Yes? Because if the game isnāt exclusive then itās on Steam.
Thatās what a monopoly gets ya. Especially if you have policies in place preventing competing storefronts from competing on price.
Exclusivity deals arenāt a particularly bad thing. Nerddom in general also keeps complaining when other first parties donāt have enough exclusives, often at the same time they make the opposite argument when it comes to Steam, which is part of the weirdness.
Itās a weirdly circular argument that youāre okay with Epic exclusives as long as the devs arenāt profiting from it, even if the end result is the same for you. And itās definitely not what people here are arguing. Thatās a very forced, disingenuous stance.
So a Monopoly (you can only purchase from one service) is bad, but exclusivity deals (you can only purchase from one service) arenāt bad. But Iām the one with the circular logic.
general also keeps complaining when other first parties donāt have enough exclusives,
theyāre idiots.
A stance someone else may or may not have is irrelevant to this discussion or the arguments I am making.
consoles are diffrent from store fronts. No one is complaining that a PC game store doesnāt have enough exclusives.
Itās a weirdly circular argument that youāre okay with Epic exclusives as long as the devs arenāt profiting from it, even if the end result is the same for you.
The end result is not the same. Thatās like saying āitās weird that youāre not okay with slave labour to work on farms, when the end result is the same to you.ā How it gets there is relevant, as well as the long term effects of supporting it. Epic has made it clear by their actions that they do not care about the end user, and if they end up āwinningā against Steam they would actively make things worse.
Yeah, that only works if you wildly misrepresent a monopoly. Itās not about āyou can only purchase from one serviceā, itās one service having a dominant position in the market. Not the same thing.
Exclusives are a competitive proposition. Thatās why Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft have first party studios. Becauseā¦ you know, they want exclusive games to their platforms. And Netflix, and every other TV station that has ever existed.
Itās not as convernient, necessarily, but it does preserve competition in a way that having a single entity deciding the prices of all games does not.
Those are the long term effects of supporting them. Thereās no āwinningā here. Itās not a zero sum game. The idea is that multiple (two is also bad) players are in the market, all competing to give you a better deal and attract you to their option. Steam gives you a better deal because the competitors exist. If they are the only game in town they donāt have a reason to give you a better deal.
And even if you assumed Gaben is a saint (he isnāt, heād just rather squeeze the devs than the users, which makes him smart, not nice), heās not going to be around forever and you donāt want a world where Steam is the next Microsoft. Does that register to you at all?
itās one service having a dominant position in the market. Not the same thing.
Youāre the one wildly misrepresenting what a monopoly is:
1 exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action
2 exclusive possession or control
3
a commodity controlled by one party
By definition Steam is not a monopoly because it does have exclusive control.
Notice how the word āexclusiveā keeps showing up in the definition. An āexclusivity dealā is literally a monopoly on that specific product. Seeing as we agree that monopolies are bad why are you supporting Epics monopoly on all sales of [game]?
Thatās why Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft have first party studios
I have no issue with Epic having the games they created exclusive to their platform. Fortnight doesnāt have to be on Steam. The developer can decide āI only want to sell in this/these storesā and I have no problem with that. My issue is with things like what happened with darq where Epic waited until the game was finished and announced on Steam, then approached them for an exclusivity deal. When the dev wanted to maintain their promise to fans and backers to have the game available on Steam suddenly EGS went from āwould love to have your gameā to āno interestā.
The dev would have been fully willing to release on both, and if EGS cared about their users they could have easily had the game as well, (more games available to users of your service is a good thing). But Epic did not care about having more options available to their users, or having actual competition in the market place, they were only interested if they had a monopoly on all sales of the game and if customers did not have a choice and had to purchase from EGS if they wanted the game.
The idea is that multiple (two is also bad) players are in the market, all competing to give you a better deal and attract you to their option. Steam gives you a better deal because the competitors exist. If they are the only game in town they donāt have a reason to give you a better deal.
I agree. EGS makes itself āthe only game in townā for every title they purchase an exclusivity deal with, and that is why I refuse to use it.
And even if you assumed Gaben is a saint (he isnāt, heād just rather squeeze the devs than the users, which makes him smart, not nice), heās not going to be around forever and you donāt want a world where Steam is the next Microsoft. Does that register to you at all?
Of course, but Iām not going to use a service that is shit now over one that might be shit later. If Steam becomes shitty I will stop using it, I can always pirate my collection if I need to. I fully agree with you that competition is important, which is why I refuse to support Epicās anti-competitive and anti-consumer behaviour.
You are wrong about what a monpolistic position is, at least in a world in which people donāt get pedantic and call it a āposition of market dominanceā because thatās not how real people talk unless they are dicks.
So yeah, Steam does have a position of market dominance that they are using to force conditions and prices on providers and customers. Whether that is done to a degree that it infringes on US antitrust regulation is currently in the process of being determined in court, but for the purposes of our conversation it is bad and getting worse.
And I canāt stress enough how exclusivity deals are signed with both first and third parties all the time. Iām old enough to remember when gamers were rioting at the concept that Metal Gear or Final Fantasy would show up on Xbox. Insomniac only got purchased by Sony in 2020, they had made Playstation exclusives for twenty years by that point. From the end user perspective there isnāt, and has never been, any difference between a game being made by a first party or being signed as an exclusive from a third party.
This is not a reason to get mad in any sane reading of a marketplace, period. Didnāt stop schoolchildren in the 90s from fighting over Sonic versus Mario, but Iām not a schoolchild now and I find it extremely tiresome.
And as for your last pointā¦ so donāt frickin use Epic, who gives a crap. You have so many ways around this entire non-issue. Go play Fortnite on the Switch, or Alan Wake on a PlayStation. Or donāt play them. Or play them on Epic and quit the launcher after. I canāt describe the subatomic size of the violin Iām playing on behalf of your ordeal, my friend.
Nobody should care about this. Epic has decided to compete by giving away freebies and signing up exclusives, which is frankly, a lot more freebies than every other first party in the past thirty years. Mediocre as their software is I have very little to no patience for anybody genuinely complaining about this state of affairs.
And I canāt stress enough how exclusivity deals are signed with both first and third parties all the time. Iām old enough to remember when gamers were rioting at the concept that Metal Gear or Final Fantasy would show up on Xbox. Insomniac only got purchased by Sony in 2020, they had made Playstation exclusives for twenty years by that point. From the end user perspective there isnāt, and has never been, any difference between a game being made by a first party or being signed as an exclusive from a third party.
Do you not see how youāre talking about something completely different here? Youāre talking about āMario is only available on Nintendo systemsā not āIf you have a Nintendo you can only buy Mario at Walmartā.
The first is not a monopoly: āYou can purchase this product anywhere you want, it is only compatible on this systemā.
The second is a monopoly: āyou can only purchase this product from US!ā
For someone so much against monopolies and arguing for the need for competition and consumer choice, you are spending a lot of effort arguing FOR a behaviour that restricts competition and consumer choice.
And as for your last pointā¦ so donāt frickin use Epic, who gives a crap. You have so many ways around this entire non-issue. Go play Fortnite on the Switch, or Alan Wake on a PlayStation. Or donāt play them. Or play them on Epic and quit the launcher after. I canāt describe the subatomic size of the violin Iām playing on behalf of your ordeal, my friend. Nobody should care about this.
So we both agree that your argument that āSteam might be bad one dayā is pointless and a non-issue. Good. You can stop bringing it up then.
Thatās not even a little bit what a monopoly is.
Which is obvious. Nobody is out there arguing that signing an exclusivity deal between a first party and a developer is somehow a monopolistic situation. Nobody has argued that in forty years of gaming exclusives and nobody has argued it in a century of television or music recording labels.
So the question becomes why argue it now, right? Why werenāt you mad when Ratchet & Clank could only be purchased an played on a PlayStation or Final Fantasy was only on a SNES? What overzealous, cult-like situation leads to a whole host of people going to bat for this ass-backwards concept on behalf of Steam? Who, I should add, have not argued this themselves or asked for this at all, although thanks to the power of lawsuits we do have a decent indication that they do approve of it.
One has to assume the cart is being put before the horse, given the timeline. People were bashing Ubisoft and EAās previous competitors for less defined, more ambiguous reasons, and often no reason at all beyond brand loyalty. The whole āexclusives are bad nowā argument happens to be the narrative that stuck with Epic specifically because itās the one thing theyāre doing that the previous ones werenāt.
So all of this has been a ton of typing to come back to the only statement this conversation ever needed:
Seeing the console wars play out on the basis of which DRM platform you want to put in your PC is wild.
Why werenāt you mad when Ratchet & Clank could only be purchased an played on a PlayStation or Final Fantasy was only on a SNES?
Why arenāt people angry that you canāt put diesel in a gasoline engine? Why arenāt you mad that a DVD canāt be played in a VHS? Why arenāt you mad that you canāt plug a computer hard drive into a switch and play Civilization?
Do you understand that there is a difference between āThis is only compatible with certain hardwareā and āYou can only purchase this at one specific businessā? Because you are once again arguing as if they are the same thing and Iāve already pointed this out to you, which means you are either completely disingenuous or an idiot. Either way this is a waste of time.
If thereās a third option Iām missing please let me know.
They are the same thing on the business side, absolutely. I mean, games are developed on PC anyway, so those are the same thing today for sure. I promise you there is a PC version of Bloodborne in a FromSoft computer somewhere, even though itās stuck as a PS4 exclusive. Not because there is some mystery technical reason, but because somebody signed a deal to make it that way.
There has never been a technical reason a port of Ratchet & Clank or Uncharted couldnāt work on a PC (or a GameCube, previously), even when there was more porting work to be done, the game would have sold more than enough to make it worth the porting costs. Those games were stuck on their platforms because Insomniac and Naughty Dog had a business relationship with Sony. And then Sony said it was fine for them to be on Epic, Steam and GoG. And then they decided they wanted to have online authentication DRM, so they were only on Epic and Steam after that point.
Hell, if you go backwards, there was an uproar among Nintendo fanboys when Resident Evil 4 stopped being a Gamecube exclusive and showed up on PS2 (and then on everything else). And that, again, was not a technical issue, but a deal that was in place until it wasnāt. Because this conversation has been dumb both ways for a very long time.
The third option is you donāt understand how games are made or exclusivity deals signed and youāre only latching onto them as a backwards justification for your foregone conclusion because you want to root for Steam as a platform.
Yes? Because if the game isnāt exclusive then itās on Steam.
Thatās what a monopoly gets ya. Especially if you have policies in place preventing competing storefronts from competing on price.
Exclusivity deals arenāt a particularly bad thing. Nerddom in general also keeps complaining when other first parties donāt have enough exclusives, often at the same time they make the opposite argument when it comes to Steam, which is part of the weirdness.
Itās a weirdly circular argument that youāre okay with Epic exclusives as long as the devs arenāt profiting from it, even if the end result is the same for you. And itās definitely not what people here are arguing. Thatās a very forced, disingenuous stance.
So a Monopoly (you can only purchase from one service) is bad, but exclusivity deals (you can only purchase from one service) arenāt bad. But Iām the one with the circular logic.
theyāre idiots.
A stance someone else may or may not have is irrelevant to this discussion or the arguments I am making.
consoles are diffrent from store fronts. No one is complaining that a PC game store doesnāt have enough exclusives.
The end result is not the same. Thatās like saying āitās weird that youāre not okay with slave labour to work on farms, when the end result is the same to you.ā How it gets there is relevant, as well as the long term effects of supporting it. Epic has made it clear by their actions that they do not care about the end user, and if they end up āwinningā against Steam they would actively make things worse.
Yeah, that only works if you wildly misrepresent a monopoly. Itās not about āyou can only purchase from one serviceā, itās one service having a dominant position in the market. Not the same thing.
Exclusives are a competitive proposition. Thatās why Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft have first party studios. Becauseā¦ you know, they want exclusive games to their platforms. And Netflix, and every other TV station that has ever existed.
Itās not as convernient, necessarily, but it does preserve competition in a way that having a single entity deciding the prices of all games does not.
Those are the long term effects of supporting them. Thereās no āwinningā here. Itās not a zero sum game. The idea is that multiple (two is also bad) players are in the market, all competing to give you a better deal and attract you to their option. Steam gives you a better deal because the competitors exist. If they are the only game in town they donāt have a reason to give you a better deal.
And even if you assumed Gaben is a saint (he isnāt, heād just rather squeeze the devs than the users, which makes him smart, not nice), heās not going to be around forever and you donāt want a world where Steam is the next Microsoft. Does that register to you at all?
Youāre the one wildly misrepresenting what a monopoly is:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/monopoly
By definition Steam is not a monopoly because it does have exclusive control.
Notice how the word āexclusiveā keeps showing up in the definition. An āexclusivity dealā is literally a monopoly on that specific product. Seeing as we agree that monopolies are bad why are you supporting Epics monopoly on all sales of [game]?
I have no issue with Epic having the games they created exclusive to their platform. Fortnight doesnāt have to be on Steam. The developer can decide āI only want to sell in this/these storesā and I have no problem with that. My issue is with things like what happened with darq where Epic waited until the game was finished and announced on Steam, then approached them for an exclusivity deal. When the dev wanted to maintain their promise to fans and backers to have the game available on Steam suddenly EGS went from āwould love to have your gameā to āno interestā.
The dev would have been fully willing to release on both, and if EGS cared about their users they could have easily had the game as well, (more games available to users of your service is a good thing). But Epic did not care about having more options available to their users, or having actual competition in the market place, they were only interested if they had a monopoly on all sales of the game and if customers did not have a choice and had to purchase from EGS if they wanted the game.
I agree. EGS makes itself āthe only game in townā for every title they purchase an exclusivity deal with, and that is why I refuse to use it.
Of course, but Iām not going to use a service that is shit now over one that might be shit later. If Steam becomes shitty I will stop using it, I can always pirate my collection if I need to. I fully agree with you that competition is important, which is why I refuse to support Epicās anti-competitive and anti-consumer behaviour.
You are wrong about what a monpolistic position is, at least in a world in which people donāt get pedantic and call it a āposition of market dominanceā because thatās not how real people talk unless they are dicks.
So yeah, Steam does have a position of market dominance that they are using to force conditions and prices on providers and customers. Whether that is done to a degree that it infringes on US antitrust regulation is currently in the process of being determined in court, but for the purposes of our conversation it is bad and getting worse.
And I canāt stress enough how exclusivity deals are signed with both first and third parties all the time. Iām old enough to remember when gamers were rioting at the concept that Metal Gear or Final Fantasy would show up on Xbox. Insomniac only got purchased by Sony in 2020, they had made Playstation exclusives for twenty years by that point. From the end user perspective there isnāt, and has never been, any difference between a game being made by a first party or being signed as an exclusive from a third party.
This is not a reason to get mad in any sane reading of a marketplace, period. Didnāt stop schoolchildren in the 90s from fighting over Sonic versus Mario, but Iām not a schoolchild now and I find it extremely tiresome.
And as for your last pointā¦ so donāt frickin use Epic, who gives a crap. You have so many ways around this entire non-issue. Go play Fortnite on the Switch, or Alan Wake on a PlayStation. Or donāt play them. Or play them on Epic and quit the launcher after. I canāt describe the subatomic size of the violin Iām playing on behalf of your ordeal, my friend.
Nobody should care about this. Epic has decided to compete by giving away freebies and signing up exclusives, which is frankly, a lot more freebies than every other first party in the past thirty years. Mediocre as their software is I have very little to no patience for anybody genuinely complaining about this state of affairs.
Do you not see how youāre talking about something completely different here? Youāre talking about āMario is only available on Nintendo systemsā not āIf you have a Nintendo you can only buy Mario at Walmartā.
The first is not a monopoly: āYou can purchase this product anywhere you want, it is only compatible on this systemā.
The second is a monopoly: āyou can only purchase this product from US!ā
For someone so much against monopolies and arguing for the need for competition and consumer choice, you are spending a lot of effort arguing FOR a behaviour that restricts competition and consumer choice.
So we both agree that your argument that āSteam might be bad one dayā is pointless and a non-issue. Good. You can stop bringing it up then.
Thatās not even a little bit what a monopoly is.
Which is obvious. Nobody is out there arguing that signing an exclusivity deal between a first party and a developer is somehow a monopolistic situation. Nobody has argued that in forty years of gaming exclusives and nobody has argued it in a century of television or music recording labels.
So the question becomes why argue it now, right? Why werenāt you mad when Ratchet & Clank could only be purchased an played on a PlayStation or Final Fantasy was only on a SNES? What overzealous, cult-like situation leads to a whole host of people going to bat for this ass-backwards concept on behalf of Steam? Who, I should add, have not argued this themselves or asked for this at all, although thanks to the power of lawsuits we do have a decent indication that they do approve of it.
One has to assume the cart is being put before the horse, given the timeline. People were bashing Ubisoft and EAās previous competitors for less defined, more ambiguous reasons, and often no reason at all beyond brand loyalty. The whole āexclusives are bad nowā argument happens to be the narrative that stuck with Epic specifically because itās the one thing theyāre doing that the previous ones werenāt.
So all of this has been a ton of typing to come back to the only statement this conversation ever needed:
Seeing the console wars play out on the basis of which DRM platform you want to put in your PC is wild.
Why arenāt people angry that you canāt put diesel in a gasoline engine? Why arenāt you mad that a DVD canāt be played in a VHS? Why arenāt you mad that you canāt plug a computer hard drive into a switch and play Civilization?
Do you understand that there is a difference between āThis is only compatible with certain hardwareā and āYou can only purchase this at one specific businessā? Because you are once again arguing as if they are the same thing and Iāve already pointed this out to you, which means you are either completely disingenuous or an idiot. Either way this is a waste of time.
If thereās a third option Iām missing please let me know.
They are the same thing on the business side, absolutely. I mean, games are developed on PC anyway, so those are the same thing today for sure. I promise you there is a PC version of Bloodborne in a FromSoft computer somewhere, even though itās stuck as a PS4 exclusive. Not because there is some mystery technical reason, but because somebody signed a deal to make it that way.
There has never been a technical reason a port of Ratchet & Clank or Uncharted couldnāt work on a PC (or a GameCube, previously), even when there was more porting work to be done, the game would have sold more than enough to make it worth the porting costs. Those games were stuck on their platforms because Insomniac and Naughty Dog had a business relationship with Sony. And then Sony said it was fine for them to be on Epic, Steam and GoG. And then they decided they wanted to have online authentication DRM, so they were only on Epic and Steam after that point.
Hell, if you go backwards, there was an uproar among Nintendo fanboys when Resident Evil 4 stopped being a Gamecube exclusive and showed up on PS2 (and then on everything else). And that, again, was not a technical issue, but a deal that was in place until it wasnāt. Because this conversation has been dumb both ways for a very long time.
The third option is you donāt understand how games are made or exclusivity deals signed and youāre only latching onto them as a backwards justification for your foregone conclusion because you want to root for Steam as a platform.
Which is the wild part.