Steam’s de-facto monopoly is so strong, Epic can’t break it. Epic made four billion dollars per year on one game. Epic licenses the engine for like half of all noteworthy games. Epic has the only platform not seizing one-third of all revenue from developers, and that platform throws free shit at customers in constant desperation. And they still can’t move the needle.
Monopoly doesn’t mean there’s zero competition. It means the competition does not matter.
PC gamers have alternatives to Steam the way that Android users have alternatives to Google Play. Yes, there are dozens. And that’s how many users each one has.
Epic can’t make a dent because their product is dogshit.
Customers don’t care that Valve takes a well earned cut (that only applies buying directly from Steam); they care that their games are on a platform that’s actually fucking useful. If Epic didn’t insult gamers shipping that piece of trash and had put work into actually providing a product that could possibly be considered acceptable, they might have been able to make a dent.
You’re not going to take market share with shitty gimmicks if your actual product is a crime against humanity no one wants.
For starters, they put so little developments money into EGS that they went two years without a shopping cart, a feature that effectively every other online store has and could be custom coded properly in a day
And every one of them comes back because paying Steam 30% is by far the most profitable way to do business. They absolutely deserve every single penny of it.
30% commission on an all margin product is not even sort of unusual or unfair.
The fact that using their services and paying them their cut is more profitable than not doing so absolutely, in and of itself, proves beyond discussion that their cut is fair.
Yes, sales should cost money. Moving units is a fucking massive value add. Valve deserves every penny they take and more. They’re the best thing that ever happened to PC gaming and nothing else is remotely close.
If it’s even possible it would take years or decades of work building up good will. It’s kinda Valve’s game to lose right now. They just need to not make any enormous mistakes and they win by default. Fortunately for Valve, they seem to be one of the few companies in game dev that isn’t managed exclusively by misanthropes and buffoons.
Would it though? Being a competitor to Valve, not sucking, and not pulling shady anti-consumer shit would result in immediate good will for a decently large (though disproportionately loud) section of the market. Hell, EGS failed at the 2nd and 3rd thjngs in that list and they still got a loyal fanbase
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.
Oh, I dunno. Everyone seems to bitch about Apple not wanting to give any leeway to Epic on the App Store. Personally I find Epic ridiculously hypocritical, so I say let them eat dirt.
Everyone likes to shit on Epic so it’s probably not a very unpopular opinion ether but there is a big difference between the App and Play store and Steam, only one of them doesn’t use anti-competiive practices and the other two also force their payment provider which is rather shitty!
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.
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.
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.
Valve supports linux gaming! The Steam Deck is awesome and with an even better configuration (or the rumored valve’s own new steam machine) this is only getting better. So, only Valve gets my money.
I buy games pretty much exclusively on Steam because of the Linux support (my gaming PC runs Linux only).
Hopefully more places follow suit because I believe competition is a good thing but for now it’s Steam all the way pretty much apart from Starsector and until recently Dwarf Fortress.
Gamers have gotten quite lucky so far that the company that has been in the position to turn the screws and establish a monopoly has been content to only make gobs of money, instead of trying to make all the money like pretty much every other entertainment industry.
Yeah, the reason why Valve can do that is that they are not a publicly traded company but a privately owned one. Gabe Newell doesn’t have a fiduciary duty to any shareholders, so they don’t have to squeeze every penny from their users or abuse their quasi monopoly.
One of the big reasons many companies go public is it’s naturally a really nice retirement package for the owners of the company. The owners of the company may have put so much time and money into building the company that they don’t have sufficient retirement savings, so by going public they turn a portion of their ownership into a boatload of cash as well as a boatload of wealth that can be leveraged, then simply elect a new CEO, retain their significant voting power on the board so they aren’t entirely abandoning their baby and then peace out
The idea that publicly traded companies have a duty to maximize shareholder value is a myth, and anyone privileged enough to sit on a board of directors likely knows this. See this article for an explanation. Every time a board squeezes a company for short term profits at the cost of long term good will, long term profits, etc., that is because they chose to do so.
EDIT: See also This NY Times article. And note that I’m not saying that corporations, board members, etc., aren’t pressured or incentivized to maximize shareholder value - I’m saying that they do not have a legal duty to do so.
It’s not a myth, it’s called Fiduciary Duty. The board, officers, and executives of a public company have a legal responsibility to put the financial interests and well-being of the company above other personal interests. The article you linked doesn’t deny this, and it also isn’t discussing the legal definition of it. It’s discussing what you might call “toxic fiduciary duty”, or more or less the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition. It’s the idea that profit is the primary motive and should always trump all other considerations.
Fiduciary duty is important to create a concrete stance against corruption and misuse of the company’s assets for personal gain. But when taken to an extreme, it becomes toxic and has negative consequences for the company. Employee wages are probably the most obvious example. There has to be a balance between underpaying and overpaying. If you chronically underpay, the best employees will seek more gainful employment elsewhere and the company will suffer from a poorly qualified workforce. If you overpay, like 100% revenue share with employees, the company will cease to make a profit and will be unable to function. A balance has to be struck to retain the best talent in order to drive success for the company; that is the point of the article you linked.
TL;DR extremism is always bad
(Please don’t mistake this for a pro-capitalism rant, there’s nuance to be had here)
It isn’t. If it were, that would mean that in practice, board members act to maximize shareholder value because they are legally obligated to do so, and that simply isn’t true.
In practice, board members and C-suite employees are incentivized to maximize shareholder value. They are not legally obligated to do so.
Fiduciary duty is a legal requirement, meaning that if you don’t fulfill your fiduciary duty, you’re liable. But nobody has been successfully sued for not maximizing shareholder value when their actions were in line with the business judgment rule (“made (1) in good faith, (2) with the care that a reasonably prudent person would use, and (3) with the reasonable belief that the director is acting in the best interests of the corporation”). Successful lawsuits regarding breach of fiduciary duty (in the context of corporate law) require the defendant to have acted with gross negligence, in bad faith, or to have had an undisclosed conflict of interest.
The closest instance of legal precedent that I know of (aside from “” of course) that eBay v. Newmark (Craigslist), which Max Kennerly took as meaning that corporations are legally required to maximize profits. In this case, Craigslist was found to have violated their fiduciary duties to eBay because Craigslist, in Max’s words, “tried to protect the frugal, community-centric corporate culture that was a hallmark for their success.”
Except, if you actually read the case notes, it’s clear that the issue wasn’t that Craigslist wasn’t maximizing their profits, but that they were diluting the percentage of stocked owned and flexibility of selling those stocks of other stockholders. The issue wasn’t that Craigslist wanted to spend half their profits supporting charities or anything like that - no, it was that they were trying to artificially limit, thus directly devaluing, the shares they had already sold. In other words, I agree that this was a case about minority shareholder oppression as opposed to being an edict to maximize profits / shareholder value.
And other than people threatening legal action, the most recent case we have (other than eBay v. NewMark) in favor of shareholder primacy is 124 years old - Dodge v. Ford. But the opposite is true:
Shareholder primacy is clearly unenforceable on its own term because the business judgment rule would defeat any claims based on a failure to maximize profit. 40 Corporate managers formulate business strategy. A rule‒sanction is antithetical to the core concept of the business judgment rule. In over one hundred years of corporate law, there is not a case where a state supreme court imposed liability for breach of fiduciary duty on the specific ground that the board, in managing operational matters, failed to maximize shareholder profit, though it made the decision informedly, disinterestedly, and in good faith.41 That case does not exist. In fact, many cases show just the opposite. Courts have held that shareholders cannot challenge a board’s decision on the specific grounds that, for example: the company paid its employees too much; 42 it failed to pursue a profit opportunity;43 it did not maximize the settlement amount in a negotiation;44 it failed to lawfully avoid taxes.45 There are classic textbook cases where courts have rejected attempts of shareholders to interfere with the board’s decisions on the argument that their views of business or strategy would have maximized shareholder value.46
The belief that a corporation is legally obligated to maximize shareholder value isn’t just wrong; it also:
Implies that no other model is feasible
Removes accountability for the negative effects of such policy from the people who are responsible for perpetuating them
Reinforces the fallacy that this should be resolved through legislation
The whole idea of investments always going up is an absurd idea that needs to go. At this point I infinitely prefer a private company over a publicly traded one.
It’s a bit of an inherent issue sadly, if your goal is to multiply money why would you invest in a company whose profits stay the same over one whose go up? And you have no reason to care if the company eventually dies as a result, you just move your money into the next one.
And most people investing money will be doing so with the only purpose of multiplying that money, as it’s mostly banks and similar institutions. In theory if the main investors of a company want it to prioritize user experience over profits, the companies’ duty to its shareholders would also be to ensure good user experience. But that’s never going to happen.
If Gabe ever leaves Valve and the powers that be decide to go public I hope it’s done in a way that gives power to the users instead of faceless investment firms. I don’t even know what that would look like but I fear the day that Valve comes under control of an ex-AAA game company CEO or the like.
Bro what do you think those Steam levels and experience are for? Obviously they’re gonna divest the company across the playerbase and divvy it up based on Steam levels!
I said this elsewhere but that’s not true. The idea that publicly traded companies have a duty to maximize shareholder value is a myth, and anyone privileged enough to sit on a board of directors likely knows this. See this article for an explanation. Every time a board squeezes a company for short term profits at the cost of long term good will, long term profits, etc., that is because they chose to do so.
Well the relation is wrong but it’s a real thing, they have a duty to grow infinitely or the sroxk price will crash and since that’s impossible to achive they essentially have to squeeze their users for short term gains to seem like they still grow sooner or later
Perhaps a transition to a not-for-profit organization structure might be what folks would prefer? It seems like a potentially better alternative than going public, but I’m not sure how it might work in practice for something like a digital storefront.
In a weird way, one could almost argue that’s roughly how Valve’s been operating anyway, except I imagine they’ve been lining their pockets more than a not-for-profit organization’s owners/employees do.
I bet they make a shit ton of money but they certainly seem to reinvest enough of it too. There is a interesting concept called purpose companies here in Europe but it’s not especially wide spread or planned by regulators so the transition is extremly complicated and expensive. The search engine Ecosia is a relatively well known one, it’s basically a company in self ownership where no one from outside can become CEO and no one can sell or go public, they are obligated to their chosen purpose and that’s where their profits go (in the case of Ecosia that’s planting trees), not sure how it works exactly or if it’s doable in the USA at all tho.
Just like I am happy with Apple and Google taking a cut and running their app stores. If these big companies could make their own store, they would. Apple would lose a cut, but that does not affect me as a consumer. What does affect me is a gate keeper keeping terrible practices in check. Making it nearly impossible to cancel a subscription instead of having a handy menu to just turn it off. Having places to put credit cards that are not secure. Collecting personal data nonstop. Etc etc.
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.
…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.
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.
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).
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.
Eh, more competition is good. This opinion is pretty basic.
From memory Epic has improved rates for developers/publishers - why the fuck wouldn’t you want that/just be ok with a base 30% cut because of some shitty ideal?
Epic also tried to datamine their users with literal spyware, their store is shit with no features, they gained market share via exclusivity deals (I shouldn’t need to explain why this is bad, yeah?), their CEO is a POS with horrible takes, Tencent has a large stake in the company…
If anything, your opinion is shallow.
Ahh, so you can only have good competitors? It’s either a monopoly (which is only as good as the CEO in charge, and with time will go to shit), or competitors which do the same stuff and play nice?
This is reality. And you get good competition, you get bad, but in general it’s good for the consumer to have options. Fuck it, I’m actually completely happy using Valve for most things and then getting free games from Epic.
The view that a monopoly is better is just extremely short-sighted and naive. Similar to a “We should just have a dictator! This one guy is really good now, what could go wrong in the future?” type thinking.
Hurr durr, a monopoly is bad because the person in charge could become bad, so I’ll actively help this KNOWN bad actor to get a foothold in the market. I am very smart
That a new person to Valve would be equal to Epic, as opposed to massively running Steam into the ground in a significantly worse way. It’d be easy for some dumbass to suggest a subscription service is needed for Steam for example, you need to may $10 a month to support it. Whelp, Steam is now shit.
You assume I’m helping Epic whatsoever. I get free games, that only costs Epic… So yes, this is helping me and costing Epic. Net win for consumers.
If a developer/publisher wants the choice to pay lower fees they can do so via Epic. It’s great they have the choice, I support devs being able to do what works best for them.
There’s no hypocrisy there - it’s just logical that it’s a good outcome to have competition.
Perhaps I should turn the argument around - why is a monopoly by Steam a good thing? Long-term it’s completely unsustainable and they will do bad things, so why would you support that?
I’m not assuming jack shit. I’m factually stating Valve/Steam are currently great for the gaming industry and Epic is toxic refuse.
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.
Are my exact words from this very thread.
You assume I’m helping Epic whatsoever. I get free games, that only costs Epic… So yes, this is helping me and costing Epic. Net win for consumers.
Did you think Epic’s financial department had an extended vacation or something? They don’t give a shit that you downloaded the game they made available for free, that was the whole point of their stunt and they were prepared to use money in order to claw some market share.
If a developer/publisher wants the choice to pay lower fees they can do so via Epic. It’s great they have the choice, I support devs being able to do what works best for them.
And I boycott devs who sell their souls for a quick buck. Darkest Dungeon is one of my favorite games of all time - I still haven’t bought DD2, even though it was made available on Steam after the period of exclusivity elapsed.
it’s just logical that it’s a good outcome to have competition.
Except it isn’t. It’s only good to have good faith competition of well behaved market players - Epic does not qualify.
why is a monopoly by Steam a good thing? Long-term it’s completely unsustainable and they will do bad things, so why would you support that?
Again a horrible question. Something doesn’t have to be perfect in order to be markedly better than something else. Steam is, right now, no questions asked, infinitely better than Epic. Why support a shitty company that would happily bring everything crumbling down if it meant a quick buck?
Valve is good now so it doesn’t need a competitor? And only when it goes bad should another company exist as competitor? This makes no sense… It’s just not how the world works. Once you have a monopoly it typically stays a monopoly. Look at any of the current monopolies - many are going to shit like Google but there’s no real competition regardless.
You’re also discounting the fact the opposite fact - Epic might be terrible now, but change leadership and its now amazing.
You’re buying way into a very specific case of looking at where things are at now and making a judgement VS. Thinking of longer term ideas like competition is good.
Also, is steam infinitely better than Epic? That’s very debatable, I have no issues with either. To be honest, they’re much of a muchness. You may just be too heavily emotionally invested in these companies. Realistically, they are both just trying to make as much money out of you as they can. For instance, Steams use of their market and giving out digital cards to collect and level up is very predatory.
What spyware?
The CEO has been a big advocate for lowering store prices (including Google and Apple stores) to help smaller developers.
Their exclusive deals have also helped a lot of developers get their games made. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a game developed these days.
Xbox, Sony, Nintendo all have exclusives.
As an indie gamedev, yes, I DO know how hard it is to make a game – I also don’t think getting funding is worth selling your soul for.
They don’t want to lower percentages and prices to “help smaller developers”, but to gain market share. Your brainless whataboutism on consoles is also irrelevant – it’s bad there too. The only acceptable exclusivity is when the company behind the market also happens to develop (not fund) the game.
Look up the concept of loss leading. Do you think Epic are really just doing this for the benefit of developers or are they after something more insidious?
But that’s ok - this is why competition is good. Devs make some more money, consumers get some free games.
Even if Epic ends up only matching Steam then this is a net win for people.
Asking for a monopoly is just short-sighted. Gabe leaves and then the next person in line is some $-hungry mofo who makes terrible decisions and you end up with a shit system. You need competition to keep things in check.
People saying Steam doesn’t have a monopoly because other stores exist, is the same as saying Microsoft doesn’t have a monopoly on PC Gaming because Mac and Linux exist. Technically true, but ultimately meaningless because its their market power that determines a monopoly, not whether there are other niche players.
While Valve and Steam have generally been a good player, and currently do offer the best product, they still wield an ungodly amount of influence over the PC gaming market space.
Epic is chasing that because they really want what Valve has, though no doubt they plan to speedrun the enshittification process as soon as they think it safe.
Steam is a natural monopoly, which although still not entirely good but are a wholly different beast from monopolies made by exploiting flaws in the system
What’s a natural monopoly? Valve currently has the freedom to implement anything they want within an extent because they’re so popular. If they decided they wanted to charge devs 35% would people stop using it? Probably not. Steam’s monopoly is as bad as any other for the same reason any other monopoly is bad.
A natural monopoly is when an industry is difficult to break into, making competition difficult or impossible. This favors incumbents, in fact, a lot of industries are natural monopolies (pharma, aerospace, chip production).
The difficulty of breaking into an industry may be because:
new players cannot compete with established scale
start up costs require a nearly all-or-nothing approach, high risk
You may want to read up on Ma Bell or Microsoft’s legal issues with Internet Explorer in the 90s to see what specifically was so bad about monopolies like those, and then revisit this idea.
Look it up? It’s an actual term, not something I made up for whatever reason you assumed to argue against something I didn’t even say. I already said it’s still not a good thing, it just would have happened regardless of whoever that was able to do it on scale first.
When people say Valve doesn’t have a monopoly, they usually mean they don’t engage in anti-competitive practices (like making exclusivity a condition for publishing on their store, cough cough).
Actually, Valve’s recent moves represent what free market capitalism should be about - when competing stores started to appear, they instead made massive contributions to Linux gaming and appealed to right-to-repair advocates with the Steam Deck. Now both of those demographics are suckling on Gaben’s teats, myself included.
That may be so, but that’s not the way that the initial tweet is using the term, and not the commonly understood definition.
I’m not denying that Valve as a whole have been a force for good in the PC gaming market, but it’s pointless to argue semantics and make up definitions to better suit personal bias instead of debating the actual point that’s being made.
they usually mean they don’t engage in anti-competitive practices.
But they do. They forbid devs to sell their games cheaper on other storefronts (outside of timed sales). Basically they enforce anti-competitive pricing on products in a way that makes it impossible for the devs to move the platform costs into consumer prices.
Devs could sell the product on Epic for example for $49 and make the same amount of profit as they do on Steam when priced $59 due to lower cut, but they can’t do it because Valve forbids it. It anti-competitively protects Valve and their 30% cut against competitors who would take lesser cuts, at the expense of end customers.
I hate DRM but really like Steam, they put in a shit ton of work to achive that! It’s certainly a monopoly but I think one of the biggest differences is that it’s not a publically tradet company so they don’t have to chase that infinite growth many very influencial idiots don’t see any issue with and there for aren’t willing to destroy everything for short term gains.
Despite not having pressure from shareholders Valve pioneered or at least popularized and normalized many of the worst practices in videogame industry designed to milk players dry: microtransactions, battle passe, loot boxes, real money gambling, you name it, Valve has it
Capitalism and a free economy are good when it’s serving customers by making the best product or service possible, while balancing that with paying labour to make that happen.
The problem is that nowadays, there’s a third party to this for the megacorps: Shareholders, which is where the enshittification begins.
Valve is a private company, so it is not beholden to any external shareholders, which is why it’s been able to chart its own course. Still, I do worry what will happen when Gabe steps down.
Epic is chasing that because they really want what Valve has, though no doubt they plan to speedrun the enshittification process as soon as they think it safe.
Like what Steam did with Greenlight and the plague of early access asset flips that clogged its home page for years?
Greenlight had nothing to do with selling out the end user experience to cash out on providing value and leaving the service near unusable, unless you have some kind of compulsion where you have to buy everything on Steam.
The trading card feature created an ecosystem allowing cheap asset flips to quickly make the threshold. And make their money back, creating a positive feedback loop.
Steam allowed its store to be flooded with these games at the expense of its customers because it got it’s cut.
The barriers to entry make them Monopoly. Steam does not enforce exclusivity, people are free to list their game on steam and any other platform with no penalties.
Steam may act as the de facto option, but it is not a monopoly. It is not excluding anybody from participating in the market
Disagree. Monopoly, by the term mono, means only one. Exclusive.
Steam is large, steam is de facto, but steam is not exclusive. The fact that GOG, Ubisoft, epic game store, Xbox, all exist without penalties. Means it’s not an monopoly
The historical term has nothing to do with todays use, that’s just the roots of the damn word. According to your logic monopolies can’t exist, Microsoft wouldn’t be one and Amazon and so on, that’s plain wrong…
I don’t think there is much of a point in it judging from the rediculess replies I got from you and others but that’s just plain fucking wrong, a monopoly is a entity with abusable position and not a entity abusing it’s position!
“In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
No, the market position makes a monopoly! What you are talking about are anticompetitive practices, a monopoly enables you to leverage those in a damaging way but they aren’t part of a monopoly…
That’s not at all what a monopoly is, it’s simply the absence of competition aka the market position. You don’t have to engage in anti-competitive practices to havw a monopoly, I don’t get why that’s so hard to understand for many here…
Other games aren’t a competition for a platform like Steam, that’s a different market. Steam has a monopoly because they have a extremely dominant position without real competition in their sector, they don’t have to engage in anti-competitive practices against games outside of steam to have that…
Fuck, this is so stupid it’s hard to even responde… Steam has a monopoly on game distribution but Minecraft isn’t a Steam competitor just like Fortnite isn’t a Play Store competitor! I am done with this thread, it’s frustrating to try and explain so many people such basic things if they don’t want to hear them!
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.
Their point being that if true ownership was the priority for consumers then they would be exclusively using GoG, since it’s the only store that gives you your games to actually own.
If they cared only about true ownership yea. But GoG doesn’t have every game Steam has. If they had the same selection i could easily see more people switching. I and I’m sure many others use both.
It’s a self-reinforcing cycle, unfortunately. GOG doesn’t have the market share that Steam does, so publishers don’t release games on it, which leads to people continuing to use Steam and maintaining its dominant market share.
First time hearing of them, after browsing a bit I’m not sure I’d agree they’re better than GOG, but they seem to focus on indie games which is super neat.
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.
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 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.
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 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 electroncef. 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
I personally get most of my games from GOG and itch.io these days. And I’ve never bought anything from the Epic store whatsoever.
I will say though that I find it kind of weird how much hate Epic gets for their store. Like, I understand that someone prefers Steam, or doesn’t want to buy stuff from Epic etc. - but what we see goes way beyond that. Epic has people actively campaigning against it, as if its mere existence is insulting. I don’t really get why.
As for the 30% cut… Developers will try to price their games competitively, and within customer expectations. So with or without Steam’s 30% cut, you can expect games to be similarly priced. The large 30% cut from Steam is basically coming out of the developer’s revenue rather than from your pocket. (I’m under the impression that GOG also has a similar 30% fee. Epic has a lower fee. And on itch.io the seller gets to choose how money goes to itch.io anywhere from 0% to 100%. So itch.io is the best deal for developers in terms of fees.)
The reason people hate Epic is fairly obvious – they don’t give a shit about the gaming industry nor about players. At some point their client contained literal spyware, they tried to brute force market share via sleazy exclusivity contracts, their software doesn’t have one tenth of the features Steam has, their CEO is a piece of shit, etc.
The reason people hate Epic is fairly obvious – they don’t give a shit about the gaming industry nor about players.
What do you mean by that? For developers, they take a much smaller fee than Steam or GOG, and for players they’re constantly giving away free games.
At some point their client contained literal spyware.
That sounds like a decent reason to campaign against them. I haven’t heard anything about that before. What was the story behind that? (As in, when / why / how / what? Perhaps you have a link or something.)
brute force market share via sleazy exclusivity contracts
I’ve heard people talk a lot about exclusivity contracts… but can you name even a single game that has such a contract? When people have discussed this the past, the relevant developers basically said “there is no contract”. But maybe there is some different case I don’t know about. In any case, that personally doesn’t bother me anyway. If some developer wants to take money to be on one store rather than another, they can do that at their own peril. As for customers, we’re only talking about a store. It’s not like anyone is in danger of not being able to buy / play their favourite games. So it seems like a bit of a nothing-burger to me. Like, is there actually something bad happening here? Or are people just speculating that something bad might one-day happen if Epic got bigger?
their software doesn’t have one tenth of the features Steam has,
Steam has more features, yeah. Steam is very good. But Steam has been around for some 20 years. It’s hard to catch up with that so quickly. In any case, although missing features is a good reason to prefer Steam, it certainly isn’t a reason to campaign against Epic.
… So from your list, I’ll keep the spyware thing and the CEO complaint. I don’t know enough about either of those to say much though. I don’t recall who the CEO of Epic is right now, so I won’t say whether or not I think that’s a good reason. And the spyware… I take that kind of stuff seriously. Right now I’m posting this from Linux - because I’m fed-up with Windows spyware. But as I said, I’ve not heard any details about any Epic spyware thing.
Incidentally, I’ve found that Steam is very good for Linux gaming. … But obviously that doesn’t mean that I’m going to start making posts trash-talking Epic. I don’t find it weird that people prefer Steam. I just find it weird that people put so much energy into attacking Epic.
Also adding to other people, they “poached” games from other platforms.
eg they wanted Rocket League, which I have on Steam and am happy to continue using there, to be completely removed from my account and available through the epic launcher some 3(?) years after I first bought it. Eventually they backpedaled, only due to community backlash, people that owned it on steam can still play it there.
Are you saying that Rocket League was removed from the Steam accounts of the people who already owned it? That sounds like a big deal, and surely must be illegal. But I didn’t see mention of that in the link you posted. Most of the things in the list seemed to be just saying that they didn’t think the Epic store is high quality. (eg. prices too high, not enough features, difficult to use return policy, etc.) Those are all fair complaints, and good reasons to not use the store - but again, they are only good reasons to not use the store. They aren’t really good reasons to crusade against it. There are heaps of crap online stores, and generally people just ignore them.
The Rocket League thing you mentioned would be a good reason to get upset at Epic beyond just not wanting to buy from them. So I’m kind of surprised to see it missing from such a comprehensive list of grievances.
Others have mentioned spyware, and like I said, I care about that. That’s a big red flag. But I looked at the links in the post you gave, and as far as I could tell they were all speculation. Things like Tencent owns 40% of Epic, and Tencent is bad - so Epic is probably bad. … Which is quite possibly true! I certainly wouldn’t want to trust Epic with my personal info. But it’s still a big step away from them having spyware built in.
I personally think that many gamers put up with too much privacy invasion and ‘telemetry’ in the form of online accounts and especially ‘anti-cheat’ software. The “anti cheat” software that some games require explicitly demand access to see every program you have installed, every program you have running, and in some cases even read RAM outside of what the game is allocated. That’s an enormous security risk and privacy breach… but people install that crap all the time with barely a whisper - but then complain about the risk the Epic will share its telemetry data with Tencent. I’m certain that some of Epic’s online games have software like that, but that wasn’t mentioned in thread you linked to.
Maybe I just don’t care about the same things that other people care about. Like, if Epic has a crap store… I just don’t care. It makes no difference to me how crap it is. It makes to difference if they say it is going to be great, and it falls short of what they said. I’m not going to go around telling people how crap it is, because I don’t think it matters. I don’t intend to use the store anyway; and if other people like the store for some reason, then fine. I don’t think it matters. They can like it, and I won’t try to convince them otherwise. But if they are somehow removing games you’ve already bought elsewhere - then that’s a big deal. That would be worth telling people about. I hope you can see what I mean.
Anno 1800 was available for purchase on Steam prior to release but at some point they made a deal with Epic to sell it there for a year. Then it was removed from Steam. If you already bought it you could use it on Steam but everyone else had to wait. You could also directly buy it from Ubisoft’s own store Uplay so in the most strict sense it was not an exclusive contract but pretty damn close. Also it wasn’t a secret. The company talked about it. They had to, because it was literally available for pre purchase on Steam and then suddenly wasn’t.
For developers, they take a much smaller fee than Steam or GOG, and for players they’re constantly giving away free games.
“Free stuff, pl0x” isn’t an indicator of supporting the industry or players. That’s a business tactic for clawing market share away from their competitors by attracting people without the means to buy games and devs desperate for funding. Also, if parity is your worry, many games on Steam go free or effectively free (<1 USD) all the time.
That sounds like a decent reason to campaign against them. I haven’t heard anything about that before. What was the story behind that? (As in, when / why / how / what? Perhaps you have a link or something.)
With Reddit going tits up and a coverup operation by Epic throwing a bunch of garbage info around, it’s been difficult to find the exact sources (why I’ve been taking so long to reply). If I find the actual articles/posts I’ll link them, but in summary:
EGS bypassed many APIs, such as Steam’s API, to data mine your usage statistics of their competitors, including friends and games played - they didn’t ask for your consent nor Steam’s.
Some major red flags with memory manipulation and internet traffic obfuscation.
They “apologized” about it, citing some bullshit reasons for that behavior. Suspiciously, behavior changed.
I’ve heard people talk a lot about exclusivity contracts… but can you name even a single game that has such a contract? […] Like, is there actually something bad happening here? Or are people just speculating that something bad might one-day happen if Epic got bigger?
There are loads of games in my “do not buy unless heavily discounted” list precisely for taking exclusivity deals. Hitman 3, Darkest Dungeon 2, Hades, Satisfactory, among others. The danger, beyond rewarding shitty behavior, shutting out large portions of the community, and limiting consumers’ options, is the same as always - you’re effectively telling companies that whoever has the biggest pocket gets to dictate what the entire industry has to do.
But Steam has been around for some 20 years. It’s hard to catch up with that so quickly. In any case, although missing features is a good reason to prefer Steam, it certainly isn’t a reason to campaign against Epic.
It wouldn’t be if Epic had shown any intention of eventually having parity. It’s been however many years since they released, with the immense advantage of seeing what works for Steam so they could copy it, and yet their client remains just as bad. It clearly shows that their focus in on getting market share to exploit gamers and devs, not on making the best platform possible.
It takes quite a lot of time to repeat all the wrong doings of Epic and it’s CEO Tim.
Thus, I can only relay to the collected information of bad old Reddit, if you want to (I’m intentionally not linking, you can search it up easily). r/fuckepic has a lot of collected information on their side page.
In short, biggest issue for me exclusivity contracts with games advertised on Steam, then as a bait and switch removed from the store page and their physical copies getting a sticker on top of the Steam logo, so a last minute deal, for Metro Exodus. And then they continued their exclusivity hunt for games, they didn’t even helped to develop. Nothing against self-made or published games to be limited time exclusive in my perspective, but not second hand bought (out).
The other about their CEO, r/timcritizisestim
He’s… a douche. Using kids with the free games to bait them to his store, using them against Apple’s store rules like a little army… he is a bad person with too much money and luck to have build the Epic engine with Fortnite…
As for the games that were Epic exclusive for a year: Borderlands 3, Satisfactory, Darksiders 3, Hitman 3, Dead Island 2, Borderlands TTW to name a few. They have a year exclusivity deal with Epic - we know how annoying exclusivity deals are on consoles.
About the features, it’s quite tricky. Epic rather spends thousands on exclusivity deals rather than invest into a launcher to have a working basket.
It’s super obvious where Epic’s priorities are, and it’s not the gamers. How are they able to dedicate so much work on Unreal, but now on a launcher? They try to substitute a half-assed launcher with exclusivity deals, because they know nobody would use it willingly.
Steam can also leverage their insanely huge userbase. Even with the 30% cut, a company will probably see more profits if they use steam and give up 30% than trying to launch it outside.
At this point. The 30% is just the cost of doing business
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.
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Steam’s de-facto monopoly is so strong, Epic can’t break it. Epic made four billion dollars per year on one game. Epic licenses the engine for like half of all noteworthy games. Epic has the only platform not seizing one-third of all revenue from developers, and that platform throws free shit at customers in constant desperation. And they still can’t move the needle.
Monopoly doesn’t mean there’s zero competition. It means the competition does not matter.
PC gamers have alternatives to Steam the way that Android users have alternatives to Google Play. Yes, there are dozens. And that’s how many users each one has.
Epic can’t make a dent because their product is dogshit.
Customers don’t care that Valve takes a well earned cut (that only applies buying directly from Steam); they care that their games are on a platform that’s actually fucking useful. If Epic didn’t insult gamers shipping that piece of trash and had put work into actually providing a product that could possibly be considered acceptable, they might have been able to make a dent.
You’re not going to take market share with shitty gimmicks if your actual product is a crime against humanity no one wants.
yeah epic might have a chance if they actually tried to make their launcher and client good and have similar features as steam
What’s wrong with Epic’s thing
Other than the fact it’s full of Chinese spyware?
Let’s see…
The interface sucks.
The app is barely stable and crashes randomly.
Absolutely zero thoughts on Linux gaming.
Unusable communities.
I’m sure others can give more reasons.
OK that’s fair.
For starters, they put so little developments money into EGS that they went two years without a shopping cart, a feature that effectively every other online store has and could be custom coded properly in a day
No platform earns an entire third of developers’ revenue.
Laughable horseshit.
They make far more than 50% more because of steam.
The cut, genius. The cut you said is “well earned.” That is what’s horseshit, here.
And on consoles.
And on phones.
And every one of them comes back because paying Steam 30% is by far the most profitable way to do business. They absolutely deserve every single penny of it.
30% commission on an all margin product is not even sort of unusual or unfair.
“It makes money so it can’t be wrong.”
“It’s commonplace so it must be fine.”
Y’all have no idea what criticism even looks like.
The fact that using their services and paying them their cut is more profitable than not doing so absolutely, in and of itself, proves beyond discussion that their cut is fair.
Yes, sales should cost money. Moving units is a fucking massive value add. Valve deserves every penny they take and more. They’re the best thing that ever happened to PC gaming and nothing else is remotely close.
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Also key activations cost the dev zero on Steam. And the dev can generate keys for free to sell elsewhere. details here: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
Neat.
A third off the top is still obscene.
The fact ‘everyone does it’ is worse.
What’s your metric for “well earned” here? What are some ways it could be earned? What do you think is the right amount?
If it’s even possible it would take years or decades of work building up good will. It’s kinda Valve’s game to lose right now. They just need to not make any enormous mistakes and they win by default. Fortunately for Valve, they seem to be one of the few companies in game dev that isn’t managed exclusively by misanthropes and buffoons.
Would it though? Being a competitor to Valve, not sucking, and not pulling shady anti-consumer shit would result in immediate good will for a decently large (though disproportionately loud) section of the market. Hell, EGS failed at the 2nd and 3rd thjngs in that list and they still got a loyal fanbase
Then why isn’t GOG bigger?
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.
Edit: See? That was the unpopular opinion…
It’s not unpopular, it’s just banal.
Based on the votes and the opinion of the majority that hates Epic and wouldn’t mind seeing Steam have a real monopoly? Seems pretty unpopular to me!
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.
This is literally the most popular opinion.
Then why are must of the comments arguing against it?
This post has more upvotes than most of the posts on this server.
Yeah. Dusk is an amazing game and the creator is talented as fuck but this is “I like oxygen” levels of unpopular opinion lol
Oh, I dunno. Everyone seems to bitch about Apple not wanting to give any leeway to Epic on the App Store. Personally I find Epic ridiculously hypocritical, so I say let them eat dirt.
Everyone likes to shit on Epic so it’s probably not a very unpopular opinion ether but there is a big difference between the App and Play store and Steam, only one of them doesn’t use anti-competiive practices and the other two also force their payment provider which is rather shitty!
This is also the most popular opinion.
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.
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.
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.
Valve supports linux gaming! The Steam Deck is awesome and with an even better configuration (or the rumored valve’s own new steam machine) this is only getting better. So, only Valve gets my money.
I buy games pretty much exclusively on Steam because of the Linux support (my gaming PC runs Linux only).
Hopefully more places follow suit because I believe competition is a good thing but for now it’s Steam all the way pretty much apart from Starsector and until recently Dwarf Fortress.
Gamers have gotten quite lucky so far that the company that has been in the position to turn the screws and establish a monopoly has been content to only make gobs of money, instead of trying to make all the money like pretty much every other entertainment industry.
Yeah I’m not really to call Valve a good guy company, but I might be willing to call them the least bad company
Yeah, the reason why Valve can do that is that they are not a publicly traded company but a privately owned one. Gabe Newell doesn’t have a fiduciary duty to any shareholders, so they don’t have to squeeze every penny from their users or abuse their quasi monopoly.
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One of the big reasons many companies go public is it’s naturally a really nice retirement package for the owners of the company. The owners of the company may have put so much time and money into building the company that they don’t have sufficient retirement savings, so by going public they turn a portion of their ownership into a boatload of cash as well as a boatload of wealth that can be leveraged, then simply elect a new CEO, retain their significant voting power on the board so they aren’t entirely abandoning their baby and then peace out
The idea that publicly traded companies have a duty to maximize shareholder value is a myth, and anyone privileged enough to sit on a board of directors likely knows this. See this article for an explanation. Every time a board squeezes a company for short term profits at the cost of long term good will, long term profits, etc., that is because they chose to do so.
EDIT: See also This NY Times article. And note that I’m not saying that corporations, board members, etc., aren’t pressured or incentivized to maximize shareholder value - I’m saying that they do not have a legal duty to do so.
It’s not a myth, it’s called Fiduciary Duty. The board, officers, and executives of a public company have a legal responsibility to put the financial interests and well-being of the company above other personal interests. The article you linked doesn’t deny this, and it also isn’t discussing the legal definition of it. It’s discussing what you might call “toxic fiduciary duty”, or more or less the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition. It’s the idea that profit is the primary motive and should always trump all other considerations.
Fiduciary duty is important to create a concrete stance against corruption and misuse of the company’s assets for personal gain. But when taken to an extreme, it becomes toxic and has negative consequences for the company. Employee wages are probably the most obvious example. There has to be a balance between underpaying and overpaying. If you chronically underpay, the best employees will seek more gainful employment elsewhere and the company will suffer from a poorly qualified workforce. If you overpay, like 100% revenue share with employees, the company will cease to make a profit and will be unable to function. A balance has to be struck to retain the best talent in order to drive success for the company; that is the point of the article you linked.
TL;DR extremism is always bad
(Please don’t mistake this for a pro-capitalism rant, there’s nuance to be had here)
All of that is true, but it doesn’t contradict my point. Fiduciary duty isn’t a duty to maximize shareholder value.
It literally is in practice.
It isn’t. If it were, that would mean that in practice, board members act to maximize shareholder value because they are legally obligated to do so, and that simply isn’t true.
In practice, board members and C-suite employees are incentivized to maximize shareholder value. They are not legally obligated to do so.
Fiduciary duty is a legal requirement, meaning that if you don’t fulfill your fiduciary duty, you’re liable. But nobody has been successfully sued for not maximizing shareholder value when their actions were in line with the business judgment rule (“made (1) in good faith, (2) with the care that a reasonably prudent person would use, and (3) with the reasonable belief that the director is acting in the best interests of the corporation”). Successful lawsuits regarding breach of fiduciary duty (in the context of corporate law) require the defendant to have acted with gross negligence, in bad faith, or to have had an undisclosed conflict of interest.
The closest instance of legal precedent that I know of (aside from “” of course) that eBay v. Newmark (Craigslist), which Max Kennerly took as meaning that corporations are legally required to maximize profits. In this case, Craigslist was found to have violated their fiduciary duties to eBay because Craigslist, in Max’s words, “tried to protect the frugal, community-centric corporate culture that was a hallmark for their success.”
Except, if you actually read the case notes, it’s clear that the issue wasn’t that Craigslist wasn’t maximizing their profits, but that they were diluting the percentage of stocked owned and flexibility of selling those stocks of other stockholders. The issue wasn’t that Craigslist wanted to spend half their profits supporting charities or anything like that - no, it was that they were trying to artificially limit, thus directly devaluing, the shares they had already sold. In other words, I agree that this was a case about minority shareholder oppression as opposed to being an edict to maximize profits / shareholder value.
And other than people threatening legal action, the most recent case we have (other than eBay v. NewMark) in favor of shareholder primacy is 124 years old - Dodge v. Ford. But the opposite is true:
The belief that a corporation is legally obligated to maximize shareholder value isn’t just wrong; it also:
I said in practice, not in law
Just pointing out I’m a different person lol
Epic is also private though I agree with your sentiment 100%
The whole idea of investments always going up is an absurd idea that needs to go. At this point I infinitely prefer a private company over a publicly traded one.
It’s not even an “idea”. They legally have to do whatever they can to make it go up. It’s idiotic and poisonous.
It’s a bit of an inherent issue sadly, if your goal is to multiply money why would you invest in a company whose profits stay the same over one whose go up? And you have no reason to care if the company eventually dies as a result, you just move your money into the next one.
And most people investing money will be doing so with the only purpose of multiplying that money, as it’s mostly banks and similar institutions. In theory if the main investors of a company want it to prioritize user experience over profits, the companies’ duty to its shareholders would also be to ensure good user experience. But that’s never going to happen.
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If Gabe ever leaves Valve and the powers that be decide to go public I hope it’s done in a way that gives power to the users instead of faceless investment firms. I don’t even know what that would look like but I fear the day that Valve comes under control of an ex-AAA game company CEO or the like.
Bro what do you think those Steam levels and experience are for? Obviously they’re gonna divest the company across the playerbase and divvy it up based on Steam levels!
/s
Each game on your account represents a share.
That sounds fun.
We should do this in the food industrie. Then I would become a steakholder.
I wish something like that existed, once you go public you are obligated to grow and that has limits so you always end up squeezing your users! :/
I said this elsewhere but that’s not true. The idea that publicly traded companies have a duty to maximize shareholder value is a myth, and anyone privileged enough to sit on a board of directors likely knows this. See this article for an explanation. Every time a board squeezes a company for short term profits at the cost of long term good will, long term profits, etc., that is because they chose to do so.
Well the relation is wrong but it’s a real thing, they have a duty to grow infinitely or the sroxk price will crash and since that’s impossible to achive they essentially have to squeeze their users for short term gains to seem like they still grow sooner or later
This isn’t a thing.
Here’s another article explaining why and how it isn’t a thing, and also why people like you think it is.
Honestly, I don’t care to continue this conversation, even the attempt to convince people like you is rather pointless
Perhaps a transition to a not-for-profit organization structure might be what folks would prefer? It seems like a potentially better alternative than going public, but I’m not sure how it might work in practice for something like a digital storefront.
In a weird way, one could almost argue that’s roughly how Valve’s been operating anyway, except I imagine they’ve been lining their pockets more than a not-for-profit organization’s owners/employees do.
I bet they make a shit ton of money but they certainly seem to reinvest enough of it too. There is a interesting concept called purpose companies here in Europe but it’s not especially wide spread or planned by regulators so the transition is extremly complicated and expensive. The search engine Ecosia is a relatively well known one, it’s basically a company in self ownership where no one from outside can become CEO and no one can sell or go public, they are obligated to their chosen purpose and that’s where their profits go (in the case of Ecosia that’s planting trees), not sure how it works exactly or if it’s doable in the USA at all tho.
Just like I am happy with Apple and Google taking a cut and running their app stores. If these big companies could make their own store, they would. Apple would lose a cut, but that does not affect me as a consumer. What does affect me is a gate keeper keeping terrible practices in check. Making it nearly impossible to cancel a subscription instead of having a handy menu to just turn it off. Having places to put credit cards that are not secure. Collecting personal data nonstop. Etc etc.
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.
So we uncritically give them all the power.
…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.
GabeN is getting pretty old, and he can’t keep doing this forever. It’ll be interesting to see where the company goes after that.
By “interesting” I mean “expecting it to be handed over to salivating, greedy idiots who don’t know what made it work before”.
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.
Good luck, piracy ain’t what it used to be. Denuvo is getting strong af
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).
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.
It’s what happens when your competition is publicly traded cancer.
Eh, more competition is good. This opinion is pretty basic.
From memory Epic has improved rates for developers/publishers - why the fuck wouldn’t you want that/just be ok with a base 30% cut because of some shitty ideal?
Epic also tried to datamine their users with literal spyware, their store is shit with no features, they gained market share via exclusivity deals (I shouldn’t need to explain why this is bad, yeah?), their CEO is a POS with horrible takes, Tencent has a large stake in the company… If anything, your opinion is shallow.
Ahh, so you can only have good competitors? It’s either a monopoly (which is only as good as the CEO in charge, and with time will go to shit), or competitors which do the same stuff and play nice?
This is reality. And you get good competition, you get bad, but in general it’s good for the consumer to have options. Fuck it, I’m actually completely happy using Valve for most things and then getting free games from Epic.
The view that a monopoly is better is just extremely short-sighted and naive. Similar to a “We should just have a dictator! This one guy is really good now, what could go wrong in the future?” type thinking.
Do you seriously not see your own hypocrisy?
So you’re making some false assumptions here:
That a new person to Valve would be equal to Epic, as opposed to massively running Steam into the ground in a significantly worse way. It’d be easy for some dumbass to suggest a subscription service is needed for Steam for example, you need to may $10 a month to support it. Whelp, Steam is now shit.
You assume I’m helping Epic whatsoever. I get free games, that only costs Epic… So yes, this is helping me and costing Epic. Net win for consumers.
If a developer/publisher wants the choice to pay lower fees they can do so via Epic. It’s great they have the choice, I support devs being able to do what works best for them.
There’s no hypocrisy there - it’s just logical that it’s a good outcome to have competition.
Perhaps I should turn the argument around - why is a monopoly by Steam a good thing? Long-term it’s completely unsustainable and they will do bad things, so why would you support that?
I’m not assuming jack shit. I’m factually stating Valve/Steam are currently great for the gaming industry and Epic is toxic refuse.
Are my exact words from this very thread.
Did you think Epic’s financial department had an extended vacation or something? They don’t give a shit that you downloaded the game they made available for free, that was the whole point of their stunt and they were prepared to use money in order to claw some market share.
And I boycott devs who sell their souls for a quick buck. Darkest Dungeon is one of my favorite games of all time - I still haven’t bought DD2, even though it was made available on Steam after the period of exclusivity elapsed.
Except it isn’t. It’s only good to have good faith competition of well behaved market players - Epic does not qualify.
Again a horrible question. Something doesn’t have to be perfect in order to be markedly better than something else. Steam is, right now, no questions asked, infinitely better than Epic. Why support a shitty company that would happily bring everything crumbling down if it meant a quick buck?
I don’t understand.
Valve is good now so it doesn’t need a competitor? And only when it goes bad should another company exist as competitor? This makes no sense… It’s just not how the world works. Once you have a monopoly it typically stays a monopoly. Look at any of the current monopolies - many are going to shit like Google but there’s no real competition regardless.
You’re also discounting the fact the opposite fact - Epic might be terrible now, but change leadership and its now amazing.
You’re buying way into a very specific case of looking at where things are at now and making a judgement VS. Thinking of longer term ideas like competition is good.
Also, is steam infinitely better than Epic? That’s very debatable, I have no issues with either. To be honest, they’re much of a muchness. You may just be too heavily emotionally invested in these companies. Realistically, they are both just trying to make as much money out of you as they can. For instance, Steams use of their market and giving out digital cards to collect and level up is very predatory.
I get it, you’re a concern troll shilling for EGS. How much are you being paid?
What spyware? The CEO has been a big advocate for lowering store prices (including Google and Apple stores) to help smaller developers. Their exclusive deals have also helped a lot of developers get their games made. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a game developed these days. Xbox, Sony, Nintendo all have exclusives.
I would say your take is a bit, shallow.
How much are you being paid to shill?
As an indie gamedev, yes, I DO know how hard it is to make a game – I also don’t think getting funding is worth selling your soul for.
They don’t want to lower percentages and prices to “help smaller developers”, but to gain market share. Your brainless whataboutism on consoles is also irrelevant – it’s bad there too. The only acceptable exclusivity is when the company behind the market also happens to develop (not fund) the game.
Look up the concept of loss leading. Do you think Epic are really just doing this for the benefit of developers or are they after something more insidious?
Yeah sure, Epic wants more market share.
But that’s ok - this is why competition is good. Devs make some more money, consumers get some free games.
Even if Epic ends up only matching Steam then this is a net win for people.
Asking for a monopoly is just short-sighted. Gabe leaves and then the next person in line is some $-hungry mofo who makes terrible decisions and you end up with a shit system. You need competition to keep things in check.
People saying Steam doesn’t have a monopoly because other stores exist, is the same as saying Microsoft doesn’t have a monopoly on PC Gaming because Mac and Linux exist. Technically true, but ultimately meaningless because its their market power that determines a monopoly, not whether there are other niche players.
While Valve and Steam have generally been a good player, and currently do offer the best product, they still wield an ungodly amount of influence over the PC gaming market space.
Epic is chasing that because they really want what Valve has, though no doubt they plan to speedrun the enshittification process as soon as they think it safe.
😡
Steam is a natural monopoly, which although still not entirely good but are a wholly different beast from monopolies made by exploiting flaws in the system
What’s a natural monopoly? Valve currently has the freedom to implement anything they want within an extent because they’re so popular. If they decided they wanted to charge devs 35% would people stop using it? Probably not. Steam’s monopoly is as bad as any other for the same reason any other monopoly is bad.
A natural monopoly is when an industry is difficult to break into, making competition difficult or impossible. This favors incumbents, in fact, a lot of industries are natural monopolies (pharma, aerospace, chip production).
The difficulty of breaking into an industry may be because:
You may want to read up on Ma Bell or Microsoft’s legal issues with Internet Explorer in the 90s to see what specifically was so bad about monopolies like those, and then revisit this idea.
Look it up? It’s an actual term, not something I made up for whatever reason you assumed to argue against something I didn’t even say. I already said it’s still not a good thing, it just would have happened regardless of whoever that was able to do it on scale first.
When people say Valve doesn’t have a monopoly, they usually mean they don’t engage in anti-competitive practices (like making exclusivity a condition for publishing on their store, cough cough).
Actually, Valve’s recent moves represent what free market capitalism should be about - when competing stores started to appear, they instead made massive contributions to Linux gaming and appealed to right-to-repair advocates with the Steam Deck. Now both of those demographics are suckling on Gaben’s teats, myself included.
That may be so, but that’s not the way that the initial tweet is using the term, and not the commonly understood definition.
I’m not denying that Valve as a whole have been a force for good in the PC gaming market, but it’s pointless to argue semantics and make up definitions to better suit personal bias instead of debating the actual point that’s being made.
But they do. They forbid devs to sell their games cheaper on other storefronts (outside of timed sales). Basically they enforce anti-competitive pricing on products in a way that makes it impossible for the devs to move the platform costs into consumer prices.
Devs could sell the product on Epic for example for $49 and make the same amount of profit as they do on Steam when priced $59 due to lower cut, but they can’t do it because Valve forbids it. It anti-competitively protects Valve and their 30% cut against competitors who would take lesser cuts, at the expense of end customers.
I hate DRM but really like Steam, they put in a shit ton of work to achive that! It’s certainly a monopoly but I think one of the biggest differences is that it’s not a publically tradet company so they don’t have to chase that infinite growth many very influencial idiots don’t see any issue with and there for aren’t willing to destroy everything for short term gains.
Despite not having pressure from shareholders Valve pioneered or at least popularized and normalized many of the worst practices in videogame industry designed to milk players dry: microtransactions, battle passe, loot boxes, real money gambling, you name it, Valve has it
True, their games have quite a few very questionable mechanics!
Valve releasing a video on how to break down the Steam Deck was one of the best things I’ve seen from a large company in a long time.
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Capitalism and a free economy are good when it’s serving customers by making the best product or service possible, while balancing that with paying labour to make that happen.
The problem is that nowadays, there’s a third party to this for the megacorps: Shareholders, which is where the enshittification begins.
Valve is a private company, so it is not beholden to any external shareholders, which is why it’s been able to chart its own course. Still, I do worry what will happen when Gabe steps down.
Even when capitalism serves customers well, it still takes the work of people who make things, and gives it to people who own things
What does that have to do with Valve?
Are you lost? I’m responding to the previous comment
Who was replying to someone talking about Valve
And benevolent capitalism
Like what Steam did with Greenlight and the plague of early access asset flips that clogged its home page for years?
Greenlight had nothing to do with selling out the end user experience to cash out on providing value and leaving the service near unusable, unless you have some kind of compulsion where you have to buy everything on Steam.
The trading card feature created an ecosystem allowing cheap asset flips to quickly make the threshold. And make their money back, creating a positive feedback loop.
Steam allowed its store to be flooded with these games at the expense of its customers because it got it’s cut.
Do you think they wanted it to be abused? It’s pretty obvious they didn’t like the way it went which is why they got rid of it…
I’ve never understood this complaint because it takes no effort at all to just ignore these games
A prerequisite for enshittification is to have a non-shit product, so Epic are actually a safe bet against enshittification.
Steam doesn’t have a monopoly, other platforms are just shit.
Missing features, badly made features, fucking spyware, some barely working at all (I am looking at you, ubisoft)
Perhaps if the other platforms tried a little bit, they would actually be a competition.
The position makes a monopoly, not the reason…
The barriers to entry make them Monopoly. Steam does not enforce exclusivity, people are free to list their game on steam and any other platform with no penalties.
Steam may act as the de facto option, but it is not a monopoly. It is not excluding anybody from participating in the market
A monopoly refers to the market position, you don’t have to abuse your monopoly to have one…
Disagree. Monopoly, by the term mono, means only one. Exclusive.
Steam is large, steam is de facto, but steam is not exclusive. The fact that GOG, Ubisoft, epic game store, Xbox, all exist without penalties. Means it’s not an monopoly
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/monopoly
The historical term has nothing to do with todays use, that’s just the roots of the damn word. According to your logic monopolies can’t exist, Microsoft wouldn’t be one and Amazon and so on, that’s plain wrong…
I linked to the definition of the word, because we appear to have a disagreement on what the word means.
As long as the system is not exclusive, it’s not a monopoly. Steam is not excluding anybody.
But since we disagree on the definition, I don’t think there’s any point in talking anymore.
I don’t think there is much of a point in it judging from the rediculess replies I got from you and others but that’s just plain fucking wrong, a monopoly is a entity with abusable position and not a entity abusing it’s position! “In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
No, the market position makes a monopoly! What you are talking about are anticompetitive practices, a monopoly enables you to leverage those in a damaging way but they aren’t part of a monopoly…
A monopoly is defined as a single seller or producer that excludes competition from providing the same product
By this definition, Epic games would be a monopoly with its exclusives.
That’s not at all what a monopoly is, it’s simply the absence of competition aka the market position. You don’t have to engage in anti-competitive practices to havw a monopoly, I don’t get why that’s so hard to understand for many here…
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Other games aren’t a competition for a platform like Steam, that’s a different market. Steam has a monopoly because they have a extremely dominant position without real competition in their sector, they don’t have to engage in anti-competitive practices against games outside of steam to have that…
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Fuck, this is so stupid it’s hard to even responde… Steam has a monopoly on game distribution but Minecraft isn’t a Steam competitor just like Fortnite isn’t a Play Store competitor! I am done with this thread, it’s frustrating to try and explain so many people such basic things if they don’t want to hear them!
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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.
What the fuck are you saying? Of course consumers care about ownership, otherwise Stadia would be dominating the market, and we can see that it’s not.
Ownership is not why Stadia failed.
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.
It wasn’t, it works for Nvidia, people just don’t want to pay for their games twice and that broke Stadias neck…
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.
Their point being that if true ownership was the priority for consumers then they would be exclusively using GoG, since it’s the only store that gives you your games to actually own.
If they cared only about true ownership yea. But GoG doesn’t have every game Steam has. If they had the same selection i could easily see more people switching. I and I’m sure many others use both.
It’s a self-reinforcing cycle, unfortunately. GOG doesn’t have the market share that Steam does, so publishers don’t release games on it, which leads to people continuing to use Steam and maintaining its dominant market share.
and itch.io which is far better than GOG but even more niche.
First time hearing of them, after browsing a bit I’m not sure I’d agree they’re better than GOG, but they seem to focus on indie games which is super neat.
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.
Epic launches my games, Steam is full of bloat that I never use… 🤷
That “bloat” is 99% of the reason people use it.
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.
Lol. You think 99% of people give a shit about forums or Linux support?
Hey!
Linux has almost a 2% market share on Steam, I have you know!
So it is only 98% who don’t care.
I personally don’t include Linux support in the bloat, but forums, social profiles, trading cards, reviews, achievements… Yes, that’s bloat.
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.
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.
That would be helpful if they actually tried to be competitive on the same level.
Unfortunately they’re only competing for profit, not as a service. Which is why they’re failing.
Competition bettering service only works if people want to compete to create a better service. That clearly isn’t the case.
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.
The numbers for Fortnite, available on EGS but not Steam, tell otherwise.
Just because they aren’t good at it doesn’t mean they aren’t trying very hard to do so, and will clearly be very shitty if they ever achieve it.
Then we’d go back to sailing the high seas, until a better alternative shows up; as Gabe said, piracy is a service problem.
i would love for steam to have some competition. i will gladly switch over to the first competitor that has
and doesn’t
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
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.
fine. i was simplifying. that wasn’t the main point of my comment. forgive me.
no…?
you mean that the store has been an embedded browser? in that case yes
but the whole steam client? has always been vgui, not
electroncef. 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”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.
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.
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.
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
I personally get most of my games from GOG and itch.io these days. And I’ve never bought anything from the Epic store whatsoever.
I will say though that I find it kind of weird how much hate Epic gets for their store. Like, I understand that someone prefers Steam, or doesn’t want to buy stuff from Epic etc. - but what we see goes way beyond that. Epic has people actively campaigning against it, as if its mere existence is insulting. I don’t really get why.
As for the 30% cut… Developers will try to price their games competitively, and within customer expectations. So with or without Steam’s 30% cut, you can expect games to be similarly priced. The large 30% cut from Steam is basically coming out of the developer’s revenue rather than from your pocket. (I’m under the impression that GOG also has a similar 30% fee. Epic has a lower fee. And on itch.io the seller gets to choose how money goes to itch.io anywhere from 0% to 100%. So itch.io is the best deal for developers in terms of fees.)
The reason people hate Epic is fairly obvious – they don’t give a shit about the gaming industry nor about players. At some point their client contained literal spyware, they tried to brute force market share via sleazy exclusivity contracts, their software doesn’t have one tenth of the features Steam has, their CEO is a piece of shit, etc.
What do you mean by that? For developers, they take a much smaller fee than Steam or GOG, and for players they’re constantly giving away free games.
That sounds like a decent reason to campaign against them. I haven’t heard anything about that before. What was the story behind that? (As in, when / why / how / what? Perhaps you have a link or something.)
I’ve heard people talk a lot about exclusivity contracts… but can you name even a single game that has such a contract? When people have discussed this the past, the relevant developers basically said “there is no contract”. But maybe there is some different case I don’t know about. In any case, that personally doesn’t bother me anyway. If some developer wants to take money to be on one store rather than another, they can do that at their own peril. As for customers, we’re only talking about a store. It’s not like anyone is in danger of not being able to buy / play their favourite games. So it seems like a bit of a nothing-burger to me. Like, is there actually something bad happening here? Or are people just speculating that something bad might one-day happen if Epic got bigger?
Steam has more features, yeah. Steam is very good. But Steam has been around for some 20 years. It’s hard to catch up with that so quickly. In any case, although missing features is a good reason to prefer Steam, it certainly isn’t a reason to campaign against Epic.
… So from your list, I’ll keep the spyware thing and the CEO complaint. I don’t know enough about either of those to say much though. I don’t recall who the CEO of Epic is right now, so I won’t say whether or not I think that’s a good reason. And the spyware… I take that kind of stuff seriously. Right now I’m posting this from Linux - because I’m fed-up with Windows spyware. But as I said, I’ve not heard any details about any Epic spyware thing.
Incidentally, I’ve found that Steam is very good for Linux gaming. … But obviously that doesn’t mean that I’m going to start making posts trash-talking Epic. I don’t find it weird that people prefer Steam. I just find it weird that people put so much energy into attacking Epic.
Also adding to other people, they “poached” games from other platforms.
eg they wanted Rocket League, which I have on Steam and am happy to continue using there, to be completely removed from my account and available through the epic launcher some 3(?) years after I first bought it. Eventually they backpedaled, only due to community backlash, people that owned it on steam can still play it there.
If you’re serious about not knowing about all this stuff take a look at https://steamcommunity.com/groups/EpicGamesSucks/discussions/0/1796278072844560561/ Obviously Steam biased, but a very good index
Are you saying that Rocket League was removed from the Steam accounts of the people who already owned it? That sounds like a big deal, and surely must be illegal. But I didn’t see mention of that in the link you posted. Most of the things in the list seemed to be just saying that they didn’t think the Epic store is high quality. (eg. prices too high, not enough features, difficult to use return policy, etc.) Those are all fair complaints, and good reasons to not use the store - but again, they are only good reasons to not use the store. They aren’t really good reasons to crusade against it. There are heaps of crap online stores, and generally people just ignore them.
The Rocket League thing you mentioned would be a good reason to get upset at Epic beyond just not wanting to buy from them. So I’m kind of surprised to see it missing from such a comprehensive list of grievances.
Others have mentioned spyware, and like I said, I care about that. That’s a big red flag. But I looked at the links in the post you gave, and as far as I could tell they were all speculation. Things like Tencent owns 40% of Epic, and Tencent is bad - so Epic is probably bad. … Which is quite possibly true! I certainly wouldn’t want to trust Epic with my personal info. But it’s still a big step away from them having spyware built in.
I personally think that many gamers put up with too much privacy invasion and ‘telemetry’ in the form of online accounts and especially ‘anti-cheat’ software. The “anti cheat” software that some games require explicitly demand access to see every program you have installed, every program you have running, and in some cases even read RAM outside of what the game is allocated. That’s an enormous security risk and privacy breach… but people install that crap all the time with barely a whisper - but then complain about the risk the Epic will share its telemetry data with Tencent. I’m certain that some of Epic’s online games have software like that, but that wasn’t mentioned in thread you linked to.
Maybe I just don’t care about the same things that other people care about. Like, if Epic has a crap store… I just don’t care. It makes no difference to me how crap it is. It makes to difference if they say it is going to be great, and it falls short of what they said. I’m not going to go around telling people how crap it is, because I don’t think it matters. I don’t intend to use the store anyway; and if other people like the store for some reason, then fine. I don’t think it matters. They can like it, and I won’t try to convince them otherwise. But if they are somehow removing games you’ve already bought elsewhere - then that’s a big deal. That would be worth telling people about. I hope you can see what I mean.
Anno 1800 was available for purchase on Steam prior to release but at some point they made a deal with Epic to sell it there for a year. Then it was removed from Steam. If you already bought it you could use it on Steam but everyone else had to wait. You could also directly buy it from Ubisoft’s own store Uplay so in the most strict sense it was not an exclusive contract but pretty damn close. Also it wasn’t a secret. The company talked about it. They had to, because it was literally available for pre purchase on Steam and then suddenly wasn’t.
“Free stuff, pl0x” isn’t an indicator of supporting the industry or players. That’s a business tactic for clawing market share away from their competitors by attracting people without the means to buy games and devs desperate for funding. Also, if parity is your worry, many games on Steam go free or effectively free (<1 USD) all the time.
With Reddit going tits up and a coverup operation by Epic throwing a bunch of garbage info around, it’s been difficult to find the exact sources (why I’ve been taking so long to reply). If I find the actual articles/posts I’ll link them, but in summary:
There are loads of games in my “do not buy unless heavily discounted” list precisely for taking exclusivity deals. Hitman 3, Darkest Dungeon 2, Hades, Satisfactory, among others. The danger, beyond rewarding shitty behavior, shutting out large portions of the community, and limiting consumers’ options, is the same as always - you’re effectively telling companies that whoever has the biggest pocket gets to dictate what the entire industry has to do.
It wouldn’t be if Epic had shown any intention of eventually having parity. It’s been however many years since they released, with the immense advantage of seeing what works for Steam so they could copy it, and yet their client remains just as bad. It clearly shows that their focus in on getting market share to exploit gamers and devs, not on making the best platform possible.
It takes quite a lot of time to repeat all the wrong doings of Epic and it’s CEO Tim.
Thus, I can only relay to the collected information of bad old Reddit, if you want to (I’m intentionally not linking, you can search it up easily). r/fuckepic has a lot of collected information on their side page.
In short, biggest issue for me exclusivity contracts with games advertised on Steam, then as a bait and switch removed from the store page and their physical copies getting a sticker on top of the Steam logo, so a last minute deal, for Metro Exodus. And then they continued their exclusivity hunt for games, they didn’t even helped to develop. Nothing against self-made or published games to be limited time exclusive in my perspective, but not second hand bought (out).
The other about their CEO, r/timcritizisestim He’s… a douche. Using kids with the free games to bait them to his store, using them against Apple’s store rules like a little army… he is a bad person with too much money and luck to have build the Epic engine with Fortnite…
3rd result on Google for “epic games exclusive contracts”
https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/23/23843018/epic-games-store-first-run-developers-revenue
4th result on Google is the epic games CEO stating they use exclusive contracts
https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-isnt-done-with-epic-games-store-exclusives-its-just-focused-on-big-ones/
As for the games that were Epic exclusive for a year: Borderlands 3, Satisfactory, Darksiders 3, Hitman 3, Dead Island 2, Borderlands TTW to name a few. They have a year exclusivity deal with Epic - we know how annoying exclusivity deals are on consoles.
About the features, it’s quite tricky. Epic rather spends thousands on exclusivity deals rather than invest into a launcher to have a working basket.
It’s super obvious where Epic’s priorities are, and it’s not the gamers. How are they able to dedicate so much work on Unreal, but now on a launcher? They try to substitute a half-assed launcher with exclusivity deals, because they know nobody would use it willingly.
Steam doesn’t let you sell the game for cheaper prices in other stores.
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Steam can also leverage their insanely huge userbase. Even with the 30% cut, a company will probably see more profits if they use steam and give up 30% than trying to launch it outside.
At this point. The 30% is just the cost of doing business
Higher fee but significantly many more multiples of customers on steam who see and buy the game.
Just like I could sell on Etsy for a massive margin or I could sell it to Walmart at a smaller margin but make 100x the sales.
You’re paying for the customer base
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.
Fuck epic games!