Dear PC gamers, please stop bitching about installing a second games launcher
No.
Don’t force me to install a garbage dump that runs like shit and isn’t even close to feature complete to play a game.
Or do and I won’t pay, either way works lol.
Comment on Remedy and Annapurna announce a strategic cooperation agreement on Control 2
masterspace@lemmy.ca 2 weeks agoDear PC gamers, please stop bitching about installing a second games launcher. If you wanted all games to only come out on a single launcher then you should have bought a console.
Us console players are getting real sick of the endless bitching about Epic just because they tried to break Steam’s monopoly.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
because they’re not feature complete or they just suck.
Or serve a different kind of user base.
E.g. GOG, itch, publisher specificKecessa@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
That’s like saying that Walmart doesn’t have a monopoly in your little town because there’s this one other store that stays open even though most clients don’t go anymore.
Hell, the first sign that a monopoly exist is that independents that says they wouldn’t deal with the company with the monopoly start to do it because they realise that their sales aren’t up to par because customers won’t buy from them unless their product is available in the buffet store.
polygon.com/…/blizzard-pc-games-steam-overwatch-2…
theverge.com/…/ubisoft-return-steam-2022-assassin…
It’s not that people didn’t want to play their games (otherwise they wouldn’t sell on Steam either), it’s that people didn’t want to play them unless they were available on a specific launcher and that means Steam is in a monopolistic position.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Lol, your two examples are from companies that have their own shitty launchers that customers hated using because they aren’t very good.
Again, store do good isn’t a monopoly. Steam isn’t a monopoly just because every other competitor doesn’t know what customers want or don’t care because it’s expensive. And you’re kinda proving my point. There are tons of competing stores out there to use, but people don’t use them nearly as much because they suck or they’re not feature complete. Both Blizzard and Ubisoft have their own competing stores, but neither can get market share because they refuse to offer features that customers want. Epic has the same problem.
Steam’s MoNoPolY is 100% a lack of services and features from the competition, and that’s what keeps people coming back to the environment. This isn’t Walmart undercutting sales to drive competitors out of the market, this is smaller hobby stores mad they can’t slap their customers and be entitled to the business the big player has.
homicidalrobot@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
What features? I have seen a lot of complaining about performance of the storefront here, which leads me to believe a lot of the complainers have not actually used EGS in actual years. I haven’t seen anyone mention an actual specific feature of Steam that EGS is missing. Multiple running versions for beta testing, DLC linking with the main game page, sale frequency, everything except the social features of steam (which are notorious for being garbage communities) are on par in EGS these days, so this thread is confusing for me since you guys haven’t actually explained a single missing feature.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
The fact that the launcher isn’t as good isn’t the point.
If you grow tomatoes and sell them in a small grocery but barely manage to sell any because they don’t have that many clients because there’s a Walmart across the street and you decide to start selling your tomatoes at Walmart as well, is it because the grocery sucks or because Walmart is in a monopolistic position?
Once a distributor gets big enough that they become the default solution for clients and selling through an alternative distributor means forgoing profit simply because clients won’t bother buying from the alternative no matter how good it is, you’re in a monopolistic system.
Let’s be clear here, no matter how good EGS gets or no matter how good a new alternative made their launcher, the vast majority of people won’t do the switch for the simple reason that their library is centralized in a single place and that place is Steam.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
yawn
If it’s not on Steam or GoG I pirate. Console children should go touch grass or go to school so they understand something other than defending multi-billion dollar megacorps.
WldFyre@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
Says the one defending Steam lmao grow up
Tamo240@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
Quick google says epic has 13000+ employee while Valve has only 300+, and yet they can’t build a legitimate competitor and have to resort to exclusivity deal to force people onto their platform which is totally anti consumer.
Also for the record console players whine endlessly about Xbox/PS exclusive games, so don’t act like this is some weird thing that PC gamers do.
WldFyre@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
Why do you bring up console players? What does that have to do with Steam?
Also, what’s the cutoff for the number of employees a company can have before it’s weird to stan for them? Because I’ve never liked Steam, and Valve was one of the first companies to promote lootboxes and literal gambling to children, but Epic is the devil for some reason?? Lol gtfo
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Not to rain on your parade but Gabe Newell collects yachts so if you’re against multi billion dollar mega corps then your option is itch.io and that’s pretty much it.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Lmao, says the guy defending a multi billion dollar megacorp’s monopoly.
I prefer competition in all markets, if you prefer monopolies that take 18% more of every single sale, I have bad news for you about your level of grown up ness.
batmaniam@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Or just… Don’t make a launcher?
ZeroHora@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Yeah lol, people forget that GoG exists god dammit.
We don’t need a launcher to install games on PC, every launcher purpose is to collect data.
zecg@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Dear PC gamers, please stop bitching about installing a second games launcher.
I’m neither bitching nor installing that shit. I take every freebie, but never install anything other than through Steam, just let 'em pile up. I’m actually not bothered by exclusivity at all, I only exceedingly rarely pay for games before they’re 75% off a few years down the line. Stuff like Synthetik 2 or Shapez 2, where I know what I’m getting and it’s a small team with an uncompromising vision.
Epic’s behaviour was explicitly to try and break Steam’s entrenched monopoly
Steam doesn’t have monopoly on anything, they just have superior service that people prefer, but there’s quite a few stores / launchers. I like Epic’s engine, but their launcher is still crap five years down the line.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
You can have a monopoly without abusing it, you’re still in a monopolistic position and in a position where you can start abusing it and people are left without an alternative.
All your games are on Steam and stuck there, tomorrow they decide to start charging users a monthly fee for online services, what then? You purchased multiplayer games telling yourself the purchase price was all you would need to pay but now you need to pay every month to play those games all because Valve can do whatever they want since they don’t have any real competition.
zecg@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
All your games are on Steam and stuck there
No, that’s the point, I have tons of ubishit and hundreds of Sweeney’s freebies, some on gog, origin or whatever they’re calling it these days, all over the place. What monopoly? I mean they sold me a linux pc in a gamepad that’s fully fledged arch only Valve is maintaining it for me, drivers work with no fiddling or deep lore research. But I can do whatever with it, it’s a personal computer. They didn’t try locking it in any way. Remarkably monopolistic
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Again, what do you do about your multiplayer games that your purchased on Steam if they decide to start charging money for the online services? They actually are stuck there, you can’t take them with you to another platform, you are dependent on their goodwill to be able to download them and there’s tons of people who got banned from Steam and that don’t have access to the games that they paid for anymore.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
monopolies are abusive by nature
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Yup, gamers just like that specific monopoly because they feel like they’re getting something good in return but they don’t take into consideration the door that it leaves open.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Steam doesn’t have monopoly on anything, they just have superior service that people prefer
Those aren’t mutually exclusive.
Tattorack@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Dear PC gamers, please stop bitching about installing a second game launcher.
No, and fuck you.
There is no purpose in a second game launcher and it only causes things to be cumbersome. Hell, games don’t technically need any launcher.
limitedduck@awful.systems 2 weeks ago
I can agree that challenging Steam is probably a good thing, but right now Steam just gives so much more value to Devs and publishers. Steam provides:
- a review system
- remote play
- the workshop
- discussion threads
- cards and the points store
and that’s just what I can think of, not including the player specific stuff like library sharing.
Devs and publishers pay more, but get a community and ecosystem in return instead of just a platform.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Yeah, but think about how much money Valve has taken, 30% of virtually every single PC game sale over the past 21 years.
I do understand that there’s more value provided, but that’s the thing with monopolies, they can still provide more value than upstarts because an upstart has to build everything they did, while having none of the market share that they had to do it with.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Reviews > Also available from websites that don’t have a financial incentive to show good reviews
Remote play > Good example
Workshop > Also available elsewhere
Forums > Also available elsewhere on platforms that don’t have a financial incentive to censor criticism
Cards and points stores > Bloat
ZeroHora@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Yeah but no one do all of that with the same tool, in the same place for every game.
stardust@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
I prefer EA and Ubisoft.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
You shouldn’t.
domi@lemmy.secnd.me 2 weeks ago
They should have spent those millions to fund development of a store that can actually compete with the competition and studios that produce games, which they then can sell on their own platform.
Instead they snatched up every new release on the way to Steam while still not being able to provide the basic necessities of a modern PC store front.
So why should I bother purchasing something from them? They have nothing to offer and actively make it harder for me to play games through their store with their anti-Steam Deck stance.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
I’m not saying you should, I’m saying it doesn’t make them villains or a bad company.
They made a mistake in their approach to the EGS, which they’ve pretty candidly talked about and admitted. But the end goal of EGS wasn’t just to make them more money, they offer every developer more money when they publish their. Their underlying motivation for creating EGS in the first place was the recognition that Valve does not need to be taking a 30% cut of every game sale to provide the services they provide.
domi@lemmy.secnd.me 2 weeks ago
But it does, paying third parties to not publish on your competitors platform is the oldest anti-competitive behaviour in the book.
It would have been completely fine if they started out with actually funding development of new games and only releasing them on their store.
I would have even given them some slack for their bad launcher since they were new to this.
Instead we are here, almost 6 years later. Their launcher is still trash, their exclusive deals were a complete money sink, EGS is still not profitable, they burned all bridges to Valve and are not one step closer to their claim that 30% is too much and they can do it with
8%12%.masterspace@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
I would argue that even restricting sales to your own store is anti-competitive tying. You’re avoiding competing on the merits of a store using exclusive licensing of a creative work.
Again, not a fan of the tactic, but they are trying to break an entrenched monopoly with a ton of network effects which is near impossible.
Their launcher is perfectly fine.
Not really. They weren’t as effective as they wanted them to be but they did ultimately gain a significant chunk of market share.
No, they needed to gain more market share to break even.
But they are. They’re not losing that much money, even with a tiny portion of market share. Valve having far more market share means they should be able to do it for an even smaller percentage.
fartsparkles@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Yet consumers get more value from Steam as a platform where that 30% cut has helped fund a powerful gaming platform, remote game streaming, driven developers to release builds for macOS and Linux and license users for all platforms with a single purchase, an open source handheld gaming device, an input library that enables practically any input device to be used and for controls to be remapped even if the game doesn’t support it, the best VR headsets and room-scale VR, popularising VR and making it mainstream, contributing to upstream to further gaming on Linux, enabling DirectX games to execute natively on Linux, several of the most popular multiplayer games on the internet, enticed PlayStation to release games on PC, putting indie developers on a level playing field with the biggest studios, enabling developers to release games mid development to help them self fund the game’s development, support the modding scene, and so much more.
Epic may charge developers less but that doesn’t offer me, a consumer, any extra value.
Instead their platform and its lack of investment and innovation make the purchases I have made in their store feel less valuable and cumbersome as their competition increase the value of their offerings.
I’m not saying they’re the bad guys but the argument that developers get more money doesn’t really matter if that 30% cut is felt justified to consumers.
And with the upcoming untethered VR offering from Valve on the horizon, which will no doubt be powered by open source with their improvements upstreamed, that 30% cut feels even more justified when Linux becomes fully capable of VR thanks to my purchases.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
What value so you actually need? Hell, I use a third party launcher so I don’t have to deal with the other ones and can just launch my games.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
I mean, I’ll give full Kudos to Valve for investing in Linux gaming, it wasn’t exactly a selfless maneuver, but it is still valuable and makes the world a better place.
And I’ll give them Kudos for contributing to VR, but they neither popularized it, nor make the best headsets, both of those titles go to Oculus. They do have the hands down best VR game ever made, but even that is not what popularized VR, Beat Saber is.
Ultimately, Valve has made billions and billions in profits on top of all that investment, and on top of paying all their employees $300k+ salaries + stock. I like a lot of what Steam offers, but it’s also objectively unquestionable that they could have offered all of what they offer for far less money, but their de facto monopoly means that everyone will buy from them no matter what.
Because, let’s be real, gamers aren’tt hating Epic for having to download mods through a third party mod site, they’re hating them for having to use a second launcher / store.
GoodEye8@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
I think it does. Instead of competing they chose to try and force customers to use their platform by buying exclusivity that specifically targets Steam. From the perspective of the customer they took the worst possible approach and, along with how Sweeney has talked about people like us, treated customers like a cattle to be herded, as if we couldn’t think for ourselves and would throw ourselves into EGS if our games went there.
That is the PR they sold that the money goes into the hands of the developer. That is true only if the developer is also self publishing. Actually that extra money goes into the hands of the publisher and then it’s up to the publisher to decide if the developers get any more money. And once again, from the customers perspective, we barely get anything out of that goal. Games don’t get cheaper for us, we don’t really get more games because of it. The publishers simply get more money per sale. They don’t even get more money (except for the exclusivity money that Epic threw their way) because you sell significantly more copies on Steam because unlike Epic Steam doesn’t treat its customers like cattle.
So to prove that Valve doesn’t need to take a higher cut they make a store where they take fraction of the cut Steam would take but also offer a fraction of the services Steam offers? I think that would be an argument if they offered at least half of what Steam offers but they don’t even do that. They made a barebones store for a barebones cut, that doesn’t show anything.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
That specifically target Steam or Steam ends up being the only target because the other stores are either specialized or publisher specific?
masterspace@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
The store taking a smaller cut of the pie either means that developers get more money to spend on the game or consumers spend less for games. Full stop.
Publishers have revenue sharing percentages with the developers, if a game sells more and makes more money per sale the developer gets more money.
There is no way that Valve is the good guy or even neutral for taking more of the pie then they need to.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
It makes their product shit
stardust@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Naive child thinks epic is offering a lower cut for altruistic reasons as opposed to it being the only method they could think of to try to convince devs to sell there. And that they wouldn’t jack up the rate once they corned the market given how their how strategy has been more reminiscent of Walmart approach of pricing lowering to gain market share. Biggest sign is that the store isn’t even profitable much like how lot of services these days aren’t profitable and burn money then jack up prices and offer less. Hell even Microsoft has offered low rates. Going to argue Microsoft is nice too now? Not falling for it Randy.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
This is literal the entire basis of our economy. A company being able to offer a service more efficiently charges less and gets more customers to come to them. It is the literal only mechanism in capitalist that keeps it running at all efficiently.
How would they corner the market? Steam still exists. As you pointed out, the Microsoft store still exists. If they ever jack up their prices devs can go elsewhere.
No one is accusing Epic or Microsoft of altruism, they offer 12% because that’s closer to what it actually costs them to run the store. Steam charges 30% because gamers refuse to buy games from anywhere else so they can just tack on an extra 18% more money that they’ll take.