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Pirate Jet posted:Classifying Steam as “a bit of middleware” is ludicrously reductive when it’s an entire social platform, content delivery service through both streaming and downloads, VR software suite, etc. If you don’t like those features, that’s fine, I’m not gonna sit here and defend the Steam forums, but maybe the answer to those features being lackluster is to improve upon them and not pull their funding entirely, considering Epic is trying that strategy now and is finding themselves unable to handle even transaction fees for international payment methods. The middleware comment was directed at people who think Steamworks is worth the difference between a 12% cut and a 30% cut. I don't think you can look at Valve and say "Why yes, the problem with all the release-and-abandon steam features is a lack of funding". Valve has effectively infinite money. Even the most conservative estimates put Steam's take at over a billion a year. More money won't solve whats wrong with Valve.
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Apr 11, 2019 18:29
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Frankly I feel like it still counts towards Steam being a true monopoly that most games you buy just give you a steam key.
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Apr 11, 2019 18:30
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Xae posted:The middleware comment was directed at people who think Steamworks is worth the difference between a 12% cut and a 30% cut. So it’s a good thing I’m not suggesting that Valve get more money, I’m suggesting that the money they already do take is fine and is matched by most of their competitors. As I said earlier, the 12% cut is so low that Epic needs to pass international transaction fees onto the consumer, and have admitted themselves that those fees can sometimes account to more of a 25% share of the game’s price. Nowhere in this thread have I said that Valve is king poo poo who does everything right. Their hyper libertarian approach is allowing dogshit like Rape Day onto the platform (even if only briefly, still for too long) and has turned the community on their forums and social pages into a cesspool. I am saying that maybe acting like those features don’t need funding at all isn’t going to make things better. My argument this whole time is that Steam isn’t perfect, and maybe not even good, but letting a richer company take over the platform just because they decided they own it now is a solution that only makes things worse. jokes posted:Frankly I feel like it still counts towards Steam being a true monopoly that most games you buy just give you a steam key. Valve gets a 0% cut of generated Steam keys. There’s a difference between Steam the platform and Steam the store. Competing with Steam the store is fine, which is why it already has several. Competing with Steam the platform is annoying. Pirate Jet fucked around with this message at 18:38 on Apr 11, 2019 |
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Apr 11, 2019 18:35
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Pirate Jet posted:72% of games on Steam are sold through its built-in store. That’s not the total of PC games sold period. So do you think that one corporation having 72% of sales (given the vast majority of new releases are published via steam) doesn't allow them to exert enormous market power on competitors, as well and up and down the supply chain? Why are you white knighting in this thread?
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Apr 11, 2019 18:52
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I agree that Epic is going about launching their store the wrong way by gobbling up games with exclusivity deals and massively dragging down their sales and visibility (Ashen is my go-to example). I actually want there to be a worthy competitor to Steam out there because maybe it'll get Valve to make their client not be so unoptimized and ugly and lovely, but right now Epic is basically bullying their way into that market and that just sucks for the game devs themselves, bigger cut or no.
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Apr 11, 2019 18:54
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Gammymajams posted:So do you think that one corporation having 72% of sales (given the vast majority of new releases are published via steam) doesn't allow them to exert enormous market power on competitors, as well and up and down the supply chain? Why are you white knighting in this thread? Not only are you operating off of this weird assumption that sales on other PC gaming stores are small enough to be negligible (they’re not) and thus we should somehow treat Steam as being 100% of PC gaming, you’re also putting words in my mouth by saying that I deny Valve doesn’t have a lot of market power. Of course they do. What I’m saying is that Valve doesn’t fit the literal American definition of a monopoly, only a practical one that people throw around casually. If Windows isn’t a monopoly on PC operating systems, then Steam sure as poo poo isn’t a monopoly on digital video game stores. If you wanna try and argue that it should be enforced that Steam the store isn’t shoved into your face as soon as you open Steam the platform, then sure, go ahead - that does make sense. But as of now you’re pulling some ridiculous poo poo accusing me of “white knighting” for merely observing reality.
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Apr 11, 2019 19:17
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In a lot of cases the game you bought cannot be played or sometimes even installed without installing Steam unless you made the initial purchase from a DRM-free competitor, so I'd say that constitutes having a monopoly because they are essentially the key that you need to make your car start. They do profit from the sale of every game that is on Steam regardless of where you buy it from because you have to use their platform to play it.
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Apr 11, 2019 19:25
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Not much of a difference when that key just becomes EPIC only.
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Apr 11, 2019 19:26
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Sure, but my point is that a functional monopoly (you need Steam to play most PC games) is the same thing as having a monopoly on digital sales of games in general. There is no difference in this case. They make their money from your purchase even if you don't buy the game through Steam itself. In that way platforms like Origin, Uplay, and now the Epic Games Store are a good thing because they offer alternatives and competition that is necessary to keep Steam from being the be-all end-all.
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Apr 11, 2019 19:31
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CJacobs posted:In a lot of cases the game you bought cannot be played or sometimes even installed without installing Steam unless you made the initial purchase from a DRM-free competitor, so I'd say that constitutes having a monopoly because they are essentially the key that you need to make your car start. They do profit from the sale of every game that is on Steam regardless of where you buy it from because you have to use their platform to play it. This is true, but there’s nothing forcing those developers to only use Steam’s APIs or storefront. There’s oodles of games you can buy on either Steam or GOG, some of which even use online multiplayer or other features that Steamworks offers to take care of for the developer. There’s nothing in Valve’s policies saying that releasing a game on Steam prevents you from selling it on another platform. The reality is that developing these kinds of features is difficult and time-consuming, and this is where we circle back to the argument of “deserving” a 30% cut - if Valve is making it easier for developers to develop their games, I see nothing wrong with charging the industry standard for doing so. There’s a vast difference between a game being exclusive because its distribution allows it unique methods it couldn’t use on other APIs, and a game being exclusive because they were handed a fat sack of cash.
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Apr 11, 2019 19:32
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That's fair, and again like I said above I think Epic is going about pushing their way into this market in a very bad way that will alienate people. I don't know what the right way to become a competitor to Steam is, but neither Origin (EA's platform for EA games), Uplay (tertiary service tied into Steam game ownership), nor Epic (hoovering up exclusivity deals to forcibly push out other platforms) have been a good solution. I think Origin is the closest, though.
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Apr 11, 2019 19:35
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I’d say GOG is the closest. There’s a lot of value in a principle of offering things completely DRM-free, and GOG Galaxy actually turned out to be a pretty great addition that didn’t sacrifice any of the advantages of the service.
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Apr 11, 2019 19:38
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Pirate Jet posted:Forgive me for being American, I guess, but here the definition is that of a company that has exclusive control over a good or service and imposes restrictions to prevent competitors from happening. There’s nothing stopping competitors like GoG and itch.io from popping up alongside Steam, and Valve doesn’t enforce exclusive control over how any game other than the ones they developed themselves is sold, unlike maybe another certain competitor. ok well american courts generally see 75% as being the threshold for a monopoly. moreover, steam's 1. control over your existing library, much of which uses steam as drm, essentially locks you into their platform and 2. prevents you from listing your game at a lower price on other platforms that offer better deals to developers. games that aren't on steam are at a massive disadvantage in terms of actually reaching a market. in order for a competitor like EGS to rise, it has to spend enormous amounts of money buying up exclusives that can drive people to its platform. that's a huge barrier to the market that exists entirely due to steam's stranglehold over online sales. look, egs loving sucks as a piece of software but there is nothing wrong with its strategy, even if it is somewhat inconvenient to us. and steam have competition is a good thing
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Apr 11, 2019 19:41
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CJacobs posted:Sure, but my point is that a functional monopoly (you need Steam to play most PC games) is the same thing as having a monopoly on digital sales of games in general. There is no difference in this case. They make their money from your purchase even if you don't buy the game through Steam itself. In that way platforms like Origin, Uplay, and now the Epic Games Store are a good thing because they offer alternatives and competition that is necessary to keep Steam from being the be-all end-all. No they dont. Steam keys are generated for free and bypass everything from the steam storefront except having to install the client since most of these games have steams DRM anyways. There is more consumer friendly competition from within steam itself than any of the other storefronts because it actually leads to consistently lower prices. Short of nationalizing steam I just dont see a solution to the problem, because all the other stores are just leveraging their IPs and or their financial power to try and create their own little walled gardens
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Apr 11, 2019 19:50
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The REAL Goobusters posted:they literally tried and failed and have closed their game store lmao. So no they didn't do a better job They did give developers a bigger cut than even EGS did. That they failed with a potentially better economic structure is more a sign of how the entrenched players have an advantage. So far you do actually have to buy developers into exclusivity or be a giant publisher to get people to launch a non-Steam client for even a hot second. There's very real reasons for the bigger players in the industry to want people to use another launcher, but right now it's a battle of interests as a lot of consumers are insistent that 30% of the PC gaming industry's profits be redirected to a Seattle fatass. Discord had no killer app and didn't have money to throw around; at least EGS can say "everybody who plays Fortnite on PC has already installed this thing." Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Apr 11, 2019 |
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Apr 11, 2019 20:01
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The REAL Goobusters posted:they literally tried and failed and have closed their game store lmao. So no they didn't do a better job They did do a better job though, that is the problem. Discord has better social features than Steam. Hell, it has replaced Steam for most groups these days. It also had a better cut for Developers. It didn't matter that the store was better for consumers and producers because Valve is a monopoly.
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Apr 11, 2019 20:08
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Discord is owned in part by Tencent too!
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Apr 11, 2019 20:11
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Xae posted:They did do a better job though, that is the problem. Discord has over 130+ Million users and their store still failed because Epic swooped in and made a bigger splash. I love using Discord as well and their social features are better but I don't want to use discord to buy my games. People don't think about Discord as a store, they think about it as a communication platform. The store didn't fail because of Valve being a monopoly, it failed because of Epic joining the race. Anyway I'm about to drop a loving knowledge bomb from someone I know in the ~biz~ https://twitter.com/esportsguy/status/1108776370929164288 https://twitter.com/esportsguy/status/1108777252576092161 https://twitter.com/esportsguy/status/1108777331118596096 https://twitter.com/esportsguy/status/1108777411137552384 https://twitter.com/esportsguy/status/1108777511251394560 The whole thread is interesting and worth checking out
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Apr 11, 2019 20:19
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Discord is just filling the niche left by the fact that most in-game communication options are loving awful, just like Ventrilo and Teamspeak before it
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Apr 11, 2019 20:24
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CJacobs posted:Epic is basically bullying their way into that market and that just sucks for the game devs themselves, bigger cut or no. Game devs have some reservations but are generally pretty happy tbh. The whole effect of EGS if successful is a store that turns back the clock to before Greenlight, which is the point where Steam has become so uncontrollably useless as a store. Putting aside dumb experimental poo poo like Steam Movies, giving something like Grand Theft Auto equal weight on the store carousel with bullshit clickteam titles put together over the weekend was only going to piss big name developers off and they're the ones paying a huge share of that 30%. The market at the end of the day needs at least two games stores, because to maintain a store that CDPR, Ubi, Zenimax, etc consider being a part of means not displaying them alongside "inappropriate" games, but as the recent outcry for anime titty clickers has shown there is an audience for games targeting lonely hypersexed virgins and the people who make them want a place to be able to sell them. This is one of those things that feels like other mediums have been able to figure it out, since nobody expects porn movies to be sold at Target and there are stores that exist to specifically sell pornography. The only thing is that Valve's monopoly over PC gaming is the kind of retail dominance Walmart could only dream of.
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Apr 11, 2019 20:26
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What if it was the Erect Gay Store and it's just for the fellas?
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Apr 11, 2019 20:34
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Mordja posted:What if it was the Erect Gay Store and it's just for the fellas? 
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Apr 11, 2019 20:39
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Craptacular! posted:Game devs have some reservations but are generally pretty happy tbh. I wonder. https://www.gamerevolution.com/news/517273-epic-games-store-rejected-assault-android-cactus https://mobile.twitter.com/SanatanaMishra/status/1111583907973992448
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Apr 11, 2019 21:23
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Scrub-Niggurath posted:Discord is just filling the niche left by the fact that most in-game communication options are loving awful, just like Ventrilo and Teamspeak before it Maybe all the early access people will move over to Discord before migrating their products to Steam or something.
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Apr 11, 2019 21:46
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Det_no posted:I wonder. Steam's curation problem was solvable, just not the way they wanted it to be so they gave up.
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Apr 11, 2019 21:57
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Pylons posted:Steam's curation problem was solvable, just not the way they wanted it to be so they gave up. This is the story of all of Steam's problems
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Apr 11, 2019 22:44
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May I ask what the actual problems are with Steam? So far I've seen a lot of people talking about how competition is going to be great and make Valve fix "stuff" but so far, I've used Steam for nearly a decade I think. It unifies all my games into one system where I can have everything I own in a single list. They have a very generous refund policy that essentially allows you to "rent" a game for a two hour demo. There's a wish list, plenty of categories in the store to break down searches, there was the "review bombing" issue they fixed which didn't really have anything to do with another game store's existence. I've never had any problems with Steam, and adding another launcher, and another list of games that I'll now have to flip back and forth to, it just seems like an inconvenience for the sake of it. From a lazy casual perspective it just looks like Epic wants to make all of the money and is strong arming their way into the online store market, and people are praising them for fixing problems with the Steam platform that I just don't see. What are all these glaring issues that have never affected me even once?
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Apr 11, 2019 23:09
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Nucular Carmul posted:May I ask what the actual problems are with Steam? So far I've seen a lot of people talking about how competition is going to be great and make Valve fix "stuff" but so far, I've used Steam for nearly a decade I think. It unifies all my games into one system where I can have everything I own in a single list. They have a very generous refund policy that essentially allows you to "rent" a game for a two hour demo. There's a wish list, plenty of categories in the store to break down searches, there was the "review bombing" issue they fixed which didn't really have anything to do with another game store's existence. I've never had any problems with Steam, and adding another launcher, and another list of games that I'll now have to flip back and forth to, it just seems like an inconvenience for the sake of it. From a lazy casual perspective it just looks like Epic wants to make all of the money and is strong arming their way into the online store market, and people are praising them for fixing problems with the Steam platform that I just don't see. What are all these glaring issues that have never affected me even once? For me: Curation is atrocious on Steam. Valve has tried to get around the issue constantly with Greenlight and then eventually giving up entirely and letting mountains of bad, low effort games onto Steam. Epic says they will remain curated by a human, so I guess it depends on whether you believe them or not. Categories are worthless and tags are doubly so, for example, I am looking at strategy games, and right now, the "new and trending" list includes a game called "Happy Anime Puzzle". It is also under the "Simulation" category. Epic has said reviews will be opt-in by developers, so that fixes the review bombing issue. This is more of a.. morality than functionality thing, but I find Steam's laissez-faire approach to content regulation to be extremely distasteful. They can claim that straight up offensive games don't represent the views of Valve or whatever, they still take their 30% from those games. I don't think this will be an issue for EGS because I don't expect those games to make it past their curation.
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Apr 12, 2019 00:25
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A lot of the issues are not necessarily consumer facing, though some like hideous curation and inconsistent policies are to an extent. I'd hardly call review bombing fixed. They only just started to tackle it. Their response to review bombing has been, until about a week ago, to do nothing and later they decided to just say "hey this is being hit by a lot of reviews" which didn't do much. There are probably a lot of other things too but those are the few that I could think of off the top of my head. There was a good polygon article on it about a year ago that had a good summary but I'm on mobile and can't seem to find it.
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Apr 12, 2019 00:26
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Nucular Carmul posted:May I ask what the actual problems are with Steam? So far I've seen a lot of people talking about how competition is going to be great and make Valve fix "stuff" but so far, I've used Steam for nearly a decade I think. It unifies all my games into one system where I can have everything I own in a single list. They have a very generous refund policy that essentially allows you to "rent" a game for a two hour demo. There's a wish list, plenty of categories in the store to break down searches, there was the "review bombing" issue they fixed which didn't really have anything to do with another game store's existence. I've never had any problems with Steam, and adding another launcher, and another list of games that I'll now have to flip back and forth to, it just seems like an inconvenience for the sake of it. From a lazy casual perspective it just looks like Epic wants to make all of the money and is strong arming their way into the online store market, and people are praising them for fixing problems with the Steam platform that I just don't see. What are all these glaring issues that have never affected me even once? Like every dipshit tech website in the world they think the community can police itself but in reality gamers must be ruled with an iron fist.
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Apr 12, 2019 00:28
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Nucular Carmul posted:May I ask what the actual problems are with Steam? So far I've seen a lot of people talking about how competition is going to be great and make Valve fix "stuff" but so far, I've used Steam for nearly a decade I think. It unifies all my games into one system where I can have everything I own in a single list. They have a very generous refund policy that essentially allows you to "rent" a game for a two hour demo. There's a wish list, plenty of categories in the store to break down searches, there was the "review bombing" issue they fixed which didn't really have anything to do with another game store's existence. I've never had any problems with Steam, and adding another launcher, and another list of games that I'll now have to flip back and forth to, it just seems like an inconvenience for the sake of it. From a lazy casual perspective it just looks like Epic wants to make all of the money and is strong arming their way into the online store market, and people are praising them for fixing problems with the Steam platform that I just don't see. What are all these glaring issues that have never affected me even once? I am not sure. I myself have never had any issues with Steam before. In fact, the only issues that I can think if right off the top of my head is the fact that Steam limits the amount of friends you can have. Now, for an everyday Joe the number is more than enough, but for somebody like a YouTuber with a following, it can be restricting. That, and I have had the personal misfortune to use Steam's customer support. It's bad. Very bad.
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Apr 12, 2019 00:33
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That sounds like a plus. They should put more restrictions on YouTubers such as on their life.
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Apr 12, 2019 00:39
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Allowing devs to control reviews is crazy talk. Just nuts. How many games have actually been affected by review bombing anyway?
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Apr 12, 2019 00:42
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Mayveena posted:Allowing devs to control reviews is crazy talk. Just nuts. How many games have actually been affected by review bombing anyway? Dozens at this point. For anything from because Warhammer: Total War didn't have full Mandarin support to because a developer pissed off someone on Twitter. Sankis posted:A lot of the issues are not necessarily consumer facing, though some like hideous curation and inconsistent policies are to an extent. I'd hardly call review bombing fixed. They only just started to tackle it. Their response to review bombing has been, until about a week ago, to do nothing and later they decided to just say "hey this is being hit by a lot of reviews" which didn't do much. https://www.polygon.com/2017/5/16/15622366/valve-gabe-newell-sales-origin-destructive
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Apr 12, 2019 00:50
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Mayveena posted:Allowing devs to control reviews is crazy talk. Just nuts. How many games have actually been affected by review bombing anyway? Quite a few.
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Apr 12, 2019 00:51
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Xae posted:Dozens at this point. Another TW game was review bombed like 8 months ago because they added female generals to like 4 factions. That looks like the article I remember but drat I thought it was more recent.
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Apr 12, 2019 00:59
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Sankis posted:Another TW game was review bombed like 8 months ago because they added female generals to like 4 factions. That was Rome 2.
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Apr 12, 2019 01:02
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China is also getting in on the review bombing, like when that Taiwan game secretly made fun of the President of China before getting de-listed.
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Apr 12, 2019 01:08
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Pylons posted:Quite a few. Here are the top 100 games being played right now.. How many of those have been affected by review bombs? I'm saying that there aren't enough to then restrict players' ability to review games across the board. Now for some people I'm sure one is too many, but to allow devs to control reviews makes them useless.
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Apr 12, 2019 01:10
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Mayveena posted:Allowing devs to control reviews is crazy talk. Just nuts. How many games have actually been affected by review bombing anyway? Off the top of my head... Skyrim got bombed when Bethesda tried their paid mods thing. (It was reversed). GTA V got bombed for banning mods and players. (It was reversed). Nier got bombed because it had no chinese language. Rome II got bombed because of a fake outrage created by the daily stormer. One of the latest Tomb Raiders got a soft bomb because the game got a huge discount soon after release. Paradox got bombed because they decided to increase their prices outside the US and I think they did it right during a sale or something. (It was reversed). PUBG got bombed by chinese players because of some issues with their service. Metro and Borderlands got bombed because Epic. I wouldn't know how to define "affected" though. We don't really know the effects review bombing has on a game other than creating brief PR nightmares, only Devotion was taken off the store and that's because their cheeky joke caused problems with their publisher because of political reasons. Case in point, Rome II got bombed by incel alt-right dailystormer weirdos but it's still top selling whenever it goes on sale. Its score hovers around mostly positive/mixed which coincides with most other TW games and the bomb doesn't seem to have caused any drop in players or anything either. It's kind of hard to say what bombs actually do. I guess the answer would be "nothing" now that they don't affect the review aggregate though. Det_no fucked around with this message at 03:50 on Apr 12, 2019 |
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Apr 12, 2019 01:17
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