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I have some personal qualms about supporting “the biggest fish” in the pond, since that tends to lead to the Apples, the Googles, and the Microsofts.
However, Steam hasn’t particularly abused its market power, and has even used it to create a very successful Linux handheld that has both helped propel Linux desktop adoption and added upstream improvements to Linux in general.
I’ll revise my opinion when Valve changes to a more overtly predatory model of capitalism, but for now, I’ll enjoy only needing to keep a partial eye open.
I’ll revise my opinion when Valve changes to a more overtly predatory model of capitalism
I believe as long they’re not publicly traded )and Gabe is in charge), that’s not a concern.
Being public (or owned by a publicly traded company) tend to bring out these nasty traits. It’s more about finding ways to bring value to shareholders than the customers.
Private companies can be dicks. Public companies can and will be sued by their shareholders if they aren’t big enough dicks.
I’m terrified of Gabe retiring or passing away. He’s been amazing for the company and I don’t trust anyone else to not want to use Valve for their own greedy purposes. The next president of Valve will likely ruin all the good things about it, thanks to late-stage capitalism.
I firmly believe in voting with your wallet; I normally don’t invest much long-term interest into businesses because you never know how they’ll change over time, but I’ve been so happy with Valve that I’ve gladly given them thousands of dollars over the decades for Steam games. My library is sitting at just over 3,500 games right now. I don’t know what I’m gonna do when Valve crumbles one day. I really hope they give me an option to download and play offline all the games I’ve bought, because that’s a massive library to lose.
I’ve never given a penny to Epic Games, and unless they get on-par with Steam’s functionality, I won’t ever buy or play any of their games. The one thing that might make Epic Games competitive (and could convince me to use their platform) is letting Steam users copy their libraries over, so we’re not just starting over from scratch with a new service.
That’s what got me on Steam in the first place. Back around 2010 or so, I discovered that if you had a physical PC game that was also in Steam’s store, you could type in the serial number on the game box and it would register and add it to your Steam library. That’s how I got my collection of early Call of Duty titles on Steam, as well as Half-Life and some others. I moved my physical game library over to Steam and I’ve been a Steam loyalist ever since.
Back around 2010 or so, I discovered that if you had a physical PC game that was also in Steam’s store, you could type in the serial number on the game box and it would register and add it to your Steam library.
There were a few older games I owned that had trouble with running well on newer hardware because of the messy manual updates. Did the seriel bumber i to steam and it installed and updated to a smooth running version on steam at no cost.
Yes, this tied the hard copy to the steam account so there was a loss of reselling unless they changed that at some point. But I never bothered with selling used games and these were old enough that nobody wanted them anyway so I got some free use out of something I was almost ready to throw out.
Back around 2010 or so, I discovered that if you had a physical PC game that was also in Steam’s store, you could type in the serial number on the game box and it would register and add it to your Steam library.
WAIT WHAT.
Does this happen even if the game wasn’t on Steam at time of purchase so long as it has a Steam version now? Because that would be amazing.
I really hope GabeN has a continuity plan that involves a nonprofit governance board when he’s no longer in the picture. I don’t even want to imagine valve as a publicly traded company (or owned by a private equity company for that matter.)
Anyone in charge of a non-publicly traded company will want to do what’s best for the company in the long term instead of milking as much from it as fast as they can, so I don’t think that replacing Gabe by someone else will be the end of Valve like so many people claim.
The problem is that you can never be certain about someone’s ability to stand their morals atop money until it is truly offered to them. Supposedly Gaben has turned down Billion dollar offers for steam. It is certainly not every person who will do so and it is hard to know how a person will react until that is truly offered to them. I don’t know that I’d turn it down (though I also don’t know how much Gaben makes).
Not necessarily. Sometimes even owners just want to milk as much as possible as fast as they’re able.
Source: life.
The joys of not having a duty to shareholders.
They’re also directly funding linux devs to work on related projects, which the most mutually-beneficial way to build products around linux
I’ll revise my opinion when Valve changes to a more overtly predatory model of capitalism, but for now, I’ll enjoy only needing to keep a partial eye open.
this is the correct approach towards how a society should support big buisnesses. the companies that don’t fuck us over will continue to get my public support and money
GoG exists and I always check there before going to Steam. I just won’t deal Epic.
GOG is great, but they need to make a Linux launcher, already. Or if they can’t, they should make it so the community can.
Yes. It’s not like you can’t even buy linux games on it. It was some jumping through hoops, but if you buy Factorio on GoG, you can get the linux version.
Wube (creators of Factorio) have the best customer policy in game development.
- Don’t go on sale so you will always pay the cheapest price.
- if you have the game on steam you can download a DRM-free version directly from their website. (alongside all old versions)
- Encourage the community to create mods, host your own mod portal accessible inside the game.
- Make a good game.
- Be open about game development through monthly blog posts.
The only way I would like it more is if the game was open source but since that’s impossible to sell I will take this.
I don’t view games as needing to be open source as the end users doesn’t need them to be productive in work. They aren’t a part of a productivity pipeline and the discontinue of a game’s support or radical change in fuction can’t throw a person’s livelihood into jeopardy.
Games should have a plan to release the source and assets if support ever gets dropped and I believe that it should be a requirement if a games gets to enjoy copyright protects that there’s a plan for when it enters public domain, but that’s a different discussion.
The heroic launcher supports GOG.
For sure, but it’s not really the same functionality. You can play your games, but you can’t buy or redeem any others from Heroic or Lutris.
It has a store page, basically an embedded web browser, I redeem free epic games through it, don’t know about GOG but I’d imagine it works the same.
It’s still a third party solution. There’s no reason they couldn’t make a Linux client for Galaxy, and some people want to use the official launchers.
The heroic launcher supports GOG.
True but paying customers can expect that CD Project to that by themselves from the cut they take from games on GOG and the insane amounts of Cyberpunk money they earned. Randy Pitchford claims that “Steam does very little to earn the massive cut they take and continues its effective monopoly” and that “very little” includes making clients for three operating systems, a VR platform, a handheld, and a whole operating system.
It’s clear that Valve’s competitors undervalue the user experience that Steam provides and don’t understand why it’s so sticky.
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The one thing I like about them is they recognized why people really wanted to stick with steam: they have a large established library and don’t want to bounce back and forth.
They took that and said “ok we’ll give you free games every week until you have a large library here and won’t want to leave!”
Jokes on them, I now have a large library of completely free games on epic and still use steam for the games I want to buy because I refuse to support their exclusivity bullshit.
I mean, Steam is also very functional and has a ton of support features. Especially for modding. It’s not just stockholm syndrome.
I get the games on epic but I haven’t even bothered playing them because I game exclusively on linux and just have not bothered with lutris / heroic etc. Proton with steam is just effortless and after years of tinkering with wine back in the day I want the simplicity
Heroic also makes it effortless, but I agree with all your points.
I resolved to never give Epic a dime when I got a popup forcing me to agree to a binding arbitration agreement in order to launch games I already have installed and in my library. It tells me that they think people will have good reasons to sue them in the future.
You can send a snail mail to opt out, which is scummy at best, but technically you can opt out.
It doesn’t count if it costs money, which mail does.
This is what’s known as a dark pattern and is the exact thing the US government is suing Adobe over.
Making service cancellation or opt-out deliberately difficult is exploitative and something that should be illegal. Any company that does it doesn’t deserve a cent from you.
You don’t need a subscription like Prime to get the free games? I was under the impression you do.
Hell no
Well that’s fuckin’ sick lmao
They were giving them away to anyone who made a free epic account.
There are even more free games from prime for the epic store, but the epic store has it’s own free games too that don’t require any subscription to anything.
Wait now it appears I’m the one out of the loop. When did that start?
No idea, I only noticed it a couple weeks ago. The prime gaming redemption site where I used to get stuff for lost ark now has a listing for free games, does amazon games, epic games, and gog games. The epic games are different ones than the free ones directly from epic.
Neat, well thanks for the heads up
Can you also launch the games through steam to get features like the overlay and stuff
I believe you can, I haven’t tried though. The games install like any other and have an .exe you can point to through steam so it would probably just be a matter of having the epic launcher open as well when you go to play.
Ah cus I have a faint memory of getting games thru Amazon and launching thru steam but idr if I had the overlay
Epic feels like a kid’s toy compared to steam imo. Just overall less usable and dumbed down.
Let’s see…
The launcher itself ran poorly compared to Steam’s. I’ve had instances of it freezing performance down just downloading 1 game through Epic’s launcher.
You’ve locked down games behind multi-year exclusives, pissing off many people along the way that we’re now just seeing their Steam releases.
You’ve spent years giving free games away, promising not to do anymore, going back to doing it again.
The launcher and storefront are incredibly barebones compared to Steam’s. In fact, any launcher not Steam, has incredibly minimal to go with other than just running games through them.
EA at least made an attempt, but still not as fully featured.
GOG’s launcher is better and it’s not even a requirement for their games!
And, around launch, didn’t have payment processors in multiple countries meaning people were just fucked by exclusives
WTF. I would fucking love barebones launcher. I was holding off using epic launcher because it was so laggy and slow when it first came out. I was using legendary before, but stopped using Epic altogether. Might just give it a try again.
I’m starting to feel steam is getting bloated and plain annoying. I just want a launcher to launch a game and pair with my friends after a long day at work. I don’t want a crappy browser following me around in the background. I already have a browser if I need it. We use a different app for voice so could do away with all the other bs as well.
If all you want is to launch a game, why keep the ‘launcher’ at all? Games used to just… start. No separate program needed.
The Epic Games Launcher is so far behind on features compared to Steam it’s not even funny. Epic chose not to try and compete with Steam on that front and to try and force users onto the platform with exclusivity deals and sweeten the deal with free games.
The one user-centric killer feature Epic has in their stack IMHO is the built-in multiplayer crossplay. Except it’s not even exclusive to their store ironically (you do need an Epic account for it though).
Epic chose not to try and compete with Steam on that front
Forget competing, they lack even the basics.
What do you consider basic that it’s still missing? To be honest I’ve felt content with it as a game launcher for a while now, but I admittedly don’t use it that often either.
Linux support.
I kinda understand it not being a priority; even if they dedicated the resources to both create and adequately maintain Linux support, I imagine very few of the games on the platform have native support anyway. Sure, many would work (to varying degrees) with the various bags of tricks available, but it’s still an extra step of compatibility that’s sort of beyond their immediate control.
Fuck off. They paid to remove support for Linux from Rocket League because their launcher doesn’t support it.
Existing games that had Linux support already.
Thanks for so politely and cordially sharing that information
edit: I would be even more appreciative if it were true: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/rocket-league-ending-mac-and-linux-support-because-they-represent-less-than-0-3-of-active-players
Quoting their statement:
Regarding our decision to end support for macOS and Linux:
Rocket League is an evolving game, and part of that evolution is keeping our game client up to date with modern features. As part of that evolution, we’ll be updating our Windows version from 32-bit to 64-bit later this year, as well as updating to DirectX 11 from DirectX 9.
There are multiple reasons for this change, but the primary one is that there are new types of content and features we’d like to develop, but cannot support on DirectX 9. This means when we fully release DX11 on Windows, we’ll no longer support DX9 as it will be incompatible with future content.
Unfortunately, our macOS and Linux native clients depend on our DX9 implementation for their OpenGL renderer to function. When we stop supporting DX9, those clients stop working. To keep these versions functional, we would need to invest significant additional time and resources in a replacement rendering pipeline such as Metal on macOS or Vulkan/OpenGL4 on Linux. We’d also need to invest perpetual support to ensure new content and releases work as intended on those replacement pipelines.
The number of active players on macOS and Linux combined represents less than 0.3% of our active player base. Given that, we cannot justify the additional and ongoing investment in developing native clients for those platforms, especially when viable workarounds exist like Bootcamp or Wine to keep those users playing.
For me it’s the inability to set my status to “invisible”.
It’s not that I don’t want to game with people, but sometimes I want to practice alone without being bombarded by invites.
Fair enough! I barely use its social side since most of the games I’ve played on there are singleplayer titles - honestly didn’t even know that wasn’t there yet!
Remote play together, local network streaming, etc.
I guess our opinions differ, because I don’t consider either of those to be “basics”. They’re nice features for e.g., Steam to have, sure, but they’re not “game launcher 101” imo.
That’s a fair take. We all have different priorities.
We use in home streaming nearly every day now, so it’s a must have for me. Remote play together is critical for certain games as well.
Steam is the only game store that is on linux
itch.io also has a Linux app
Oh yeah
Let me know when Heroic integrates it
you didn’t mention your distro. is that because it’s ubuntu?
No, because it isn’t 2015 anymore.
so you admit you weren’t using arch in 2015? pffft
Nah it’s not ubuntu
I use arch btw
Things I need a storefront/launcher to provide me:
- Reviews
- Wish list
- Beta/Alternate build installations
- Friend list, chat, game invite functions
- Mod browser
- Refund policy
- Excellent search and discovery tools
Nice to have:
- Forum for guides/support
- Game sharing
- Ability to move game files
As a family…I need the family sharing provided by steam. Especially the recent beta version. It’s fantastic.
- Linux support
Two things that would be nice to have is:
-
If Steam’s mod directory didn’t REQUIRE you to buy the game on Steam
-
Shared Games could be played simultaneously
Their store, their policy, their framework, their infrastructure, their rules. Deal wirh it and install mods like any other user does. Manually
I do, but there are a lot of Cities Skylines mods for example that cannot be found elsewhere.
-
Lose the ‘infinite growth’ promise to shareholders (in fact, lose the whole shareholder thing entirely). That’s the root of all evil right there. It’s the cause of all woes suffered by gamers, devs and even the very sociopathic CEOs who think Epic exclusivity is a sound financial strategy. We all suffer for it, and all to benefit shareholders who, in 2024, still believe the lie that next year’s profits will exceed this year’s. It’s delusional, and even if it weren’t, it would quite literally be cancerous. Cancer is just a board of shareholders in a biological system.
Didn’t take long for Randy’s tone to change after the Epic bribe money dried up.
I feel like he’s know for this shit like aliens colonial Marines
That and mysteriously disappearing thumb drives
And assaulting the original Claptrap VA, among other things.
One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates. – Gabe Newell, 2011
Time and again, digital distribution platforms have proved this. Apple Music became a dominant music distribution platform at the height of Napster, LimeWire and other peer to peer sharing apps. They did it, because it was easier to just buy the tracks/albums you wanted than to dig through trackers and websites which may or may not actually have what you want. Netflix became the de-facto source for streaming movies at a time when BitTorrent was common and well known. Again, they made it easy and convenient, while not charging an arm and a leg. Steam also faced competition from BitTorrent piracy. But again, Steam made buying, downloading and running games easier than the pirates. And people are willing to pay for that convenience and not dealing with the crap which floats around the high seas.
And, so long as Steam continues to treat it’s customers right, those customers will keep coming back. And that’s the problem with Pitchford’s whole premise. Developers will go where the customers are. Sure, you’ll get the odd case of a publisher/developer doing an exclusivity deal. But even then, it’s probably limited, because the customers are on Steam. If another storefront wants to draw customers, they need to start with treating customers well. They will still face headwinds, as Steam has a large “first mover” advantage. But, success is going to start with making customers want to come back.
yea let’s just forget about the illegality of those things and how companies, ISPs and law enforcements fight tooth and nail to shut those services down repeatedly.
You ever wonder why these companies don’t operate in countries that don’t have strict piracy laws and can’t shut down sites with court orders? Because it’s still easier to pirate than face criminal charges.
Re-read what I wrote, but hop down off your high horse first, it’s obvious you weren’t able to read it clearly from up there. I’m neither promoting nor defending piracy. Quite the contrary, I’m praising the legitimate services (and Steam in particular) for understanding that competition with piracy isn’t all about money, it’s often about the quality of service. Funny enough, your own comments are actually a point in favor of this:
You ever wonder why these companies don’t operate in countries that don’t have strict piracy laws and can’t shut down sites with court orders? Because it’s still easier to pirate than face criminal charges.
Yet somehow, with a lot of time, money and effort put into shutting down piracy, the pirates were able to provide a better service. Seriously, step back from the whole “napster bad” for a moment and think about the dissonance of the situation. Large companies, pulling in millions of dollars a year, with no need to worry about law enforcement or monied interests coming after them, somehow failed to create anything resembling a functional digital marketplace. They were stuck in the physical distribution paradigm and fought tooth and nail to avoid digital distribution. At the same time, a few kids, with little money, and law enforcement trying to shut them down created a pretty good user experience. Sure, some of that is not having to worry about licensing. But, a large part of it is understanding what the users want and giving it to them.
It wasn’t until Apple came along and basically created “Napster, but legitimate” that music piracy really fell off. Netflix pulled off something similar with video (though that is rebuilding some rough edges at the moment) and Steam did it for games. Sure, piracy still exists, and it will always be a problem. But, a lot of piracy can be tamped down by having a good service available.
No shit. Everyone was saying this from day one, but Sweeney was too stupid to realize it.
After the Borderlands 3 incident, not surprising.
What is this incident?
Probably referring to the 6-month timed exclusivity on PC for EGS that Borderlands 3 went through.
And the fact that Epic couldn’t cobble together a content delivery platform that supported preloading before BL3’s release.
And the fact that they used Steam essentially as an advertising platform until the TOS was changed.
As someone who sunk hundreds of hours into each of 1 and 2, the staggered launch felt like it did so much damage to player base as well as player interest. Felt like when I was interested in it none of the old hardcore raiders I used to play with were and vice versa. And thats after I was the one to crawl to epic because I was afraid of missing out that sweet endgame co op high I got from 1 and 2.
I loved BL1 and 2 so much, my pets are named after characters from the games. The staggered launch of BL3 caused me to forget about it for years after release.
The DLC didn’t help either, I was thinking about getting it to hop back on right around the same time the steam players were ready for something else for a bit. I actually really liked the game. Story was whatever but had as much fun as I can have by myself in a game like that.
I played a ton of 2 and presequel but only just bought 3 at like a 90% discount and even then I’m not exactly interested in playing it.
Any decent person who would have been “overly optimistic” at the time would have supported epic, and just that. There was no need to go out of his way to trashtalk others like a whiny bitch, especially when at the time said “others” where the place they had a chance to make money before.
There’s only one thing I want from gearbox anymore. For them to re-enable the online servers for Battleborn so I can finish the damn story mode for a game I bought.
ReBorn doesn’t work on Linux yet, (or at least it crashes for me).
Be sure to sign the citizen’s initiative!
Already have. Unfortunately even if it becomes law one day, it will only apply going forward in time.
well the only thing i want from gearbox is them not sucking so i guess we can’t all have what we want
I want them to let Civvie 1v1 Randy, it’s been a long time coming.
Let them fight in a sewer.
A glorious mental image
I log into EGS via heroic a few times a year to claim a free game. Yet to ever play any said free games 🤷
Remember to claim The Callisto Protocol!
Huh, that was what 5 years ago now? I will remember telling randy he was wrong (in perhaps an alcohol fuelled rant 🤭) only to get swiftly blocked.
Brick voice ‘Ahhh good times!’
