If Epic could actually provide a better service, they would be seeing customers and developers actually want to use their platform.
Instead they try to lock games behind exclusivity deals and bribe customers with free games and they still fail.
So what do they do instead of fixing their own problems? They go after everyone else who’s actually successful.
I’d love it if they had a comparable service, because competition is good for the consumer, but they just don’t.
Steam has had a relative monopoly for two decades, and we’re lucky they’ve been customer friendly. But if something were to happen to Gabe, or Valve decided to go public or something, we’re screwed.
When Gabe dies, we’re SO fucked.
They ruined a game I loved and I will never forgive them.
What game was that?
Rocket league 😞
My condolences just FYI, if you have a PlayStation account or an Xbox account you can use that to link to epic and you do not need to make an epic account to play
Probably rocket League
Epic building a launcher that has equivalent features to Steam would do nothing. Everyone wants all their games in one place, and everyone already has their friends list there.
Getting exclusives and giving away games is probably the only way they could even enter the market. Yeah the launcher kinda sucks, but Valve has decades of development that they’ve poured into Steam, it isn’t simple to just copy everything. There was a time that Steam sucked.
Steam is a de-facto monopoly. They luckily don’t really do anti competitive practices, they just focus on having a great product, and that’s why people (myself included) love them. But I don’t think another company can ever really enter the PC market without a few tricks like exclusives or free games.
If Epic could actually provide a better service, they would be seeing customers and developers actually want to use their platform.
Doubt
Gog is objectively giving you more value for your money but even cdpr had to release the Gwent standalone on steam eventually because people didn’t buy it enough - once it was on steam it sold more than in a year on gog in weeks
People don’t look at the alternatives at all - unless it’s a AAA game with an exclusive deal
GOG doesn’t have regional pricing. It’s giving me less value for my money lol.
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/2720-4EC7-B95A-1D2A steams regional pricing is basically gone…
Well, I feel sorry for gamers from those countries but I’m not from there so I’m not impacted by this. Only time regional pricing is not available for my region is when the publisher has opted out of it.
that picture of Gabe is fucking peak IDGAF
Sweeney is such a child
He’s entirely right. Valve is just stealing money from gamers and developers by not lowering their fees.
You’re right. Giving 30% for really fucking good platform services is way worse than having to find a publisher that takes in 70 to 90% of revenue and pushes devs to release unfinished games.
Yeah seriously. As a dev, that 30% cut gets you a lot of stuff with absolutely no additional charges. Trying to roll your own distribution for your downloads could exceed that 30% by itself after you:
- Host the files somewhere that can be downloaded anywhere close to as fast as steam’s servers
- Handle payment processing fees
- Develop and maintain a site with high reliability
And that’s only downloads. With steam you also get:
- p2p networking tools
- game server hosting
- steam community integration
- analytics
- cloud saves
- voip
And like 50 other things. It’s ridiculously good value unless you’re developing some super low rent single player indie title. Even then, just having it available on steam will get you way more sales to make up for it.
Sure, epic charges 10% but you basically only get distribution and some super half baked community features.
