Sure there Tim.

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[+] -14 points 1 week ago (8 children)

They aren’t wrong… vendor lock-in is bad. Not seeing any proposed solutions though, only shit slinging.

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  • [–] [S] 34 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

    I don't think you're applying the term vendor lock-in correctly here.

    The next day, he added another response to the community note, agreeing that Valve"doesn't kidnap you and force you to use Steamworks," but suggesting that it is impractical for developers not to use it.

    Considering that developers offer their games on other platforms with minimal fuss all the time like recently with the new Control Resonate just released on GoG, I think saying there some nefarious vendor lock is kind of ridiculous.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    It's funny because there's lots of games that use shitty Epic Online Services... great vendor lock-in there.

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  • [–] -3 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    I think you are assuming that the vendor must be the one doing the lock-in. Not all developers have the skills/budget to decouple from Steamworks. This is just a reality of software development. It's not Valve's fault and it's not "nefarious". The same problem applies to Tantrum Tim's cloud services... doesn't matter how loud he shouts "bbbut it's free*".

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

    Insert Princess Bride meme.

    The vendor doing the lock in is literally the key aspect in vendor lock-in, hence why it's called VENDOR LOCK-IN. One of the defining principles of vendor lock-in is making their proprietary tools difficult to disentangle from or having restrictive contracts for their platform.

    First off you're not even required to use or integrate Steamworks to release on Steam, so no vendor lock-in there.

    Having the lack of foresight or have skill issues or budget to initially move to another platform and using their version of achievements and then simply hardcoding all achievements, login checks, or whatever else you want to use with direct calls of the Steamframe works calls within game's core algorithms instead of taking time to properly isolate and abstracting those calls outside of your game's core code in my opinion doesn't equate to vendor lock-in, especially when again, you are not required to integrate Steamworks to begin with if you so choose and still release on Steam.

    Like you said, Epic has their own propriety API for their launcher and backend calls, so does GoG but just having that doesn't make them guilty of vendor lock-in, you have to also make it prohibitively hard or expensive to move to another platform, and again not having the wherewithal to abstract API calls isn't making it prohibitive hard or expensive but you know what is? Epic exclusivity.

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