I would love for Steam to have **actual competition. Which is difficult, sure, but you could run a slightly less feature-rich store, take less of a cut, and pass the reduction fully on to consumers and you'd be an easy choice for many gamers.

But that's not what Epic is after. They tried to go hard after the sellers, figuring that if they can corner enough fo the market with exclusives the buyers will have to come. But they underestimated that even their nigh-infinite coffers struggle to keep up with the raw amount of games releasing, and also the unpredictability of the indie market where you can't really know what to buy as an exclusive.
Nevermind that buying one is a good way to make it forgotten.

So yeah, fully agreed. Compared to Epic, I vastly prefer Steam's 30% cut. As the consumer I pay the same anyways, and Steam offers lots of stuff for it like forums, a client that boots before the heat death of the universe, in-house streaming, library sharing, cloud sync that sometimes works.

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[–] Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I prefer GoG to Steam. I will not install Epic, especially after killing off the Unreal franchise.

[–] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Man the thing I hate the most about fortnite is that it killed UT4...

[–] Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yup. For some reason some companies seem to think throwing all your eggs in one franchise basket is a great idea. You would think with all the easy money Fortnite is bringing in, you'd diversify your library of games. Angry Birds developers thought they could ride that thing for 20 years. Sanrio is smarter then that. Hello Kitty is their reliable money maker, but they're always trying something new.

[–] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think it was more so that they needed those devs on Fortnite to scale it... Then when they got some breathing room to look at other projects, Quake Champions had already released and flopped ... as has since Halo Infinite and Diabotical (which Epic partially funded) ... AFPS is a genre that isn't getting much love from consumers.

So, I think Fortnite caused the project to get dropped, but it's not the reason it wasn't picked back up. I'd imagine Epic is working on other games, these things just take a while (and they're going to want bigger profits than they expect UT4 could bring in).

[–] Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I don't think Epic is working on other games. If Fortnite wasn't going to be their only brand, they wouldn't have delisted Unreal and shutdown the master servers.

[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Same, I always check whether GOG has a game first, and whether it's patched up to par. Sadly, surprisingly often while games release on GOG they then lack features (although personally I do not really care about achievements) or worse, the devs give up on releasing patches for the non-Steam versions.

[–] brawleryukon@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sadly, surprisingly often while games release on GOG they then lack features

This is almost always a situation that can be pinned on Steam, actually. The games that end up doing this are usually using Steamworks, which essentially forces them into a sort of soft-exclusivity on Steam since their multiplayer features and such can only exist there.

[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is almost always a situation that can be pinned on Steam, actually. The games that end up doing this are usually using Steamworks, which essentially forces them into a sort of soft-exclusivity on Steam since their multiplayer features and such can only exist there.

But Steam doesn't force them to use Steamworks, so I don't really see "steam's fault" fault here. Although, of course, it'd be cool if Steamworks would work for non-steam games at least for modding/multiplayer. Granted.

[–] brawleryukon@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Although, of course, it'd be cool if Steamworks would work for non-steam games at least for modding/multiplayer.

That's the point. No, nobody's forcing them to use Steamworks (especially since Epic has rolled out their cross-platform, store-and-OS-agnostic free competitor to it), but anyone who chooses to do so (which is a lot of devs) ends up locking those features to Steam (barring a ton of extra work for themselves) simply because of Valve's chosen policy.

Don't think Valve doesn't understand this. They found a way to get devs to all but lock their games to Steam and thank Valve for the opportunity to do it.