Technology

I have some personal qualms about supporting "the biggest fish" in the pond, since that tends to lead to the Apples, the Googles, and the Microsofts.

However, Steam hasn't particularly abused its market power, and has even used it to create a very successful Linux handheld that has both helped propel Linux desktop adoption and added upstream improvements to Linux in general.

I'll revise my opinion when Valve changes to a more overtly predatory model of capitalism, but for now, I'll enjoy only needing to keep a partial eye open.

After the Borderlands 3 incident, not surprising.

The Epic Games Launcher is so far behind on features compared to Steam it's not even funny. Epic chose not to try and compete with Steam on that front and to try and force users onto the platform with exclusivity deals and sweeten the deal with free games.

The one user-centric killer feature Epic has in their stack IMHO is the built-in multiplayer crossplay. Except it's not even exclusive to their store ironically (you do need an Epic account for it though).

Didn't take long for Randy's tone to change after the Epic bribe money dried up.

One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates. -- Gabe Newell, 2011

Time and again, digital distribution platforms have proved this. Apple Music became a dominant music distribution platform at the height of Napster, LimeWire and other peer to peer sharing apps. They did it, because it was easier to just buy the tracks/albums you wanted than to dig through trackers and websites which may or may not actually have what you want. Netflix became the de-facto source for streaming movies at a time when BitTorrent was common and well known. Again, they made it easy and convenient, while not charging an arm and a leg. Steam also faced competition from BitTorrent piracy. But again, Steam made buying, downloading and running games easier than the pirates. And people are willing to pay for that convenience and not dealing with the crap which floats around the high seas.

And, so long as Steam continues to treat it's customers right, those customers will keep coming back. And that's the problem with Pitchford's whole premise. Developers will go where the customers are. Sure, you'll get the odd case of a publisher/developer doing an exclusivity deal. But even then, it's probably limited, because the customers are on Steam. If another storefront wants to draw customers, they need to start with treating customers well. They will still face headwinds, as Steam has a large "first mover" advantage. But, success is going to start with making customers want to come back.

The one thing I like about them is they recognized why people really wanted to stick with steam: they have a large established library and don't want to bounce back and forth.

They took that and said "ok we'll give you free games every week until you have a large library here and won't want to leave!"

Jokes on them, I now have a large library of completely free games on epic and still use steam for the games I want to buy because I refuse to support their exclusivity bullshit.

with the amount of money they apparently had available to spend on this little jolly, it's absolutely incredible how much they fumbled things by trying to force their way in instead of asking nicely

if they just hadn't done exclusives, and had instead relied on their decreased split to offer lower prices, while chucking in the odd free game, they'd probably be a lot closer to the 50% of revenue they were hoping for when they started

valve is actively abusing their monopoly by preventing epic from offering the same product(s) at lower prices in their storefront, and their customer base are happy about it because of thoroughly epic pissed everybody off with their opening move

what chumps

I log into EGS via heroic a few times a year to claim a free game. Yet to ever play any said free games 🤷

Let's see...

The launcher itself ran poorly compared to Steam's. I've had instances of it freezing performance down just downloading 1 game through Epic's launcher.

You've locked down games behind multi-year exclusives, pissing off many people along the way that we're now just seeing their Steam releases.

You've spent years giving free games away, promising not to do anymore, going back to doing it again.

The launcher and storefront are incredibly barebones compared to Steam's. In fact, any launcher not Steam, has incredibly minimal to go with other than just running games through them.

There's only one thing I want from gearbox anymore. For them to re-enable the online servers for Battleborn so I can finish the damn story mode for a game I bought.

ReBorn doesn't work on Linux yet, (or at least it crashes for me).

No shit. Everyone was saying this from day one, but Sweeney was too stupid to realize it.