Finally someone with a voice said it.
Epic gives so many games away, but their launcher and store are so bad that I don’t even play their free games.
I don’t care if Uni wants to run a store. But forcing me to use their store when I buy the game on steam is pretty af. So I don’t play Ubi games either.
Their shit launcher made the games run worse.
In present day. I dont want to use Windows. So I simply cannot play much if the new games from the other shit companies because they have some vendetta against Proton / Steam Deck.
Now they’re literally doing it to themselves.
If I could testify for Valve as a customer I would.
i think personally Steam’s/Valve’s dominance is really good here’s why:
- Improving Linux gaming,improving Wine and DXVK for gaming,so you dont rely on Microsoft for your OS.
- Great client(i like the: inbuilt Chromium based browser,Community features)
- Not so awful and maybe simple DRM methods(eg, needing the Steam client doesnt tank the performance that much,compared to something like denuvo which i think makes modding impossible,needs consistent internet connection,and tanks the game’s fps alot )
- I can buy with cash giftcard to buy games(I wish GOG had that)
- Workshop for modding on supported games.(ik some games have workshop and dont let you mod everything)
- Makes/has good games(Half-life 2 is the best game i ever played)
but the bad things:
- Steam Client is still 32 bit and Steam doesnt target ARM(E,G. For like M1+ macs,those need rosetta )
- third party clients arent a option
- You dont own anything you buy on Steam.
- Having the Steam client open at all times(ik not all games have this, but i assume CEF based Steam will lower the performance like slightly)
- TF2 neglect
- lootboxes/battle pass in some games(i am aware Valve was the first company to have a battle pass and fortnite popularized it)
alright thats what i think of the Good and bad of Valve/Steam
Edit: Fixed Paragraph break.
I think you switched to cons without saying.
I admit I haven’t tried very many, but I think you can launch any steam app “normally” without steam running. If you can find the executable or startup script, you can just point a shortcut to it. Some games will need Steam Services to run, but it’s not blocked or anything.
There’s a ‘but the bad things’ buried in the middle, desperately wanting a line break.
I did the same thing initially and tried re-reading it as sass. Especially if “TF2 neglect” was considered positive.
There’s a ‘but the bad things’ buried in the middle, desperately wanting a line break.
Thanks for the feedback, i have fixed it
they said it but there’s not a paragraph break do it’s easy to miss
I admit I haven’t tried very many, but I think you can launch any steam app “normally” without steam running. If you can find the executable or startup script, you can just point a shortcut to it. Some games will need Steam Services to run, but it’s not blocked or anything.
I think i mentioned this,? but there are Steam games that dont let you use it without having the client open, but yeah there are Steam games that work without the client.
I think you switched to cons without saying.
Its there but i didnt have a line break.
Steam kinda killed gaming piracy for many. Hope they won’t go the Netflix way in the future.
i kinda agree:
but its still possible to pirate some Steam games without the Steam Client,
and some still require it.I’m curious what you mean by this.
Netflix only went the way it did because they were liscensing shows and movies from other publishers/studios who could have, and finally did, take their shit back and start their own subscription service.
It’s not just Netflix that sucks now; it’s the whole of legit streaming video services becoming what cable was that got Netflix popular to begin with.
This is unlikely to happen with Steam, given that competitors are already trying to do what they can similarly and it has yet to actually do anything.
I mean that although the good shows got removed by the other competitors and streaming got downhill with that, they increased prices, put ads, removed account sharing and their only focus is profit.
Edit: also they removed shows by themselves to countries that the particular shows were not that popular just to save money. That started before the rise of other streaming platforms.
Yeah streaming has an assumption of an exclusivity deal whereas in gaming it’s unpopular and financially not worthwhile (though subscriptions would rapidly change that).
If Netflix and HBO and everyone else all were equally able to buy content and no service was the primary sponsor of content you’d get services competing on price, quality, and selection rather than each of them aiming to always have something worth the subscription price coming out.
Steam had been one of the good companies so far. Until they showed clear signs of enshitiffication, I will patronise Steam.
Steam is the very, very rare case of a major company that is both not beholden to shareholders, and has a pretty good guy at the helm.
I simply do not understand the sentiment that not being a total bastard is something celebrated and not expected or required.
And while many like our Steam benevolent (almost) monopoly, I do wonder how would the market look like if we had 20 competing companies that cannot gain more than 5% of the market share. Can you imagine the competition between them and how would that benefit us, the consumer?
That would mean exclusives everywhere. Everyone would try to force some game pass on us, until our only choice to get an OK selection would be having 4 subscriptions. Or piracy.
With Steam, I get a well integrated platform for buying, updating and launching everything with the correct compatibility layer.
That’s more convenient than piracy, so I use it.
Exclusives are a bastard child of oligopoly, where the distribution platform has more power than the publisher.
Before Steam physical games were NEVER sold only in ToysR, they were sold in all shops.
No, that’s pretty wrong. There absolutely were exclusive store releases, or temporary releases where one store would get a certain game a whole month early.
they’re still sold everywhere…just nobody buys em cause why the fuck would you when you can buy em online?
Honestly 20 different companies would probably suck for the consumer. That’s 20 different storefronts to compare, 20 different libraries to manage, potentially 20 different sets of logins, 20 sources of data breaches. It’s unlikely they would adopt an open standard to allow a shared library. Maybe you have a 21st company that makes a product like heroic launcher. You’d likely run into regionality issues where a particular store is unavailable, so you may not be able to play purchased games. You would have all sorts of odd exclusive dlc and pre order bonuses so a cosmetic item you like could be locked to a store you haven’t used. Multiplayer likely wouldn’t be global cross play between all companies, you likely get some set of 20 companies working together for multiplayer. Some games may develop a good scene available to a single store, requiring a game to be repurchased. Exclusives or timed exclusives would be annoying to track, as each store would likely have different catalogs.
I think this amount of competition could be good if individual competitors were allowed to fail. All the parts that build vendor lock-in would need to be removed, and more things would need to be interoperable, but it could be quite good and even specialised.
Each storefront could live or die independent of each library and each game service. If one company tried to squeeze money from users, they could just take their elsewhere, without worrying about losing access to games or connections to friends.
Of course no company would create such a system voluntarily, most depend on monopolistic practices to survive. It would take monopoly busting-policy or a foss group to even begin such a thing.
That would require real ownership which is unlikely to ever happen. Company failures more likely just means loss of any library from them.
It would likely result in endless corporate backstabbing, exclusive deals, contracts fights, and patent trolling
Which would likely result in horrid quality of life for the end user. Having to maintain countless accounts and subscriptions to have even fractional access to games.
It would likely also fuck over the studios and indie developers who would be shoved aside or relentlessly bought up in a ever growing attempt to grow.
More competition does not always mean things are better for the consumer. You can see the exact same thing played out with the recent rise and now slow descent to streaming services. As we went from one good one that turned into a horrible one as the sharehold is demanded it, then more rows and then things only became worse.
When you start operating at the sort of scale that the internet does, true, the whole competition thing being better for the consumer rarely works out.
You more frequently just end up with a bunch of greedy companies endlessly trying to one-up each other f****** over everyone in their attempts resulting in no one-winning, not the company, not the developers creators or middlemen nor and definitely not least the consumer.
True competition benefiting the consumer also requires there to be a connection to the consumer in a reason to actually service them. The companies need to be fighting for the consumer and not just each other. But that is all capitalism is turned into. The consumer is no longer the end goal. They’re just fighting each other to stomp them out so that all that’s left is themselves.
It’s been shown time and time again for decades now at at sufficient size competition just by itself does not help. The only thing that is repeatedly shown to be helpful is private companies with a good person at their home. Not trying to be a greedy f***.
And it’s showing time and time again. Every time that person retires the company sold their holders. Found public offerings made things just get worse.
The problem is not monopolies are bad. It’s not. The competition is good. It’s at public companies are a problem in the law forcing companies to do everything in their power to please. The shareholders is killing everything.
More competition does not always mean things are better for the consumer [cut], e.g. streaming services
I don’t believe this oligopoly is competing with each other?
(I’m not arguing with the rest of your post because capitalism bad :) )
“Not being a total bastard” is a weird way to describe overhauling the gaming on linux experience at no additional cost to the end user, among many other incredibly pro consumer choices they’ve pushed in the last twenty odd years.
Yeah. Steam is fucking solid.
step aside jesus, we have a new savior and his name is gaben
Benevolent dictators are great, but like pet goldfish, they eventually die, and the next fish might be an asshole you have to flush down the toilet.
This is intentionally word salad.
I simply do not understand the sentiment that not being a total bastard is something celebrated and not expected or required.
It’s simple really. If you don’t give positive feedback, you’ve lost the major lever that can be used to get what you want.
Using negative feedback is a useful tool but it’ll never achieve the same outcomes if used by itself.
And while many like our Steam benevolent (almost) monopoly, I do wonder how would the market look like if we had 20 competing companies that cannot gain more than 5% of the market share. Can you imagine the competition between them and how would that benefit us, the consumer?
More comptetion wouldn’t just benefit consumers, it would benefit devs. A dev could shop their game around go with a store front that suits their needs better.
If I’m going to need to install several different clients/launcher on my computer just to keep up with where games get published, I’ll just resort to piracy.
Being forced to install some shitty client to run a specific game has been a deal breaker for me in the past. And there is no guarantee that other “competing” platforms will bother making Linux versions of their clients.
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Is discovery a dumpster fire? I mean sure it could be better but I dont think its a dumpster fire. It seems there are constantly new small team indie games doing wild numbers on the platform. If discovery was truely bad we would be seeing the charts dominated by big studios.
The regular Next Fests have probably been the single best thing for game discovery I’ve found in s long time. Nothing beats an actual hands-on demo for deciding if I’ll wishlist a game.
As a player, I feel like discovery is great. I found literally dozens of interesting games just by scrolling down the main page.
I don’t know how it’s for devs, but it’s probably all but impossible to get traction if you’re just throwing your game in there, Fests being a compromised solution to an impossible problem
i kinda wish we had greenlit, there’s so much shovelware assetflip shit…lotta crap to wade through to find the good stuff.
but greenlit itself is probably worse in the longrun, maybe they should just increase the cost to post a game (that deposit is refunded after certain number of sales, iirc). larger deposit would make it less lucrative to throw out shit
I guess he talking about the search system, which is a dumpster fire relative to other Steam features.
Are we using the same product? There’s a vast array of quality tags that seem to genuinely work to find stuff?
You can’t filter using more than one tag as an “and” filter, only “or”. That’s pretty basic for a filter feature, isn’t it? It’s just surprising given how well implemented other Steam features had been in my experience.
He wasnt talking about search it was about algorithmic recommendation.
But you can filter by multiple tags. When you click search select the advanced search at the bottom of the dropdown. It does all the things you mention and far more
Mr biggest problem with tags is that it’s user curated and you can recommend an unlimited number of them.
Just because a game has a few funny moments, doesn’t mean it gets the comedy tag. Just because it has a brief driving sequence doesn’t mean it gets the racing tag. Just because there’s some reading involved doesn’t mean you get the visual novel tag.
It’s getting to the point I feel like there’s a conspiracy where there’s teams of people intentionally sabotaging the tag system and teams trying to counter it, all so they can control views and sales. It’s really noticeable when a publisher stops marketing and moves to another release.
This is a bot ^^
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I only buy games on Steam, GOG and ItchIO. The main reason I don’t give a cent to stores from EA, Ubisoft or Epic Games anymore is their services and terms are horrible. I’m all in for supporting competition when it’s good competition.
I would buy from GOG too, if they provided Linux support in form of an official launcher. And if available also official Linux builds. Back in the days GOG did that, but they stopped doing it. And before someone comes after me, I know there are alternative launchers on Linux. But I don’t want to give GOG money for work others doing it for free. I don’t want support a company who only cares about Windows.
In the past, before Proton, if a game was available at comparable prices on GOG and on Steam, I’d buy it on GOG. After Proton, my purchases from GOG went way down.
I used to be the same.
I have changed to prioritizing GOG though since I try to limit purchases from US companies and I despise how Steam knowingly profits from making children addicted to gambling.
I bought Resident Evil 0 on GOG yesterday but Heroic wouldn’t download the game for some reason (stuck at 0%). Refunded, got it on Steam for cheaper and it launched right away.
Sometimes I purchase on GOG out of principle and for some reason they always punish me for it.
They started supporting and cooperating with heroic launcher.
Thus heroic is the defacto official GOG launcher on linux.
What type of support and cooperation? And where it is documented, so I can read about it?
Weird. I can fibd no source on it. However I seem to distinctly remember that GOG announced to help heroic implement more cloud features.
That does not mean it never happened, we just can’t find the source. I had this with my own statements in the past too, sometimes it was true sometimes I was wrong. Therefore I cannot trust everyone in the internet. What I can imagine is, that GOG worked on the GOG API (the programming interface for other tools) to add access to the Cloud features in example. It might came out of a request from the Heroic Launcher project. So in a sense GOG would cooperate. But this is just speculation on my part here.
Still the Heroic Launcher is a separate project doing all the work on their own.
If you login to the Lutris client with your GOG account it skips GOG Galaxy and install the game for you in proton.
Yeah they were ahead of Steam there for a while.
I could understand this sentiment for any pc-platform but GOG. After all, they are the only ones (afaik) that make their launcher optional. And while i do ocassionally use launcher-functionalities from for example steam, i would much rather not have to bother with it if i didnt have to.
You can just add it to Steam as a non-Steam game and launch it from there
This does not address the issue I brought up in my reply. Besides the brought up point, it would not solve all other issues I would have. I know the functionality to add non-Steam games since I am on Steam over 12 years ago.
Oh cool then just be a prick about it for no reason. Go fuck yourself, I was just trying to help you.
I told you that it does not address my issue. No need to be mad, I have no bad intentions. I expressed what issue I have and adding the game as a non-Steam game does not solve the issues I have.
It came off as hostile but maybe I misread.
How does it not fix the problem? You can buy a gog game, add it to Steam and launch it with Proton. You’d just be using Steam instead of the gog launcher you want.
The problem is the launcher. He does not want one.
I bought Anno 1800 through uPlay and, to be fair, the app is not too bad, but now that I’m on Linux idk if I’d be able to get it working again. Not that I necessarily have interest to play again.
stores from EA, Ubisoft or Epic
Better yet, games
Is there a place that highlights these bad terms in the ToS?
I think valve has the absolute worst skins market out there but their store is really good.
I feel like they’ve earned it because they’ve put in the most work. They are the best in the game because they make the user experience the best there is. EA, Ubisoft, and Microsoft have/had their own storefronts or launchers but they are clunky and unpleasant to deal with and the only benefits they had were exclusives. They’ve never put any effort into user experience and were mainly doing it to make themselves more money and it definitely showed. The only one that’s ever been a real competitor is Epic Launcher. And while it has gotten better over the years, the user experience is still not anywhere near Steam. And even now the Epic Launcher is still unpleasant to deal with in a lot of cases unless you just use it to play Fortnite.
With Steam everything just works and is basically seamless. Not only that, before Steam the modding community for most games had an immense learning curve and most people just avoided it save for Minecraft. And as far as I can tell you can’t even mod games you buy on the Microsoft Store because their file structure is atrocious.
The only storefront I wish was better/more popular was GOG. It’s not bad and has a lot of benefits (Like no DRM and offline installers), but Steam just makes everything so easy it’s hard not to get stuck with them once you’ve started.
Offline installers are the reason I only use my money on gog. I like to have control over the things I own, though it’s getting harder and harder these days. But where it’s still possible I use it, and gog is the only storefront that offers this service (which beats every other service I could think of).
The only storefront I wish was better/more popular was GOG. It’s not bad and has a lot of benefits (Like no DRM and offline installers), but Steam just makes everything so easy it’s hard not to get stuck with them once you’ve started.
Well the no DRM/offline installer part is the most important part. I buy a game, I download and install it. If I need more features I may be better off with Steam anyway.
While Steam is more or less the best big solution we have, it does leave a lot to be desired. The only reason they are the best is because they clawed their way to the top early, kept themselves “good enough” compared to the competition, and haven’t yet sold out their entire customer base.
At this point, they completely dominate. It’s insanely difficult to compete with them. So long as they make half of an effort to improve things and continue to be somewhat benevolent they’ll likely keep their crown.
However, Valve is not ideal. They are still looking out for themselves, primarily. Many of Valves improvements have just been reactions to competitors and other threats not an inherent desire to deliver the best product possible or do the right thing. It’s just the fact that most competitors are more obviously greedy and immoral that makes Valve look like the heroes.
Without Epic and others throwing cash on the fire trying to compete I doubt we’d have seen even the slow upgrades to the Steam experience we’ve seen in recent years.
Without the Australian lawsuit, we’d have no return policy.
Without the clever abuse of arbitration by a group of lawyers, Valve would still have forced arbitration in the agreements.
Steam OS was only a thing, and Proton only got backed by Valve, when Microsoft first started positioning itself to eat Valve’s lunch by exerting control over Windows and pushing for things like UWP and the MS/Windows/XBOX storefronts on PC.
The vast majority of Valve’s storefront improvements are algorithms and crowd sourcing solutions. They want to be as hands off as possible because being hands on is hard and comes with liability. The whole skins market and gambling fiasco kind of shows that they’d much rather just not get involved if possible - same risk/reward cost/benefit analysis used by every greedy company. If that means lying about how aware they are of it that’s what they’ll do.
Don’t get me wrong. The least worst is, unfortunately, the best we’ve got. I love gaming and use Steam a lot. It’s just that the other big players are just so terrible that I think Valve gets a free pass. Hell, much of the tech industry is swallowing tactical nukes hoping that the radiation will somehow mutate them into a good business. In the meantime they are using the illusion of “expansion” from the resulting explosions to make themselves look bigger for investors. I support anyone not doing that.
How to explain Steam’s success on PC for console players: “Think of it like the X1 vs PS4 era. Steam is the PS4 and every competitor was the Xbox One”
That’s far to generous to other companies, they were far more like the WiiU.
I was thinking more along the lines of being proud of shit features that consumers despise, to the point it becomes an ad for your main competitor, like the PS4 “how to share a game with a friend” video
People feel good about Valve because they don’t rely on anti consumer behavior. It does what I want and doesn’t enforce me on other crap.
I’m a fan of Valve and Steam too. But you cannot deny that Valve does shitty stuff too. In example Valve is the company who either invented or popularized Loot Boxes. And they don’t do anything about the Black Market for the item trading and selling, such as Counter Strike skins and so on. And there are other little things that could be done, but nothing else upsets me as this.
But besides that, for the most part I love Valve. The commitment to support on Linux is unmatched in the gaming world. As a private company, Valve can do whatever they want. I genuinely think that PC gaming wouldn’t be this good without Valve. If anything, Microsoft would have the power… which in an alternate universe people have to suffer.
The skins and loot boxes is the only negative thing I ever see brought up about steam, and it is a completely voluntary system that applies to a few of their own games. In fact, I keep forgetting they even have them unless someone brings it up and despite being a terrible thing people apparently love them and would be mad if they went away.
So I’ll forgive them for one stupid thing they do and appreciate the other 99% of things they do.
While many accuse Valve of monopolising the PC gaming market, others argue that Steam’s dominance is simply the result of doing things right.
These assertions do not contradict. I cannot overstress that.
This whole article is ‘Valve’s monopoly is fine because they did things right.’
Having one good store is not, in itself, a problem. But it does mean we’re one fuckup away from having no good stores.
And if his yacht sinks, we’re boned.
lol I’m imagining a line item on all transactions like
Subtotal 13.21 Taxe 6.02 Platform fee 6.33 Yacht fee 10.00 --- Total $35.56 CAD
Devs are still free to sell their game outside of Steam and charge whatever price they want for that version
Alan Wake 2 didn’t make its money back for a year despite being a huge game on the second-biggest service.
Steam doesn’t care about other stores because other stores do not matter. They can let other stores sell Steam keys, and it still doesn’t threaten their untouchable market share.
Not and keep their listing in Steam they can’t.
You can though
Steam’s “most favored nation” contracts with devs explicitly prohibit this
I provided the example of Krita in another comment.
You’re only required to match deals outside Steam if you sold Steam keys. I haven’t found any other clause online.
I will say they were less weirdly invasive than whatever it was EA had me running just to play sims 2 in 2017ish. Why tf do you really need to protect you IP that hard for a game that old with newer sequels for???
So we’re acknowledging it’s a monopoly? Cool. Defense is still an acknowledgement. I’ve had the weirdest goddamn arguments with people insisting they’d never shop anywhere else, and if games aren’t on there it’s their own fault they’re doomed… but how dare anyone use the m-word! Obviously that can only mean one seller with absolute control, like how Standard Oil owned all 85% of the market.
I still don’t feel like it’s a monopoly when there is nothing stopping developers from selling the game as a paid download off their own site. Players can even add that game as a non-Steam game and still get a mostly complete experience as if they brought the game from Steam. Companies selling their game on Steam was always a option and not a necessity.
None of that is what defines a monopoly.
There’s only one store that matters. They have unthreatened supermajority marketshare. Customers go there by default - sometimes exclusively. Developers can sell there, or they’re basically fucked.
What you’re concerned about are anti-competitive practices. But some businesses don’t need those, to lack any relevant competition. It can just happen. They didn’t do anything wrong. They’re still monopolies.
