Yeah, but think about how much money Valve has taken, 30% of virtually every single PC game sale over the past 21 years.
I do understand that there’s more value provided, but that’s the thing with monopolies, they can still provide more value than upstarts because an upstart has to build everything they did, while having none of the market share that they had to do it with.
But it does, paying third parties to not publish on your competitors platform is the oldest anti-competitive behaviour in the book.
It would have been completely fine if they started out with actually funding development of new games and only releasing them on their store.
I would argue that even restricting sales to your own store is anti-competitive tying. You’re avoiding competing on the merits of a store using exclusive licensing of a creative work.
Again, not a fan of the tactic, but they are trying to break an entrenched monopoly with a ton of network effects which is near impossible.
Instead we are here, almost 6 years later. Their launcher is still trash,
Their launcher is perfectly fine.
their exclusive deals were a complete money sink,
Not really. They weren’t as effective as they wanted them to be but they did ultimately gain a significant chunk of market share.
EGS is still not profitable,
No, they needed to gain more market share to break even.
they burned all bridges to Valve and are not one step closer to their claim that 30% is too much and they can do it with 8% 12%.
But they are. They’re not losing that much money, even with a tiny portion of market share. Valve having far more market share means they should be able to do it for an even smaller percentage than what epic is using, especially since Valve has 21 years of infrastructure to lean on.
I mean, I’ll give full Kudos to Valve for investing in Linux gaming, it wasn’t exactly a selfless maneuver, but it is still valuable and makes the world a better place.
And I’ll give them Kudos for contributing to VR, but they neither popularized it, nor make the best headsets, both of those titles go to Oculus. They do have the hands down best VR game ever made, but even that is not what popularized VR, Beat Saber is.
Ultimately, Valve has made billions and billions in profits on top of all that investment, and on top of paying all their employees $300k+ salaries + stock. I like a lot of what Steam offers, but it’s also objectively unquestionable that they could have offered all of what they offer for far less money, but their de facto monopoly means that everyone will buy from them no matter what.
Because, let’s be real, gamers aren’tt hating Epic for having to download mods through a third party mod site, they’re hating them for having to use a second launcher / store.
Not really I don’t think … Anna Purna already publishes a lot of games and has published a lot of notable films in the past few years.
I feel like if anything it’s most notable because Anna Purna has deeper pockets than Remedy, more experience in film and television, and produce notably high quality creative and narrative work, meaning that they’re unlikely to screw up Remedy’s writing chops and can legitimately help them expand their mixed media ambitions.
I’m not saying you should, I’m saying it doesn’t make them villains or a bad company.
They made a mistake in their approach to the EGS, which they’ve pretty candidly talked about and admitted. But the end goal of EGS wasn’t just to make them more money, they offer every developer more money when they publish there. The underlying motivation for creating EGS in the first place was the recognition that Valve does not need to be taking a 30% cut of every game sale to provide the services they provide.
I’m happy that Remedy can afford to self publish and that Anna Purna is willing to finance the project without publishing it, but I don’t think Epic is a particularly bad publishing partner.
We would never had an Alan Wake Remaster without Epic paying for it.
Dear PC gamers, please stop bitching about installing a second games launcher. If you wanted all games to only come out on a single launcher then you should have bought a console. Us console players are getting real sick of the endless bitching about Epic just because they tried to break Steam’s monopoly.
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. They’ve also spent hundreds of millions of dollars to break other monopolies like Apple and Google’s. They are by no means the evil villains that PC Gamers make them out to be. The tactics they took with EGS were misguided but they’ve genuinely fought to level the playing field at the legislative level, they’re a full tier better than an EA or Ubisoft who only ever try and squeeze as much profit as possible at every turn.
Tetris Effect: Connected was it. The Switch version is janky as hell but the real version that makes a PS5 run hot is one of the most sublimely beautiful and enrapturing games ever. And it’s still just Tetris.
I’m not advocating for that either and I don’t necessarily they think they would these days. Ubisoft is steadfastly ignoring the dumbasses around the black male / Asian female leads for AC, no matter how loud they whine.
Games should just get rid of character creators. Just play the damn game with whoever the main character is and learn to empathise with someone other than yourself.
According to Shotbolt, the developer and digital distribution company is “shutting out” all competition in the PC gaming market as it “forces” game publishers to sign off on price parity obligations - supposedly preventing them from going on to offer lower prices on other platforms.
If you have a point to make about why Valves is not abusing it’s monopoly position make it. Otherwise no one wants to hear your dumb ‘but the free market is always right’ statement.