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Epic Game Store’s free giveaways just cause a huge spike in Steam sales, reveals New Blood CEO (frvr.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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[+] -27 points 9 months ago (52 children)

Steam is a self perpetuating monopoly because people love having all of their toys in a single place. Just one more confirmation that it’s pointless to try to compete until regulators take a look at this situation.

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  • [–] 22 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    GOG. If you’re a solo player, this is the place, for no other reason than their highly principled mission to do DRM free games. No, it’s not all the games, but even so. That and supporting CDProjekt appeals, to me anyway.

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  • [–] 56 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

    Every other platform is simply worse. The only one who even tries to be better is GOG, of which they do a good job for DRM free, which gets sales from me.

    My question to you is: why would anybody buy something other than on those two platforms? There is not a single advantage to Epic's or Amazon's game store I can think of. They don't have good Linux support, they don't have a good review system, they don't have forums, they don't have mod delivery systems, they don't have any better sales, they don't have family sharing, they don't have in-home streaming.

    Edit: And don't get me started on the Microsoft store....

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  • [–] 24 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    About the linux support, not only its bad, they seem to actively hate it. Some games after getting bought by epic(like rocket league) lose their Linux support

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Saw this today from the guy that did the WINE development to get the Adobe creative suite installers working

    https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1qidql1/it_appears_that_i_have_rage_baited_tim_with_my/

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    "Removed by moderator"

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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago

    ahhh damn. It was a post from the person that submitted the wine merge request for Adobe installer support. In it was a screenshot of a steamdeckhq post about his WINE patch he did and Tim Sweeney having a mocking reply to the post about Linux and Adobe users. The dev was celebrating that Tim for whatever reason got a bit triggered about people celebrating his work to get the Adobe installer working in WINE

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  • [–] 44 points 9 months ago (7 children)

    Valve is a private company. Are they going around buying out competition like an end game capitalist?

    They are where they are at is because they do what they do well and people have voted with their wallets.

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  • [–] -1 points 9 months ago* (5 children)

    They don’t have to. You don’t need to abuse your monopoly to be a monopoly (although Valve does in different way). Valve enforces same pricing on all stores a game is available on so EGS can’t compete on price despite having lower cut. In the end customers and developers lose.

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  • [–] 14 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    There's also the question of what happens when Gabe dies or retires. Unless he's a secret communist and has plans in place to make it into an employee coop it'll be sold by his estate to private equity.

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  • [–] 10 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Valve enforces same pricing on all stores a game is available on so EGS can’t compete on price

    Obvious falsehood. Did you just choose to omit relevant nuance? The post is literally about games which are free on EGS and non-free on Steam.

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago*

    Your screenshot doesn't support your text, and from what I recall they say that:

    • if you put your game on sale cheaper elsewhere (but are selling steam keys), you need to have a similar (not even identical) sale on Steam at some point.
    • You can't undercut Steam's price and sell the freely generated CD keys that add the game to a steam account elsewhere for a lower price.

    That's it. It's actually about the CD keys, not the game itself. There's no rule about selling the game on another store, using that store.

    Found the doc I was thinking of. They actually just say "a worse deal", so it's not even about a lower price.

    https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys#3

    Your screenshot there seems to be quoting this page, in fact.

    My point is that they absolutely don't enforce pricing, that was something one dev said in a lawsuit and you'll notice they didn't get agreement from people. You're welcome to check the documentation out, or find any other source that isn't bad reporting based on a lawsuit that wasn't successful?

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  • [–] 26 points 9 months ago

    I wouldn't mind using other services if any of them were competent. Steam gives me one-click Linux support for Windows titles, massive control reconfiguration capabilities, and a full suite of the normal expected features: achievements, cloud saves, forums, etc. Name me any competitor who even comes close. They dominate because they put in the work. Everyone else wants their slice of the pie but won't bother to develop features worth using.

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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago

    Why do you think epic gives games away for free? They thought this was the main factor so they decided to build a library for you to not want to leave, but it turns out that it isn't the only reason people like steam. I have a huge library on epic now (99% free giveaways), but I still would prefer to buy a game on steam especially if they utilize the steam workshop.

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago (5 children)

    Pointless to try competing? I guess we'd know if there was ever a real competitor on the field.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago* (4 children)

    There’s GOG, there’s Itch.io. What’s wrong with them?

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    GOG recently got on my radar since I heard they'd be focusing more on Linux support

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Even if GOG gets Linux support it won’t make the devs come there.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    I don't mind not having large games, even if it ends up being an indie fest I'd be very content with that

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago*

    Indies don’t release there either. I wrote about an observation in this comment thread - small devs are no longer releasing their games outside of Steam because they need all sales to go into one pot - if they split it between stores they rank lower in the only store that matters.

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  • [–] 21 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah it totally has nothing to do with proton, steam input, steamvr, mods, remote play / together, family library sharing, flexible refund policies, or the multitude of other things that other stores don't do.

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  • [–] 6 points 9 months ago

    The only better alternative (for me) would be a bunch of DRM free stores feeding their catalogues to an open source front-end that has everything that Steam already does.

    Like Heroic, Lutris, Playnite, etc. But way more developed features and with official vendor support and a built-in unified store that supports all catalogues in the same view, like a federated marketplace.

    That would be the only thing capable of moving me away from Steam completely.

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  • [+] 11 points 9 months ago (10 children)
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  • [+] 7 points 9 months ago (7 children)
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  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago (6 children)

    I’ve done so in this community it repeatedly over the course of ~2 years. If you don’t want to make an effort why would I.

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  • [+] 2 points 9 months ago (5 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

    Enforce interoperability, lower Valve cut as abusive and punish abusive clauses in developer agreement (you can’t price your game lower than Steam on other storefronts).

    Ideally you’d treat Valve like a telecom monopoly, meaning you’d have to break it down into two companies - Valve infra (handling license ledger, storage, bandwidth) and Valve store/developer. Allow other stores to notify that user owns a game and allow access to Valve infra with third party stores. Valve infra can’t give preferential treatment to Valve store.

    If Valve is as good as everyone says they have nothing to fear, they provide better service after all. Where I live this approach killed monopolies and prices dropped quickly.

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  • [+] 3 points 9 months ago* (3 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago* (2 children)

    It’s not leeching, Valve mostly lucked into this monopoly because of how grossly incompetent competition was at the time. Valve owners were rewarded handsomely for this already, there’s no reason for this to continue until heat death of the universe because there’s not that much value added that they provide now.

    It’s cool that they pay salaries of like 3 Linux devs and piggyback on Wine work that Codeweavers funded for the past 30 years. You’d think there’s so much more they could do with 30% cut of nearly all PC game sales however which is why they need competition.

    Details of such breakup can be ironed out but it’s important to keep in mind that this option exists and was used before successfuly.

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  • [+] 3 points 9 months ago (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    Consumers aren’t the only consideration. Even if Epic sucks in many ways they’re much more better for smaller devs because they don’t take anything until you make $1M. One would think that this would be enough for indies to publish there but they don’t want to split sales between platforms (they need all sales to happen on Steam so that they rank better there, it’s the only store that matters).

    It’s a viscous cycle where smaller competition like GOG or Itch.io have no chance in hell to compete. I’m pretty sure anyone considering competing with Steam has done this math, hence you get only competition backed by big $$$, which usually is the worst people imaginable.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    I hope their Android store offers a good experience and succeeds since Play Store just sucks. But Valve pretty much made Linux gaming, if you saw what it looked like before they got involved you would understand. And they are the only big video game company that still does some good stuff in addition to the bad stuff.

    Epic burned 95% of their good will among gamers, if not all of it. They allowed play 2 earn and other crypto shit just to be contrarians, delisted and ended support for old Unreal games and are pretty much just The Fortnite Studio at this point, which itself is seen as an amalgamation of everything wrong with gaming by some, they struck exclusivity for highly anticipated games so that people have to buy it from them, stories of crunch and Tim defending and supporting every new technology gold rush including Grok producing fucking CSAM.

    It's not hard to see why people have so much animosity towards them.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    I saw what it looked like. We had native ports and Wine (rebranded as Proton by Valve so that it looks like their own product).

    EGS is just one store. Devs don’t even bother releasing games outside of Steam and you can’t make the same argument against GOG or Itch.io.

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  • [–] 13 points 9 months ago* (1 child)

    I wonder what the regulator will make steam do.

    "no, you can't have community page! Stop developing Proton and Lepton! You have to stop doing sales and deny more game from being sold in your platform and be generally shitty to your customer just so Epic Gamestore can catch up!"

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago (7 children)

    If epic put money into bringing linux gaming decades ahead of where it was instead of hating on it I would have jumped ship even if they didn't make linux supported hardware that lives on my recliner.

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  • [–] -2 points 9 months ago (6 children)

    Nobody cares about Linux, it has user share close to a margin of error in a poll of 1000 people. Valve employing 3 Linux devs doesn’t offset damage to consumers and devs.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (5 children)

    and the bulk of the users can enjoy being forced to upgrade to hardware with even more spying being the only difference just to run a shittier version of their old operating system rental cloud compute and game streaming. I'll reassess when gabe dies or if they start firing off u.s. politics level red flags but worst case I have drm free/stripped copies of every game I might play again or recommend on offline hdd and tape.

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  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    „Gabe wouldn’t do that to me”.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

    literally just said I would reasses if he died OR things went that way

    and literally every other company is aready doing their version of 'that' to their clients but yes lets attack the ones that haven't yet then if they do I guess we can switch back to ignoring it like the rest of them

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (2 children)

    Aren’t you bothered by the fact that most Valve games these days rely on gambling for monetisation? Aren’t you bothered they don’t make an effort not to advertise gambling to children unless forced to like in Netherlands or Belgium?

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    that should absolutely be regulated globally and it better damn well include roblox and literally every gacha and shooter game too. Parents should really be doing the wallet voting and politician mailing there but I've seen dads quiet their kids by letting them roll gacha on the phone while waiting to pay for food and when I told my friends about the pedos on roblox situation they told me off saying I don't know what its like to have kids... When the parents are happy to feed their children to the machine what the fuck can I do about it?

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