• Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works
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    9 months ago

    If Epic could actually provide a better service, they would be seeing customers and developers actually want to use their platform.

    Instead they try to lock games behind exclusivity deals and bribe customers with free games and they still fail.

    So what do they do instead of fixing their own problems? They go after everyone else who’s actually successful.

    • The Picard Maneuver@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I’d love it if they had a comparable service, because competition is good for the consumer, but they just don’t.

      Steam has had a relative monopoly for two decades, and we’re lucky they’ve been customer friendly. But if something were to happen to Gabe, or Valve decided to go public or something, we’re screwed.

      • Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        The fact that everyone else is shit isn’t Valves problem, it’s theirs.

        And we are fucked when something eventually changes with Valve, but we’d have been fucked this whole time without them.

        • dindonmasker@sh.itjust.works
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          9 months ago

          There will be a time where Gabe will no longer be there. Hopefully someone as good as him is ready to fight the good fight.

          I wonder if Gabe would go as far as doing a Halliday move like in ready player one.

          I feel like that’s a bad idea cause it’s gonna be a sweaty cheater that would crack the thing and fuck everyone up.

    • hannes3120@feddit.de
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      9 months ago

      If Epic could actually provide a better service, they would be seeing customers and developers actually want to use their platform.

      Doubt

      Gog is objectively giving you more value for your money but even cdpr had to release the Gwent standalone on steam eventually because people didn’t buy it enough - once it was on steam it sold more than in a year on gog in weeks

      People don’t look at the alternatives at all - unless it’s a AAA game with an exclusive deal

      • Domi@lemmy.secnd.me
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        9 months ago

        Gog is objectively giving you more value for your money

        What value do they give you exactly?

        The games are mostly priced the same, they don’t have integrated modding support, no input remapping, no remote play, no in-home streaming, no steamcmd for server operators, no VR client, no Linux client and no Steam Deck support.

        The only thing they do give you is no DRM, but nothing stops a developer from adding a DRM-free game on Steam.

        • tan00k@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          I really like steam for its friends network and local streaming, but these are the reasons I occasionally buy on gog:

          Games that my wife likes to play so that they don’t tie up my steam account. I still find it weird that ALL games in steam get locked down when one is running. I understand it keeping the same game from being run more than once simultaneously, but more than that is unnecessary.

          I also buy games on gog (when available) that I mod a lot, because it’s really easy to stop updates on gog (updates often break mods).

          • CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            She can play your steam games in offline mode without affecting your online activity. As long as the game developer/publisher allows offline use.

            Obviously doesn’t solve all your problems but figured I’d mention it if it gives you more flexibility.

            • tan00k@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              I do know about that, but I want it to be as easy as clicking on a game to play it without worrying about toggling the mode. I know I could make a separate account for her too, but we share machines and again that becomes a barrier when wanting to just click a game to play it.

              In this niche case, gog is just plain better.

          • fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works
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            9 months ago

            You also can share games with family mode with steam. So even online my SO and I can play games from either of our accounts.

            • tan00k@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              That is a cool feature, and I do use it though in a different way. I made an alt account that I buy vr games on so that I can share them with friends. That way if a friend is playing one of my vr games through family share, it won’t lock up all the games in my main account.

              In the example you’re talking about, say your SO is playing a game shared from your account - it locks up all the games in both accounts! Pretty annoying if you want to play a game, now.

              But if it’s a gog game, there’s no issue at all.

        • VSDreams@yiffit.net
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          9 months ago

          Steam is DRM. Note the warnings all mention third-party drm. Eventually your login to steam expires and you can’t play your games, and steam can revoke games and your access to them at any point for any reason.

          Steam is good, but let’s not imply it’s providing a DRM free experience.

        • squid_slime@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          all of the things you have listed are things we as individuals can and have implemented without steam, theyre pretty good like adding code to wine and pushing linux to the larger audience and i myself have been on steam for 11 years with 320 games, but integrated modding? i mean we had mod managers before steams implementation.

          game streaming we have moonlite and shunshine > for amd hosts, and theres more.

          input remapping can be done through standalone applications i use sc-controller for remapping my steam controller.

          id say steams vr client is more of a negative than a positive, leads to segmentation and issues with device support when we should of focused on a wide approach to vr. like what google did with android, funded a free and open eco-system>(less so now)

          steam sells accessibility and DRM, personally i see this as a bad thing. force people to become dependent. and while gog isnt natively on linux there are work around like downloading from gog.com or installing heroic games launcher.

          • Domi@lemmy.secnd.me
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            9 months ago

            steam sells accessibility and DRM, personally i see this as a bad thing.

            So we can agree that GOG does not objectively give you more value for your money as OP implied.

            • squid_slime@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              Value is personal, I for one want a game, I dont want a bloated web browser that only connects through steam, which is what the steam client is. All the thing I need steam to do I can do and I can do it in a more agnostic way and less bloated. I use wayland therefore steam does not run without xwayland support enabled and even when enabled I can’t stream my desktop over steam remote.

              • Can’t use remote play and have an open source implementation that has fine tuning controls.
              • Installing mods through third party tools or manually is easy enough and allows for multiple distributors.
              • Dont use vr and even so its a closed ecosystem.
              • More than happy to visit steam in my own browser to buy and download games if that was possible.
              • Dont care for skins, cards, or any of the inventory system.
              • I talk to friends through open source solutions.

              If you do however want a streaming, mod manager, vr, forum, store front, download manager, DRM and much more in one bloated application then yes the value proposition is there.

              I highly value diy solutions in software, you on the other hand may not. And this is fine. GOG offers more to me than to you as steam offers less for me than for you.

              • Zeroxxx@lemmy.id
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                9 months ago

                That is your opinion. Steam is growing and it satisfies millions people. Just not your style does not mean it is bad.

    • TheSambassador@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Epic building a launcher that has equivalent features to Steam would do nothing. Everyone wants all their games in one place, and everyone already has their friends list there.

      Getting exclusives and giving away games is probably the only way they could even enter the market. Yeah the launcher kinda sucks, but Valve has decades of development that they’ve poured into Steam, it isn’t simple to just copy everything. There was a time that Steam sucked.

      Steam is a de-facto monopoly. They luckily don’t really do anti competitive practices, they just focus on having a great product, and that’s why people (myself included) love them. But I don’t think another company can ever really enter the PC market without a few tricks like exclusives or free games.

  • urda@lebowski.social
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    9 months ago

    Tim Sweeney is literally the biggest fucking cry baby I’ve ever seen.

    I won’t touch anything Epic because of such a man child he has become.

    • Patapon Enjoyer@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Hey if him being a giant baby keeps giving me free games let the manbaby cook.

      Mankind Divided is free right now btw

      • CaptainEffort@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        Not worth me being a statistic that they can sell to investors imo. Fuck Epic.

        Besides, that game’s been on sale for less than $5 on Steam.

        • Patapon Enjoyer@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          “As you can see, a whole bunch of people joined our service, downloaded games we paid literally millions for from our servers and didn’t give us money” isn’t a good pitch.

            • the_crotch@sh.itjust.works
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              9 months ago

              It is the only reason I have epic installed. Not planning to buy anything but they got their foot in the door

            • Patapon Enjoyer@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              Fooling investors into thinking people will just start paying them for a worse experience than you can get on Steam is funny but even they should realize once they look at the financials.

              • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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                9 months ago

                I wouldn’t be surprised to hear something like…

                they rope kids in with the free price tag over the summer, school starts and they get bullied for only having the default Fortnite skin, and suddenly the “customer” “converts“.

      • circuitfarmer@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Mankind Divided is free right now btw

        It’s not free. The point is to get me to make an account on Epic and install their stupid launcher. That isn’t free and I’m tired of people claiming things are “free” when in fact they exist to get you to sign up for another service. It’s not free-as-in-air.

  • macisr@sh.itjust.works
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    9 months ago

    Oh Sweeney having a tantrum, when hasn’t that happened monthly since like 10 years ago? Sweeney if you want more money than what you’re already making, then fucking make better products man. Fucking asshole trying to win the game by crying to daddy government and having fits. It would be one thing if he was a small guy being treated unfairly, but this dude is in the elite as well, his company is a big name in the game, but he cries as if he was small potatoes being treated unfairly by big corpos. Fuck off, corpo trash trying to pass as a small boy. If there’s a thing more annoying than a corporation being an asshole is an asshole corporation trying to pass as a victim.

    • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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      9 months ago

      You know what I find more annoying then that? Defending a monopoly that’s rent seeking to the tune of a million dollars of revenue per employee per year, and that’s with most of the employees literally being paid to work on nothing.

        • Agrivar@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          the one that occupies the vast emptiness of masterspace’s cranium, I’d wager.

        • Adalast@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Everything you said specifically excludes Valve and Steam from being a monopoly. The definition of monopoly includes the anticompetitive behaviors. They don’t give a fuck about competition. They don’t buy up everyone who could be a threat. They don’t push for exclusivity contracts on big upcoming games. They exist and work to continue to do so. That is how business is supposed to be.

      • TORFdot0@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Developers are allowed to distribute their games directly to consumers. Thats not rent seeking or a monopoly.

    • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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      9 months ago

      He’s entirely right. Valve is just stealing money from gamers and developers by not lowering their fees.

      • jivandabeast@lemmy.browntown.dev
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        9 months ago

        Perhaps, but on the other side of that coin: Because valve doesn’t have legal obligations to make money snd increase shareholder value, they put a lot of money elsewhere. The products they create are awesome (literally the best launcher on PC, Tim Sweeney is probably upset because his is ass) and invest heavily in things better for gamers:

        • digital returns were huge when they first rolled out
        • (IMO) spearheading game streaming with steam in home streaming & the steam link
        • creating awesome games and not milking them for perpetual profit (other than maybe in game items but i don’t want to have this discussion)
        • investing heavily in alternative ways to play (steam machines, aforementioned steam link, VR/index, steam controller, steam deck)
        • legitimately spending money to make it possible to game on Linux, reducing gamers reliance on Microsoft/Windows
        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          9 months ago

          The Epic launcher could actually be so much better if they bothered to put any effort into it. Obviously they’re going to have fewer games and stuff but they could still make a decent launcher that isn’t so annoying to use and actually has additional features.

          Part of the problem they have is that it’s actually difficult for game developers to put their games on both platforms so i’ve got to pick one and obviously i’m going to pick Steam.

        • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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          9 months ago

          Valve also allowed most of their employees to work on whatever they wanted for a decade, an initiative that produced almost nothing, and during that time they still made close to a million dollars per year per employee.

          I’m not saying I’m unhappy with Valve being private or with Valve making enough money to give itself a nice cushion, but the scale of the money they’re making is absurd when independent game devs often still struggle to make money.

            • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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              9 months ago

              Yeah, I’ve been with Steam since 2013 when they came to Linux, and Steam has gotten better every year since then. For example:

              • Steam Controller
              • Steam Input
              • Steam Link app
              • Proton & Steam Deck
              • tons of bugfixes (Steam on Linux sucked when it launched, it’s way more stable now)

              And so on. I don’t know which decade OP is talking about, but at least the last decade has been fantastic for me.

          • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            Valve also allowed most of their employees to work on whatever they wanted for a decade

            So 30% cut leads to employee well being? Great!

            • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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              9 months ago

              No it doesn’t. It leads to Valve wasting money enriching themselves to the tune of millions of dollars per employee per year while independent game developers making normal salaries continue to have to lay people off and be underfunded.

              • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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                9 months ago

                It leads to Valve

                “… employing Linux developers and finally making actual cracks in the true monopoly of Windows.”

                FTFY.

                while independent game developers making normal salaries continue to have to lay people off and be underfunded.

                Funny, it’s not the indies with the huge layoffs but the megacorps that have enough money to buy fucking Activision-Blizard-King and then shed crocodile tears about the hard economy.

                • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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                  9 months ago

                  “… employing Linux developers and finally making actual cracks in the true monopoly of Windows.”

                  Again, Valve has made close to a million dollars per employee per year. No they have not spent anywhere remotely close to that on Linux developers. You’re equating a trinket they tossed you in the last couple of years with the giant horde they robbed from developers.

                  Funny, it’s not the indies with the huge layoffs

                  It is, independent studios lay people off and have to close up shop all the time, on top of just not making that much money to begin with, they just don’t make headline news the way that big companies do.

      • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Valve is just stealing money from gamers

        If you actually think that reduced fees mean lower cost for consumer, you’re out of touch with reality.

        and developers

        They are free to go somewhere else like the EGS utopia where developers are definitively get paid directly an equal cut of each sale and no publisher intermediary like EA and Activision is just taking all the revenue and the developers get paid their usual salary anyhow.

      • xtapa@discuss.tchncs.de
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        9 months ago

        You’re right. Giving 30% for really fucking good platform services is way worse than having to find a publisher that takes in 70 to 90% of revenue and pushes devs to release unfinished games.

        • skulkingaround@sh.itjust.works
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          9 months ago

          Yeah seriously. As a dev, that 30% cut gets you a lot of stuff with absolutely no additional charges. Trying to roll your own distribution for your downloads could exceed that 30% by itself after you:

          • Host the files somewhere that can be downloaded anywhere close to as fast as steam’s servers
          • Handle payment processing fees
          • Develop and maintain a site with high reliability

          And that’s only downloads. With steam you also get:

          • p2p networking tools
          • game server hosting
          • steam community integration
          • analytics
          • cloud saves
          • voip

          And like 50 other things. It’s ridiculously good value unless you’re developing some super low rent single player indie title. Even then, just having it available on steam will get you way more sales to make up for it.

          Sure, epic charges 10% but you basically only get distribution and some super half baked community features.

      • Phegan@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        They are not stealing from gamers. A game would still cost 70 dollars on steam no matter the cut they take.

        Developers, I won’t argue with

      • criticalimpact@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        EGS is not profitable with the cut they take atm.

        Sweeney it’s on drugs if he thinks valves cut is unfair

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          9 months ago

          Exactly. I’ve been Linux-only since 2009 or so, and had never used Steam before switching. I remember buying Minecraft and Factorio directly from their websites, and I remember when Humble Bundle didn’t have such a connection w/ Steam.

          I’d be down with it if they support my platform. If they don’t, I’ll stick with Steam.

      • TORFdot0@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        And Epic Games is just distributing games to gamers and providing services to developers at cost?

        I don’t like Steam but its clear that Epic is just mad because they were late to market and would otherwise charge similar fees.

        • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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          9 months ago

          What about our economy makes you think that multiple industries can’t be corporate controlled monopolies / oligopolies?

          • The_Lopen@sh.itjust.works
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            9 months ago

            You know what, I appreciate the call-out. I don’t trust our economy, and shouldn’t reference it in defense of one (in my experience) honorably led company.

  • Paradachshund@lemmy.today
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    9 months ago

    As petulant and annoying as tim Sweeney can be, I do think he’s right that valve’s fees are pretty exorbitant at their level of success. They could take a much smaller cut and still be making bank.

    • astrsk@piefed.social
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      9 months ago

      No, valves fees are completely reasonable. $100 one time fee, then 30% for any game key sold by valve with something like a million guaranteed impressions. Also it’s 0% if you generate the keys for free and sell them elsewhere like on your own website. All with the benefit of the steam network and hosting. I’m tired of people believing Tim’s lies under the facade of “he’s and asshole but he has a point”. He doesn’t have a point. He’s throwing a tantrum because he doesn’t have what he wants which is hundreds of millions of paying customers and he doesn’t want to put the time and investment needed into building out the infrastructure to achieve the same feat. He’s a greedy little fuck that wants to do the bare minimum to get rich while valve has been coasting as a market leader because they built the whole freakin market!

      • NaoPb@eviltoast.org
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        9 months ago

        Yes, these fees are completely reasonable. Do they think hosting and maintaining a platform costs nothing?

      • Paradachshund@lemmy.today
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        9 months ago

        I agree with everything you said except that the fees need to be that high.That is not mutually exclusive with anything else you said.