GeneralEmergency comments on Valve "played capitalism so well they broke it" and now Steam can never be replaced, former Epic dev says: "I don't think this is fixable"

[–] GeneralEmergency@lemmy.world -2 points 3 days ago (9 children)

If someone tried to recreate Steam today. The G*mers would throw a fit.

How do I know?

Because that's what Uplay and Origin were.

Attempts to recreate Steam as a forced online launcher for physical products

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[–] Jesus_666@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Epic walk in and make a copy of Steam as it was in the late 2000s then wonder why nobody praises them for their amazing retail service. It's as if someone showed up to a car show with a straight clone of the original Volkswagen Beetle, 1930s tech and all, and wondered why nobody liked their car. It's literally patterned on the most widely sold car in the world!

Of course Epic are purely MBA-driven and only consider that people should purchase games as quickly as possible as often as possible. They don't see any value in anything besides maximally efficient value extraction by means of a streamlined purchasing workflow.

Valve, meanwhile, turned Steam from a glorified auto-updater into a marketplace when they saw demand for one, then kept reacting to customer requests because they realize that happy customers are returning customers. (Also, they actually give a shit about their platform beyond how much money it makes them.)

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[–] GeneralEmergency@lemmy.world 1 point 3 days ago (1 child)

they actually give a shit about their platform beyond how much money it makes them

They have repeatedly gutted quality control and dropped the barrier to entry, so much over the years. That all it takes to get a game on Steam is to pay them.

It doesn't even need to be finished.

They also fought for years to prevent refunds, and are part of the group fighting against "Stop killing games".

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[–] Jesus_666@lemmy.world 1 point 2 days ago

I'm not saying they are saints. There's definitely room for improvement; their excellent reputation mainly stems from the fact that everyone else makes no effort at all to deliver anything worthwhile. Hit-and-miss looks damn attractive next to miss-every-single-time.

Valve do give the impression of actually putting thought into what people want from their platform even if they don't always get it right and even if they're not consistently on the side of the gamers.