Also the fact that the Epic Games Store exists is a step towards countering Steam's monopoly on mainstream titles.
People complain about the loss of functionality like screenshots or the in-game browser when using Epic. And there are exclusivity deals. Complaints against those things are valid, and the actual implementation of the storefront needs a lot of improvement, but I'm wondering if a Steam monopoly would have been any better for consumers and developers.
To me it sounds like a lot of consumers were happy with the monopoly and saw the exclusivity deals as disruptive as they had to migrate their friends list and set up a lot of things just to play that one hyped title. But when it comes down to the hard issue of staying afloat I can see how the money Epic offers to game studios is enticing.
Steam has been good to me with their native Linux client, Linux client support, proton compatibility tools and community tool support (glorious eggroll proton version). Epic has nothing to offer me.
Furthermore, I know some gamedevs personally who release an early access level title with exclusivity deal on epic's playform just so that they gain access to further funding to finish the game and release on Steam for the actual shot at success. They take advantage of the money to fund their work, but have said that the numbers do not compare to that of Steam.
I began gaming for the first time (unless you count playing on my roommates' XBox in college) this past week, mostly for The Witcher 2/3--both on Linux. The Witcher 3 was never supposed to run on my platform, but somehow Steam and Proton/Wine made that not only possible but actually enjoyable.
I know technically they're doing it to make money, but I can't help like feel it's also something of a labor of love as well. It would have been much easier to leave people in my (our?) position behind, so I appreciate the heck out of Valve for putting in the effort. I imagine they're going to have my goodwill for a long time as a result.
If you want to be cynical, Proton was made from the scraps of a contingency plan that was the Steam Machine. When they realized that Microsoft wasn't going to force their platform onto users, they gave up on Steam Machines and I guess they leveraged the tech to something else.
I think that it is a bit more complex than that. Their original plan was for native[1] gaming on Linux.
When it proved hard to bootstrap that and seeing that the Steam Machine itself they started looking for options. Wine was already pretty good but DX11 support was bad. I do not know if it was serendipity that DXVK started showing promises around they same time they started looking into wine or whether it was the reason for them focusing into wine in the first place.
The rest is history, although the side effect is that it pretty much killed native ports for AAA games on Linux [2].
[1] for some values of native. Many, most, ports are based on internal close source equivalent of wine.
[2] I do not really care about native vs proton, but it would be nice if game companies did officially support proton.
... and unrelatedly, on the other side, the latest appeasing thing called WSL was made from leftovers of a plan to run Android on Windows Phones, which was dropped when Google refused to allow Play Services run there.
Phoenix Point was a game I cared about a lot. Then one day, they announced they would not be making a Linux version. Not long after they announced it will be Epic exclusive for a year.
Personally I think at the very least the developers deserve equal blame for accepting the bag of money from Epic.
Money is a strong motivator but the Phoenix Point devs chose to break promises from crowdfunding to accept it. I think that reflects worse on them than it does Epic personally.
> Steam has been good to me with their native Linux client, Linux client support, proton compatibility tools and community tool support (glorious eggroll proton version)
Reminder: Valve was forced to double-down on SteamOS/Linux by Microsoft's then-intention to shutdown 3rd-party storefronts on Windows. I have a complicated relationship with both Steam (as a Proton user) and Epic (for pulling Linux support on a multiplayer game I already own!), but I still appreciate more competition in the arena: GOG alone won't cut it.
>if a Steam monopoly would have been any better for consumers and developers.
Well steam runs on and is actively supported on linux, Epic takes games that used to support linux then removes linux support and makes the games exclusive to their store.
So for me personally, a steam monopoly would be better. The epic game store's existence has actually caused games to be removed from the platform I use. It's taken away choice from me. If it stopped existing, I'd be happy.
The exclusivity deals were disruptive because they took games that were promised to come to steam and made them exclusive.
The customer has no benefit from the lower cut epic charges.
Epic doesn't treat everyone equally. Big games like Cyberpunk 2077 are allowed to also sell on other platforms, while smaller games either go exclusive or go with everyone else.
Competition is good, but I'd rather have GOG be that competition to Steam than Epic purely based on their anti-DRM stance.
I don't much care for EGS, but Epic is paying small developers a lot for that exclusivity. In the current indie market, that chunk of change can be the difference between profitability and failure.
> Epic doesn't treat everyone equally. Big games like Cyberpunk 2077 are allowed to also sell on other platforms, while smaller games either go exclusive or go with everyone else.
There isn't a conspiracy here. Epic pays developers to make certain games (like Control) temporarily exclusive to EGS. Other developers, like CD Project RED, have not made such a deal, and thus Cyberpunk 2077 is available on many different PC game clients.
There are plenty of games on EGS--large and small--which are not and have never been exclusive. Examples include The Unfinished Swan, SuperHot, and Axiom Verge just to pick three off the top of my head.
I meant the case of DARQ, where the developer was specifically told to either go exclusive or every other store with no possibility of selling on EGS and other stores. [1] According to the article other indie games got similar offers, while the big budget ones can go to multiple stores.
To me, asking smaller games for exclusivity is just asking for commitment. One of the reason I don't buy games on GoG anymore is that the developers don't commit to updating their GoG version to keep parity with other versions of the game.
No, because it's clear from the beginning what platforms their games will support. That wasn't the case with Metro Exodus [1] for example and one other indie game I can't remember the name off.
I have one particular example of this I love since it happened right on the borderline. I own Anno 1800 on steam, but if you don't you can't (at least for the foreseeable and likely future) - Ubisoft pulled Anno from the steam storefront shortly after launch but! Probably due to some contract shinnanegans with steam, they continue to offer expansions + DLC to users who own Anno already on steam while new users remain locked out from buying it anywhere except UPlay + EGS. Ubisoft has moved a few things over to EGS but I love the Anno example because it landed just as EGS was gaining fame so it sits in the weird middle ground of technically being on steam but not really.
Be a bit mindful blaming ubisoft for stuff vanishing from Steam.
A significantly large part of why Ubisoft started cozying up to Epic was not because of the 5% stake tencent has in it.
It was because Steam pulls all kinds of nasty shenanigans but ubisoft will not state any of it publicly because it would hurt their relationship.
Steam has outright pulled all ubisoft games before, and ubisoft took the blame. People assumed it was because ubi wanted to push uplay; but it was all about someone at valve deciding that we'd violated some rule about content distribution.
We gave UK players of AC:Syndicate a country specific hat which wouldn't have made sense to the global market.
They didn't warn, we woke up to see that kotaku[0] had run an article about it before we even knew ourselves.
This is not an isolated incident, just a dramatic one that I remember as my own personal shifting point w.r.t. steam, because I'd only just started working at Ubisoft and was hating on uplay and was quite fond of steam.
Having bought a Ubisoft game on Steam and having to sit there for minutes while uplay updates itself when I just wanted to play for 10 minutes or so, I have very little sympathy for you.
> We gave UK players of AC:Syndicate a country specific hat which wouldn't have made sense to the global market.
So Valve makes sure that players from different countries get the same content? As a UK expat that's something I'm glad of.
Better customer service, user experience, and game selection. All these various online game stores should be required, by law, to allow any publisher to put their games on the platform for a standard publishing rate. No exclusivity, no special rate setting. Those are classic anti-competitive tactics, and this is yet another front to fight that battle on.
How else are they going to get people to use these stores?