I’ll never understand the absolute cock worship of steam. They’re just a huge, near monopolistic gaming store that apparently requires daily fellatio on this platform. Apparently, I’m supposed to agree or get smashed with the typical vitriol one gets with disagreeing with the hive. You Assholes
I’ll never understand why some people look at the fact that steam is popular because of their policies, and can’t help but make a comment like this equating that popularity to cock worship.
Like, we get it bro. You’re thinking about cocks and you’re mad about a half decent game store. What compelled you to combine those thoughts on a public forum?
The weird thing is that this isn’t even the first comment I’ve seen like this. Dudes that are mad about steam want everyone else to know about steam’s massive, throbbing cock for some reason. This guy alone has posted 3 of these.
I mean, aside from the lack of a period at the end of the sentence, the post looks grammatically correct to me. Why do you think I didn’t proofread my own post? What a silly goose
It’s because of their backend tech. Steam has some of the most efficient CDN usage in the world. How do you think you’re able to download a 60Gb game in 10 min?
The 30% cut is an obscene standard that needs to be reduced on PC, console, and mobile. Taking an entire third off-the-top as nothing but a middleman and file-server is indefensible. Valve doesn’t even control their platform - they shoved their way onto computers via HL2 and now perpetuate an overwhelming market share. Then as now, it is a problem that games require any online DRM launcher.
Tim can still get bent.
EGS by all accounts does fuck-all to attract users or sellers, beyond adjusting that cut, and it is still a project that exists primarily as rent-seeking for that cut.
Same deal for Fortnite on iOS: their excuses are pretense for taking 30% of everything spent on an app or IN an app, on every iPhone. They once strongarmed Facebook out of even mentioning that. Furthermore, people must have software freedom. It is intolerable that Apple ever restricted what you install on your own goddamn phone.
Fortnite should be unavailable because Fortnite should be illegal.
Nothing inside a video game should cost money. Real-money charges make games objectively less enjoyable. Maximum revenue comes from addiction to manufactured discontent. It is infecting every platform, genre, and price point. It is in single-player games. if we allow this to continue there will be nothing else.
Steam is just perfect at keeping the gamers behind them as they are only assholes behind doors to the Devs on their platform.
30% is an absurd cut for a store that has such a monopoly that if you don’t release there your game is pretty much cancelled even if you release at your own store without DRM and with additional goodies (Looking at GOG and The Witcher - they released the Gwent standalone like a year later on steam because it didn’t sell at all on GOG and then it apparently outsold the GOG version without a week)
People are just too lazy and Steam is keeping them happy enough to not bother looking another way.
Epic isn’t a good guy in any case but the exclusive deals on AAA Games they do is probably the only way to get someone to buy the game there instead of Steam
A short list of the biggest fucking games in half a dozen genres. Do you know what an outlier is? There’s not just the one.
As a direct comparison: Fortnite probably installed a lot of Android copies outside the Play Store. But surely 99.9% of Android games are still installed through the Play Store. No matter how hard any particular ultra-popular game could have gone, the reality for an overwhelming majority of cases is that being outside that one store is death.
Steam is not perfect but far better than 90% of the outcomes we could have had. It helps they work on Proton/Wine, helping Linux community directly. They are the reason Linux gaming picked up steam (very punny, ik) since Ubuntu 16.04 + Wine made primary desktop Linux usage viable.
I will buy from other storefronts if the deal is good, I have bought plenty from GOG. Epic are just anti-consumer and I refuse to support that store.
Steam just offers peace of mind with refunds and the feature set they provide is next to none, I haven't been given a reason to look elsewhere primarily.
75% is not “basically a monopoly”, especially not when there are so many other ways to buy and sell games. Plenty of games have been incredibly successful without ever being on Steam.
They have an overwhelming majority that makes assorted competitors individually irrelevant. Jesus, do I hate having to say “they have an overwhelming majority that makes assorted competitors individually irrelevant,” just because people get in a snit about the word “monopoly.”
You know Standard Oil didn’t own all the oil - right? They peaked around 85% of sales. They had many competitors. Those competitors did not matter.
For every game that’s done well outside Steam, there’s ten that eventually came to Steam and sold massively better than before. That jump is the power Steam wields. That is why we regulate competition, beyond ‘do competitors exist.’
The barrier to entry is a huge concern on whether something should be considered a monopoly or not. Extracting and refining oil is nowhere near the same as selling your videogame online. Today the barrier of entry for digital distribution incredibly low.
It definitely does matter. Some games effectively pay Valve about 15%, which basically nullifies Sweeneys whining since it’s roughly the same they’d pay on the Epic store.
You’re right about Steam being the dominant game store, but the narrative around it is all wrong. Steam offers far more functionality for their cut than any other competitor could even come close to.
The epic games store user experience is awful. Exclusives are awful. I have zero reason to ever use it except for if I’d been taking advantage of the countless free games they’ve been giving away.
Steam offers a service, hosting downloads and all the backend for friends/multiplayer connectivity/etc isn’t free. If you’re big enough to not need that(minecraft), good for you! Otherwise, it’s clearly difficult to make a launcher/game platform that doesn’t suck ass(uplay/origin/etc) - sorry that steam is just better than any alternative right now.
People are just too lazy and Steam is keeping them happy enough to not bother looking another way.
You say that like we are making any kind of sacrifice by using steam. I used Epic and Xbox Gamepass or whatever on PC for like a year or two but stopped using either because the steam experience is just better and the exclusives weren’t worth changing.
I know we happen to be a minority, but given how much valve has done for linux gaming, I’m happy to vote and support them with my wallet.
For reference, before they started giving a good linux experience I didn’t buy games for more than 15 years, so is not like the game developers were going to get 100% of the money I’m paying for games now, the choice is to get 70% or nothing because I wouldn’t play their games. Not only that, if the proton compatibility layer fails, I’m very confident that steam’s refund policy has my back, again, without this policy I wouldn’t buy games.
Remember, not everyone is you, and not everyone plays games the way you do.
This is me too. I’d moved away from PC gaming completely when I dropped Windows from my PCs back during the XP era. The Steam Deck has brought me back though. I really like the experience, and I get a kickass Linux handheld PC for a great price.
I recently moved my main desktop to Linux (everything else has been for a long time), and - aside from some problems with Wayland (due to NVidia) - everything has just worked. Every game I’ve played has been working flawlessly. They’ve been doing an amazing job with Proton.
30% is an absurd cut for a store that has such a monopoly that if you don’t release there your game is pretty much cancelled
That’s exactly why they take 30%. Because having your game on Steam is a huge deal. Because Steam is very popular and lucrative. Because it’s well-made and useful. Little Timmy wants to skip to having a popular and lucrative platform without first doing the step of making it well-made and useful.
The exclusive on epic game store is a cancer that should not exist. And epic should remove their parody of launcher from existence because they somehow managed to make this a cancer too.
300+ library on Steam over more than a decade with them. I’m not moving to Epic regardless of how shitty Steam gets because I’m not maintaining multiple accounts for multiple launchers just 'cause Tim fucking Sweeney decided it was mandatory I split my library so he could stack a couple more zeros in his bank account.
steam’s cache of installed/downloaded/updates to games can get corrupted and cause this. try the ‘clear download cache’ option in settings and then restart steam and try to uninstall a game again.
Honestly I just wish I could freeze updates to games that are playable offline. It’s so frustrating when I’m playing a single player game with no problems then an update happens and I have to break my mods because steam forces me to update.
Except as soon as it realizes an update is ready it will make you update before you can play. The only way to stop it is to stay in offline mode all the time so that it doesn’t check for updates to your games.
All the auto update disable does is keep it from automatically doing the update but it’ll still force you to update.
What are the best deals I need to consider? Looking to treat myself to a couple of games that can sit unplayed next to the others I picked up last year.
I second the nomination for The Witness! A game that teaches you the puzzle systems and challenges you without using a single word. And then when you realize what’s going on, the game suddenly gets twice as deep.
If it’s not a game you can redeem through Steam, then install through desktop mode and add it to your list of games in Steam (add non-steam game). That will let you access it through the normal Steam OS
They’re gonna protect their whales. It’s like Facebook, I report outright calls to violence, doing, and hate speech all the time to be told it “doesn’t violate TOS” but I make one comment that “hiding behind Christianity to justify your hate is bullshit” got me a hate speech ding on my account in under 5 minutes.
Valve doesn’t care one whit about good moderation. I got kicked from a CS game recently because I wouldn’t say the n word. The team agreed that only racists are allowed on the team and since I wouldn’t say the n word they kicked me. Of course I reported all of them but I have no doubt that report falls into a black hole and the 4 people proud of their racism just get to keep playing as if nothing happened.
Riot does a ton of things very very wrong but one thing they do a decent job of is actually punishing people for bad behavior like that and then notifying the reporters that hey, you helped us get those guys. Valve needs to take that kind of approach or their games and services will just continue to be overrun by this shit
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