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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[–] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 33 points 1 year ago (29 children)

You know you made a really interesting point that they marketed to the sellers not the ultimate customers. I hadn't really picked up on that before, but it does mitigate what should be a healthy dose of competition by altering the target audience a bit.

[–] MeanEYE@lemmy.world 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (16 children)

That's what I always said, why use Epic store? As a user you get worse treatment. Sure price is the same or they give you some discount but number of services offered is far from being on par with Steam. No family sharing, no refund policy, no cloud saves, no networking system, no streaming, no card collecting, no steam play. I might not use or desire all of those but some people do.

The fact Epic had to resort to extremes like timed exclusives just meant I dropped those developers off of my list of wanted games as it only went to show they are willing to sacrifice your inconvenience and happiness for some extra money. For them it was probably making sure project succeeds but in the end I don't care about them if they don't care about me.

[–] tehmics@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I use so many of steams features it's unfathomable to use any other launcher or even pirate anything because steam is so streamlined. Cloud saves, automatic local file transfers instead of redundant downloads, family share to my friends PC so half the time when I visit she'll have already downloaded and played my new games. When I get there they're just ready to go. Remote desktop to make any tweaks on my PC or casual gaming over stream. Big picture mode so I can lay back with a controller and chill, no futzing with m+kb UI. Steam input means I can easily drop in and out with any controllers.

I just got a steam deck and while I could install another app store on it, I've entirely stuck with steam just for the UX. I don't want to fuck with extra launchers and touchscreen bs.

I just played a coop Windows game on a Linux based portable PC on a 4K TV with a $24 USB hub for video out, using an Xbox and ps5 controllers over Bluetooth. This was completely seamless and controller navigated. Steam is insanely good.

[–] natryamar@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Last I tried using a Bluetooth controller it didn't go very well, has the experience gotten better?

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

I didn't have any issues. We did notice some input lag but disabling vsync helped a lot. Not sure if that was controller related

[–] natryamar@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

I tried to play Halo reach over Bluetooth a long while ago and when the rumble went off it would stop taking my input. Glad to hear your aren't having any issues.

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