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 They’ve already rescinded their “curated” catalog.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.
As someone who has played the game from day 1, and almost every day since, it’s a shame that this game that already is on auto drive will be crippled even further. If you have a bunch of friends who just wanna chat and don’t wanna play something competitive it fills all those roles.
I guess we should expect even less changes and content going forward… I know the level creation was just created to allow the community to provide free content so I wonder what else they can do to continue this or if the game will just die off.
They were and they weren’t. They literally said they don’t think Microsoft would make COD exclusive like the FTC were saying they would, and that they would be absolutely fine if Microsoft were to buy them and make all games exclusive, unlike the ftc said, but they wanted to stop the deal because of course they do, Microsoft are a competitor.
I’m saying that even Sony disagreed with the FTCs reasons for challenging the acquisition.
This case shows she’s not fighting on behalf of the people though, but on the behalf of other corporations - Sony specifically. Their entire argument was how it would hurt sony. They basically didn’t mention the consumers at all lol. It was a complete joke. At least the CMA and EU had concerns, however weak they were, around competitiveness in the cloud market which could hurt consumers.
Correct, but unfortunately she’s not a big fan of picking her battles well either.
It’s all well and good to “go after big tech”, but you should only go after them when you’ve got a leg to stand on, otherwise you’re going to be made to look stupid by the ludicrously highly paid big tech lawyers. Under khan the FTC has lost almost everything they’ve tried, and most of the times you could take 1 look at their case and know they had no chance in hell.
The Microsoft/ABK case is a perfect example. There’s no lt even the slightest hint of a monopoly or anti-competitive behaviour. Then the ftc basically made their entire argument about poor old market leader Sony potentially being hurt.
Whoever advised them of their strategy in this case should have their credentials stripped. Who thought fighting for the market leader to maintain their dominance and to keep last place in last place was the angle they should take? They’re supposed to look out for consumers and competition, but this case did the opposite.
This article leaves a lot to be desired imo. Some of the stuff in here you can see is incorrect just from launching into the main menu of the game.
Here is my personal take on Star Citizen as someone who’s been following the project from the beginning:
If it’s something that interests you, you should wait for a free fly weekend and try it out. The game is far from done but it’s fleshed out enough now that you can have fun if it’s your thing. If you think it’s not worth buying, don’t buy it. Then you can come back on the next free weekend to check it out again and see the progress.
Everything else is just noise. Yes the game has raised a lot of money, yes there has probably been mismanagement and development has been slow. Yes there’s still a ways to go before feature completeness.
TLDR: Who cares. Go play it if it’s your thing and have fun, or don’t and just forget about it until they hit 1.0 sometime who knows when.
People who paid money expecting the promised timelines instead of useless feature creep, care very much. In fact people cared so much that CIG changed the user agreement to no longer allow refunds.
They took a stupid amount of money from people all while promising timelines that were never kept, and a game that I doubt will ever see completion before bankruptcy.
They need to stop throwing money and precious development time on minuscule features when their alpha can barely run on modern hardware without taking 10min to load and crashing shortly thereafter.
I hope that I am wrong about SC and the game does come out some day, because I will absolutely love the game in stable form; but the last few years have been painting a very grim picture of SC’s future
Fun fact, the user agreement doesn’t mean anything in Australia. Australian’s can get a refund any time they want because legally we cannot sign away our rights.
I got a refund a while back after I discussed this point, and my grievances with their broken promises, delivery failures and increasingly hostile sales tactics with RSIs (at the time) Director of Player Retention, Will Leverett.
Yeah, that’s fair enough. I think they should definitely give refunds to folks but that’s also the risk you take with backing a project. I’ve had plenty of disappointment with backing games, I don’t consider SC in that category but I can definitely understand people who do.
If they give me a refund I will stop caring, until then you don't really get to say 'who cares, forget about it for another decade'. I paid money for a product that still doesn't exist and is more than 8 years overdue, and that's even without getting into the discussion about whether the PU is worth it or not - where is sq42?
People paid money because they were promised a finished game by 2014. It’s still nowhere near finished. It hasn’t had an estimated release date for years.
Sure, if you enjoy the game at its current state, fine. No one should take that joy away from you.
This article was the same paragraph over and over. “Lot money, lot time, no game, please say date.” I didn’t really learn anything about the situation or controversies.
Insomniac has really raised the bar for accessibility features. Even though I don’t necessarily need them, I love that these same features give me the ability to tweak so many aspects of the gameplay to my liking.
I played it obsessively for the first season and got pretty decent at it.
The second season started, I got disconnected from my first four games about 3 rounds into each. Played it once more on the day that you could cheese the Infallible achievement by running Hoverboard Heroes over and over.
Never played it again. Certainly never touched it since it went “free”.
I mean, it’s an obvious scam. Always has been. They only have a few tech demos, and bunch of polished marketing material. There’s nothing to actually release.
I do not believe it to be an outright scam. However, it is horribly managed and I do consider the funding model to be predatory.
The whole "pledge" store should not be a thing at this stage IMO. It's just a cash shop they can justify huge prices with. It's actively contributed to the scope creep by introducing new vehicle roles, which they sometimes admit to not having designed gameplay for yet. Nor does it currently tell you if you can actually rent or buy the ship in-game (subject to progress wipes). Heck, the closest thing to a scam they've had recently was a "new starter bundle" of in-game gear that you lose upon your first death / unrecoverable body. This is a game where 80% of your deaths are to bugs or unintuitive behaviour.
They also keep trying to change their standards to match modern games. Ships have gone through multiple reworks which take months for a single ship. A sensible dev would lock that in and commit to releasing under those standards. It's been pointed out that with the current rate of progress, they'll still be releasing currently announced ships into the 2030s.
That's not even mentioning the single player component, Squadron 42, which got indefinitely delayed a few years back before a major demo showcase which never materialised. Supposedly, it's been scrapped and re-done more than once.
Their last big chance to show they've pulled things together is going to be the upcoming CitizenCon (yes, it has one) where they'll supposedly be making a big Squadron 42 announcement. A former customer service employee, who recently criticised the company's spending practices, claimed they'd taken a much more serious approach to the scope creep and that we'd see some results of that towards the end of this year.
I'm not holding my breath though. They've been known to create bullshit for presentations before (e.g the infamous sand worm) and I absolutely would not be surprised if Chris Roberts feels pressured to one-up Starfield.
As a side note, does anyone else get the impression this article was written by an AI? It repeatedly lists of buzzword features, like the Hangar module which hasn't been relevant for years, and barely discusses what the game is actually like.
The fanbois have obviously found this story and voting down the people saying how obvious the grift was/is.
I wonder how many other space sim genre games that conspicuously did not hand out the begging bowl, or squander all their money and were actually delivered have happened in the time that Star Citizen hasn’t. Being generous the best that can be said is the project is just badly mismanaged. At worst, and more realistically, much of that money just got siphoned away to fund lifestyles. Maybe the devs know they can run this grift for as long as their people stupid enough to keep funding them, knowing they’ll never have to actually deliver on their promises.
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