Dear PC gamers, please stop bitching about installing a second games launcher
No.
Don’t force me to install a garbage dump that runs like shit and isn’t even close to feature complete to play a game.
Or do and I won’t pay, either way works lol.
Edit:
Noone is a fan of exclusives but Epic’s behaviour was explicitly to try and break Steam’s entrenched monopoly and they legitimately offer far more favourable terms for developers.
What a surprise, an epic defender that thinks that monopoly means store do good. There are plenty of competition against steams store, they just don’t get market share because they’re not feature complete or they just suck.
There is a fundamental difference between using anti-competitive behaviour to break a monopoly, and using it to entrench a monopoly.
Yes, and as we all know, a company that gets to the top using scummy tactics will definitely change them once they’re on top. /s
How fucking naive are you? There’s no difference between the two because the later turns into the former every time. You’re just defending your favored party using shit tactics, which is why you can’t defend the opposite.
That’s like arguing that a bully using violence and someone standing up to a bully using violence is the same thing.
If you have to use violence constantly to survive and thrive, violence is your only tool. Once the bully is defeated, the victim will begin bullying, continuing the cycle of violence. This is no different.
Lol, your two examples are from companies that have their own shitty launchers that customers hated using because they aren’t very good. That’s a service issue entirely on them, steams MoNoPoLy is a lazy excuse to paper over that glaring fact.
Again, store do good isn’t a monopoly. Steam isn’t a monopoly just because every other competitor doesn’t know what customers want or don’t care because it’s expensive. And you’re kinda proving my point. There are tons of competing stores out there to use, but people don’t use them nearly as much because they suck or they’re not feature complete. Both Blizzard and Ubisoft have their own competing stores, but neither can get market share because they refuse to offer features that customers want. Epic has the same problem.
Steam’s MoNoPolY is 100% a lack of services and features from the competition, and that’s what keeps people coming back to the environment. This isn’t Walmart undercutting sales to drive competitors out of the market, this is smaller hobby stores mad they can’t slap their customers and be entitled to the business the big player has.
The fact that the launcher isn’t as good isn’t the point.
It absolutely is the point, because the store and launcher being shit is why they have no market share. You’re basically saying that it’s not their fault that customers don’t want to use their product.
The whole rest of your argument about physical distribution is a non-sequitor which doesn’t map to digital distribution. And again, you keep alleging monopolistic tactics that don’t exist in the real world. Epic being shit and not even remotely close to the same usable product does not make steam a monopoly.
Let’s be clear here, no matter how good EGS gets or no matter how good a new alternative made their launcher, the vast majority of people won’t do the switch for the simple reason that their library is centralized in a single place and that place is Steam.
You have no evidence of this, because no one has tried to offer a competitive service. And in fact, there is evidence against you with people choosing other stores like GoG and itch.io for games they want from those platforms even with the lower feature set. I use both platforms frequently for indie games or stuff I want DRM free, even though my main library is steam.
But again, those platforms aren’t nearly as popular because they don’t offer the same feature set. It’s not steam forcing out competition, it’s no one being willing to make a product to actually compete. Again, this is a service issue, not a tactics issue.
Also, L.O.L. at comparing a free service chasing cash to something you have to pay for.
Nah, I saw that piece of shit in theaters and still wish I would have walked out. I know what he was going for, but like every other roth movie I’ve seen (doubly for anything he’s written), it’s just not well done outside of the cinematography. And frankly, well shot porno and gore scenes don’t make for a compelling movie on their own.
It’s actually pretty easy to argue it’s fair once you look at everything. Steam offers a shit ton of resources for that 30%, including hosting, distribution, patching, workshop, etc. And that’s not even getting into the fact that the dev can get all of that AND get steam keys that they can distribute themselves (meaning valve doesn’t get a cut of that) that still utilizes the same infra.
I wish I could find it, but I recently saw a video of Thor (@piratesoftware, does his own game dev and used to work for Blizzard) talking about this and going into even more detail than I can remember at the moment.
Competition isn’t possible? EGS is an active competitor that only takes 12% and they still can’t get fucking anywhere because their store fucking sucks. GoG exists and also takes 30%, their store/launcher are ok, but they don’t offer nearly as much for that 30%, but they make up for that with drm free games. There are other minor players out there, so competition is definitely possible, but not one of them offers a comparable product.
The only way steam would lower their cut is if someone came along and made a game store that actually offered a significant portion of the services steam offered and was about as good but also had a lower cut of sales. But good luck finding someone who can do all of that and also takes less than 30%.
Ok, so then handle all of that yourself at cost. Which will lead to the death of your studio faster?
Seriously though, a $15 game selling just 100k copies is still $1m to you (before taxes) and has no upkeep. You do all that steam does yourself, you’re going to drown in operations costs and upkeep time.
Epic poured billions of Fortnite money with little to show for it.
Yes, Into fortnite, not EGS. The eggs spent all their money on timed exclusives instead of a better product, and that’s why they failed to make a steam competitor.
Oh, I know. I got exactly 1 free game from EGS, which I promptly bought on stream myself once I realized that EGS had no offline mode (so the game I had been playing refused to launch during an Internet outage).
And that’s one of the many reasons EGS isn’t able to get a significant market share, because as I said initially, EGS fucking sucks. If they spent half as much on improving the store as they do for timed exclusives and trying to lure people in with free games, they might actually get somewhere.
I love doom 3, but I also have a vivid memory of a sleepover at a buddy’s house in high school where we made a friend play it then we scared the bejesus out of him during one of the early locker scares that we saw coming and he didn’t.
This has to be the funniest PR disaster in video game history. “Guy did not forsee players getting mad for locking a gamemode behind a $250 edition, doubles down on it and tells people to chill out”
Anything is possible when you’re not constrained by what is actually something that can really happen. For example, epic could even blow up some of Apple’s headquarter campuses by uploading a bomb to the iOS app store because of all the ‘wholes’ in the epic drm.
I haven’t used EGS in 5 or 6 years, but the whole reason I refuse to use them (aside from the timed exclusive bullshit) was no offline mode when I wanted to play subnautica. I remember being so mad that I couldn’t play my game when I lost Internet that once it was back I bought it on steam and uninstalled EGS entirely.
So not sure how much of their library is actually drm free if you can’t play a game without being able to contact their servers. But who knows, maybe EGS finally got around to adding basic features after all this time.
Today, on February 28, nearly five years after Control’s initial launch, Remedy Entertainment, the team behind the Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and Control series, released an announcement regarding a deal between them and 505 Games, detailing a full transition to Remedy acquiring full rights to the franchise. While Remedy...
Well then, if that asshole Sweeney is involved, I won’t be playing this game for a decade until it gets a sensible release. Which is a shame, because the first one is such a gem.
Apologies that this is not a pure gaming question, but I’d really like to hear people’s opinion on the Borderlands movie trailer and especially from people who have played the games. That’s why I’m asking here, I hope that’s ok.
Existing Windows Mixed Reality devices will continue to work with Steam through November 2026, if users remain on their current released version of Windows 11 (version 23H2) and do not upgrade to this year’s annual feature update for Windows 11 (version 24H2).
Tldr: fuck you, if you want to use your hardware, bend over and spread your cheeks cuz your OS is gonna be raw digging the security vulns we’ll be releasing over the next 2 years.
Remedy and Annapurna announce a strategic cooperation agreement on Control 2 (www.remedygames.com) angielski
Remedy and Annapurna announce a strategic cooperation agreement on Control 2 and bringing Control and Alan Wake to film and television
Borderlands is failing already. (www.eurogamer.net)
Steam Is Run By Fewer Than 80 Staff, Lawsuit Docs Reveal (insider-gaming.com) angielski
Bethesda Is Charging $7 For A New Starfield Mission, And Players Are Upset (www.gamespot.com) angielski
DOOM: The Dark Ages | Official Trailer 1 (4K) | Coming 2025 (www.youtube.com) angielski
We are so back
You can't take it with you, but you can't leave it for someone else either: Valve says you aren't allowed to bequeath a Steam account in a will (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
"PSN isn't supported in my country. What do I do?" Arrowhead CEO: "I don't know" (lemmy.world) angielski
Escape From Tarkov studio boss says he "did not foresee" players would get mad about charging extra for PvE (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
This has to be the funniest PR disaster in video game history. “Guy did not forsee players getting mad for locking a gamemode behind a $250 edition, doubles down on it and tells people to chill out”
The Steam Spring Sale is now in full swing (www.destructoid.com) angielski
Apple terminates Epic Games developer account calling it a 'threat' to the iOS ecosystem (techcrunch.com) angielski
Remedy acquires full rights to the Control franchise from 505 (www.destructoid.com) angielski
Today, on February 28, nearly five years after Control’s initial launch, Remedy Entertainment, the team behind the Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and Control series, released an announcement regarding a deal between them and 505 Games, detailing a full transition to Remedy acquiring full rights to the franchise. While Remedy...
Borderlands players - what is your opinion about the new movie trailer? (piped.kavin.rocks) angielski
Apologies that this is not a pure gaming question, but I’d really like to hear people’s opinion on the Borderlands movie trailer and especially from people who have played the games. That’s why I’m asking here, I hope that’s ok.
EA flop Immortals of Aveum reportedly cost around $125 million, former dev says "a AAA single-player shooter in today's market was a truly awful idea" (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Personally I would not call Immortals of Aveum an AAA game. 😅...
Windows Mixed Reality to be removed in Windows 11 24H2 (blogs.windows.com) angielski
Windows MR and HP Reverb VR headsets to lose all functionality in Windows 11 24H2, so don’t update if you use those headsets....