Meanwhile if you’re part of Steam’s partner program you know that Valve are constantly improving things on the backend for devs and publishers. Just about the only “developer-friendly” thing Epic does that Steam doesn’t do better is asking for a smaller cut.

I have never had remote play together work smoothly enough to actually play. Even when on the same network the input lag is problematic.

The meme of “Valve maintains dominance by doing nothing but waits for competition to trip over itself” is funny but they do put part of the billions they make towards beneficial products for their customers.

• Remote Play (stream your own game from another PC)
• Remote Play Together (can stream a game to friends without a copy of the game and play together)
• Linux, Proton
• Well designed hardware innovations

Not out of the goodness of their heart but to drive sales and foster a customer base willing to return.

GOG and itch do try in their own way so I have bought from them, IMO they are the only competitors making serious efforts to build a mutually benefical gaming ecosystem.

Epic, Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA and the rest are like a trapdoor with a wooden board over it. Tim Sweeney is standing there hoping you won’t think he’s trying to find the right time to swipe the board away and get you to fall in.

It’s called shortsighted management.

Valve has had success with Steam because they ask themselves “What do gamers want, and how can we turn a profit by giving it to them?” For example, many of us want to mod our games. Enter the Steam Workshop. It’s free, convenient and exclusive so it fidelizes (is that a word in English?) customers and indirectly makes them money while improving their image in the market.

Epic’s management instead asks themselves “How can we make money off of gamers?” without trying to understand the market. They see that there are many free games on Steam, and many console exclusives, and their tiny MBA brains decide that the only way forward is with free games to lock us to their platform (that’s what Valve did, right?) and exclusives so we have no choice. And they have no idea why Valve waste their time with Workshop, Community forums for each game, Proton (Linux and Mac are such a tiny share of the market!) or any of that not-obviously-profitable filler that is in fact what sets Steam apart as a service rather than just a storefront.

Family sharing got a huge upgrade recently too where now only the game you’re actually playing is locked instead of your whole library.

Tim Swiney said on the game product page there should be no disclosure of Ai usage in the games, in response to Steam “forcing” the disclosure of what is being used Ai for. Just shows how I will avoid Epic Games Store even more than before. There are plenty other reasons. Epic will not buy me as a “user” by giving me free games (however I do not blame anyone else doing so, free is a great deal to be honest).

The meme of “Valve maintains dominance by doing nothing but waits for competition to trip over itself” is funny but they do put part of the billions they make towards beneficial products for their customers.

• Remote Play (stream your own game from another PC)
• Remote Play Together (can stream a game to friends without a copy of the game and play together)
• Linux, Proton
• Well designed hardware innovations

Not out of the goodness of their heart but to drive sales and foster a customer base willing to return.

GOG and itch do try in their own way so I have bought from them, IMO they are the only competitors making serious efforts to build a mutually benefical gaming ecosystem.

Epic, Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA and the rest are like a trapdoor with a wooden board over it. Tim Sweeney is standing there hoping you won’t think he’s trying to find the right time to swipe the board away and get you to fall in.

Not out of the goodness of their heart but to drive sales and foster a customer base willing to return.

I think this is partially true, but also I legit think Gabe Newell is ideologically a market anarchist that legitimately loves video games as a medium. He probably could have (more safely) made even more money doing something else considering his early Microsoft connections and ability but he didn’t.

Unfortunately as a result, the moment hes dead Valve might be in trouble long term. Depends on who takes over afterward and how they want to direct Valve. Pierre-Loup Griffais or Lawrence Yang seem possible given how successful Steam Deck has been. Its hard to get a read on them. They seem smart and well meaning though.

Based on what I’ve heard of the internal structure of Valve, there’s a good chance he’s helped foster enough an environment of “doing what you love” that it’d survive him retiring/dying. Maybe not forever, but at least for a long while after he’s gone.

Alright I know people rag on Epic all the time… but it’s truly incredible how hard they keep dropping the ball. It’s been SEVEN YEARS since it was created and it still feels so basic and terrible to use.

The store is drab and uses huge chunks of space just to advertise fortnite and f2p rewards. Discovery is terrible and the store is full of crypto scams and AI spam shovelware, which is ironic because Epic started off being very selective about what’s allowed to be published there. The store also feels like adware because it keeps spamming random notifications and ads unless you turn it off.

The best part is that Epic constantly blames users for not wanting to leave Steam instead of admitting their store sucks. They keep spending tens of millions buying exclusives and giving away games for free rather than spending any time improving the store. Seriously, what are they doing over there?

The reviews are a part of the community, even if they’re not found in the “Community” part of Steam.

But yeah, EGS has many failings, pretty much all of which were pointed out right at the start. They weren’t improved upon because Epic don’t want to deliver the best possible experience or promote the capability of the PC as a gaming platform. They just want you to buy digital shit, get bored of it, and then buy more digital shit at the lowest possible cost to them. Effort costs money so they won’t make any.

The reviews are a part of the community, even if they’re not found in the “Community” part of Steam.

But yeah, EGS has many failings, pretty much all of which were pointed out right at the start. They weren’t improved upon because Epic don’t want to deliver the best possible experience or promote the capability of the PC as a gaming platform. They just want you to buy digital shit, get bored of it, and then buy more digital shit at the lowest possible cost to them. Effort costs money so they won’t make any.

Almost a decade ago I was playing a game called paragon in development by epic games. The game was amazing, and then epic forced the devs away from what the game was, a MOBA, and forced the devs to make it more like a brawler with smaller and smaller maps. Epic ignored the community playing the game and acted shocked when the community left. While all this was going down, they were alpha testing fortnight, which was a plants, zombies clone with base building. When PubG took off, they killed Paragon, rolled the assets into fornite, and abandoned what fortnite was to turn it into a PubG copycat. (Highly recommend predecessor, a fan made remake from the released paragon assets with og heros, it’s on steam.)

Epic doesn’t have an original thought rattling around in the heads of their MBAs and C-suite. They copy what others are doing, and pray that some of the shit they fling against the wall will stick. They don’t want to take chances or innovate. Plenty of other options out there besides their game engine too. I’m looking forward to the fall of epic and EGS.