If Epic could actually provide a better service, they would be seeing customers and developers actually want to use their platform.
Instead they try to lock games behind exclusivity deals and bribe customers with free games and they still fail.
So what do they do instead of fixing their own problems? They go after everyone else who’s actually successful.
I’d love it if they had a comparable service, because competition is good for the consumer, but they just don’t.
Steam has had a relative monopoly for two decades, and we’re lucky they’ve been customer friendly. But if something were to happen to Gabe, or Valve decided to go public or something, we’re screwed.
The fact that everyone else is shit isn’t Valves problem, it’s theirs.
And we are fucked when something eventually changes with Valve, but we’d have been fucked this whole time without them.
When Gabe dies, we’re SO fucked.
There will be a time where Gabe will no longer be there. Hopefully someone as good as him is ready to fight the good fight.
I wonder if Gabe would go as far as doing a Halliday move like in ready player one.
I feel like that’s a bad idea cause it’s gonna be a sweaty cheater that would crack the thing and fuck everyone up.
Unless the puzzle is in the one place you can’t just download cheats for: real life. The only cheats you get in reality are rich parents.
Jeff Bozos, Melon Husk, Sam Alternator, and Zark Muckerberg gonna hired a bunch of people to crack the puzzle and it will just be a show where 4 of them compete, the rest of us peasant will be irrelevant.
“Melon Husk” 🤣
If Epic could actually provide a better service, they would be seeing customers and developers actually want to use their platform.
Doubt
Gog is objectively giving you more value for your money but even cdpr had to release the Gwent standalone on steam eventually because people didn’t buy it enough - once it was on steam it sold more than in a year on gog in weeks
People don’t look at the alternatives at all - unless it’s a AAA game with an exclusive deal
Gog is objectively giving you more value for your money
What value do they give you exactly?
The games are mostly priced the same, they don’t have integrated modding support, no input remapping, no remote play, no in-home streaming, no steamcmd for server operators, no VR client, no Linux client and no Steam Deck support.
The only thing they do give you is no DRM, but nothing stops a developer from adding a DRM-free game on Steam.
I really like steam for its friends network and local streaming, but these are the reasons I occasionally buy on gog:
Games that my wife likes to play so that they don’t tie up my steam account. I still find it weird that ALL games in steam get locked down when one is running. I understand it keeping the same game from being run more than once simultaneously, but more than that is unnecessary.
I also buy games on gog (when available) that I mod a lot, because it’s really easy to stop updates on gog (updates often break mods).
She can play your steam games in offline mode without affecting your online activity. As long as the game developer/publisher allows offline use.
Obviously doesn’t solve all your problems but figured I’d mention it if it gives you more flexibility.
I do know about that, but I want it to be as easy as clicking on a game to play it without worrying about toggling the mode. I know I could make a separate account for her too, but we share machines and again that becomes a barrier when wanting to just click a game to play it.
In this niche case, gog is just plain better.
You also can share games with family mode with steam. So even online my SO and I can play games from either of our accounts.
That is a cool feature, and I do use it though in a different way. I made an alt account that I buy vr games on so that I can share them with friends. That way if a friend is playing one of my vr games through family share, it won’t lock up all the games in my main account.
In the example you’re talking about, say your SO is playing a game shared from your account - it locks up all the games in both accounts! Pretty annoying if you want to play a game, now.
But if it’s a gog game, there’s no issue at all.
No DRM is definitely better :)
Steam is DRM. Note the warnings all mention third-party drm. Eventually your login to steam expires and you can’t play your games, and steam can revoke games and your access to them at any point for any reason.
Steam is good, but let’s not imply it’s providing a DRM free experience.
Steam is only DRM if Steamworks is required for the game to launch, e.g. I can copy my Baldur’s Gate 3 files to a different PC and launch them without Steam.
It’s up to the developer how they behave if Steam is not present.
See also https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam
I didn’t know that. It’s good to know. Thanks.
I think what they mean is that when you buy the game on Steam, you can’t just download the game files through their website. You need to install their client. Which can be seen as a form of DRM.
No, I meant what I said, I was wrong and have been corrected.
all of the things you have listed are things we as individuals can and have implemented without steam, theyre pretty good like adding code to wine and pushing linux to the larger audience and i myself have been on steam for 11 years with 320 games, but integrated modding? i mean we had mod managers before steams implementation.
game streaming we have moonlite and shunshine > for amd hosts, and theres more.
input remapping can be done through standalone applications i use sc-controller for remapping my steam controller.
id say steams vr client is more of a negative than a positive, leads to segmentation and issues with device support when we should of focused on a wide approach to vr. like what google did with android, funded a free and open eco-system>(less so now)
steam sells accessibility and DRM, personally i see this as a bad thing. force people to become dependent. and while gog isnt natively on linux there are work around like downloading from gog.com or installing heroic games launcher.
steam sells accessibility and DRM, personally i see this as a bad thing.
So we can agree that GOG does not objectively give you more value for your money as OP implied.
Value is personal, I for one want a game, I dont want a bloated web browser that only connects through steam, which is what the steam client is. All the thing I need steam to do I can do and I can do it in a more agnostic way and less bloated. I use wayland therefore steam does not run without xwayland support enabled and even when enabled I can’t stream my desktop over steam remote.
- Can’t use remote play and have an open source implementation that has fine tuning controls.
- Installing mods through third party tools or manually is easy enough and allows for multiple distributors.
- Dont use vr and even so its a closed ecosystem.
- More than happy to visit steam in my own browser to buy and download games if that was possible.
- Dont care for skins, cards, or any of the inventory system.
- I talk to friends through open source solutions.
If you do however want a streaming, mod manager, vr, forum, store front, download manager, DRM and much more in one bloated application then yes the value proposition is there.
I highly value diy solutions in software, you on the other hand may not. And this is fine. GOG offers more to me than to you as steam offers less for me than for you.
That is your opinion. Steam is growing and it satisfies millions people. Just not your style does not mean it is bad.
yes and analogous to value also never said steam is bad
GOG doesn’t have regional pricing. It’s giving me less value for my money lol.
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/2720-4EC7-B95A-1D2A steams regional pricing is basically gone…
Well, I feel sorry for gamers from those countries but I’m not from there so I’m not impacted by this. Only time regional pricing is not available for my region is when the publisher has opted out of it.
They ruined a game I loved and I will never forgive them.
What game was that?
Rocket league 😞
SAME.
I feel you man. 😔
Still play but no interest at all in ever using the shop or buying a pass
Same. I play out of habit and will drop it like a rock once I find a replacement game. I’m already at like half the playtime. Haven’t spent a cent since they moved trading.
My condolences just FYI, if you have a PlayStation account or an Xbox account you can use that to link to epic and you do not need to make an epic account to play
Unreal Tournament
Probably rocket League
Epic building a launcher that has equivalent features to Steam would do nothing. Everyone wants all their games in one place, and everyone already has their friends list there.
Getting exclusives and giving away games is probably the only way they could even enter the market. Yeah the launcher kinda sucks, but Valve has decades of development that they’ve poured into Steam, it isn’t simple to just copy everything. There was a time that Steam sucked.
Steam is a de-facto monopoly. They luckily don’t really do anti competitive practices, they just focus on having a great product, and that’s why people (myself included) love them. But I don’t think another company can ever really enter the PC market without a few tricks like exclusives or free games.
Tim Sweeney is literally the biggest fucking cry baby I’ve ever seen.
I won’t touch anything Epic because of such a man child he has become.
I don’t care about his crying as much as I’m annoyed they won’t make anymore Unreal games
Hey if him being a giant baby keeps giving me free games let the manbaby cook.
Mankind Divided is free right now btw
Not worth me being a statistic that they can sell to investors imo. Fuck Epic.
Besides, that game’s been on sale for less than $5 on Steam.
“As you can see, a whole bunch of people joined our service, downloaded games we paid literally millions for from our servers and didn’t give us money” isn’t a good pitch.
It’s not, no. Would you imagine they would pitch free players as potential future customers?
It is the only reason I have epic installed. Not planning to buy anything but they got their foot in the door
Fooling investors into thinking people will just start paying them for a worse experience than you can get on Steam is funny but even they should realize once they look at the financials.
I wouldn’t be surprised to hear something like…
they rope kids in with the free price tag over the summer, school starts and they get bullied for only having the default Fortnite skin, and suddenly the “customer” “converts“.
Investors (not China)
Mankind Divided is free right now btw
It’s not free. The point is to get me to make an account on Epic and install their stupid launcher. That isn’t free and I’m tired of people claiming things are “free” when in fact they exist to get you to sign up for another service. It’s not free-as-in-air.
Well, on Linux (e.g. my Steam Deck), I can just install Heroic Launcher and don’t need their stupid launcher whatsoever.
I am playing my epic games exclusively via heroic and it is a blast.
I am missing an equivalent community to “fuck epic”. With all the relevant information of why this service is still not a good idea to follow, even by grabbing their games “for free”.
Edit: Like this extensive summery: https://old.reddit.com/r/fuckepic/comments/bs4kh6/rfuckepic_for_dummies_a_quick_breakdown/
You’re right, but I do appreciate getting GTA V for $0. They’ll never get a cent from me but I’ll take their games. I’m also running Windows so nothing about my gaming is free-as-in-air anyways
Chances are they have already gotten more than a cent from you – depending on what they do with your account data. Even just an email address has a price. That’s my only point, really. Just signing up gives them something.
Well if they can turn [email protected] into money they honestly deserve the 50 cent they’re getting for it.
They can. That’s literally what data brokers do.
The point is that an email address that is not in use except once to create that epic account is worthless to whoever buys it.
We know it isnt free free. But in this economy you take what you can get.
The horror 😔
Gabe Newell gives me Hedonism Bot vibes in the image from this article
Gabe: Hello Handsome, might you procure my services?
Me: What do I have to do?
Gabe: Nothing sordid I assure you. Simply open your wallet, ever so gently, while I humiliate Tim Sweeny
~opens my wallet~
Gabe: Save it for the Steam Sale
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=gt4Pfhd02w0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
that picture of Gabe is fucking peak IDGAF
Is he holding a bowl in his hand or is it just me LMAO
It’s a steam deck. (and a phone)
I thought the phone was a knife, cause that would have also been reasonable.
I like to believe that the Steam Deck was never meant to be sold as a product.
It was just Gabe who wanted to play games on the deck of his yatch, so he got few engineers at Valve to work on a solution.
Of course the engineers were a bit too enthusiastic and turned it into an actual consumer product.
Brilliant advertising. That could be me!
Oh Sweeney having a tantrum, when hasn’t that happened monthly since like 10 years ago? Sweeney if you want more money than what you’re already making, then fucking make better products man. Fucking asshole trying to win the game by crying to daddy government and having fits. It would be one thing if he was a small guy being treated unfairly, but this dude is in the elite as well, his company is a big name in the game, but he cries as if he was small potatoes being treated unfairly by big corpos. Fuck off, corpo trash trying to pass as a small boy. If there’s a thing more annoying than a corporation being an asshole is an asshole corporation trying to pass as a victim.
You know what I find more annoying then that? Defending a monopoly that’s rent seeking to the tune of a million dollars of revenue per employee per year, and that’s with most of the employees literally being paid to work on nothing.
In which market is Steam a monopoly?
the one that occupies the vast emptiness of masterspace’s cranium, I’d wager.
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Everything you said specifically excludes Valve and Steam from being a monopoly. The definition of monopoly includes the anticompetitive behaviors. They don’t give a fuck about competition. They don’t buy up everyone who could be a threat. They don’t push for exclusivity contracts on big upcoming games. They exist and work to continue to do so. That is how business is supposed to be.
Developers are allowed to distribute their games directly to consumers. Thats not rent seeking or a monopoly.
Sweeney is such a little bitch.
Sweeney is such a child
He’s entirely right. Valve is just stealing money from gamers and developers by not lowering their fees.
Perhaps, but on the other side of that coin: Because valve doesn’t have legal obligations to make money snd increase shareholder value, they put a lot of money elsewhere. The products they create are awesome (literally the best launcher on PC, Tim Sweeney is probably upset because his is ass) and invest heavily in things better for gamers:
- digital returns were huge when they first rolled out
- (IMO) spearheading game streaming with steam in home streaming & the steam link
- creating awesome games and not milking them for perpetual profit (other than maybe in game items but i don’t want to have this discussion)
- investing heavily in alternative ways to play (steam machines, aforementioned steam link, VR/index, steam controller, steam deck)
- legitimately spending money to make it possible to game on Linux, reducing gamers reliance on Microsoft/Windows
legitimately spending money to make it possible to game on Windows
Linux* I assume?
Yeah good catch LMAO
Finally… after all these years… Steam on Windows
The Epic launcher could actually be so much better if they bothered to put any effort into it. Obviously they’re going to have fewer games and stuff but they could still make a decent launcher that isn’t so annoying to use and actually has additional features.
Part of the problem they have is that it’s actually difficult for game developers to put their games on both platforms so i’ve got to pick one and obviously i’m going to pick Steam.
Valve also allowed most of their employees to work on whatever they wanted for a decade, an initiative that produced almost nothing, and during that time they still made close to a million dollars per year per employee.
I’m not saying I’m unhappy with Valve being private or with Valve making enough money to give itself a nice cushion, but the scale of the money they’re making is absurd when independent game devs often still struggle to make money.
Experimenting with company structure is a good thing long-term
Source on producing almost nothing for a decade because the employees had freedom of work projects?
Yeah, I’ve been with Steam since 2013 when they came to Linux, and Steam has gotten better every year since then. For example:
- Steam Controller
- Steam Input
- Steam Link app
- Proton & Steam Deck
- tons of bugfixes (Steam on Linux sucked when it launched, it’s way more stable now)
And so on. I don’t know which decade OP is talking about, but at least the last decade has been fantastic for me.
Valve also allowed most of their employees to work on whatever they wanted for a decade
So 30% cut leads to employee well being? Great!
No it doesn’t. It leads to Valve wasting money enriching themselves to the tune of millions of dollars per employee per year while independent game developers making normal salaries continue to have to lay people off and be underfunded.
It leads to Valve
“… employing Linux developers and finally making actual cracks in the true monopoly of Windows.”
FTFY.
while independent game developers making normal salaries continue to have to lay people off and be underfunded.
Funny, it’s not the indies with the huge layoffs but the megacorps that have enough money to buy fucking Activision-Blizard-King and then shed crocodile tears about the hard economy.
“… employing Linux developers and finally making actual cracks in the true monopoly of Windows.”
Again, Valve has made close to a million dollars per employee per year. No they have not spent anywhere remotely close to that on Linux developers. You’re equating a trinket they tossed you in the last couple of years with the giant horde they robbed from developers.
Funny, it’s not the indies with the huge layoffs
It is, independent studios lay people off and have to close up shop all the time, on top of just not making that much money to begin with, they just don’t make headline news the way that big companies do.
Valve is just stealing money from gamers
If you actually think that reduced fees mean lower cost for consumer, you’re out of touch with reality.
and developers
They are free to go somewhere else like the EGS utopia where developers are definitively get paid directly an equal cut of each sale and no publisher intermediary like EA and Activision is just taking all the revenue and the developers get paid their usual salary anyhow.
You’re right. Giving 30% for really fucking good platform services is way worse than having to find a publisher that takes in 70 to 90% of revenue and pushes devs to release unfinished games.
Yeah seriously. As a dev, that 30% cut gets you a lot of stuff with absolutely no additional charges. Trying to roll your own distribution for your downloads could exceed that 30% by itself after you:
- Host the files somewhere that can be downloaded anywhere close to as fast as steam’s servers
- Handle payment processing fees
- Develop and maintain a site with high reliability
And that’s only downloads. With steam you also get:
- p2p networking tools
- game server hosting
- steam community integration
- analytics
- cloud saves
- voip
And like 50 other things. It’s ridiculously good value unless you’re developing some super low rent single player indie title. Even then, just having it available on steam will get you way more sales to make up for it.
Sure, epic charges 10% but you basically only get distribution and some super half baked community features.
They are not stealing from gamers. A game would still cost 70 dollars on steam no matter the cut they take.
Developers, I won’t argue with
EGS is not profitable with the cut they take atm.
Sweeney it’s on drugs if he thinks valves cut is unfair
EGS would be profitable if they had the sales numbers that Steam does. Theyre not profitable because they’re basically just a fortnite and rocket league store.
And also a free games tap
If the developers want to just directly sell me their games old school I’d be cool with that.
Exactly. I’ve been Linux-only since 2009 or so, and had never used Steam before switching. I remember buying Minecraft and Factorio directly from their websites, and I remember when Humble Bundle didn’t have such a connection w/ Steam.
I’d be down with it if they support my platform. If they don’t, I’ll stick with Steam.
And Epic Games is just distributing games to gamers and providing services to developers at cost?
I don’t like Steam but its clear that Epic is just mad because they were late to market and would otherwise charge similar fees.
Those fees are multi-industry standard though.
What about our economy makes you think that multiple industries can’t be corporate controlled monopolies / oligopolies?
You know what, I appreciate the call-out. I don’t trust our economy, and shouldn’t reference it in defense of one (in my experience) honorably led company.
The whole wolfire thing is very confusing.
go back to ZZT
BTW, that game rocked. I want ZZT Sweeney back, not whatever it is we have now.
yeah! Jill of the Jungle was pretty good for its time, too. But didn’t have ZZT-OOP!
As petulant and annoying as tim Sweeney can be, I do think he’s right that valve’s fees are pretty exorbitant at their level of success. They could take a much smaller cut and still be making bank.
No, valves fees are completely reasonable. $100 one time fee, then 30% for any game key sold by valve with something like a million guaranteed impressions. Also it’s 0% if you generate the keys for free and sell them elsewhere like on your own website. All with the benefit of the steam network and hosting. I’m tired of people believing Tim’s lies under the facade of “he’s and asshole but he has a point”. He doesn’t have a point. He’s throwing a tantrum because he doesn’t have what he wants which is hundreds of millions of paying customers and he doesn’t want to put the time and investment needed into building out the infrastructure to achieve the same feat. He’s a greedy little fuck that wants to do the bare minimum to get rich while valve has been coasting as a market leader because they built the whole freakin market!
Yes, these fees are completely reasonable. Do they think hosting and maintaining a platform costs nothing?
I agree with everything you said except that the fees need to be that high.That is not mutually exclusive with anything else you said.
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What is there so hard to understand?
They became billionaires without treating their customers like a product.
Enshitification hasn’t reached Valve yet.
They are making important progress in Linux compatibility for free.
Customer support consistently break their own rules to keep customers happy, at the expense of profit.
Their platform offers a lot of great services to customers for free.
Lmfao “for free”. Did you read the article? Did you not see the part where Valve takes 30% of every single game in existience’s revenue? The part where Valve makes more money per game then the studios actually developing them?
Yes, steam was great and rose to its monopoly through its greatness, but they have been flat out abusing that monopoly by not lowering prices when they can. The occasional free return is a trinket they throw back at you after overcharging you by at least 15% on every single other game you’ve ever purchased.
30% is average for distribution fees across all media industries.
In the games industry: Microsoft (Xbox): 30% Sony (PlayStation): 30% GOG: 30% (used to be 40%) Steam: 30% Epic: 12% (the outlier) Google (Android): 25-40% Apple (iPhone): 30%
Music and film industry distribution deals range from 10% to as much as 60% depending on your contract. Yes it could be as low as 10% for people who just aren’t that popular. But it’s also not at the upper end of the spectrum for media distribution.
On PC, Microsoft takes a 0% cut of apps distributed through it’s store and 12% of games, so EGS isn’t really the outlier there, but regardless 30% being average in an existing anti-competitive industry doesn’t really prove anything about whether or not it’s a fair cost. That can easily be oligopoly collusion / price signalling which happens all the time.
Console makers like Microsoft and Sony are also funding building the hardware and maintaining the platforms since they lose money on up front hardware sales. I’m not saying I agree that this should be a legal business model, but they have more of an argument for charging 30%.
And regardless of all of that, when I’m talking about a fair price, I’m talking about a fair price in an economic sense, as in, does Valve provide more back to the economy then money they take out of it, or are they rent seeking? Given that Valve made more revenue per employee than literally any other tech company (pushing $1million/employee/year), all during a period where their employees literally were allowed to work on whatever personal projects they wanted (virtually none of which went anywhere or made Valve any money). In that context, I can’t see their fees as anything other than rent seeking. Yes make a profit, yes pay your employees well, keep a nice cushion, and invest in R&D, but Valve has been able to afford to do all of that and just burn / hoard cash at a ridiculous rate, all money that would be going to the actual game designers and developers if we had competitive markets.
Well here’s another fun fact about steam for you then, you can sell your game on steam and retain the full profit of the sale by selling steam keys on other platforms like itch.io or humble bundle. The only stipulation to this method of sale is that you have to sell it at the same price the game is listed on steam at. Steam does not take a cut of steam key sales and encourages developers to distribute steam keys. They are free to request from steam and you can request however many you would like. No other platform does this.
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The services are free for the customers though.
30% is and isn’t a lot when you consider everything it entitles you to do as a developer, including high-speed download servers, community tools, advertising, SteamWorks platform etc.
The work valve is doing in development of Proton isn’t an occasional trinket, it’s an ongoing and important project which is helping to defeat the real monopoly, Microsoft.
Also, I’m a patient gamer, Steam sales are frequent enough that I have always paid the best price.
Epic charges you 5% of revenue after a million dollars to use the entirety of Unreal engine. 30% for a store with an add on market is not reasonable.
And how’s that going for them? Have they stopped running at a loss yet?
Come back to me when Tim Sweeny has a viable business strategy.
And how’s that going for them?
Excellently, Unreal Engine makes a huge amount of money for them.
Have they stopped running at a loss yet?
You’re probably thinking of the Epic Games Store, not Unreal Engine, and it would be grossly profitable at 12% commission if it had the established infrastructure and sales numbers that Steam does, it’s only not profitable because they are still developing and building infrastructure and they basically just sell Fortnite and Rocket League.
I was only talking about Epic Game Store, not Unreal.
But on that matter, Valve charges much less for their engine, and is often free for indie devs.
EGS would be grossly profitable if they had a good service, but they don’t because their platform is shit.
“They basically just sell Fortnite and Rocket League”
So, has anything changed in the past 3 years or are they just doing the exact same thing, hoping something would change?
Your reading comprehension skills are garbage if this is your take. Also steam has DEEP discounts on their store 4x a year for 2 weeks at a time lol. Literally two months out of the year.
Gotta love it…
I’ll never understand why some people look at the fact that steam is popular because of their policies, and can’t help but make a comment like this equating that popularity to cock worship.
Like, we get it bro. You’re thinking about cocks and you’re mad about a half decent game store. What compelled you to combine those thoughts on a public forum?
The weird thing is that this isn’t even the first comment I’ve seen like this. Dudes that are mad about steam want everyone else to know about steam’s massive, throbbing cock for some reason. This guy alone has posted 3 of these.
Fucking hilarious 🤣🤣🤣😂
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You could go to another site but then you wouldn’t get the attention that you crave.
You need us “assholes.”
