If you claimed all of them you’ve got some seriously great games in there… Control, Subnautica, Alien Isolation, all the Tomb Raider games, Evil Within…
That’s what I always find funny about the EGS hate crowd… They complain about the features it didn’t have at launch (that it now has) but in the end having to launch any launcher pisses me off, might as well use the one with the least garbage! No Valve, I don’t need fucking trading cards with my games!
Their launcher is perfectly acceptable and even requires less inputs to launch games than Steam as the games you’ve installed are listed in the menu on the left that’s always visible. Steam has become a mess that’s full of bloat and useless features that only exist to profit from whales and gambling addicts.
Steam has a whole lot of useless features compared to Epic or GOG Galaxy, it’s the most bloated launcher available at the moment. Do you need cards and tradable items linked to your account to play your games?
What’s funny is that if the roles were reversed Epic would be accused of trying to monetize whales and gamblers, but no one bats an eye because it’s Valve doing it.
Still gives a good idea of the proportions though and I’m willing to bet that most of the Steam games missing are shovelwares that no one ever installed.
They account for about 75% of game sales on PC from what I’m finding, it’s a “virtual monopoly”, i.e. they have enough reach to control the market even if they have competitors.
No it means that if the game is for sale on Steam then it can be sold elsewhere (GOG, EPIC…) but it’s in the contract with Steam that it can’t be sold for a lower price elsewhere, it’s not about Steam keys sold by third party vendors.
Actual unpopular opinion: I don’t give a fuck, I want my launcher to launch my games, all of them do it, Steam just comes with a shit load of extra stuff I don’t care about. I buy my games where they’re the cheapest and with all the free games on Epic I rarely use Steam anymore. If they’re the same price I’ll go with the platform that give the devs the biggest share of the profit and that’s not Steam.
The reason it’s the same price on Steam and Epic is that Steam prevents the sale on their platform if the game is sold for cheaper on other platforms…
I would also gladly increase the developer’s profit instead of the platform’s profit if the price is the same on both as I don’t use all the extra crap that Steam comes with…
No, 99% of the reason they use it is that they were first to market, made it mandatory for their first party games that were extremely popular at the time (and even today) and became defacto mandatory for many third party games as it made it simpler to control piracy to just sell through them or include a key in the physical copy and force people to install Steam. The majority of Steam users are casuals that couldn’t care less about their forums, cards, social profiles and so on. It’s the same thing in everything, there’s enthusiasts that think everyone is as crazy as they are about their hobby, the majority are just casual users that will never know/use half of the possibilities available to them because they don’t care.
Oh if you’re talking about exclusives then pricing is all over the place because they have exclusive in all categories (AAA to indie)…
There’s also more than them in the balance to determine the price at which games sell, 2K games won’t sell the new Borderlands for 60$ while other AAA titles are selling for 70$, they still need to maximise profit and if the market has determined that 70$ is a fair price then so be it.
Anyway I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want the devs to make more money so they’re able to produce more games instead of the launcher company making more money so they can develop “trading cards” as a way to make even more money.
They have their own unethical business practice they’re getting sued for (preventing sales at a lower price on competing platforms) and just because you agree with what they do now doesn’t mean it’s not a risk to have such a behemoth in the market, Gaben is nice now, it just needs him changing his mind or retiring/dying and shit could hit the fan real quick.
Find me a source confirming that they actually studied Steam’s position in their market. They have specific criterias, including financial and user ones, and Steam doesn’t meet them… oopsy!
*Because they don’t meat the minimum financial and monthly user criterias to be taken into consideration when analyzing the monopoly status of their platform
No, what I’m saying is that they didn’t check the PC gaming platform market at all because it doesn’t fit the criterias necessary for them to pay attention to it, which means that Steam not being on the list doesn’t mean they’re not a monopoly. You try to use that as proof, yet the European Union just didn’t check what’s happening in that market at all!
There’s tons of monopolies they don’t list because the market they’re in is too small to bother, it doesn’t mean they’re not monopolies.
No, the PC videogame market is too small for the European Union to analyse it.
If the local hardware store is the only one selling screws for 100km around and it doesn’t show up on their list, does it means they don’t have a monopoly or it simply means that they don’t bother checking that because the hardware store doesn’t:
Make 6.5B a year/doesn’t have a market capitalization of 65B
Doesn’t have 45m monthly users in the union AND 10k business users in the union
Meets those criterias three years in a row
Because these are the criterias required for the EU to take the time to analyze a companies’ position in their market.
The European Union considers some companies to be a monopoly with a smaller market presence than Steam has in the PC video games sales market. That comes from your own source buddy.
Your whole argument to show that it isn’t is based on ignoring their market dominance and referencing the DMA that hasn’t even been used to analyze Steam’s position in their market because the PC video game market as a whole isn’t big enough to be covered by the DMA.
They haven’t provided a source! They extrapolated from data they don’t understand! The criterias for companies to be analysed under the DMA are public and the PC video game market just doesn’t fit! The reason Steam isn’t on the list isn’t because it’s not a monopoly, it’s they the industry they I operate in isn’t taken in consideration by the law.
You could be the only online windmill hat seller, the EU wouldn’t put you on the DMA list because you wouldn’t sell 6.5B euros worth every year and your market valuation wouldn’t be 65B euros. It doesn’t mean you wouldn’t have a monopoly!
Heck, Valve doesn’t even have a market valuation because it’s not public! They’re evaluated to be worth less than 10B USD and it’s purely surveillance, that’s a long fucking way to the minimum threshold required be the DMA isn’t it? They’re still the biggest player in the PC video game sales market.
Weird mindset… you consider that it’s ok because it’s cheap? At what price is it not ok anymore?
It’s unacceptable to me that we have to pay for services that should be free and that we can’t own certain games because they’re locked behind a paywall.
Windows doesn’t offer the service that connects Counter Strike players together, Valve does, and they do it for free and they offer it for first and third party games and they suffer the reputation hit if the service doesn’t work (possibly even worse because at least with consoles you potentially have a physical copy as a backup to play with, which isn’t a possibility with always online games on Steam).
Nintendo gets a cut on all software sold on their consoles, they get all profits from first party software, they don’t tend to be the manufacturer that sells at the biggest loss (if at a loss at all), but people are still defending their choice to lock basic functionalities behind a paywall…
I just love collecting them all! (startrek.website) angielski
I remember being angry at how much this made me laugh (lemmy.world) angielski
Graphics can't save boring mechanics (startrek.website) angielski
Valve is now reversing VAC bans due to AMD drivers in CS2, according to patch notes (store.steampowered.com) angielski
Recently there was a thing where VAC would erroneously flag AMD’s antilag+ feature as cheating, and issue a ban....
It was a lively, bustling major city... of about 12 people and 1 chicken. (startrek.website) angielski
Dusk: Unpopular opinion: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly (twitter.com) angielski
Valve: don’t expect a faster Steam Deck ‘in the next couple of years’ (www.theverge.com) angielski
Sep 14 - Nintendo Direct MegaThread - All Announcements, with Youtube Links and Release Dates! (www.youtube.com) angielski
Direct Link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecsVny3ebQ0...