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Bardeh posted:I'm not sure I agree with this - competition is good. EA has their subscription service which is only a few bucks a month for a ton of great games, and the more expensive tier which lets you play their top new releases. GoG's is completely DRM free. Epic is heavily curated and I like the look of the games they're bringing to the table. I think the frustration a lot of people feel is how many of the storefronts aren't actually consumer-focused alternatives as much as just really limited attempts to avoid a third-party markup. Like, EA Access/Origin aren't terrible unto themselves, but they're primarily a storefront just for EA games. Things like Steam, GOG and (hopefully) Epic are less customer-frustrating because they're offering a marketplace with more convenience and value, but when you have EA Access/Origin for just EA games and Battle.net for just Activision-Blizzard games and the Bethesda Launcher for just Bethsoft games and someday you throw in Ubisoft finally flipping the switch that makes UPlay your location for Ubisoft games, it feels like you're going down a terrible path where every major publisher could credibly have their own thing, and while that decentralizes a Steam-style monopoly, it creates a bunch of separate fiefdoms with their own corporate markups rather than storefronts that are trying to explicitly compete with each other to provide the best customer experience, which has the added issue of raising the barrier of PC gaming entry to people who are inclined to/capable of juggling a half-dozen logins with 2FA for each one so you minimize the added risk of, say, Bethsoft unintentionally surfacing all of your PII because not every corporation is going to put the work into securing their storefronts properly because their primary concern, rather than customer experience, is markup management. It's good that companies are competing, and I'm really excited for the Epic store given how hard they're coming out swinging on establishing a foothold as a new consumer marketplace and how it will hopefully force both them and Steam to up their respective games, but I don't think the every-publisher-a-storefront model is one that actually benefits the consumer in the long run.
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Dec 8, 2018 20:37
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 22:13 |
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