The whole idea sucks. You know what would be worse than Steam having a monopoly on PC game stores? Five different megacorps each as untrustworthy as Epic dividing the market between them, each with their own exclusive deals so that people who want access to most things need to sign up for all of them. Like with the streaming services it would only drive people back to piracy.
This is kind of a wild take on the fediverse. If Epic is a megacorp, then what is Valve? I get that fracturing the marketplace could lead to a worse outcome for consumers, but surely praying for benevolent billionaires isn’t a winning strategy.
Steam is just as much of a problem as EGS.
This got me thinking. One of the big things i like about steam is the ease of use on Linux and the achievements with the community profile and friends to share it with on top of it. So what if you made those features federated. A protocol that allows you to attach a game to it and log achievements and display them on friendica. You could also attach the executables from steam or gog or whatever you launch through lutris or heroic or whatever. I think atm Devs put in extra stuff to make steam achievements work but what if there was a common interface for it?
For what it’s worth, usually devs use one of a handful of telemetry solutions to track achievements and the like. There’s some plumbing needed to hook those systems to a platform like Steam, but it’s the same idea for Xbox, PSN, etc.
Most major platforms have the same general pieces on the backend, though all laid out a bit differently.
If Epic is a megacorp, then what is Valve?
It’s a marginally less problematic megacorp. Being stuck with three or four of them instead of the current one or two would not solve any problems and would make things substantially more annoying for their customers — both publishers and gamers. There’s currently no way for enough of them to exist in that market to provide meaningful competition. It’s the type of service where consolidation and market concentration is inevitable when they’re run the way they are now. You can’t reasonably be expected have 50 different equivalents to the Steam client on your PC; having both Steam and GOG is already a bit of a stretch.
Speaking of the fediverse though, if all the PC game stores were somehow federated such that listing your game on one automatically made it available on the others as well, and they could thus be constrained to compete fairly in a well-regulated market based on the fully interoperable services they provide, that would be a better world.
Sorry, I’m a bit too used to the average take everyone has that Steam somehow gets a pass and Epic is the peak of tyranny. Pardon that, I largely agree.
The stupid piece of shit software doesn’t tell me anything about the games. That’s the problem with it.
I go to Steam and it tells me all sorts of info regarding the game. More videos. More screenshots. The data on the right side describing if it’s coop/single/mmo/whatever. All the reviews.
HOW HARD IS IT TO COPY SOMEONE ELSE’S HOMEWORK?!?!?!?
The excuse was (from Tim Swiney) that Steam also started barebones.
Epic is still barebones 8 years in. Steam wasn’t by that point.
Full official Linux support or GTFO.
Now I’ll collect the free game I’m never playing.
Ooh the Botany one sounds cool, thanks for reminding me
I do occasionally play the free games, I just do it through heroic games launcher.
Heroic tends to log me out if not used for a bit, (or sometimes, at random it seems) and login with the deck while commute is annoying.
Epic giveaway is just a moral justification to download from torrent and add to steam, honestly.
When I used windows and had EGS, I had to log in nearly every time because it was so rare that I launched it. So not even a Heroic issue, yet another Epic issue
There was a recent article about a dev saying that when their game was given for free on Epic, it increased their sales. But not on Epic Store… They increased on Steam…
The problem with Epic is that they were with the wrong assumption that people will “just” migrate to a new launcher. You might be able to attract new players that don’t have any baggage, but older ones with games on Steam, you’ll need to climb the Everest to convince them.
That task would already be hard even if your platform had 100% parity in features with Steam. But it isn’t, it lacks basic features that Steam has for years, so I’m not sure what they were thinking that giving free games would be enough (and I’m not saying this in hindsight, I’ve been saying this ever since they launched Epic Store)
GOG manages to get by because they offer something different. As long they offer DRM-free games, they will always have an audience. Steam can’t compete with that, unless some day they decide to do the same. So GOG will always have a place in the market.
Epic on the other hand, is picking a fight with Steam, on Steam’s territory, with Steam’s rules. It could be a David vs Goliath story except David doesn’t even have a sling or a stone.
problem with Epic is that they were with the wrong assumption
A lot of Epic was based on very cynical assumptions about who play games and why. Epic and Tim Sweeney see “gamers” as a monotype who spend money like water and have no loyalty to a brand or marketplace. It must be a shock to give away so much stuff and not buy and favor with the community.
Shareholders don’t understand that we have a few games we cherish and spend years playing. Epic never understood it’s audience and still seems to be missing the point.
You might be able to attract new players that don’t have any baggage, but older ones with games on Steam, you’ll need to climb the Everest to convince them.
At this point, my Epic library is technically bigger than my Steam library, even with family sharing somehow? But its a bunch of free games I don’t care about, except for a few, and steam has modding features built right in, so one of the few games I have played after getting it free on Epic, I eventually bought on steam when it went on sale there. There’s also the history of achievements and friends (and sharing of games with those in my steam family). So if I had to pick between Steam and Epic for a game, I’d pay more for it to be on steam. Still, I’d rather go with GOG or itch if I didn’t still have steam credit from gift cards.
I’ll be up front, steam is still a corpo and I’ll gladly drop it like a hot rock the second it looks at me funny. That said, decade plus that I’ve been using it, it’s treated me good. Steam runs on Linux without complaints, it doesn’t dick with my very specific file organization, and it doesn’t ask questions when I use it to run cracked software that I aquired dubiously. I don’t even own 100 games on it, I only buy things I’m willing to play and can’t pirate.
The only concievable thing another company could do to get me to pick them over steam is to give me an exact copy of steam but with the option to change the color to anything but blue.
The only concievable thing another company could do to get me to pick them over steam is to give me an exact copy of steam but with the option to change the color to anything but blue.
YSK, you can change Steam’s look: https://steambrew.app/themes
Well fuck, this gave me a rollercoaster of feelings lol. I love this, but it doesn’t work with flatpack so I have to do a full reinstall of steam. This may be my weekend project lol
They took a look at Steam and decided the forums were the big thing missing? The community reviews of games are on some occasion useful, and the steam workshop is great, but the actual forum is just about the most useless feature of Steam I can think of. There are so many places on the Internet to talk about games, chat with people while playing games, post about games, etc.
To be honest, I think the forums in Steam are a good addition, and worth having it. And in my opinion every game store should have such a community feature builtin.
My experience has been far less valuable. The steam forums are typically very poorly moderated, and bigotry runs wild in basically all of them.
It’s not inherent to Steam or forums as a concept, but unless the people running it take care to invest in resources for proper moderation, forums will just naturally trend towards toxic behaviour because it’s easier to be an asshole and harass good people out than it is to do the opposite.
So basically like any other forum. At least there is not much over moderation compared to Reddit or worse, Discord in example. I am reporting posts and comments all the time, and get messages from time to time that action has been done. I can see the accounts being banned (public info) and comments or posts being removed. But usually I am only active in forums with lot of activity, so not sure how this compares to less active communities. There is a screenshot of a confirmation reporting a discussion post:
It’s not useless for things like walkthroughs and fixing common issues.
