77
"The launcher sucks, let's call it what it is," Epic Game Store boss [Steven Allison] says, promising a year of big improvements to speed, new "forum-type" social features, more (archive.is)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
46 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 35 points 9 months ago (9 children)

The whole idea sucks. You know what would be worse than Steam having a monopoly on PC game stores? Five different megacorps each as untrustworthy as Epic dividing the market between them, each with their own exclusive deals so that people who want access to most things need to sign up for all of them. Like with the streaming services it would only drive people back to piracy.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 9 child comments
    •
  • [–] 18 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Sooo don't buy in. Steam, Itch and GoG have covered all my gaming needs for a decade. Why look anywhere else?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] -2 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    This is kind of a wild take on the fediverse. If Epic is a megacorp, then what is Valve? I get that fracturing the marketplace could lead to a worse outcome for consumers, but surely praying for benevolent billionaires isn't a winning strategy.

    Steam is just as much of a problem as EGS.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago* (1 child)

    If Epic is a megacorp, then what is Valve?

    It's a marginally less problematic megacorp. Being stuck with three or four of them instead of the current one or two would not solve any problems and would make things substantially more annoying for their customers — both publishers and gamers. There's currently no way for enough of them to exist in that market to provide meaningful competition. It's the type of service where consolidation and market concentration is inevitable when they're run the way they are now. You can't reasonably be expected have 50 different equivalents to the Steam client on your PC; having both Steam and GOG is already a bit of a stretch.

    Speaking of the fediverse though, if all the PC game stores were somehow federated such that listing your game on one automatically made it available on the others as well, and they could thus be constrained to compete fairly in a well-regulated market based on the fully interoperable services they provide, that would be a better world.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    This got me thinking. One of the big things i like about steam is the ease of use on Linux and the achievements with the community profile and friends to share it with on top of it. So what if you made those features federated. A protocol that allows you to attach a game to it and log achievements and display them on friendica. You could also attach the executables from steam or gog or whatever you launch through lutris or heroic or whatever. I think atm Devs put in extra stuff to make steam achievements work but what if there was a common interface for it?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    For what it's worth, usually devs use one of a handful of telemetry solutions to track achievements and the like. There's some plumbing needed to hook those systems to a platform like Steam, but it's the same idea for Xbox, PSN, etc.

    Most major platforms have the same general pieces on the backend, though all laid out a bit differently.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent