I don't think it will die. It will take its place within the market just as Origin and Uplay have.
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That would require Epic to be releasing their own games.
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But you know, now that they have a storefront we'll never see a Fortnite 3.
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Those only still exist because they sell their own games on there. Plus even if you buy Uplay games on Steam you still need to use them through Uplay.
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Those only still exist because they sell their own games on there.
Yeah, that's my point.
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Yeah and that's the only reason they exist. People are not going to go buy these exclusive games on Epic's client.
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Actually they are buying them, a lot of them it seems.
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That's not what the sales numbers show, unless you think Epic is faking all those sales.
It doesn't matter whether you or I like them or not, the fact is people are buying from them.
Trying to deny that is just sticking your head in the sand.
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Both exclusives and non-exclusives are selling.
Why are you trying to deny it?
You don't like it, fine, but the rest of society is under no restriction to follow your desires, and they don't.
Some buy from Epic, some will buy or wait to buy on Steam, some buy other places, and some won't buy at all.
You stated a false premise, and I pointed out that it was incorrect.
Why do you keep trying to deny the truth and even move the goal posts?
Maybe this will cheer you up.
These initial sales don't mean that the Epic store will succeed over the long term.
Of course they don't say it won't either.
They're just sales and there's a lot more to being a successful store that's trying to horn in on the territory of a defacto monopoly.
Ok. This conversation has gone on long enough for such a simple point. Thanks for playing, buh-bai
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It's no guarantee but I think Epic is not quite as pathetic as Bethesda.
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That depends on how much money gets pumped in to keep Epic afloat.
Just look at Uber. It lost $1.8 Billion last year and has never had a profitable year. It warns that it "may never achieve profitability":
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-12/uber-may-never-make-a-profit-ipo-documents-reveal/10996390
Yet it's still going strong because people keep pumping money into it.
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Uber is probably propped up by intelligence agencies and their black budgets as a way of collecting data on people. A lot of tech companies are the same way. That isn't the case with Epic and their storefront.
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I dont know how real this paranoid factoid is but if companies like Uber can, you can bet your butt that Tencent would be the first in line to collect and pass on your data to the Chinese government.
Again, not saying there's any truth to it but with their history regarding involvement with an oppressive government, and reports of spyware in the client...
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as a way of collecting data on people.
Stupid intelligence agencies. They should make account on facebook instead xD
s
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Amazon was a money sink for a long time.
It's not easy or cheap to make a solid position for yourself in a field that already has very strong competitors that basically have the field locked up in the first place.
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Honestly I don't think the Epic Games Store is going anywhere especially not in 2 years.
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I'd rather wager that Steam will cease to exist sooner than Epic.
Although more realistically it will be like WinRAR or Internet Explorer. The competition will have long ago surpassed it in every way from usability to market share, but some dinosaurs will keep using it out of habit, not letting it finally end up in the waste bin of IT history, where it belongs.
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10 years in and still no other store comes even close featurewise. I would not be so sure about that prediction.
Here a WIP comparison chart that I am working on (open to amendments)
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GOG does have game forums, though sometimes they're bundled by series.
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Does every game/franchise have their own sub-forum or only the bigger/popular ones? That's what I wanted to check before filling that field.
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Fair point. Also, people seem to forget that Steam is not just some random utility, many people have more games on it than they can realistically play in a couple of lifetimes, so would be little reason to abandon it even if it became in some way inferior to others. And as you pointed out that isn't the case at all.
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If it can help you completing your chart, here is a link about what's to come to the Epic Store. Give it a year or so and it should be a totally different experience.
Back when i registered to Steam in 2003, featurewise it looked more like Twitch than what it is now and it was unstable as hell. Way worse than actual EGS. I remember people hated it with passion.
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6 months to add a goddamn shopping cart. They truly got their priorities straight in C O M P E T I T I O N
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Does Epic even have a big enough gamelibrary to warrant that? I never really checked outside the freebies.
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They have to get filtering in it.
If you want an FPS or Sports or whatever, but don't have a specific name, you need to be able to sort and search by keywords/tags/genres/etc.
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Back when i registered to Steam in 2003, featurewise it looked more like Twitch than what it is now and it was unstable as hell. Way worse than actual EGS.
The difference is when you registered with Steam back then there weren't the plethora of competing services there are today. Steam effectively made a numberof those features the standard.I didn't expect EGS to launch feature complete but they should never have launched in the state they did.
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To be frank, three of those—trading cards, inventory, and marketplace—are artificially generated needs that nobody asked for. Nobody wanted trading cards, nobody wanted a lootbox gambling system where you can pay money to other users for content that used to be free.
The rest can be subjective. For example, I only want reviews, forums, cloud saves, DRM-free, and maybe an API and gifting options. Everything else is adorable but irrelevant social media fluff, including screenshots, achievements, play time tracking and the like.
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For example, I only want reviews, forums, cloud saves, DRM-free, and maybe an API and gifting options.
Agreed! Those are the essentials for me, along with the built-in community guides (assuming those aren't counted under forums).
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Guides can be incredibly useful and handy, although, in my experience, most of the really good ones are just copy-overs from other sites. Sort of like a big aggregation channel when it comes to Steam (including a hefty dose of plagiarism for the upvotes).
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altough the color schemes can lead to think that "Yes" is positive as in "good" and "No" is negative as in "bad", it might be just mere information, so that steam is marked as having trading cards, inventory and market while egs is marked as not having them can be deduced as a good point for gs over steam
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Steam has a ton of features, that I've never even looked at and don't give a rodents donkey in the first place for.
Everyone is different, but there's also a point where adding these niche things is just creating cruft after all.
Though cloud saves are freaking awesome! Especially when my computer needs a nuke & pave for some reason.
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Do we really know who owns the other 52% percent of EGS? Also even if that 52% is split among more then a few people, who don't live under the Chinese governments control, that would make EGS Majorly owned by Chinese companies.
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You could add controller and VR support (in Steam's favour) to that. Is "Not majorly owned by Chinese companies" meant to be a "No" rather than "Yes" for EGS?
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Great, helpful chart! Btw. Blizzard's battlenet could be added.
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I'd rather wager that Steam will cease to exist sooner than Epic.
Why? Literally nothing points to that fact. Steam has more consumers, more products, more good will from consumers, a more established base of 3rd party sellers, an objectively better client, more capital and so on. Would like to know where that wager comes from?
Although more realistically it will be like WinRAR or Internet Explorer. The competition will have long ago surpassed it in every way from usability to market share, but some dinosaurs will keep using it out of habit, not letting it finally end up in the waste bin of IT history, where it belongs.
There's two problems here. Internet Explorer was considered to be a relative failure (so it kind of even supports the idea that Epic will just flat out fail). Though Edge replaced it. Edge, like Explorer, is owned by Microsoft, a company that had a bigger profit in 2018 than the GDP of 66% of countries. Edge isn't made to be a successful product either. Or, at least, that's not its sole goal. Edge/Explorer are there to be the default internet browsers and it's way more profitable for them to have it be their own browser, which requires very little upkeep compared to everything else they do. It's a "Youtube" situation for Alphabet. It boosts up their company's value and it's not designed to make direct profits, instead helping them indirectly. Explorer and Edge have a combined ~12.5% (a whole eighth of the entire internet browser market) market share. 12.5% of 4.3 billion. 543 million's not a number to be scoffed at. At the same time Epic boasts a $3 billion profit from a relatively random success story. Epic hasn't repeated its success like Microsoft has and so it's not a given that Epic will rekindle that flame once again. Also helps to mention that Fortnite is losing its grip on the gaming market just like any game is and Fortnite won't bring in the 2.5 billion again in 2019, unless something drastic happens. It'd have to be something never seen before, so I wouldn't hold my breath.
WinRAR has very low upkeep (5 employees) and it does earn a fair amount of money. They keep it pseudo-free though due to their personal business practice ideals. The thing is that WinRAR does sell copies. Just that you're not in their target demographic, since you're not a business. Sure, some individuals also buy a copy of it, but the main clientele are businesses. Mind you, they compete with 7ZIP, but that's an actual competition, unlike what's happening with Epic, which isn't interested in competing. At least that's what I thought... Since you say their market share has plummeted so much, I think I'm not the only one that's interested in the source for that since I personally haven't found it. As to people being "dinosaurs"... okay? I mean, most of the US government uses Windows XP, for example. I'm not saying that what they're doing is right or wrong. I'm just saying that that right there is multibillion dollar industry. It'd be ridiculously shortsighted to claim that those "dinosaurs" don't matter anymore. Those "dinosaurs" are currently worth as much as "le epic tech magicians" like you, if not even more.
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Literally nothing points to that fact. Steam has more consumers, more products, more good will from consumers, a more established base of 3rd party sellers
So did Atari in 1984 or Nintendo in 1993. Gigantic market leaders with barely any competition, many of which they crushed with their sheer weight along the way.
One of them ceased to exist since then and went down in a matter of months. The other nearly vanished and took radical refocusing and changes to put it back on the map in its chosen industry.
If someone really wanted to crush Valve, they could. There are several companies in existence with the power and capital to simply blow Steam out like a candle if they ever decided to get into the digital video game distribution. The fact that it did not happen yet is just a coincidence and does not mean it won't happen.
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Microsoft and EA already tried and failed, every year another new "Steam killer" fails. Literally every other launcher is niche crap.
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So did Atari in 1984
I think there are three major differences though. The industry they were in, how big it was and what actually happened.
First is that they made games and published them. Valve hasn't done that in a while and to say that it's not their focus is an understatement. Atari's more in line with companies like Activision, EA, Bethesda, Ubisoft. All of whom have storefronts, indeed, but also all who rely on profits from game publishing and development. Steam's more in line with a mix of Amazon and a traditional storefront.
Second is that Atari pioneered an industry in its infancy. The amounts of money were smaller, even when adjusting to inflation and so I don't think it's a good way to compare it since the entire home entertainment market was worth around as much as a single EA production today. We're talking about a multi-billion dollar industry now. Steam's becoming too big to fail. $4.3 billion dollars in 2017. You'd have to convert millions today instead of having to convert thousands.
Third is that it was a total video game market crash. People didn't have the money to buy games at the time while Atari kept pushing more and more out, most of which was shovelware. Now, of course, there are parallels here. Valve's doing the same thing with Steam. But the difference is that Valve's not footing the bill here. They're not publishing, they're not developing. So like with any products, failures will occur, but it's not just one company taking all the successes and failures, like it often was then.
Nintendo in 1993
I don't know too much about the story of Nintendo other than some surface level details, unlike with Atari where I had to wrote a research paper on them.
I know their seal-of-approval basically lost its meaning and they also published a lot of crap over time, if I'm correct. But even then, it's a publisher, not a storefront. Valve is as much of a publisher as I am a streamer. Sure, I've streamed, but that was mainly in the past and even if I were to stream today, it'd be a one time thing and not regular.
Overall, perhaps you are right and Valve will crumble. But personally, I can't think of any stores that are richer than many countries just failing like that. It doesn't have the overhead costs of a traditional retail store and it doesn't have the costs of a publisher/developer. They seem to be in such a good spot at the moment. I guess we'll see.
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Nintendo just did not move fast enough with the time. The N64 was already late and the GameCube may have had one of the best controllers in history, by that time, everyone who made games simply went over to Sony, so Nintendo was left alone with its own products.
Later they re-repositioned themselves as the family console and pushed the handheld market before anyone could react, so they survived just fine, but they completely lost their old 80s and early 90s market.
If publishers similarly just start to abandon Steam and post the games somewhere else, then the people will eventually follow them. If UbiSoft and Take Two will be convinced enough in the next 12 or so months that picking EPic is lucrative for them, then eventually someone may decide to leave Steam altogether. And if the Japanese follow eventually, then what will be left? Capcom and Square Enix are already testing the waters with other distributors.
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...and PC gamers are testing drm-free torrents as well. Do you think abandoning Steam will help greedy publishers to boost their sales?
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Eventually, yes. Epic's 12% cut means ~40% loss in sales is still more profitable for them.
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And yet, Epic's 12% cut wasn't enough to convince publishers to jump to Epic. They had to pay unknown publisher Phoenix Point more than two million dollars to convince them to move to Epic for a single year. And Phoenix Point approached Epic first.
I wonder exactly how much they are paying the publishers of Outer World (even the Obsidian didn't know anything about the deal days before) or Borderlands 3 developers (again, even Randy Pitchford is saying that was a publisher's decision, not from the developers)
Personally, I find Epic too pro-publishers and too anti-users. They are even saying that they are not making forums and instead go to reddit, or they are not allowing reviews. How can we know if the game is good or not then? Go to metacritic? It has been years since I last checked metacritic for games. Even much-smaller GOG has better player's support than Epic.
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On one hand: yes, it is true.
On the other hand: the most "useful" reviews on Steam usually fall into the "10/10, would <random meme> again" category. Or they are a support ticket about a technical issue that is 99% the user's fault.
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Still, Steam reviews are better than having nothing, that is what Epic wants. Usually, while there are random memes, true, people vote that ones as funny, not useful, and I have useful reviews first, and I barely ever see memes. Also, If I see 167,681 people with ARK: Survival Evolved in their steam library, voting mixed, I don't care if some people have problems with technical issues or memes. I know it's a mixed game.
Besides, reviews may change, and a bad game may get better, or the opposite. Yet, the metacritic reviews never change.
Even if you are discussing this, you know having steam reviews is useful and it's better for gamers than Epic's approach
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No, Epic wants it to be an opt-in system. If a publisher wants user reviews, they get user reviews. If they lock it down, then it can be an indicator in itself and may drive away more people than mixed reviews.
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That's nonsense. If I see that there is no reviews, it just means there is no reviews. And when about 80% of the games won't have any reviews, I won't have any information. Besides, if Epic allows reviews, people will be easily able to see how popular vs steam.
So don't expect a feature that neither Epic or the publishers want for years, if ever.
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I may be missing something out of math, if you talk about loss in sales as copies sold, it's not checking out. Higher percentage loss than Steam's cut means they lose more than Steam would take, and that is before factoring in Epic's share.
Selling 100 units means 70 units at publisher, 30 at steam.
40 loss of sales means 60 units sold, 52.8 at publisher, 7.2 at Epic.
52.8<<70
The breaking point is at 1000.7=(100-x)0.88, where x being the absolute of loss in number of sales, 20.25%. ( Not counting in the alleged money EGS pays to exclusivity at the fist place, and maybe then another sum to prevent the game generating a loss?)
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Normally, yes, but EPic right now is aggressively ploughing their market share with a compensation program from their infinite Fortnite money (which seems to be more infinite than Valve's own gambling system).
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I would say Valve's money is more infinite than it seems, they just hate to spend money on anything :D
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IE and WinRAR are rather bad comparisons. Their replacement does exactly what they do and user don't have anything with IE that keeps them there. Apart from rare old stuff in some corporations...
On other hand with Steam people have their libraries which aren't transferable.
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Well yes, the libraries aren't transferable, of course we aren't counting the uncommon GoG giving you some of the same games on their store if you already have it on Steam, but then again, that doesn't make them not work either.
To check if you have anything on Steam that you can also add to GoG that day (I never know when they'll allow what or which ones before I check, but still) just go to gog.com/connect. (sorry for not making that a link)
So you have a second launcher, big freaking deal. Individual companies are more and more often forcing us to use their launchers for their games anyway, so it's not like it's something out of the ordinary anymore. At least it wasn't like when Origin got launched, and they pulled my EA games from my Steam account and put them on Origin without my permission or even notifying me they would do that! Now that was F'd up!
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you honestly think Steam will cease to exist sooner then Epic. a store paying millions of dollars out for exclusive games.. A store that is almost as barebones as you can get, with totally anti consumer practices, linked to the Chinese Government, with crap security.. Epic games is one massive Breach away from being nothing.. Only reason anyone is talking about them are because of the exclusives they are paying for..
Lets see what happens when those exclusives show up on steam once the deals are over.. then we can have a conversation about which store will or won't be dying.. People ignore the fact that 40% of PC's using Epic games don't have steam..
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It can't be that difficult to 'surpass Valve on features and quality of service' if you have enough cash, but both those things don't mean you'll beat Valve.
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Remember that we are talking about the Epic Store. Which didn't launch with a shopping cart. It doesn't look like they have competent developers working on it.
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Look, I'm not defending Epic in any way whatsoever, they suck and the store sucks. However, a lot of people seem to have forgotten just how shitty Steam was in the beginning. Not only the beginning, but for years.
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No, I'm just saying to take off those rose colored glasses. People are falling victim to the same mentality they used to decry.
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Everyone I knew (myself included) was confident Steam would eventually go under, which is part of the reason I never bothered maintaining a regular account [this was the fifth one I created, if I'm recalling the count correctly]. That is to say, not only was it absymal at the start [both inherently and compared to similar platforms of the time], but Valve didn't bother advancing the design much across the following decade (though, admittedly, every minor bit of GUI improvement was significant, given how deeply unpleasant the initial release was to look at).
It was only a bit before I joined SG that Steam really became consistantly stable and fully functional in its interface [that being a major basis for my finally keeping a steady account] and, even with that, there've been stability and performance issues following later updates.
Meanwhile, BNet (at least, once it was decided to be revamped into a proper platform), Origin, and Uplay all developed themselves into a proper state of functionality within a much shorter duration, achieving about as much with foundational platform development within 4 years as Valve did in 12.
Of course, Steam is more fully featured than any of those platforms, with Valve having taken their platform further (and adding more side features) than the others but, as far as speed of initial development went, Valve released a turd and spent a long time polishing it, before deciding to take their platform seriously. Well, though one could argue they then circled back around to treating their platform as a joke, given their current lack of meaningful moderation, filtering, or organization of titles- but that's a bit of a different matter.
Hell, even GOG Galaxy took a much shorter duration to reach a stable point, and I think it spent a full two, maybe three years with major performance issues? Which is something that really puts Steam's slow initial development and continued hiccups into perspective.
As far as directly comparing a new platform to an established one, that feels like a dive into absurdity. It comes across as someone saying "Look, there's a talented middle school athlete that is preparing for eventual olympic participation" and receiving a response of "Man, look at them, they can't even begin to compete with Usain Bolt, what a total loser." Generally speaking, that's just not a form of serious-minded comparison that one'd expect to come across.
Putting aside how hard it is to take such a comparison seriously, such a comparison overlooks the fact that launching a fully developed product straight out the door takes a lot more initial investment and effort than slowly growing it. That, after all, is the same underlying premise behind why releasing a game as episodic content is something which is favored by many developers. One may not favor such a release method, but that doesn't make it any less valid an option for those utilizing it.
What matters is whether a product can release a fully developed product within a reasonable amount of time, or if it'll spend a decade in Steam Early Access [Valve may have pioneered it, but survival games made it a thing :P]. While Epic has a significant amount of concerns* that may never be addressed to satisfaction, as far as basic development goes, they seem to have the enthusiasm to cover foundational expectations within a somewhat reasonable amount of time.
* Aside from the more well known issues, going off my personal experience their customer support manages to be beyond even the Steam level of uselessness, with them not only offering similarly nonsensical replies, but them simply ceasing to reply entirely after a certain point, in contrast to Steam Support's seemingly endless bag of unrelated nonsense replies.
tl;dr version: Agreed, early Steam was a mess, and Epic seems more in line with other platforms in their development speed, despite Epic "sucking" in various other ways.
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Thanks for at least recognizing the nostalgia I was referencing, instead of immediately jumping on a tangential point like everyone else (one that I wasn't even making).
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for at least
I'm confused as to what impression you had of my post to make such a reply to it (especially as far as the need to emphasize your earlier post goes), or as to why my post would be interpreted as anything other than supportive of your previous comments. 🤔
Edit: I added a tl;dr, maybe that'll help? ^.^
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No worries, you're cool. The c/p was for the other peeps. I appreciate your thoughts, as I often do.
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As far as directly comparing a new platform to an established one, that feels like a dive into absurdity. It comes across as someone saying "Look, there's a talented middle school athlete that is preparing for eventual olympic participation" and receiving a response of "Man, look at them, they can't even begin to compete with Usain Bolt, what a total loser." Generally speaking, that's just not a form of serious-minded comparison that one'd expect to come across.
I prefer to compare it to all the MMOs that launched in a state that was:
- Better than what WoW launched with
- Worse than what WoW had when this other MMO launched.
I've seen many people try to defend those MMOs with "but WoW was worse when it launched". None of them ever threatened WoW's dominance. They all had a lot of hype around launch, followed by a massive decline in players. Those that launched with a subscription quickly switched to a f2p business model.
It turns out that the players who can be easily pulled from whatever live service they are playing are also going to be easily pulled off of yours to the next new one. So far, Epic has grabbed customers who could be easily pulled away from Steam, but I wonder if it can hold them.
As for the Epic store in general, they come off as a race to the bottom. Doing everything cheaply to make more profit for the devs/publishers. Consumers always lose in a race to the bottom.
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What online storefronts are you talking about that steam compared negatively too.. Prior to steam bringing PC games to the masses.. computers didn't have a unified storefront you could buy games from.. Steam Created that ish..
You'd have publishers and developers selling their games, sure, but nothing unified where you could shop for extensive amounts of games.. for that matter back when steam first got into the distribution game. PC gaming was on it's death bed, a few months away from the killshot.. Valve brought PC gaming back from the brink of death..
I always find it funny when people ignore how influential steam has been on getting PC gaming back from life support..
As for Epic games.. security concerns, spying concerns.. buying up exclusivity deals.. anti consumer practices and behavior.. I wouldn't be so sure that Steam is going anywhere anytime soon.. Eventually Fortnite will get less popular.. how much money will Epic have to throw at exclusives when Fortnite starts to die out, when the next big thing hits..
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How bad Steam was in the beginning doesn't matter. Epic isn't competing with the Steam of more than a decade ago. They are competing with the Steam of today.
When was the last time you heard of an online store releasing without a shopping cart ?
Also: Joke gifs don't help your point.
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Look, I'm not defending Epic in any way whatsoever, they suck and the store sucks.
Guys, seriously.
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When was the last time you heard of an online store releasing without a shopping cart ?
Damn, you edited it. Before you added the "online", I totally could have referenced several organic food stores (nevermind liquor stores) that I've come across here in the states. Alas. :'P
That said, technically it's not an online store, it's a direct sale platform. Unlike a secondary retailler, which focuses on encouraging large combined purchases from consumers, direct sales are common for self-contained platforms. For example, within perhaps the majority of microtransaction games, microtransactions don't store in cart but are instead acquired directly.
To phrase that more clearly, when you're directly selling individual elements related to your own product, you don't especially need to put weight on adding something as unnecessary as a cart function [as the main functions of a cart are in storage and applying combined discounts, neither of which is inherently necessary for individual sales], and so it tends to get overlooked. That's not to say that adding more fully developed sale features wouldn't be of benefit to Epic, it's just to say that a cart is in and of itself neither a priority for early addition nor a major loss to consumers to not have access to. Unless I'm overlooking some benefit to it?
It feels a rather trivial element to put much criticism towards, in any case.
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It's a function that is necessary to how I buy games. I usually wait for the big sales, then buy a lot of games.
With a shopping cart, I put all the games into it. Then go through the checkout once.
Without a cart, I'd have to go through the checkout for every single game or piece of DLC I want to buy.
I refuse to save my credit card details. That way, entering them serves as a check on impulse purchases.
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The Steam of today has problems maintaining their SSL/TLS certificates so half the requests to their store servers fail to authenticate.
Steam may have more features, but their backend is still garbage after all these years.
That, and despite betting their business on various algorithms, they don't have one that scans store pages for violations to their terms of service so every few months we get another public shitstorm.
And they're doing not much to avoid spreading known phishing links via their chat etc.
Tl;dr: Steam isn't doing a great job either.
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what would you like them to do aside from what they've already put in place to stop people from using Phishing links.. To add friends and use most of the social features from steam, you have to spend 5 dollars.. Would you like them to increase that amount so that legit gamers can get locked out of having any social interactions with other people because you can't be arsed to close out some chat messages..
BTW I'm almost positive I get far more phishing links then you and at most I get 5 a week.. Which are easily taken care of by reporting the links to steam., removing the friend and blocking them..
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For starters, Valve could do more to track & suspend hijacked accounts that get turned into spambots.
I don't get the impression that they're good at detecting that logins all of a sudden come from a different geographic location, and that the number of chat messages sent per hour jumps to numbers beyond what the average human can achieve.
They could also apply a link filter to the messages themselves, and outright block links to the phishing sites. And yes, they can do that without violating any privacy rules, by doing it at the last possible moment when the Steam client draws the chat message on your display. Then the message still passes through their servers unseen and untouched.
(And the reason I'm not getting more phishing links is because I left most groups I was part of and longer accept friend requests unless I know the person in real life. Because I got too many phishing links before. (10s per day) )
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so you get 10 phish links per day huh? Kinda odd considering I have 14k games, and joined up to about 500 groups and friends with 1418 people.. most of which I have never talked with. and I get all of about 5 per week.. Which are normally dealth with by reporting, unfriending, then blocking the person..
I'm going to assume someone like myself with a huge game library and a massive inventory filled with 10's of thousands of items would be a far bigger target then someone who has 800 games and an inventory set to private but what do I know..
Could steam do more.. probably, but eventually people need to use their own personal responsibility in terms of protecting themselves.. Also do you make sure to report the links that happen.. I've seen tremendous strides made toward cutting out the bad links.. and spammers.. obviously they'll continue to exist because people continue to click on bad links without even taking a second to consider the danger.. It'll never be perfect as everything steam does to try and stop it, will just cause the spammers to find new and inventive ways to get past the system..
So you want Valve to block all links? How can valve know the difference between Johnny the good natured trader sending a link to his Steamgifts profile so his trading buddy can give him +rep, and Johnny the Phish spammer trying to steal your password that gives a link which looks somewhat normal but leads to a site that steals your information? Sure eventually so and so link will be blocked, but until that link is reported, valve has no real way of knowing what is and isn't a legit link.. How many messages do you think get sent a day on steam?
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I don't get the impression that they're good at detecting that logins all of a sudden come from a different geographic location
They are, but sadly, that is something you cannot do much against. I seemingly log in from three different countries daily, since company VPNs and the occasional private VPN I use seemingly jump my IP address around half of Europe.
I mean, sure, they could add the same feature some of my other services do, send an alert if I log in from yet another country/IP block. But that probably has a lower return investment than designing this week's rainbow-colour CS:GO knife skins.
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is 2019 no 2003 EPIC GAME STORE is only a bad joke.
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Look, I'm not defending Epic in any way whatsoever, they suck and the store sucks.
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Sure, but the epic store is going against the current version of steam. The consumer doesn't really care about how good it can be but how good it is. Untill they don't offer what's considered basic nowadays they're gonna have a hard time selling any game that isn't an exclusive.
Also, is not only steam that is ahead of them in functionallity, origin, uplay and gog galaxy are also a better offer right now. Origin has access that lets you pay a flat rate each month and play a bunch of exclusives + well known games, everything on gog is drm-free, and uplay... is a bit like an unwanted parasite that comes along with ubi games but you get used to it over time.
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Look, I'm not defending Epic in any way whatsoever, they suck and the store sucks.
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Yeah, but still, it's not much of an excuse on their part either. They were pretty cocky claiming to come for the first place just to not deliver on pretty much anything on the user end, they had years to prepare for this if they were actually serious.
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You are right, but I think they have a point also -- Steam was able to be bad initially because it had no competition. It was the trailblazer, and the PC gaming community was willing to ride with it through its growing pains.
So maybe Steam's early struggles aren't a great comparison for Epic's current situation. I think that's all they're saying.
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Which is fair enough, I'm just trying to offer some perspective. It's not as if Valve lends their experience to the newcomers in their market. A lot of these companies are just now tackling hurdles that Valve took years to overcome.
And again, yes, the onus is not (and should not) be on the consumer to stomach these growing pains. They should always choose the service that best meets their needs for a competitive price.
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Also, let us not forget what Steam originally was: the worst DRM in human history, making Denuvo look like a sack of cute little puppies.
"Hey kids, would you like mandatory internet connections and a large amount of data transfer to unscramble your game installation in the age where under 50% of households have internet and even less can do over 56 kbps? Sucks to be you!"
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It's true that Steam was terrible for a while, but I'm not sure that's particularly relevant to Epic.
If a new car company came along tomorrow and hyped their new car as being a new alternative to the existing car companies... but it turned out that their "new" car had manual windows and doors, no radio, no heat or air conditioning, no power steering, and a 3-gallon gas tank...
Would we say "Remember how bad cars used to be in the 1930s? Give them time to figure it out!"
I'm guessing no. I think we'd say "How can you be missing so many basic functions that have been standard for YEARS?! Call us when you have a product that's actually competitive."
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You've earned every facepalm you get for that comment.
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lol, it never will, they even already said they're not adding forums for example.
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True, but it's pretty much a minimum requirement to even try to be a success in that field these days.
Of course Valve basically blowing off virtually all of their responsibility on and towards Steam expect for legal things does leave a possibility for someone to kick their assets clear up to their CEOs jaw.
If Steam cleans up their act and starts doing what they are supposed to, then Epic is in for one heck of an uphill battle since Steam have a virtual defacto monopoly. (ianal, but legally monopoly doesn't mean you are the only company, it gets complicated sometimes, it also applies when you have a nearly unbreakable hold on a market, and others can't easily enter it to any meaningful extent without huge resources.)
On the other hand, if Steam keeps up it's laissez-fair rent sitting like it's currently doing, and Epic gets their act together, Steam will likely lose their crown as king of online game stores.
As to all the hate for the new store, it just seems like petty whining to me. After all, it's not like it's taking your games away from you in the slightest. And I'm sure you all know how to set up Steam to launch a non-Steam game if you absolutely must have it launch from Steam.
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it's not only about launching games via steam.. it's never been about that.. It's about losing all the beneficial features that steam offers in for games.. achievements, forums, guides, workshops, friends, etc etc etc etc.. Epic offers none of these, and already said they will have no forums for their games.. they will have opt - in reviews. and many other anti consumer practices..
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I bet Digital Devolver is planning some sort for launcher parody for their E3 presentation this year. Can't wait.
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That guy is a massive tool. Never got to know of a person who fits that word more than him. Also, Epic Store is absolute shit. I know that Steam ain't perfect in many ways, but at least there are many features which the com,munity loves and uses.
Fuck that guy. I hope his coffee machine breaks so he has to get disgusting Starbucks shit!
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there are also many features that used to be on steam that valve removed... steam has steadily gotten WORSE over the past few years. all it would take is a company with decent funding, the ability to look into steams history (what it offers, what it used to offer, and what users want), and a desire to genuinely compete, and valve COULD be in trouble if they don't start trying to make steam better for its users again.
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Pretty sure OP refers to Pitchford's statements about how Epic Store is the future and how Steam is outdated.It's not exactly lying but rather a very, very stupid thing to say. But I guess nobody is puzzled by that since Pitchford is a very stupid man.
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I think it's definitely too early to say some of the things he's saying. However there are some major people in the industry think this might be the case as well from my understanding, not that Steam is outdated but that their store is the future. A couple big names in the industry that I've personally talked to believe that Valve is going to need to make some big changes otherwise they are going to continue to see more and more devs depart and possibly not come back to Steam. One of the big things they mentioned is the Steam used to offer great support to developers and that's basically non existent now, whereas Epic offers tons of support to the developers.
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Valve is currently overhauling their store so I guess many people are wrong. Also, it's the publisher's job to support developers, not Valve's.
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Their overhaul doesn't include a lower cut like Epic offers, and that's one of the biggest factors. As far as support goes, if you have a publisher sure. If you are an indie developer that doesn't it's non existent, which is a major change from what it once was on Steam.
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Yes it does so. The major publishers now only have to accept a 20% rather than a 30% cut. Also, Steam is the best you could get as an Indie developer since there's so much users. Even with 30%, you'll make so much dough. Also, 30% is fair for so many features Valve is offering.
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For steam it's a 25% cut down from a 30% cut if the game makes over 10 million dollars and it drops to 20% if the game makes over 50 million. Epic only takes 12% no matter how much your games sells.
Are you in game development? I'm asking cause it's really easy to make guesses and think how great things are but you really don't know all the details unless you are behind the scenes. What I've mentioned is coming from devs I've talked to that have worked in the industry for years that were and are in AAA studios working with major IPs as well as indie studios that have games on Steam and other clients.
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It's always 20% for major publishers now, that's why EA is returning to Steam very soon. No idea where you got that "25%, drops to 20%" got from.
I have multiple friends who work in the gaming industry and yes, they complain about Valve being kinda greedy but they also always mentioned that Epic is not an alternative as releasing on Steam is easier and reaches a far bigger audience.
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come on man indie games are dying in their own excrement on steam. You couldnt find a indie gem through the buckets of filth even if someone gave you its searchable name lol
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Valve did this to themselves with Greenlight and Steam Direct.
The number of games coming to Steam has massively outgrown any support structure or staff they had in place.
It's hard to fix.
How can they add dozens of people to support this, when 90% of those games will make almost nothing?
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Not that many indie developers on Epic. Without searching tools i have a hard time believing they would even be seen in a store that only lets you scroll down
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You have a hard time believing they would be seen on the front page?
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Front page on a store you have to scroll down, and has about 75% of their games as coming soon..
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Exactly.. it's not hard to see at all you just scroll down the page.. it's one page. On Steam lots of games get buried and there's tons of pages to scroll through. I'm not really sure what UlverHausu isn't understanding.
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so assuming Epicgames continues to grow.. I'm going to assume eventually they won't have all their games as sloppily thrown together pictures on their store front.. As for steam lots of games getting buried.. ignorant people don't know how to navigate steam store.. I mean they only give you about 35 different ways to modify your search, with both tags, and selections you can make which will totally and utterly remove 95% of the crap..
People's complaints about not being able to find so and so indie games are just flat out not true.. you have to be special not to understand how to use and navigate steams game library..
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He's trying to claim credit for features that Epic has promised, but not yet delivered on. Features they promised before Epic grabbed Borderlands 3. Features like a shopping cart.
That's what I'm calling a lie.
The rest might just be him being delusional.
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Borderlands 3 launches in September as you've quoted and it's only April so I'm kind of confused by what you're saying. Did you look at the roadmap?
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A lie is when someone intentionally tells a falsehood and you know it to be false. I just don't see anythng like that here. So he says those features will be ready in September, and BL3 might be a factor that speeds up development? Where is the lie in that?
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Well, to be frank, it is Randy Pitchford, so the default answer is: "everything he ever spoke of."
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This.
Normally no-one would bet an eye but hey, another attempt to bash Epic so even non-news becomes news. Gotta manufacture that outcry somehow. Really grasping the bottom of the barrel here though.
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i think the guys an asshole.. im not convinced about the longterm success of epics store, BUT... BUT there is EASY potential for ANY online distribution platform to quickly catch up to and surpass steam. Valve has languished in its superior position, and steam hasnt done anything innovative or user-focused in a long time. If anything, things on the platform have steadily gotten worse and more restrictive as valve focuses more on profit driving and locking down its platform. I've always said the opportunities were ALWAYS there for the likes of uplay or ESPECIALLY origin to use steams roadmap and easily see what worked, what didnt, and what users are demanding, but NO ONE has really bothered to try and beat steam.
if epic actually WANTED to, what dipshit randy is saying is true... its entirely possible for them to surpass steams features and quality of service.
implement heavily customisable user profiles that are globally viewable... a decent messaging/chat/friend system, user activity feed, a BETTER system for sharing/gifting/trading games, and enforce a non-scummy regional pricing system that restricts the maximum a publisher can demand for a game to... i dunno.. 10% higher than its HOME pricing, make your platform resource-friendly, and ensure your servers are relatively reliable and stable and you would EASILY offer something more attractive than what valve is offering to give people a GENUINE reason (instead of exclusivity bullshit) to consider giving epic a try.
valve is lazy and a prime position in the industry is THERE for the taking for any company with a high level of funding and the desire to be king.
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I doubt it since I am relatively sure that the bulk of Valve's income is from their marketplace lootbox gambling. They could probably ditch the entire store and live from that money alone, assuming they can keep sucking Bluehole's cock so they won't leave Steam as Riot Games did.
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Don't count on 3. All game developers left Valve so even if Steam (doubtful) dies off they can't really make it unless you love an absolute trash rushjob.
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Again that monopoly thing. Epic is doing a lot worse monopoly policy than steam ever did. You can but almost every steam game on drm free HB, GoG etc. While Borderlands and other games won't be released for a while without launching EGS.
And a lot worse thing imo is that hateful policy of pitchford against other games stores. In times of a lot of hatred he's just spitting venom in every direction making EGS some kind of light of hope.I understand nowdays buisiness models but this is just a lot of crap from side of Epic. If you have faith and some good buisness ideas you don't need to load a ton of crap into media.
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Choosing only parts is not that nice play ;p buuut let's go!
Yea ppl are bringing up monopoly but without understanding what it means. Simple example from part of what you answered to me - You can get steam keys from different sources as it goes for epic? Only epic and now some hb because their monopoly went too far(Edit: and boxed versions with stickers covering steam lables xD as it was for Metro). And a lot of ppl are using this word in quite unaccurate way.
As it goes for second quote, Take the rest of that one sentence into consideration not only the part that you can get stats. And check which paltforms are other than steam on HB because I'm pretty sure that there are some blizz, uplay and other keys. ;)
And last but not least last sentence I agree with you. It's free market and You can do what You want but there are some limits of being ridiculous and Pitchford is near that limit. I would blame media too for amount of that crappy news and clickbait titles and at the end gamers for making this war against the wall of money of both - steam and epic.
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Yea ppl are bringing up monopoly but without understanding what it means. Simple example from part of what you answered to me - You can get steam keys from different sources as it goes for epic? Only epic and now some hb because their monopoly went too far(Edit: and boxed versions with stickers covering steam lables xD as it was for Metro). And a lot of ppl are using this word in quite unaccurate way.
"Their monopoly went too far"? Sorry, but I think it is you who uses that word in a very weird way. Steam has a quasi-monopoly in their fieldd. They are the one big launcher on the market. GOG, Uplay, Origin or Discord don't even come close to their user base and generated sales. With very few exceptions (a few extremely big publishers) everyone in the market is forced to use Steam as a publishing platform. Sure, you then can sell your Steam game keys elsewhere. But that doesn't mean it is any less of a monopoly. Devs confirmed in a recent poll that the majority of their income is generated on Steam. The other platforms are simply irrelevant. They have no choice but to release on Steam. If they don't do that, they will not sell enough to keep their company running. That is just the reality.
Epic bought a few exclusives. That does not mean they have a monopoly. I don't even know what that is supposed to mean. An monopoly on a single game? That is not how that word is used. Epic does this, because they cannot compete with Steam without being absolutely aggressive about it. Else they would just take their place among GOG and Discord as being basically irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. They want to be on equal footing with Steam, so they basically force people to go on their platform. That may not be nice, but I don't think you can play nice if you want to compete with the big boy Steam. We can only hope that they will develop their client fast enough so that in a few months or maybe a year they actually have a software comparable to Steam. Because exclusives will bring people on your platform, but they won't keep them there forever. I personally hope that Epic works on the right things right now and becomes an equal competitor. That will in the end be good for all of us.
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I think his point was, Epic is trying to actively become a monopoly by buying exclusive games, where as Valve doesn't do anything to stop publishers/developers from selling their games on other storefronts.. Steam is a game downloaded but hardly has a monopoly on game sale, as games can be purchased from many other stores.. Monopolies would mean valve would be doing everything in their power to stop outside stores from selling the game.. (like Epic is doing) Yet it's the complete opposite, how many keys can developers get steam to give them absolutely free so they can sell on other stores and cut Valve out on the money.. Doesn't sound very monopoly like to me..
I wouldn't even mind Epic as a competitor to steam if they actually cared about making a store front that was appealing to gamers.. instead of that hastily thrown together crapfest they have right now.. Everything I hear coming from Epic is nonsense, and the Epic defenders are even more obnoxious.. Like it's 2019.. those features are considered basic necessary components of a working storefront.. They have been basic features since like 2014....
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The features thing really bothers me. It's not because I care about the features - I don't absolutely need badges, trading cards, emotes, profile themes, chat, or even profiles at all in an online store, personally - but because they use them to justify the lack of an offline mode. My phones got knocked out the other weekend, so my Internet went along with it. Saturday, I booted up Steam for some Yakuza Kiwami, it booted in offline mode, and the thing played just fine; got to spend time with my gentle giant yakuza boyfriend. Sunday, I go to play some Axiom Verge, and the Epic launcher won't do anything but sit there and stare at me. I looked for an offline mode, but it didn't have one because "Epic needs an Internet connection to best provide you with features." WHAT features? Luckily, you can just root around in the directories and boot games right from your hard drive, but why jerk people around like that? If I'd dropped 60 bucks on a new game, and got something like that, I would've been furious! If their strategy with all of these freebies was to get people used to using their launcher, it's going to backfire unless they fix some of these issues. Not that they aren't being met with plenty of resistance already, of course.
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I can imagine the prospect of having some other company join in on the cash grab and the story will start all over again. 😂
But reality, is that it is only the beginning for Epic and i'd give then at least 2 years before they crumble but will continue to exist.
And to the person who let out a bit of gibber that Steam will diminish soon, don't even count on it. For a man such as Gabe to pioneer the birth of the digital age of gaming, and to deliver a service that is undeniably a bit buggy but still works flawlessly close to 15 damn years, you should ask yourself this question, why did you sign the SSA and this question goes out to everybody else. Why? Because you'd be a fool to insult Valve and Gabe when you are in Valve's territory. So your comments are likely to tip people off.
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Discord and GoG sell (essentially) all the games that Steam does.
You ought to be joking. GOG has abour 3k games, with many big publishers not even being present, and many of it is exclusive to the platform, further growing the list of games that are on Steam and not on GOG.
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Irrelevant who's fault it is, as at the end of the day, in many-many cases people do not have a choice where to buy. Games exist on Steam, and if lucky, on GOG.
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There ARE options. For MOST games
Why do you keep going on about "MOST games" despite the numbers?
Steam has more than 16k games. The biggest DRM-free online store, GOG has 20% of that. Itch.io barely has same games, because it deals with more experimental, smaller games. Humble has 1400 items in the DRM-free category, including a lot of redundancies - OST, Special Edition, DLC, Packs count as extra individual items. So it has 1100-1200 games max. 7.5% of Steam's selection.
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You're the classic case of moving the goalposts. less than 30% is most, less than 10% is most, then when called out on it, suddenly the "most" becomes "akshually, 3k games is a substantial library". It's not cool to start an argument heavily relying on ratios then suddenly change it to flat numbers. Could be avoided by thinking through the arguments before stating something obviously wrong.
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Discord??
They have a total of 87 games, completely irrelevant as a store.
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Just checked a bit more, they actually killed off the store page, only the games in the Nitro subscription are listed, you can't even see what games are buyable anymore.
With that it effectively is dead as a storefront.
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epic just want to build their consumer base, so a way to do this faster is to being the only one offering what the consumer wants, at some point they gonna stop doing exclusives, and i bet they are gonna increase their cut in the future once they are big enough, maybe not 30% but something lower, but tencent like any other company, doesnt invest in something to get cents in return, they are just doing what others did, going with really low profit, or with loss just to do damage their competency and get ahead
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tired now about all epic thread. Valve won't die, Epic won't die, exclusives eventually will stop because it just creates piracy and not sure why I cared because I never buy games on release with the exception of Paradox grand strategy games but those never will be epic exclusives. Those heavily uses steam workshop function.
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That anyone believes anything Pitchford says is beyond me.
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Not wanting to protect him, but lying is such a harsh word. Bethesda was outright lying about Fallout 76, or the typical "no microtransac oh look a microtransaction in the game, I wonder how it got there" AAA lie.
While it's not better, Pitchford simply got a delusion of grandeur. He is kind of lying, kind of twisting the narrative, but not to really gain something out of it, just because of his stupid ego he poses as he did anything to affect that roadmap that was done and planned before his game's announcement. He's like the fisherman lying about the size of his caught fish, while not lying about getting a fish. ( we have a word specially for these kinds of lies, where someone just blows things out of proportion, always makes a bigger deal about it, sadly I don't know an equivalent in english. So, there's the longer than pleasant description)
He is still a massive twat.
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I think exclusivity periods will continue to come down. Even indie games, which don't have the massive pre-launch marketing campaigns of the big games, typically make 20% of their first year's sales in the first week, so capturing that ultra-impatient launch market doesn't take long.
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the day Pitchford speaks the truth i will make a thread about it
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i think we need a mental doctor here
lying is a serious case of disease
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Epic itself started that hate thing against steam using lies like monopoly of steam - just shom me how many games froms steam i can't get on some drm free stores. And now randy is just going with the flow of his policy to create war between shops. I like idea of many shops with concurrent prices but not by the price of screwing gamers by paying publishers than selling games with pricetag same as steam did.
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Lol, classic Randy talking out of his ass. Remember that time he got caught lying about how Gearbox got the name?
https://www.engadget.com/2009/08/17/whats-in-a-name-gearbox-software/
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When we read about Randy we read about this: https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/randy-pitchford-gearbox-lawsuit-1203106006/ and the thing about Alien Colonial Marines and how Borderlands born.
The thing here is: WE CANT START PAYING EXCLUSIVITIES (like Epic) OR SUBSCRIPTIONS (like Origin or Discord)
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Origin pays for exclusivities?
Also, what would the arguments be against subscription models? You can still buy the games you'd get through the subscription, but now you have the chance to play €600 worth of games for around €12 (if you need a whole 3 months to play them). Personally, I do think that this deal would benefit students and people who just don't have a shitload of cash burning holes in their pockets.
So my question would be what do you dislike about the subscription based model as an extra option?
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I've edited my post bc the misundertanding that if "Origin pays for exclusivities".
And what i mean with subscription is the future of gaming. Can you imagine that after this "Epic vs Steam" thing, could appear a new model based on subscriptions, and just that. Not buying a game, just rent the services, like Netflix. Im talking about the future, not about now, now everything is good with that.
Discord have a new model called "Nitro" and i can't buy a game, it is just subscription (until i know) and that's what im afraid of. I wont be paying a month on every platform because the other one has a game i want to play and the other hasnt.
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Yeah, I agree with you if you can't buy the game instead. But the current system for Origin, with an extremely small free of 4€/month for access to 184 games with you having the option to also buy those games outright, is a great one in my opinion. I'm on board as long as there are more options, I'd say.
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I would love to be valve now so that I can tell to gearbox: "5-10 years? you don't need to wait that long, for you steam is dead right now, you never publish in steam again :)"
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randy the idiot, another one to the bag of self-righteous-developers/publishers/ceo-trash.
professionalism level 100 https://twitter.com/DuvalMagic/status/1114172860103311360 👍
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Yeah, never really a good sign when he has to say "Maybe don’t think of me as “CEO” but rather an entertainer? Anyway, dude told me he was done. If you want a divorce, that’s cool - I don’t want a relationship with anyone who doesn’t want one with me. But expect I’ll consider a restraining order if you keep stalking me after." as a response to a tweet that said "Charming. Randy I have been a big supporter of you and Gearbox since the release of the first Borderlands game but with the way you're acting on twitter to the fans of the series is making it really hard. This is not how the CEO of gearbox should be talking to his customers.".
I feel bad for Randy. Must be tough being a millionaire who has such an easy life that he can just complain on Twitter about his multi-million dollar company being disrespected by 11-year olds on Steam.
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Reminds me the time cliffy b got into an heated discussion with AngryPat ending with him creating fake accounts just to harass the small YT. millionaires with a fragile Ego and too much free time
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Arguing with Randy Pitchford on twitter is like trying to wrestle a pig that has been rolling around in its own filth. Whether you win or lose you are going to end up covered in shit.
I'm just going to vote with my wallet on this one. Borderlands is a franchise that I've got enough hours it is one of the few games that I'd have happily pre-ordered - but I'm not buying it on Epic.
I'm all in favour if people want to compete with Steam by trying to offer a better service but money grubbing exclusivity deals are the exact opposite of good for gamers.
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Well, UPlay and Origin have been around for years now with their own launcher, and look how few features they have. They won't ever surpass Steam in that regard, and yet, they are still going fine. They run exclusivity in a software sense, much like Nintendo do in a hardware sense.
EGS may never have the same feature set as Steam, but narrowing the market share to how many features a launcher has seems to be simplifying things somewhat. We have yet to see what EGS' real visible plans are for their launcher beyond scalping titles so far, so they may only end up as flop.
As I've said before, I hate the launcher (create account, can't even access it, get multiple emails saying my account has been hacked even though I've never successfully logged in, etc,.), I hate how they've decided that nabbing exclusives and giving some high quality games away for free (many of which are STILL on my wishlist after years of waiting for a reasonable discount in most cases), and finally I hate company behind it all. BUT, at the end of the day, just like Steam, if they end up doing something right and are still around in a few years, we could be looking at something interesting. Although I'm too cynical to believe that at the moment.
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But Randy Pitchford thinks that Steam will be a dying store.
Lol. I wonder if there's a human being out there (other than Randy himself) that thinks he should be trusted in any way. Dude's such a moral failure and a legal weasel. There's a reason why he's so hated in the industry.
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I was going to say the same thing, thanks for doing it for me.
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Borderlands 3 has the shortest Epic exclusivity period so far. Also, I got an email this morning telling me that Metro Exodus and Borderlands 3 are both now in the Humble Store. Sure, those are Epic keys, but I doubt Epic gets a cut of those sales. To me it looks like Epic's funds for buying exclusives are running low so they had to scale back their demands.
But Randy Pitchford thinks that Steam will be a dying store.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/gearboxs-pitchford-steam-may-be-a-dying-store-in-5-to-10-years/
Though his big lie is when he takes credit for features that Epic promised will come later:
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