Comment on Dusk Developer David Szymanski: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly

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brawleryukon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

If they had spent more time cooking up the EGS ecosystem into something more similar to XBL or PSN before trying to attract consumers en masse, they likely would’ve been pretty successful.

That’s not remotely how it would have happened.

Have a read over this article that was posted by Lars Doucet (well-respected indie developer of Defender’s Quest roughly a year before EGS even launched. It lays out exactly what a Steam competitor is going to run into trying to break into that market and provides a blueprint to not fail that is almost exactly what Epic did. And yet, the discussion to this day is still filled with nothing but “REEEEE, EXCLUSIVES!!!1”, nevermind the fact that those games all still run perfectly fine on the exact same machine you launch your Steam games from (excepting, now - multiple years on from the whole kerfuffle having begun - the Deck… buying straight from Steam does make that a much nicer/smoother experience). You can even add them to Steam to get the extra features like the controller customization and such.

Basically, even if they built a launcher that was better in every conceivable way than Steam, nobody was going to switch. They had to do something else to bring both devs and players on board. As the article states:

Even if every aspect of your service is better than Steam’s in every possible way, you’re still up against the massive inertia of everybody already having huge libraries full of games on Steam. Their credit cards are registered on Steam, their friends all play on Steam, and most importantly, all the developers, and therefore all the games, are on Steam.

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