re: this article.
The title is a joke. “Free, but you have to make an EGS account” is a bit too rich for me.
Epic: It’s not right that if you want a game on your smart phone you have to go through Apple or Google!
Also Epic: if you want this game you have to go through US!
Not on Steam? No direct release? Steam released, but with a bunch of bolt on EULAs/Denuvo/3rd party launchers?
The seas will provide.
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Steam’s DRM is not mandatory to release a game on Steam. Its there in fact to provide a necessary lesser evil than to encourage every developer/publisher to produce their own. They still unfortunately do, which Steam at least warns customers about, but them providing their own minimal DRM is a good thing, given the context.
(That said, I still respect gog)
Valve does not discourage third party DRM at all. I wanna say there are dev FAQs where they actively encourage it, in fact. Let me look for the quote…
…Here we go. They straight up point out that their DRM isn’t enough and recommend making GaaS games and leaning into their platform features to make pirate copies and non-DRMd copies not work or work worse. And they support third party DRM explicitly.
I don’t see how this is consistent with discouraging DRM use. People project a lot on the go-to defenses for this particular argument, and it’s weird.
The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy (i.e. copying all game files to another computer) and has some obfuscation, but it is easily removed by a motivated attacker.
We suggest enhancing the value of legitimate copies of your game by using Steamworks features which won’t work on non-legitimate copies (e.g. online multiplayer, achievements, leaderboards, trading cards, etc.).
The Steam wrapper can and should be used in combination with other DRM solutions. To do so, apply the Steam wrapper in compatibility mode first before applying any other DRM. Apply it first so that it does not interfere with the DRM solution. Compatibility mode will disable DRM capabilities of the wrapper.
The DRM is optional for use by the devs. Rimworld is one game I know doesn’t use it, you can just zip the entire thing up and put it somewhere else and it’ll run fine. It’s still a launcher. But the only better alternative to a launcher is plain installers to download and hold onto like GOG provides as an alternative to its Galaxy launcher.
Steam is good mostly because the competition is unbelievably incompetent. I cannot see a single good reason for EGS to be a fucking Unreal app, for starters, and a couple of reasons that it shouldn’t (the store is just web pages, the text rendering sometimes gets blurry, it uses too many computer resources to run).
Even GOG, which I always shill for, has some pretty dumb faults, like how it lists different editions of the same game, like a base/deluxe/platinum, as completely different: if you own the platinum version, you might still see the base game on the store page without the “Owned” sticker; more than once I added a game to the cart only to double check and realize that I already owned it. This also happens to games that GOG sells in bundles.
no other platform gives as much of a shit as valve does about linux gaming. proton made pretty much every windows game in my library Just Work™ (and no, just wine still isn’t enough), meanwhile tim sweeney is actively hostile to linux as a platform.
Ever other platform is just ass. I have played games on Epic, Battlenet, Ubisoft and the EA launcher but they all barely have basic functionality. Meanwhile steam has:
- good UI (store & settings)
- no forced ads
- reviews
- discussions
- workshop
- player stats
- a lot more settlings / options
Steam seems to be the only one that actually puts any effort in providing a good user experience. It’s more than just a store / launcher and noone else is even trying to compete.
Don’t forget non-profitable free-to-use features such as:
- Steam Link
- Cloud storage for saves and screenshots
- Over the internet couch co-op (I don’t remember the name.
And there’s probably more that I’m forgetting. These things cost Valve money to make and maintain. Only a small portion of users actually use these features and yet it’s not locked behind some subscription or whatever and instead can be used by all users of the platform.
They cost money to make, but the only one of those that costs them a significant chunk to maintain is cloud saves. As far as I can tell their streaming solution is strictly peer-to-peer, in the vein of Moonlight or Parsec.
And all of those are definitely profitable for Steam via… well, look at this thread. Their technological advantage on the client feature set is worth billions to them. They are in the process of spinning it off into a separate hardware platform and OS. That’s Microsoft money they stand to make, on top of all the Microsoft money they are already making.
I mean, those are cool, don’t get me wrong, they have by far the best feature set in the PC market, and arguably in all of gaming… but it’s not a gift, it’s either feature parity with competitors or investment in their market position.
Theres also steamvr link to make meta’s quest headsets better and also all the steam for linux stuff like proton and gamescope
What do you mean “no forced ads”? It throws up a separate window with store sales every launch?
Those are promotions, really. Not advertisements. Steam is showing me relevant video games that are available, not a sale on Coca-Cola.
I fail to see the distinction. If I want to just play a game, it’s still getting in my way.
Turn it off then and quit complaining about something so insignificant.
Up until this thread, I had tried several times to find out how to disable it. That setting name is obviously obfuscating itself.
Of fucking course Steam isn’t advertising soda, they sell games. It’s still an advertisement… just because it’s relevant to the platform you’re on doesn’t mean it’s not an advertisement.
Turn it off in the settings if it annoys you…
I did turn it off. That doesn’t really have anything to do with my comment though.
I am screaming at the reality distortion field. I can feel my molecules being pulled into a million parallel realities just reading this.
Then stop reading. Some of you people are really aggravating.
Who people? Reality people?
These conversations are always so weird. People are here going “yeah, Steam is the best client, but maybe it’s fine to have some competition on PC storefronts” and this army of borderline religious devotees just crawls from under the ground to tell you how when Steam does ads they’re not ads, they’re the Good Word of Gaben bestowed upon us.
I don’t even like the Epic store.
You can turn that off, you know
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Still think it’s a bit different, steam is essentially a store so I’m expecting to see a promotional banner when I walk in. Windows is a “paid” product that shows you more ads on something you already “own”.
You can turn that off.
https://majorgeeks.com/content/page/disable_steam_popups_notifications.html
To be fair, “it just works” and they haven’t tried to screw us over, which is almost unprecedented.
Man, I want whatever MiB forget beam they have at Valve. I remember plenty of “trying to screw us over”, starting with rolling out Steam in the first place.
Maybe you had to be there before all the Gaben memes and the digital distribution.
The thing is, the OP’s meme is right, all these arguments always devolve into bashing Valve in a reactionary manner… but man, it’s because the cultish memory holing gets so weird that it’s not about whether Epic is successful or good software or about any other store. Whether you want to or not you end up reality checking the Good Guy Valve myth.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to criticise Valve. I still strongly disagree with being forced to update a game before I can launch it. Greenlight and Steam Direct were/are consistently a pit of scum and shovelware. I still haven’t forgotten their attempt together with Bethesda to introduce paid mods to the Workshop. I wasn’t around when Steam itself was introduced (we still traded game CDs on the playground at the time), but I understand it was a horrid service and software. Then there’s the matter of actual gambling in Counter-Strike and TF2 and the massive secondary market attached to them that Valve refuse to acknowledge.
Nothing’s ever only one way or the opposite, though. There’s always a spectrum of what a customer is willing to put up with, weighed against what a customer gains by putting up with a company’s behaviour. For putting up with Valve’s bullshit, as a gamer, I get a reliable service, a massive library of games, unparalleled download speed, free cloud storage for saves and settings, content management, community integration, and benefits too numerous to recount. As a Linux gamer, I get all of their work on Proton, on upstream Wine, Gamescope, DXVK and VKD3D, many of which I use even outside gaming, for free.
When Steam’s quasi-monopoly was threatened by the EGS, Valve did not try to lock down developers. The only policy change they enacted was requiring games that are advertised on Steam Steam to actually launch on Steam, after people who preordered Metro Exodus were shafted, in order not to become an advertisement platform for their competition. Then they released publicity videos about the Steam Deck that appealed to Linux enthusiasts, handheld gamers, and right-to-repair advocates. Even as a “DRM platform”, they’ve captured that niche.
I’ve said many times that success is not illegal. I was excited and hopeful when I heard that Steam was getting a competitor with a company backing it that had a chance of challenging the status quo. Epic and the EGS were given the best opportunity anyone was ever going to get and they fumbled it. They alienated their potential customerbase when they poached Metro Exodus and early third-party-exclusive titles, showed that they did not have a solid foundation when Borderlands 3 was launched without the ability to preload, gave us reason to question their security practices when a data scraper was found in the installed application, and drew further criticism when they would only accept indie titles if they were made EGS-exclusive while allowing Cyberpunk 2077 to launch on multiple platforms. Since then, it’s become a haven for AI and NFT shovelware that Valve have rejected based on legal/moral issues.
I will acknowledge that some good came of their actions. Apple was forced to remove their anti-competitive policy that prevented developers from placing links and buttons that directed users to other payment processors. Still, it is the fruit of the poisonous tree: they intentionally broke ToS and had an eighty-page lawsuit and an animated short film prepared, acting like they were the innocent “for the players” party set upon by the evil corporations, rallying children as their uncritical lynch mob.
In conclusion, Valve has done things I dislike, but I have reason to conditionally accept and tolerate them; as I have reason to distrust and dislike Epic and the EGS. My choice whenever possible, though, is GOG, which I didn’t mention as it was not part of the conversation and is mostly doing its own thing.
I rambled too much, and I’m too lazy to proofread, so I hope I make some kind of sense.
See, that’s a very even keeled summary.
And you still missed the fact that yes, it turns out Valve was aggressively locking down developers by forbidding other platforms from competing on price by holding store discoverability hostage. Which may have been illegal, we still have to wait on that particular class action to resolve. And that regulators had to force them to hand out refunds after a lot of the “evil” competition was already doing it.
Look, the fact is these are massive corporations fighting for who gets to milk money from gamers. I have zero need to root for either Fortnite guy or Digital Distribution Inventor Monopoly Haver guy. Steam is undeniably the better software by a mile, but considering their margins I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people to ask them not to do the shitty things they do (and they do do shitty things, as you point out).
I do root for GoG, but let me be perfectly honest here, it’s because they’re the only semi-viable 100% DRM-free option. And even then, you can tell they absolutely hate that they are grandfathered into that branding and increasingly unable to compete because of it. I will have no need to root for Cyberpunk guys the moment they cave and/or are forced to drop that policy.
It’s not about “my billionaire is better than your billionaire”. Epic could gain complete supremacy overnight and my position wouldn’t change.
Which may have been illegal, we still have to wait on that particular class action to resolve.
Can you give me a case number or some other reference? I know of only one class action lawsuit, but that one is concerning the resale of Steam activation codes.
Nah, it’s weird how many people missed that during discovery in that one (the one everybody was saying was irrelevant and vacuous and only about code resellers) emails came out where Steam reps were outright telling devs that either they kept price parity on Steam or they wouldn’t get store placement. Not just resellers, but for Humble and UPlay as well.
It’s nuts how long it took me to find the quotes and documents, by the way. It’s all about how few employees Valve has and that one time Tim Sweeny called them assholes in an email for having a 30% cut and they shared it internally with “Are you mad, bro?”. Barely any specific coverage about the fact that… yeah, Steam will pressure you to never have the game cheaper anywhere else, resale keys or not.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bwajZMNAof74mSNRMcTAVlF8m0fplHkA/view
For the record, my position WOULD change if Epic gained total dominance because I want the gaming market to be competitive. Any of these people having a monopoly is a bad thing in my book, so in our reality that’d be Steam.
i honestly believe the biggest part to this is steam having been around for a long time, and being a kind of the default video game store. people dont like being forced to get another launcher for a game, so whenever a game isnt on steam, they get mad at the whichever launcher its on.
i dont think there is very much critical thinking about drm, expoitative store platforms and capitalism going on.
I think if a Dev decided to only release their game on GoG because they prefer GoGs business practices there wouldn’t be a lot of complaints about it.
That is extremely disingenuous. It wouldn’t be commercially viable to do that (as seen by… you know, CDPR not even doing that). The way to make that commercially viable would be to get paid for an exclusivity deal by GOG… at which point I’m pretty sure people would, in fact, complain.
would be to get paid for an exclusivity deal by GOG… at which point I’m pretty sure people would, in fact, complain.
Yes, I’m sure they would. Note how in your scenario here people aren’t complaining about it but being on Steam, they are complaining about the exclusivity deal.
Man, it’s really hard to say this without sounding condescending, so let me say I absolutely am not trying to be, but I don’t really understand what you’re trying to say here. I think something got cut in that sentence somewhere.
I am agreeing with you that if someone signed and exclusivity deal with GoG people would complain.
I am pointing out that in order to get people to complain (in this hypothetical scenario) about something only being available on GoG, we had to introduce an exclusivity deal.
So people aren’t complaining about it not being on Steam, they are complaining about exclusivity deals.
Fanbois of a different flavor but with the lovely twist where none of them accept they are fanbois.
Call me crazy, but I don’t like it when somebody tries to hold me hostage and force me to do things their way…
store simping is really cringe ngl
It’s not simping if telling people to stay out of there is the digital equivalent of telling people to stay out of number 4 reactor hall at Chernobyl.
I like me some freebies, but I could use some friendly recommendations not in the FPS or MOBA category. Outside those two genres, it seems to be just idle clickers and unbalanced pay-to-win RPGs. The reviews on these two remaining categories are typically not very good.
I’m not as salty about EGS as a lot of PC gamers seem to be.
… But god damn is their default client trash.
Thank fuck for Heroic Launcher on Linux (I think it even got a Windows version?)
But honestly, people complain about exclusivity, and seem to not realise (or care?) that certain games would not exist without this kind of funding deal. They are only funded by the platform that pays for their exclusivity. If you want to be mad at something, don’t be mad at the devs, don’t even be mad at Epic, be mad at Capitalism as an institution, which rules that art needs money to exist.
Wait what game was that?
Oh wait you mean Shenmue 3? Yakuza’s like “Good Shenmue” anyway
Alan Wake 2, as mentioned by the article I linked. Sales have dried up before it became profitable, but Sweeney has confirmed that it wouldn’t be released on Steam.
Oh, I don’t really remember anyone giving a shit about Alan Wake 1.
As a writer, I give any story ABOUT a writer a hard fucking pass.
It’s always had its fans. The story is a pulp adventure with notes of Stephen King (without the cocaine), the action gameplay ranges from underwhelming to pretty bad, and the narration’s delivery by Matthew Porretta is flatter than a bowling alley, but it all comes together as something incredibly charming. I credit Twitch user shaft_of_justice with the most accurate description: “the best 6/10 game there is”.
eh the first one’s on my list of
“Media I had no interest in, but now I play DBD and need context for the crossover content”
Alongside Stranger Things and… well Saw was on the list but then I marathoned the films. Tokyo Ghoul’s also on that list because that’s allegedly dropping in March
Just a tip for Tokyo Ghoul the anime is alright but very very bad compared to the manga. The anime made some very stupid changes for the story and failed to capture much of the tone of the manga.
Epic paid them a bunch of money for the exclusivity. Money they needed to produce the game. Remedy needs the money upfront. And Epic takes less of a cut than Steam.
I feel like you’re mad at the wrong people?
The formula goes like this:
- Release the title on first-party platforms.
- Profit until the sales dry up. If potential players haven’t bought the game at that point because of platform-related reasons, they won’t likely be convinced otherwise.
- Once that happens, release the title on all other platforms.
- Profit more.
Sony’s had great success when they started bringing first-party titles to PC. Square is feeling the squeeze after the disappointing sales of the FFVII remakes. DARQ’s developer rejected third-party exclusivity and was met with praise and sales exceeding expectations.
The fact is, some people will never consider buying on EGS. Whether their reasons are legitimate or not is irrelevant. It is only by the choice of one
manovergrown man-child that both Epic and Remedy are kept from greater sales and greater profits.Sony releasing games on PC yet region locking them to countries with PSN access is beyond absurd.
It’s almost like they hate money.
