I will always support valve because of their amazing Linux support but if GOG finally made a client for Linux then I would try to use that more. I wish Epic would also support Linux but with massive douchebag Tim Sweeney running the company, that will never happen.
If these platforms supported Linux, they’d be able to compete with Steam… 15 years ago.
Nowadays Steam offers so many solutions to PC gaming that other clients simply would take ages to copy. Steam Input, cloud saves that actually work, Steam Link, Remote Play Together, etc
Yeah because if you don’t, they delist your game. That’s the literal definition of anti-competitiveness. They could never get away with that if they weren’t a monopoly.
That’s the literal definition of anti-competitiveness.
No it isn’t. That’s actually a very common store policy that’s been in place since the days of brick and mortar locations. Why do you think you never see any platform listing games at higher or lower full retail prices than every other one regularly, even when they’re not on Steam?
Where did you get the idea that this was the definition of anti-competitive? There are so many more things that define it more, like buying up all the competition or taking a big hit on loss leading pricing to force the competition to undercut themselves and collapse.
I’m one of the few who actually like the existence of Epic. Like, not necessarily Epic itself, but some serious competition is needed. I personally would’ve loved it if the competition was GOG, but it seems consumers don’t particularly care about ownership, so we have Epic.
If you are trying to argue that ownership was not even a part of the multitude reasons Stadia failed and is off the table, you should seriously need to consider evaluating your critical thinking skills.
This was supposed to be the comment where you show why ownership was a major factor in why Stadia failed, not a comment where you huff and puff and complain that something you insist on isn’t being accepted.
The problem is that all the competition to steam is far far inferior to steam in technology and ideology and future prospects. Steam isn’t a publicly traded company, has features that are pro consumers, is supporting other OS’s and doesn’t have a CEO that is a prick like epic.
Sure. But what if Gabe newel decided to sell tomorrow. Just wants to retire maybe he’s pretty old. What if Microsoft buys it and you’re left with a monopoly you don’t like. That’s the eventuality of every unhealthy industry.
Well it will be a sad day and Ubisoft, Microsoft and Epic competition won’t fix anything if steam goes to shit. Steam is basically the unicorn and once it becomes extinct we won’t get anything half decent to replace it with. Publicly traded companies are the bedrock of unhealthy industries.
Competition in the marketplace is the only thing that has any chance of saving you when that day comes.
You are in lucky days today. Tomorrow won’t be so good, but you can choose to support an industry controlled by a monopoly, or you can support an industry with healthy competition.
I would hope that Gamers aren’t so near sighted, but I’ve been proven wrong over and over again.
When steam shuts down and we have Ubisoft and Epic to replace it with I’m just moving to itch.io and probably torrenting my steam library if it comes to the worst. Also I might actually stop playing games since steam is pushing proton development forward and without them I have no reason to play or buy anything new. Epic’s shitty CEO has made toxic remarks against linux before and Ubisoft just couldn’t care less. I’ll support a company that supports my interests, epic doesn’t so I don’t simple as.
“Supporting competition” is not a good enough reason to use a shitty service. If I start a service that charges twice as much as Steam and has none of the features would you use it in order to “support competition”?
If the only reason to purchase from Epic is “they exist” that’s not good enough.
I will happily avoid Epic’s attempts to be a monopoly now over worrying that Steam might be shitty in the future.
It’s super weird to me that you guys think epic is trying to be a monopoly. Epic had 0.00001% of the market. In their wildest dreams they might expect to get ten percent.
I feel Steam vs competitors is like how after 1st wave MCU, everyone was jumping on that bandwagon, but instead of putting in the groundwork just skipped ahead, or like the monsters one just abandoned it because of one bad movie.
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.
i would love for steam to have some competition. i will gladly switch over to the first competitor that has
a big picture / controller-friendly interface
controller configurator that
is more powerful than rewasd
is editable in the overlay
has import/exportable configs (incl. with the community)
supports the best controller i’ve ever used, the steam controller
cross-platform client
cross-platform cloud saves
workshop/modding support
proper reviews system
community page for each game
etc.
and doesn’t
buy exclusivity rights to games
i don’t mind revenue deals for exclusivity, but buying existing games takes the biscuit
actively worsen existing games
e.g. removing the impeccable siapi support in rocket league, and making it run on the shitty epic servers so it disconnects all the time
particularly now that steam has switched over to electron, so the client runs like shit
i do sometimes use gog because i like their ideology, but they’re missing quite a few from this list. any gog or itch.io games i buy, i inevitably add to steam as a non-steam game. which adds a lot of these handy features, but not all
unfortunately, until a competitor brings along something new to the table, i’m quite happy to wait and pay more for a game on steam. it just has too many features i can’t give up
particularly now that steam has switched over to electron, so the client runs like shit
It uses CEF not Electron, which it has used for over 13 years. This isn’t something they just added. If it’s running slow for you you probably have an issue with hardware acceleration.
you mean that the store has been an embedded browser? in that case yes
but the whole steam client? has always been vgui, not electron . did you even read the link you sent? just because there is reference to chromium in the commit log doesn’t mean the whole thing’s built in chromium, and just because a programme can render web content also doesn’t mean it’s built in chromium. when firefox switched from xul to html did you go “akshyually, it was always able to render html content so it hasn’t switched at all”
If it’s running slow for you you probably have an issue with hardware acceleration.
it’s not just me who has performance issues. at one point it was everyone on linux with an nvidia gpu. which is supposedly fixed (and it’s definitely better) but it’s still unusably slow on both linux and windows. also, so what. “it works on my machine” isn’t a great excuse to ignore the biggest gaming gpu brand, and electron is notoriously non-performant (if my pc can handle playing a video in ffx whilst playing recent 3d games, i think it should also be able to display my list of owned games without stuttering). my point was that i never had issues with vgui, and now i do.
edit: ah, i’ve just looked through your comment history. i don’t believe anyone who’s not a troll has -10 karma and no negative comments (especially with some comments with >100 points), and i also suspect vote manipulation. i should never have engaged. sorry. i won’t engage any more.
but the whole steam client? has always been vgui, not electron cef. just because there is reference to chromium in the commit log doesn’t mean the whole thing’s built in chromium.
The “whole client” hasn’t been VGUI. Yes now every element is CEF but many, many pieces have been CEF for a very long time. “Switched over to Electron” implies it was entirely changed but it’s just using more of the thing it was already using. Those are two different things.
it’s not just me who has performance issues. at one point it was everyone on linux with an nvidia gpu
The issue you linked had nothing to do with Steam it was a bug with the Nvidia driver itself. Not sure what that’s supposed to prove.
my point was that i never had issues with vgui, and now i do.
And my point is that is not an inherent problem with Steam, that is something specific to your configuration. If it runs fine for other people it can run fine for you. I’m on Arch with an Nvidia GPU. I have zero issues with the performance.
How is a competitor ever supposed to compete with a feature list like that? It has to come out of the gate with all those things? This is why monopolies exist.
honestly? i kind of agree. but gog spent a lot of dev time revamping their client into "gog galaxy 2.0" just to make it less controller accessible; and the epic client is just unusable
i would have more sympathy if they were little indie companies. but the itch.io client is better than either. these companies are pouring money into breaking into a market, but not bothering to develop features
that comment was more an example of why the egs isn’t yet a real competitor than a criticism of any as yet nonexistent competitors
We are just now getting out of the bullshit days of 40 game launchers. The Big Industry morons like Ubi, Ea and Bliz are crumbling. Indie devs are being celebrated and releasing titles now more than ever before. We are in a ‘quiet’ time of gaming. i believe. not a dark time. If the mainstream industry can get back to more honest and longevity based projects then we will in the next 5-10 years see another golden age (think 2007 or 2017 release titles) and of course year over year everyone can point to one or two games worth playing for the whole year or two till the next one.
Remember, Skyrim was released closer to the first year you listed than the second one and the sequel is still quite a ways out. There are entire release day players of Elder Scrolls 6 who were not yet born when 5 came out.
Valve may not be the cheapest by any means, but that’s because they’re offering a product 30x as valuable. The other launchers companies have are shit, across the board, nothing but shit. It’s not even in the same continent. If any one of these companies actually wants to ever see this change, they are going to have to set their greed aside. That’s impossible for CEOs in this day and age, so I don’t see Steam ever losing their stranglehold unless they do an about-face from everything they’ve done so far. In the grand scheme of things, Valve is one of the most customer friendly companies on the face of the Earth and they continue to be innovative and supportive to users. Epic on the other hand is everything wrong with capitalism, and much the same can be said for any of the other companies with competing launchers/game stores.
What’s so wrong with Epic? I prefer Steam but Epics client has a better UI, I haven’t found any problems, and deals seem better than Steam, especially with free games.
No communities, no guides, no VR , no game streaming, annoying download manager, annoying friends tab, no steam deck, no game collections AFAIK. When Fall Guys came out for free I gave the Epic launcher a real chance and it was incredibly limited in it functionality and frustrating to use compared to Steam.
Steam is shaping up to be your all in one library for anything games be it PC, VR or portable. The Switch, Quest, Playstation, Xbox and Epic launcher all offer a piece of that experience but having a unified platform that syncs your saves and doesn’t nickel and dime you for features and accessories is why Steam is more popular.
I haven’t been using Epic enough to really compare with Steam sales but stuff gets really cheap on steam really fast. I would also gladly buy my games for money on Steam just to be able to play them easily on my Steam Deck. Also Epic is only doing the free games because they have unreal and Fortnite money, there’s no telling when the free games will stop.
You’re right about most things, and Linux/VR support is often a deal breaker for me so I rarely use Epic. But you really think its that unusable? I’ve heard mostly positive things from my friends. I don’t care how or why they’re giving out free games but its a huge plus. I just really don’t understand all the hate.
I remembered some more stuff epic doesn’t have. Steam input and launch option customization. I can play Civ 6, a game meant for kbm, on my steam deck with the controller buttons. Epic obscures their exe files to make it hard to know which to add as a non steam game to steam.
It was annoying to go from steam with it’s deep and helpful functionality to epic with what essentially just feels like the iOS appstore. I especially hate being forced to use epic online services on a game I bought ON STEAM. I couldn’t play the sackboy game with a friend on steam deck because something along the way broke and epic services wouldn’t let me. This game is P2P there’s definitely no servers being involved so why the heck can’t they just use steamworks?
Epic being unusable is a bit of an exaggeration but in terms of the platform they offer it is inferior to steam in every single way and they have done almost zero to make up the gap. Instead they pay money to keep games away from steam and force you to use their launcher in the most annoying and inconvenient way. That’s why they get so much hate from people.
Adding to what Natryamar said, epic once bundled actual malware with their client and is partially owned by Tencent, the chinese company known for turning games into garbage.
I absolutely love their client and prefer GOG over Steam. I remember how their client GOG Galaxy is highly praised in the developer community, because it is so well designed and runs so performant. It also allows you to play any previous versions of games you own.
What has GOG done for Linux? I care about OSS and companies supporting my preferred OSS operating system. To that end, Valve continues to be a steward without peer.
This opinion is in no way unpopular. Valve is privately owned and headed by a single individual with tremendous purpose of will, which is how they’ve done so many great things for the gaming industry. The issue lies with said leadership vacating their role (GabeN is getting old) and some greedy bastard taking the company in a wholy different direction. tl;dr: we need a strong competitor, but not now, and ABSOLUTELY not Epic.
I don’t see what people have against Epic, they’re just another company running a storefront, right? Or are they union busters or something?
Any competition that can take on Stream’s monopoly is good, it’s been a long time coming.
You might think Steam are the good guys because they don’t abuse their customers yet, but all good things come to an end, eventually. A company with their level of monopolistic grasp doesn’t remain benign forever.
Valve is a private company so Gabe doesn’t have anyone breathing down his neck to grow endlessly not matter the costs. Also epic refuses to add any half decent consumer features along with buying exclusivity to their platform. Sweeney is also extremely anti linux so why would I give him money.
Steam is pretty good, in many ways. … … There is a little bit of customer abuse creeping in though. It annoys me that I can’t turn off the “what’s new” panel. It’s nothing more than an advertisement panel, and the only options are to say ‘show less’ for individual games, one by one (and even then, it doesn’t stop showing advertisements related to those games).
In any case, I don’t use Epic’s launcher at all; so I won’t try to comment on which is better. I just think it’s good to point out that Steam isn’t perfect, and I agree that competition probably does them some good.
It’s incredibly frustrating from an ideological perspective that the whole PC gaming industry runs on a benevolent dictatorship by Valve.
I mean they have near total control not just over sales, but over the gaming software installed on our PCs. They have the power to do whatever, whenever, to whoever.
But at the same time, they’re cool people with good products who have good stewardship of this role.
The day Gabe dies and pathetic bastards with business degrees take over and ruin everything that’s made Steam great for all these years, is the day I begin pirating everything.
Exactly. Steam is a load-bearing member. After seeing what happened to Twitter, Reddit, Unity, Wikia, etc. it’s reasonable to think ahead. If Valve gets enshittified that’s basically the end of PC gaming.
I don’t even play games that have Denuvo. But I’m happy to see many of them remove it after a few years because they can’t afford to keep paying for their game to literally be worse and several had been cracked (although it’s my understanding that only one person was cracking those games).
…but… Literally, benevolent, sectionalized dictatorship is the only response to the Tragedy of the Commons.
…that is to say, individual responsibility and exercise of power. Work primarily on responsibility until you’ve got one area covered - then expand your power. Know your limits, and don’t try to expand your power beyond what you’re capable of handling responsibly. Encourage others to do likewise. Steam is good because they haven’t sold out, but are managed by people who have genuine interest in the industry, and who are willing to exercise power responsibly.
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.
Based on how you completely changed what your point from one comment to the other, it seems you realized you had to have something more interesting to opine.
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.
I have no problem with competition, but don’t force me to use your inferior product. If any of the major companies developed an actual competitor with the Steam launcher (in terms of features, not just a lousy storefront), it would likely get some use. If they somehow made it better than Steam, plenty of people would likely jump ship.
Epic is just a failure of a launcher. Nobody uses it over Steam by choice, because it’s lacking in nearly every way. While I’m not big on exclusives, if the launcher was a reasonable Steam alternative, they wouldn’t bother me nearly as much. As things stand, I’m firmly in the “fuck Epic” camp.
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