Although, of course, it’d be cool if Steamworks would work for non-steam games at least for modding/multiplayer.
That’s the point. No, nobody’s forcing them to use Steamworks (especially since Epic has rolled out their cross-platform, store-and-OS-agnostic free competitor to it), but anyone who chooses to do so (which is a lot of devs) ends up locking those features to Steam (barring a ton of extra work for themselves) simply because of Valve’s chosen policy.
Don’t think Valve doesn’t understand this. They found a way to get devs to all but lock their games to Steam and thank Valve for the opportunity to do it.
Sadly, surprisingly often while games release on GOG they then lack features
This is almost always a situation that can be pinned on Steam, actually. The games that end up doing this are usually using Steamworks, which essentially forces them into a sort of soft-exclusivity on Steam since their multiplayer features and such can only exist there.
There have been multiple games, mostly in the past now, that announced launching on certain platforms, including Steam, then had to backtrack and reveal that Epic bought their exclusivity and that gamers that were already expecting to get the game from one platform, now wouldn’t be able to.
There was one game that happened to. Metro. And anyone who had already pre-purchased on Steam had it fulfilled through Steam at launch.
The rest of the games people claim this happened to were Kickstarter projects in which the backer reward promised a “digital key”. Now, at the time of those Kickstarter campaigns, the only stores that existed were Steam and GOG, so there was an assumption made that the keys would be to one of those two. But by the time the games were getting ready to launch, another option came into existence and devs who clearly needed money (or they wouldn’t have been going to Kickstarter to begin with) made a deal.
They can’t “push and pull” anything. With Sweeney owning 50%+1, Tencent and anyone else he sold shares to can literally do nothing - he will always have the final say. And since the company is private, there’s almost certainly an agreement/contract in place on those share purchases that if someone wants to dump them they have to offer them back to him/the company first. Since it’s not a public company they can’t just go sell their shares on an open market. The threat of a large shareholder is gone in a case like this - they can’t stage a hostile takeover and they can’t dump and run.
A publicly traded company, on the other hand, effectively has no choice but to cause as much harm as possible to their customers and to society in general in order to maximize short term shareholder profits
Nobody is talking about public companies here. Both Valve and Epic are private companies.
If you want to complain about profit motives, that’s a capitalism problem overall, not an issue with public vs. private corporations.
If they had spent more time cooking up the EGS ecosystem into something more similar to XBL or PSN before trying to attract consumers en masse, they likely would’ve been pretty successful.
That’s not remotely how it would have happened.
Have a read over this article that was posted by Lars Doucet (well-respected indie developer of Defender’s Quest) roughly a year before EGS even launched. It lays out exactly what a Steam competitor is going to run into trying to break into that market and provides a blueprint to not fail that is almost exactly what Epic did. And yet, the discussion to this day is still filled with nothing but “REEEEE, EXCLUSIVES!!!1”, nevermind the fact that those games all still run perfectly fine on the exact same machine you launch your Steam games from (excepting, now - multiple years on from the whole kerfuffle having begun - the Deck… buying straight from Steam does make that a much nicer/smoother experience). You can even add them to Steam to get the extra features like the controller customization and such.
Basically, even if they built a launcher that was better in every conceivable way than Steam, nobody was going to switch. They had to do something else to bring both devs and players on board. As the article states:
Even if every aspect of your service is better than Steam’s in every possible way, you’re still up against the massive inertia of everybody already having huge libraries full of games on Steam. Their credit cards are registered on Steam, their friends all play on Steam, and most importantly, all the developers, and therefore all the games, are on Steam.
But that’s not what Epic is after. They tried to go hard after the sellers, figuring that if they can corner enough fo the market with exclusives the buyers will have to come.
They did both things.
Yes, they went after sellers, because they needed something to sell. Nobody’s going to go to the new upstart store without some incentive. For sellers, that incentive was piles of money (with the understandable trade off of an exclusivity period - a completely normal thing for businesses to do).
But they also went after buyers by handing out hundreds of free games to build up everyone’s libraries (something they’re obviously still doing), and by running the best sales seen on a PC store since Valve stopped doing flash deals during their sales.
But nothing they do is going to achieve your statement of “you could run a slightly less feature-rich store, take less of a cut, and pass the reduction fully on to consumers and you’d be an easy choice for many gamers.” They actually tried that at the start, with Metro [Whatever - I don’t play the Metro series so I can never keep the titles straight] launching at a reduced price point because of the lowered cut, but everyone just focused on “ZOMG, I HAVE TO CLICK A DIFFERENT ICON TO LAUNCH IT?!?!11”. Aside from that example, though, the pricing of the games isn’t up to them. Blame the publishers for prices staying the same while they pocket the extra from the lowered store cut - they could easily pass it along to consumers, but they choose not to. Epic themselves did what they could with the coupons during sales (leading to devs/pubs like CDPR maliciously increasing the prices of their games to disqualify them from it just to spite Epic and their potential buyers) and now the not-nearly-as-good-a-deal cash back program they’re doing.
The bulk of gamers simply don’t want to buy from anything other than Steam, and nothing anyone says or does will budge them from that. Every argument against EGS existing is just a rationalization of that stance. I’ve literally seen people say “I want every game on every store and then I’ll buy it from Steam.”
It’s almost as if Epic actually does have developers’ and the industry’s best interests at heart despite the shit takes from the terminally-online Gamer™ crowd…
EGS is really the only thing remotely close to what Steam does, though.
GOG will always be an afterthought as long as they have their DRM-free policy in place. They’re super cool, but they’re a niche and will never grow beyond that without losing what makes them cool.
Origin (or whatever EA’s calling their store now) gave up pursuing third-party sales years ago. They still do it, but they clearly have no interest in actually making a go of becoming an actual competitor to Steam.
The Windows Store is terrible for a number of different reasons, even if it’s better than Microsoft’s previous attempts at getting into this space (coughGWFLcough). EGS is more likely to overtake Steam than Windows Store is to even rival EGS.
Uplay (or, again, whatever Ubisoft is calling their store these days) is like Origin - I don’t even know for sure if Ubi is doing third-party sales, but if so, it’s very much an afterthought for them.
And then everyone else just sells Steam keys. They’re not in the same market as the others, so don’t really fit into this conversation. If you’re 100% reliant on the store you’re “competing” with, you’re not competing with them.