So pumped for this. Put in a bunch of hours back when it first came out in early access then decided to put it down until combat came out. Super excited to jump back in!
It’s usually fine during the day (school/work hours) but yeah evening and weekends are almost entirely unplayable, so much so that my clan has basically stopped raiding until it’s over.
No they don’t lol. GOG doesn’t even have a client, you have to use Lutris or Heroic Launcher that support it.
Itch has a half implemented Linux client that they gave up years ago and is straight up unusable/broken. The client is worse then a web wrapper and nas no support for Wine, so if the game doesn’t have native Linux support, it just won’t run through the client. It will download exe’s that won’t actually run and silently fail, and doesn’t have any wine support.
They don’t have a client but both allow you to just download the game and run it from a .sh that installs it in the local folder. That’s enough for me but I agree it may not be for everyone.
Lol, Epic cut Linux support when it bought Rocket League.
But you are right, no one even tries. Everyone wants to have Valve’s income, but no one wants to do the legwork of innovation that Valve does. If someone would compete with Valve where they don’t already have a massive foothold, there might be some better results. For example, Linux. If any of these funding-gorged companies were to put serious money into competing with Valve in the Linux space, it’d be a real competition. Then you could leverage your stake in that to compete in different sectors. But the Linux market is small, and averse to paying for things (userwise) so not much to gain. But Valve understands that if gaming parity with Windows happens, then it will have a compounding effect. It would unshackle the PC market from Microsoft. It would make spending funding on a gaming device that DOESN’T have to have Windows involved a much more appealing prospect. Hell, the phone gaming market. No need for these re-skinned Skinner boxes when you can have the actual PC version on your phone. Whole new market, right there.
The companies that innovate tend to lead. And those who follow the coin and not the music, do not.
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.’
I can’t name a single other digital service anywhere near steam level of trust. things you bought don’t disappear. they are on the record saying there is a contingency in case of shutdown. they havnt a used their position. as far as market leaders go, you could do worse
I don’t want a curated store though and would rather have people be able to release games, and let users decide if it is something they want or not. I can access reviews myself and don’t need companies deciding what game is or isn’t worthy of being available. And users is who I trust more anyways, which is why for so long search term + reddit is what I’ve relied on.
I mean, isn’t community self-policing and an overly tolerant attitude towards picking what type of games are allowed on your platform exactly what we want from them?
Quality control is another word for "high barrier to entry", and especially with their market position, being rejected by Steam for some arbitrary reason would effectively kill your project.
Not only should they not restrict the ability to sell your games there without a concrete reason; they shouldn't be permitted to do so. A company with that much influence shouldn't be allowed to be a gatekeeper of what constitutes a "good" game.
Their review system and strong return policy are more than enough.
I didn’t ignore it, you just didn’t think it through.
You’re complaining about having more options as if it’s some kind of moral stand. But the only reason to be mad about those things is if you were forced to buy them. Steam doesn’t only have to sell games that you specifically approve of and it’s not some kind of moral failing to sell games that are low quality.
This isn’t even getting into how you’re ignoring history to make the claim that they did it all for their bottom line and not the huge amount of user demand for them to open up the store. This also isn’t getting into how any money coming in from asset flips specifically is negligible, and not at all like some kind of NFT scam level of dubious behaviour like you’re referring to it.
The only reason to be this mad about more games being sold on Steam is if you feel a need to buy it all.
That’s an extremely loose idea of “promotion”, to the point of manufacturing upset. A storefront does not inherently promote something merely by offering it, that’s like saying a convenience store promotes Pepsi and Coca-Cola because they sell both even though both those companies have extremely strict promotional initiatives that ensure no crossover.
Because there is a gamer. Someone who plays games.
And Gmer. Someone who’s entire personality is based around games, and not in the fun healthy way. But in the justifying a monopoly because it’s their colour way. Just look at some of the comments here and you’ll see a lot of Gmers.
Ok, so that is the what, but what is the why? Why the censored word? I don’t get it. Nonetheless I’m closer to getting it now so thank you for that much
Guess I’ll continue to not buy playstation consoles then. Bought multiple playstations every generation up until the PS4 - PS, PSOne, PS2, PS2 slim, PS3, PS3 slim, PSP, PS Vita all bought on launch day, but after the PS3s slow change to cinematic 3rd person linear story driven games I gave up on them.
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