but DRM-free is a compelling argument for me. Epic does not make a compelling argument for the consumer, which is why that meme, pasted in the middle of the article, exists.
There’s a difference between Valve deciding to not make Mac games anymore and Valve leaving the Mac Steam client a slow and laggy mess on newer Macs. The former only affects people who want to play Valve games, the latter affects a lot more people.
Is it perhaps a slow, laggy mess because Apple decided to break from the same convention that everyone else uses and has used for decades and now has to emulate a different processor architecture? Apple is the one who made gaming shittier on Macs, and they’re going to point to Death Stranding and Resident Evil 4, expecting the flood gates to be open, and now everyone’s going to port their games to Mac. Except they’re not. Apple won’t understand why not, but once again, as they’ve always done, breaking from convention and establishing your own standard that doesn’t play nice with what everyone else is building around is bad for developers. Before this, they were still making developers’ lives harder by not supporting certain graphics APIs. Valve made a Vulkan translation layer to Apple’s Metal, since Apple wouldn’t officially allow for Vulkan, and that was shortly before the architecture change.
Every other major application and service on Mac has ARM-native builds now, there’s not really an excuse for Valve. It’s especially silly when much of Steam is running through a Chromium engine, not machine code or anything else that might be difficult to port.
It is an excuse for Valve, because their business is selling thousands of games that do not have ARM-native builds. No action of Valve’s made Steam worse for Mac users. An action of Apple’s did that. At some point, it’s not worth it for Valve to update their application to be better for a platform that’s actively hostile to its business partners.
Valve leaving the Mac Steam client a slow and laggy mess on newer Macs.
What happened to the Apple fanboys who claimed that the Apple M processors were so fast, x86 applications emulated on Apple M would run much faster than natively on x86 because x86 is supposedly so bad and slow…?
This article is essentially written by an Epic fan boy that’s “hoping” Steam will eventually succumb to capitalism and commence the enshittification that is happening elsewhere.
If anything, it’s Epic that will succumb to capitalism because they’ve been failing to innovate on their platform since the beginning. EGS is still a glorified game launcher without any platform features. Where’s the equivalent to Steam Input, Remote Play and Remote Play Together, Family Sharing, Chat, Discussion Boards, Proton, Steam Deck, etc.?
Maybe spend some of that Fortnite money on your platform instead of buying up exclusives…
I don’t think the author is an Epic fan per se. The Epic argument appears to be a distraction from their main point, which appears to be their dissatisfaction with Valve’s support of Steam on Mac. As an example, even though Epic game store ( by a quick google search) seems to support Mac, they make no mention as to why they didn’t exercise consumer choice and simply use Epic game store for their Mac gaming needs.
As a mac user I’d love to see more mac games. I think it’s a relatively underutilized platform. Im not a game developer but it seems like one of the main issues of game development is the complete mishmash of supported hardware and different components and trying to optimize and support all of them. In that respect, macs seem more like consoles in their limited number of configurations and hardware variance so optimizations SHOULD be easier. Or at the very least not as complex. But macs are expensive and there is not a lot of overlap between gamers and mac. So therefore not a lot of mac games. It was easier when you could bootcamp and also play games on windows but that’s not really possible anymore.
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.
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.
I haven’t had much sleep today so maybe its just me, but I’m a bit confused here:
Valve isn’t obligated to continue supporting all its games and software features on Mac, especially when Apple’s reluctance to natively support Vulkan and other cross-platform technologies makes game development more complex.
Then the next sentence:
There’s no excuse for Steam on Mac to be a far worse experience than on other platforms, though.
As others have mentioned, Apple was the one who chose to abandon x86 and go with ARM - and anyways are there any games that are on Steam that actually are ARM native? You would still end up having to launch a game that is x86 as far as I understand correctly (I haven’t used a Mac since the Apple Silicon transition)?
Porting games to run on ARM is apparently a pain so a lot of devs aren’t doing it. Instead they just use some kind of translation program so that ARM can understand x86 instructions rather than recoding the game to support it directly. Resulting in inferior performance but at least it does sort of work which is better than it was before.
I would not be surprised at all if Steam did something very similar.
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.
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.
When I block OP and his trash articles from my feed, it’ll be his fault for not going out of his way to deliver content to me anyway. And when I block his next attempt too, it just means he’s being anti-consumer in not catering to me anyway.
spacebar.news
Ważne