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.

  • zoostation@lemmy.worldEnglish
    22·
    1 year ago

    Valve is a rent seeker that has taken more from players than it’s given them.

    Before Valve we owned our games. We had the freedom to resell them. Being able to play them without a third party involved, offline, without bullshit launchers, was the norm. As physical goods they dropped in price rather than holding the same digital listing price for years.

    Forums? We also had those before Valve. Independent. With less censorship. Friends lists? Also something we had and it didn’t tie us to a specific store.

    Valve, having been early to the party, has done more to normalize loss of digital consumer freedom than any other company. We don’t even remember that they started it, and what rights we lost.

    But the prevailing attitude among gamers is hostility to them even having competition. It’s profoundly misguided. They’ve given us some conveniences and present us with flamboyant sales (after data mining the shit out of us) that distract from their manipulation of higher overall list prices.

    So the fact that we ride their dick is annoying in the first place. Opposing them having competition for silly reasons like features is even worse.