itch and gog are both great storefronts and I continue to buy games from both of those. At this point the only person who can defeat Steam is Steam itself. You might laugh but I’ve seen a change in leadership absolutely destroy companies before. Let us all pray that Gaben lives forever. The next person might run Steam into the ground to make himself richer, just like all our American CEO’s.
Loser mentality.
Epic actually make a good product challenge
level: impossible
No wonder they think its impossible, because they vibe code everything now.
No disagreement hating on vibe-coding, but that has nothing to do with it. Making a good product went directly against Epic’s customer-exploitation goals long before that became a thing.
I know, I was just making a cheeky comment. What I actually meant is, it won’t change by just vibe coding it.
If Epic could find a way to monetize the constant fucking whining about Valve they’d be doing great.
They are too busy to monetize their userbase.
Witness the efficiency of capitalism
-> a whiny man baby at the very tippity top of a shitty corporation complains about his rivals offering too good of a product repeatedly over and over again.
All Steam had to do is something that has long been forgotten by lot of companies these days. Treat customers well and make them feel they are the main priority.
Lot of other companies know they can treat customers like crap and still make money, and even outright reject them like Crucial deciding enterprise customers buying millions to billions in bulk sales is all they need.
Many companies think customers can be forced to buy from them. Like Epic did with exclusives and thinking sounds bites taunting Steam would wins hearts and minds. Meanwhile steam just quietly focused on improvements to their own services without acknowledging Epic.
The performance complaints were also stupid.
Valve had their boot time fixed in beta channel for weeks
Only an idiot would have put out a marketing blitz about it when the sword of Damocles is swinging above them.
Lol, the only real competition would be GoG, not fucking Epic
Agreed. GoG is the Nintendo of the consoles, where it does not try to compete on the same level as the other two. Off course not at the same success and without the exclusives, I just mean they try to be different and offer something the others don’t.
Itch.io has a lot of games too. 😊
That’s a different breed of game though. Itcho is indie dialed to 11. It can be difficult for a lot of people to get into the games there.
It’s the logical continuation of Gabe’s law. He said piracy was a service issue and that people would be willing to pay for the product is the service was good.
Epic tried and win by the venture capitalist playbook and give away free shit and undercut the incumbents to steal away their customers. Unfortunately that doesn’t work because their service is shit, and Valve has incredible soft capital built up.
Yours is definitely the best explanation of the circumstances. Epic saw games as the product they were selling. Gamers can pirate games, so the free game you want with some hoops to jump through vs a free game you didn’t ask for with some hoops to jump through is a weak value proposition. Valve sees Steam as the product. It’s not just a good library manager, it’s a store with decent discovery and relatively accurate user reviews, and a moderately useful multiplayer experience. If they had felt the pressure to incorporate TeamSpeak, then Discord wouldn’t even exist, but that was money Valve didn’t have to spend to still be more convenient than piracy.
I don’t make a lot of money, so I’ve gotten value out of the free games on Epic, but their launcher is terrible for figuring out what I’d like to play next. Playnite has ended up being an incredibly useful launcher, because it can consolidate launcher libraries, then show me which games I haven’t played, then sort them by critic score or user score.
I probably have 30 free games on Epic. I have literally ended up buying some of those same games on Steam because the user experience of Epic is so bad.
The epic games launcher looks and feels like a virus. I tried to grab a free game from them once and had a visceral reaction to the launcher lol
It’s like Walmart vs Costco.
The bar is so goddamn low it’s unreal
Kiaran Ritchie, former principal animation engineer at Epic Games kicked off discussions surrounding Steam’s 30% sales cut last week (with the assertion that “you could vibe code a Steam alternative in a week”).
It took Steam so long to add a shopping cart, because there weren’t many games in Steam at that time anyway. And it took so long for Epic Games to add a shopping cart, because nobody wanted to buy many games on Epic anyway (due to either Fortnite only play or just to grab Free Game giveaways).
It turns out “some other company will make more money” isn’t a compelling sales pitch for your store. Who knew
if you’re running a business (like epic), and you feel like you’re somehow just entitled to a certain percentage of the market share dominated by the king of the market (steam), while also giving consumers literally no reason to give you that money (in epic’s case, actually giving more reasons NOT to use them), then-- LOL get fucked. keep shitting on linux and refusing to unfuck your shit tier slopfest UI, while whining about everything. i find it amusing.
they bought a game I liked after it was released and now I can’t play it, because I don’t internet without VPN. I’m very upset with them about this.
because they own it now.
and they want my money.
Seriously!!
The best part to me is that this is a former “principal animation engineer,” and they still have no self-awareness about why Epic sucks.
It reminds me of an old saying that really good people hire really good people… but mediocre people often hire those that are worse than them to look better. That is, “A” people hire “A” people, but “B” people hire “C” people, and the team (or company) declines.
Essays like this make me wonder if Epic has hired many good people over the years.
It’s not a good sign that the cult of entitlement at Epic is so strong, even their most experienced former technical staff still write entitled essays after they leave. And they post them on X.
you are not the target audience
just assume malfeasance
unfortunately, narcissists/psychos are often the ones that ruthlessly manipulate and bully and deceive their way to the top, shoving aside higher quality and more human people more deserving of those positions of authority. you see it in musk, bezos, the epic chode, etc… also in govt
He argues if a better launcher emerged it “would still be of no interest to Steam users”
What part of that sounds like “no reason” to give such a service money? If the guy in the article was talking about Epic I’d be inclined to agree with you, but he’s talking about a hypothetical service that’s better than Steam. I’m inclined to agree with him too, it would be very difficult to make a better service than Steam (he’s obviously wrong for thinking you could vibe code such a thing) but even if someone did at this point I have so much of my gaming life on Steam that it would be difficult to switch.
It reads to me like you’re arguing with Tim Sweeney more than the guy in the article you’re responding to.
It’s all hypothetical though because there is no alternative the matches steam’s features. If there were i have no doubt people would use it, i mean most people tolerate uplay and ea origin and all that, and they are also much worse than steam.
To be fair, I think Steam’s actual launcher is the worst part of interacting with Steam, but it works well enough and everything else about the steam experience is smooth and all but like 30 of my games are there so I keep using them. My point being, even if someone made a better launcher that wouldn’t be enough in part because there launcher is only part of the experience.
People use capitalism to mean anything involving commerce, I guess.
The fact that valve is privately owned and the profits go to the owner instead of the labor isn’t really the reason steam is dominant. A worker owned co-op could have succeeded by making the same product. Though if they were beholden to shareholders who demanded a profit, it probably would have resulted in a worse product. An argument against capitalism, with uninvolved owners taking profits, if anything.
They made a product people like. Boo-boo. Epic could have made a good product. They didn’t.
To be fair, by nearly all accounts, Valve treats (and compensates) their employees very well. I think that compensation may also include profit-sharing but I might be wrong.
I am surprised that UE and Fortnite are still afloat lol. Are they run by the same company and people? Or are they smart enough to let devs do their thing bringing the money home?
Well let me think some reasons to actually support Valve:
- Supports open source
- Doesn’t try to fuck up their customer base
- Produces nonrestrictive hardware
- Invents things to make gaming better
- Their own games actually optimized and work on older hardware
- Optimizes the gaming experience and helps 3rd party developers to be successful (literally opposite of Nintendo)
- Customer support actually work
- Non invasive opt in data collection / telemetry to make products better
- Filters away the adware customer is product bs
- Supports older hardware by updating / upgrading drivers that original manifacturer doesn’t anymore (less evaste, more opportunities to game)
- Developed SteamOS (Linux distribution) to keep Microsoft from vendor locking gaming
-Supports open source
-Doesn’t try to fuck up their customer base
-Produces nonrestrictive hardware
-Invents things to make gaming better
-Their own games actually optimized and work on older hardware
-Optimizes the gaming experience and helps 3rd party developers to be successful (literally opposite of Nintendo)
-Customer support actually work
-Non invasive opt in data collection / telemetry to make products better
-Filters away the adware customer is product bs
-Supports older hardware by updating drivers that original manifacturer doesn’t anymore (less evaste, more opportunities to game)
-Developed SteamOS (Linux distribution) to keep Microsoft from Vendor locking gamingIf you add 2 spaces before using a line break markdown will preserve your formatting. Alternatively, if you add a space after the hyphen you can make a bullet list which will also keep your line breaks.
- Supports open source
- Doesn’t try to fuck up their customer base
- …
I learned recently you can also add a \ to get
a similar effect.
More like it’s compatition is so shit, it doesn’t have to lift a finger to stay in the lead.
