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Carighan Maconar @lemmy.world

Dusk Developer David Szymanski: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly

twitter.com /DUSKdev/status/1705948957233299948

If I'm honest, I don't disagree.

I would love for Steam to have **actual competition. Which is difficult, sure, but you could run a slightly less feature-rich store, take less of a cut, and pass the reduction fully on to consumers and you'd be an easy choice for many gamers.

But that's not what Epic is after. They tried to go hard after the sellers, figuring that if they can corner enough fo the market with exclusives the buyers will have to come. But they underestimated that even their nigh-infinite coffers struggle to keep up with the raw amount of games releasing, and also the unpredictability of the indie market where you can't really know what to buy as an exclusive.
Nevermind that buying one is a good way to make it forgotten.

So yeah, fully agreed. Compared to Epic, I vastly prefer Steam's 30% cut. As the consumer I pay the same anyways, and Steam offers lots of stuff for it like forums, a client that boots before the heat death of the universe, in-house streaming, library sharing, cloud sync that sometimes works.

161 comments

  • You know you made a really interesting point that they marketed to the sellers not the ultimate customers. I hadn't really picked up on that before, but it does mitigate what should be a healthy dose of competition by altering the target audience a bit.

  • I have 146 titles in my Epic library. I've never given them a penny and don't plan on starting. I can't be the only one.

    • Oh that's another really good point: Epic trained the consumers to open Epic weekly to get free games, then close it again. It's a weird thing to be known for.

      Sure, had them cornering the sellers market worked out - unrealistic as it was in hindsight - then having the buyers already all have the store installed for the free games would have been a genius way of getting more and more people onto the store. But it did not, and now it has just cemented the Epic store as a place you do not spend money on!

    • I have maybe 2 dozen and I haven't played a single one. I downloaded titles a few times, forgot about it, then went on and bought the game on steam.

  • Epic is on a decline, never forget what they did to unreal. Also I really like when devs give the option to buy on itch.io and get a steam key with the drm free version. They get more money per sale and I get a drm free version and a steam version in one. Zortch and Dwarf Fortress are the only two games I know of to do this but would like to see more.

    • What did they do to Unreal?

      • delisted all the unreal and unreal tournament games from all storefronts to reduce competition to fortnite. You can't buy any unreal game legit anymore, either have to pirate or scrounge internet archive. For anyone who doesn't know unreal was epicmegagames first flagship series, the one that printed the money for the foundation they sit on. Very dedicated fanbase and everything, and epic kills it. even the singleplayer campaigns.

    • in these instances the steam version is usually also drm-free

  • I was reading about the Unity debacle and thought thank God Gabe that Steam has never pulled shit like this.

    I think part of the problem is too many companies are controlled by venture capitalists, or private equity, or whatever you call it. The point is that a single entity owns multiple companies from the shadows.

    Companies are supposed to compete and the best company win, that's good in theory. But when a single shadow entity owns multiple companies they'll do something like squeeze customers of one company, which drives customers to their competitor, which, surprise, is owned by the same shadow entity.

    • You seem to know what you are talking about, so this is for those who don't, the "illusion of competition" has become such a staple in the modern world. In the US (and much of the world as I understand it) eyeglass sellers are all owned by the same company. Pearl Vision, LensCrafters, and I think even the Walmart vision centers are all owned and operated by Luxottica. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxottica

      It is a vertical monopoly that controls everything from materials acquisition to sales, directly "competes" with itself, and lies to customers every day to make them think they are actually in control.

      Then you have companies like 3M, or Nestle, who control most of the entire industries. A good 85% of all food on the shelves in the USA is produced by one of 4 or 5 companies that definitely collude to fix prices and use aggressive tactics to protect their position. They also follow the "compete with yourself" model to make you think you are actually making a decision with your money. You aren't.

      Then there is the big Ag companies. In Ohio they have actually gotten laws on the books that make it illegal to do Farm Shares, where you purchase a share of the crops they produce for the year and for about 8 months a year you get a big basket of fresh produce delivered to you. An ex and I got to do it for a year before we split and it was amazing. It was a ton of food and only cost us about $150 for the half-share we purchased. It would be amazing right now with prices and it would help local private farms, which is precisely why they pushed it out.

      I can rant for hours... So I cut here. This whole topic just infuriates me to no end.

  • That's a stupid take. "I'd rather contribute to an existing monopoly than a potential one" is just saying you'd rather support a monopoly than any other corporation. Every corporation seeks monopoly. None are our friends, but we should at least try to make them as small and friendly in any particular industry as we reasonably can.

    • I think the pseudo-quote you wanted to do the other way around.

      The thing is, sure, I prefer buying things from say, GOG. But Epic is horrible, and that's even just from my consumer perspective with it's bad client, terrible discoverability and lack of forums or anything. So as a consumer I have no incentive to support Epic, no matter whether I want to give my money to Steam or another place.

      • You're right, I did get the pseudo-quote backwards.

        As far as customer experience, that's one thing, and that's valid. "I prefer to use Steam because it has features Epic doesn't, even if one's a monopoly" though is very different from the quote above, which is distinctly about supporting X company over Y company; not about product difference, but actual support.

        Let's be real though, if Epic had literally just released Steam but with a good UI people would still boycott it, referencing xenophobic shit like "because china", angry at tim sweeney, complaining about another launcher, and anything else. The PC market has this really strange and uncomfortable adoration of Steam. It's console-warrior levels, really.

        I don't disagree that EGS is a lackluster product in many ways, but it's pretty clear that the complaints about it by and far are simply justification for a pre-existing opinion, both because of predisposition towards steam, and against "the guys who made that stupid fortnite game".

  • But that's not what Epic is after. They tried to go hard after the sellers, figuring that if they can corner enough fo the market with exclusives the buyers will have to come.

    They did both things.

    Yes, they went after sellers, because they needed something to sell. Nobody's going to go to the new upstart store without some incentive. For sellers, that incentive was piles of money (with the understandable trade off of an exclusivity period - a completely normal thing for businesses to do).

    But they also went after buyers by handing out hundreds of free games to build up everyone's libraries (something they're obviously still doing), and by running the best sales seen on a PC store since Valve stopped doing flash deals during their sales.

    But nothing they do is going to achieve your statement of "you could run a slightly less feature-rich store, take less of a cut, and pass the reduction fully on to consumers and you'd be an easy choice for many gamers." They actually tried that at the start, with Metro [Whatever - I don't play the Metro series so I can never keep the titles straight] launching at a reduced price point because of the lowered cut, but everyone just focused on "ZOMG, I HAVE TO CLICK A DIFFERENT ICON TO LAUNCH IT?!?!11". Aside from that example, though, the pricing of the games isn't up to them. Blame the publishers for prices staying the same while they pocket the extra from the lowered store cut - they could easily pass it along to consumers, but they choose not to. Epic themselves did what they could with the coupons during sales (leading to devs/pubs like CDPR maliciously increasing the prices of their games to disqualify them from it just to spite Epic and their potential buyers) and now the not-nearly-as-good-a-deal cash back program they're doing.

    The bulk of gamers simply don't want to buy from anything other than Steam, and nothing anyone says or does will budge them from that. Every argument against EGS existing is just a rationalization of that stance. I've literally seen people say "I want every game on every store and then I'll buy it from Steam."

    • While I can understand the difficulty of trying to come up with competition to a pre-existing and dominant storefront, they went about it almost entirely the wrong way. They underestimated consumers' aversion to change and overestimated the value their own launcher provided.

      Everybody and their mother used Steam at the time, and it provided a whole lot more than just a storefront and icons to click. When Epic launched EGS, it offered absolutely none of that. Without any social aspects or significant consumer buy-in to their ecosystem, it had no staying power. People—myself included—would go to it to play a shiny new free game until it stopped being fun, then fuck right off back to Steam to play our other games with friends. If they had spent more time cooking up the EGS ecosystem into something more similar to XBL or PSN before trying to attract consumers en masse, they likely would've been pretty successful. They could've even just decided to partner up with (or buy) NexusMods and integrated a mod manager, and a lot of us would've had a good reason to prefer EGS over Steam for some games.

      Instead of doing something to make their ecosystem more appealing, though, they used paid-for exclusives to make other ecosystems less appealing. It was an obvious attempt to herd consumers into their ecosystem, and it backfired spectacularly. Before that, most people were either indifferent or liked them as a company due to their legacy and/or Unreal Engine. These days, I see a lot of bitching about "timed exclusives".

      • It wasn't really even exclusives technically. It was explicitly Excluding-Steam exclusives. It released everywhere else but not on Steam. And it was further aggravated by games that were already on Steam being taken off in favor of launching elsewhere.

      • If they had spent more time cooking up the EGS ecosystem into something more similar to XBL or PSN before trying to attract consumers en masse, they likely would've been pretty successful.

        That's not remotely how it would have happened.

        Have a read over this article that was posted by Lars Doucet (well-respected indie developer of Defender's Quest) roughly a year before EGS even launched. It lays out exactly what a Steam competitor is going to run into trying to break into that market and provides a blueprint to not fail that is almost exactly what Epic did. And yet, the discussion to this day is still filled with nothing but "REEEEE, EXCLUSIVES!!!1", nevermind the fact that those games all still run perfectly fine on the exact same machine you launch your Steam games from (excepting, now - multiple years on from the whole kerfuffle having begun - the Deck... buying straight from Steam does make that a much nicer/smoother experience). You can even add them to Steam to get the extra features like the controller customization and such.

        Basically, even if they built a launcher that was better in every conceivable way than Steam, nobody was going to switch. They had to do something else to bring both devs and players on board. As the article states:

        Even if every aspect of your service is better than Steam's in every possible way, you're still up against the massive inertia of everybody already having huge libraries full of games on Steam. Their credit cards are registered on Steam, their friends all play on Steam, and most importantly, all the developers, and therefore all the games, are on Steam.

    • The reason that it's so hard to compete with Steam is that Steam just does what it does so well.

      I don't have much desire to change my primary digital storefront because there isn't really much of anything more I want from a digital storefront that Steam doesn't already provide. If the quality of Steam's experience declines at some point, I would welcome competition, but otherwise, why would I bother switching to another service when I don't really have any complaints about Steam?

      Besides, the TV/movie streaming service market has already demonstrated what happens when not enough competition suddenly turns into too much competition. If Epic were able to demonstrate that it was possible to overtake Steam, everyone would try to copycat their strategy, and then you likely end up with a balkanized market where no one has the market share or resources to provide the level of quality that Steam does.

      • Exactly, Steam got where it is because it managed to be more convenient than piracy (as Gaben himself said, piracy is a service problem), as did Netflix before the fragmentation (and rampant enshittification) of the streaming market made piracy once more the most convenient (and better quality) option.

        Epic store exclusives don't promote Epic, they promote piracy, as that is the second most convenient option after Steam (it's worth mentioning that Steam also acts as unobtrusive DRM; infect your game with malware like Denuvo and suddenly piracy again becomes the more convenient — even the only reasonable — option, as cracked games perform better and are more stable than malware DRM infected ones; Steam provides a good enough and, more importantly, harmless option for both consumers and developers, something no alternative, including piracy, has managed to achieve).

        And, of course, the instant Gaben retires and Valve goes public and begins to enshittify itself we won't be going to Epic or GOG (unless they manage to replicate what Steam has achieved), we'll be back to sailing the high seas.

161 comments