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ampersandrew ,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

It’s an open question whether Epic’s limited success is a result of the company’s failure to “press its advantage,” as Pitchford opines, or just a sign that Steam’s massive entrenched network effects have proven more resilient than he expected.

It’s not. EGS doesn’t solve any problems that Steam leaves on the table to be solved. Customers have no reason to shop at EGS when Epic takes its thumb off the scale.

conciselyverbose ,

It doesn’t solve most of the problems Steam already solved either.

Graphy ,

Not only that but it’s a worse user experience all around.

I fucking hate the EGS and Xbox stores for browsing new games. Most of the time you’ll get an animated video that’s not game footage and two screenshots that don’t tell you shit.

Not to mention that the formatting is so bad that the client requires you to basically be in fullscreen but you’ve still gotta scroll a mile down to get any info.

halcyoncmdr ,
@halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world avatar

Not to mention that the formatting is so bad that the client requires you to basically be in fullscreen but you’ve still gotta scroll a mile down to get any info.

For Xbox, that’s because the PC app is literally copy/pasted from the Xbox console app. Hell, it probably is the same universal app since that was a big Microsoft push to have more apps available on the consoles and Windows Phone.

XeroxCool ,

Lol I thought it was just my advanced age of 33 that made it difficult to understand a game from the Xbox previews. A majority of screenshots look like garbage once you’re not in character and the store highlights that.

Katana314 ,

The funny thing is, I feel like it’s not so hard to navigate Steam for particular problems that consumers would like a solution to, but Valve has been ignoring or considers beyond them. For some people, those individual problems form the root of their buying decision. You’d have to beat them at something before you beat them at everything.

altima_neo ,
@altima_neo@lemmy.zip avatar

Even ea’s origin tried to offer more, with the overlay chat, etc. Epic did none of that.

Steam also offers community pages, user reviews, and other features that allows players to discuss their games.

AceFuzzLord ,

If anything, the only thing that other stores have that Steam doesn’t would be games not on Steam. Even then, half of the time, they’re either itch(dot)io exclusive indie titles or shitty triple AAA titles.

ampersandrew ,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

When I buy on GOG, I know I’m getting a game DRM-free. They muddied that a tad with how they handle online multiplayer, but for the most part, I get more value from their store for that. It’s a huge reason why I’d choose their store, because they’re solving a problem for me that Steam does not.

Glide ,

While I normally check both locations and buy from GOG if it’s available there, you would be surprised how many Steam titles are completely DRM free.

I needed some DRM free games for the classroom last year and was pleasantly surprised that a lot of the smaller, indie games I own Steam, the ones I was most interested in bringing into the classroom to begin with, run perfectly well on a machine without Steam even installed just by copying the folder to a flash drive. Some required deleting a Steam.dll or adding a text document that states the SteamID of the game, but most of the games I wanted I was able to run from a flash drive, DRM free, no Internet, Steam or game install required.

Steam offers DRM to devs that want it, but it is not a DRM platform in of itself.

ampersandrew ,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

I’m aware, but when GOG takes the ambiguity out of it, I don’t have to do tons of extra research to know that they have an extra feature that’s important to me. I’d really appreciate if some store took the ambiguity out of it when it comes to multiplayer games being playable offline. It’s something that Steam should easily tell you in theory, but there are tons of games that have LAN and such without bothering to report it. Some say they require an online connection and actually don’t. These are problems worth solving for me, a particular kind of consumer.

doodledup ,

I gave Epic’s store a chance but even after all this time it’s still shit and very far from feature parity with Epic. There’s not even proper reviews. No big-picture equivalent. No good out-of-the-box Linux support. No Steam-Deck. The list is very very long. Until Epic starts delivering, the 30% cut Valve takes is more than justified.

Albbi ,

I gave it a chance when they took over Rocket League. The damn platform doesn’t even support profile avatars while Steam did. So to get a basic nice feature working all you had to do was… not use their platform.

They still don’t have avatars.

TachyonTele ,

They absolutely slaughtered rocket league. They even put the dumb cyber truck in it lmao

Albbi ,

Oh really? I haven’t played since they disabled trading items.

I mean, the cyber truck probably looks better than some of the other cars, and you’ll probably get better FPS due to the lowered polygon count! But yeah… no bueno.

jagermo ,

Heroic launcher works pretty well to get epic and gog games in the deck. But yes, support could be better, especially since i remember unreal tournament being Linux friendly early on.

thejoker954 ,

Yeah i get and play the free games from there, but they don’t seem to want to do more than the bare minimum for the storefront so I won’t purchase anything through them.

BedbugCutlefish ,
@BedbugCutlefish@lemmy.world avatar

I never gave it a chance, as theit practice of paying for exclusivity is infuriating to me.

Make your shit better. Hell, make it comparable, and charge a lower cit (so devs make more), and I’d support then.

Paying to make the market more closed off sucks.

Sanctus ,
@Sanctus@lemmy.world avatar

EGS is worse than Steam was 10 years ago. Its only useful for piling free games from the store that I’ll never play.

XeroxCool ,

Oh yeah, I don’t have time to play my main Elite:Dangerous profile anymore but I’ll totally have time to use my free Epic license to plaster my name across the galaxy on deep space exploration.

Jerkface ,

Why can’t you just draw dicks like a normal person?

L0rdMathias ,

do nothing

Win

The gaben method works again

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

Imagine if Steam and EGS were hotdog vendors.

Steam offers all the condiments; mustard, ketchup, mayo, relish, onions, pickles, tomatoes, bacon, cheese, chili, etc.

EGS is just a plain hotdog. No condiments. You’re lucky to even get a bun.

Both are equal price.

Which hotdog are you getting?

Now imagine that the plain hotdog guy keeps whining that nobody wants his hotdogs.

Corvid ,

The hotdog vendor keeps going on about how he’s the good guy because he pays more to the sausage suppliers. As if that’s at all relevant to his customers.

altima_neo ,
@altima_neo@lemmy.zip avatar

He also tried suing the fruit vendor because they wouldn’t let them sell their hotdogs on their Apple cart.

BleatingZombie ,

I’m having a really hard time keeping up with the analogies at this point, haha

altima_neo ,
@altima_neo@lemmy.zip avatar

Epic games store occasionally gives you a free hotdog every week. But it also contains no fixings, and you gotta eat it at the counter.

Jerkface ,

I eat that free hotdog every week, then go across the street and buy another one.

woelkchen ,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

I eat that free hotdog every week, then go across the street and buy another one.

You actually eat it? I put it in the fridge for bad times but only eat the ones from the other side.

ahal ,

To be fair, I also put most of the hot dogs I buy across the street in the fridge too.

AlphaOmega ,

I have a 100 plus free hotdogs

whenyellowstonehasitsday ,

yesssssssss, but the second hot-dog vendor wants to offer customers lower prices, and the first says they can't because otherwise those hot dogs will be banned from their stand, and the second responds by attempting to throw piss water-balloons at any passers by, or something

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

the second hot-dog vendor wants to offer customers lower prices, and the first says they can’t because otherwise those hot dogs will be banned from their stand

It’s more accurate to say that the plain hotdog vendor wants to sell the other vendor’s hotdogs at a lower price at his own stand, thereby undercutting the sales of the first vendor for their own hotdogs.

whenyellowstonehasitsday ,

not really, unless you're implying the fancy hotdog vendor paid for the development of said hotdogs, which they didn't

games don't belong to valve

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

The keys that put the game in your Steam library are. And that’s what those pricing guidelines are about; Steam keys, not the actual game.

whenyellowstonehasitsday ,

you'd hope, wouldn't you?

But when I asked Valve about this plan, they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM.

HiddenLychee ,

I think I lost this analogy. What are the condiments in this metaphor?

Scafir ,

I don’t know so much about EGS, but probably some of the following (most of which I don’t use very often, I hope I recall correctly)

  • Refunds
  • Family sharing of games
  • Sharing games for other local users
  • Being able to lend games
  • Remote Play (with friends)
  • Remote Play (stream for a local machine)
  • Linux support through proton
  • probably more?
dual_sport_dork ,
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

That, and Gabe’s hotdog stand has spent decades building customer trust by generally acting decently towards its customers, right after it invented the concept of the hotdog stand.

Making the core of your business model revolve around whining about your competitors doesn’t work so great when your main competitor is already significantly better than you are.

PunchingWood ,

What he really meant to say was that he shilled out for the bags of money

Klanky ,
@Klanky@sopuli.xyz avatar

I don’t get why anyone pays attention to these wannabe Hollywood producers like him or Todd Howard. The most interesting and innovative things in gaming are NOT happening in the AAA space.

suburban_hillbilly ,

Honestly AAA studios don’t even exist anymore. Is there any gaming studio making multipe $60 games per year you can name where you would vouch for the quality of their games solely on the basis of who made it?

Maybe some first party console games(and even then only some series), but nothing for PC.

MentalEdge ,
@MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz avatar

I’d be very worried if a studio was pumping out several full-scale games a year. Did you mean publisher? I find following publishers to be pretty hit or miss, they usually deal with a multitude of game studios whose output will vary wildly. The days of EA making a bunch of EA games is over, now people care whether it’s Dice, Respawn or BioWare, and what the specific game is like.

Studios still just making games do exist. Kojima Productions, Santa Monica, Guerilla, Remedy, Fromsoft, Square Enix, Larian, Id Tech, Insomniac, Sucker Punch, CDPR…

They’re just relatively fewer and farther between as so many studios have pivoted to spending years and years working on one live service title or another, and the rest of these you only really hear from once in several years, when a game comes out.

For publishers, Devolver and Paradox come to mind.

bouh ,

Sometimes I wonder if these people understand that no player ever wanted exclusivities on a game store. Instead of providing a decent service, they’re litteraly trying to kidnap customers with a choice between waiting for months for this big release or taking it on a subpar platform.

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