LMFAO, I love when someone says they tried everything when it’s so blatantly obvious they didn’t really try anything.
Both Epic and Amazon seemed to believe that if you gave out enough free games then Steam would just… Disappear? Really really dumb.
Neither company has invested any time into making their launcher any good. They haven’t invested any time into making their ecosystem feature rich like Steam. They have just given away a bunch of games and had sales and hoped that magic would take care of the rest.
Valve doesn’t even have to try to beat the competition when the competition doesn’t put any effort in.
GoG Galaxy is the only decent alternative launcher I’ve used and it’s being maintained (seemingly) by one guy who only works one day a year. It’s not as good as Steam by a long shot, but far far better than any of the launchers that come from companies WAY WAY bigger and wealthier. Even the itch.io launcher is better!!!
Blizzard, Amazon, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, and Rockstar (and more) all have their own launchers and not a single one is decent or necessary. Why make such an inferior product when Steam already exists?
Valve and I have trust. 20 years of it. They are there, have fair prices, let me play where and when I want, no gotchas, I trust them. Sure tomorrow they could break that trust, but so far they haven’t.
Then Amazon, who has continuously ruined my trust. Adding ads to an ad free prime tier, lying about delivery times, getting shittier and cheaper products on their store, and oh yeah, just being an evil company. And they wonder why I never even looked at their store.
And Valve is pushing for Linux support, it might not be a major point for most but for me it is.
In my two days with linux ive come to really like it, im annoyed at myself for staying with windows for so long and not even trying it. (Cachyos) I prefer everything about gnome and plasma to windows right now. I was just dealing with their garbage ui and random updates for no reason. Its nice having some control.
It’s more than just pushing for support. They have made a lot of windows only games just work on Linux.
They’ve changed it from “need to release and support Linux” to “zero effort other than not actively fuck up the compatibility layer”. In user land, it’s the same thing. For developers it’s a vast difference.
More than that, they don’t lock it down to apps coming from Steam. In a Steam Deck, you can get the app from anywhere, even pirating, if you wish, and it works with Proton.
And the Steam Deck runs games that didn’t have to come from Steam.
Valve is legitimately doing things for the customer, even if they aren’t always a customer of Valve.
Have they tried being trustworthy, adding value, and not fucking over customers?
But we tried everything BUT that.
Maybe it’s because they don’t have VP of Steam at Valve ?
Did they try removing DRM and selling you a product instead of an option on a subscription service?
Why would they? it hasn’t helped gog and valve don’t do that either.
It hasn’t helped GOG? News to me.
It really hasn’t. They had a period where AAA pulbihsers were shipping games there day and date (Sega and Sony) and that’s no longer the case. And if you default to GOG, which I do, it’s easy to notice that fewer indies are defaulting to multilaunching on it.
To be clear, I’m not saying that GOG should start allowing DRM, I’m saying that they are quietly struggling and people won’t prioritize getting their games on GOG over Steam to avoid DRM. Which is a shame.
“It really hasn’t. Also, these are some reasons why it has.” It is literally their whole spiel and what keeps them on the radar, even if the popularity of the platform isn’t what it used to. Which makes sense, since they don’t actively advertise or force their platform but they’ve also been subject to negative press such as their handling of the Devotion devs and "many gamers"in their efforts to prioritize the success of Cyberpunk 2077 over any potential fallout in the region.
You run on an ideological platform, you lose people on ideological grounds, like incorporating titles and forms of DRM into the storefront. Indies can default to whatever storefront they want, that’s should be the norm. Mohjang did it to great success.
Being effectively forced to do it on Steam, that’s basically a statement about their effective monopoly. Your accumulated Steam library is basically an ever increasing sunk cost fallacy, although to the credit of Valve they haven’t acted like massive dickheads (yet). But that will change with time because the people who lead companies change over time whether they would have wanted it or not.
There is zero evidence that this is the case. I guarantee the vast majority of GOG users have never heard of Devotion.
GOG also do advertise. They’ve been reaching out to hardcore users for feedback, they have rolled out campaigns to promote their Capcom old game licensing and their new game request system and they’ve implemented an ad tab in their launcher (that they keep sending people polls about for some reason).
Much more likely what is happening is they are being choked out by Steam and DRM. With large publishers increasingly wanting data streams from their games, AAA releases on GOG are less justifiable. Sony pulled out when they started adding a PSN login to their games. It’s harder to tell Sega’s reasons, but they may have just been a desire to keep their increasingly popular Ryu Ga Gotoku stuff DRMd for longer. Indies, meanwhile, are cash strapped and MUST default to Steam, with support for any other platform being an increasingly unjustifiable spend. With Steam banning competing on prices (beyond free giveaways and subscriptions, it seems), there is just no competing.
So no, the DRM-free hook alone isn’t working for GOG. Working here would mean growing or at least preserving their stake against Steam’s all-consuming rage, and that’s clearly not happening.
Which is why I’d love for people to start acknowledging the issues with Steam and their position and start defaulting to GOG where they can.
To be fair, “gamers” did acknowledge the drm related issues… and insist that Steam is also drm-free and it is only the games that use drm (including steam-drm…) that aren’t.
Which… look, I like gog a lot and do make it a point to buy games there when feasible. But it is hard to get TOO upset with people changing the definition of DRM when cdp already did that for gog (it is basically just GOO with less stardock shitheads).
Which gets back to the bigger issue of people needing to understand what they are and aren’t “giving up” for a given DRM model. But that would involve people thinking critically and… we don’t do that anymore.
I keep reminding people that we “gamers” used to be super mad at Steam. There were boycotts. Every warez group on the planet dropped what they were doing to jailbreak Half Life 2 out of sheer spite.
I don’t worship GOG any more than I do Steam, but I do want a solid competitor keeping Valve in check and I would love it if that competitor was also DRM-free because I like owning stuff.
The “most Steam games are DRM-free” line is baffling, though. Especially since Valve itself seems to disagree. I mean, they’ll tell you to add more DRM on top and use their centralized online services to make backups and pirated copies worse because it’s weak DRM… but it’s DRM both stand-alone and as part of the GaaS model they’re pushing. They even added an entire warning box to remind you that they aren’t selling you anything and they can take all your stuff away whenever and people somehow presented that as a welcome sign of honestly, which was some of the most surreal PR I have seen in my life.
To disrupt stream, you’d need to be better than Steam. Also, what am I gonna do with my existing 1000 games in steam? I DON’T WANT 5 GAME MANAGERS.
All these companies think people want 10 streaming services, 5 steams, 7 spotifys. WE DONT. We just want 1 that does everything we want.
I want five game managers.
Maybe a sixth to manage those.
Competition in the PC market is a good thing. Otherwise it’s just another locked down console.
I know that today in most English-speaking countries, competition is worshipped as an all-powerful god that solves every problem. But the reality is that competition is often detrimental to a lot of stakeholders in an industry. Competition optimizes for specific parameters in a downward spiral- that’s why every streaming service sucks, and is worse than Netflix was 10 years ago.
What would you hope to get out of a Steam competitor? I will guess that you are talking about price pressure. But Steam does not set the prices- publishers do. That’s why the same game is $69.99 whether you get it on Steam, the PlayStation Network, Xbox store, Epic Games Store, or buying physical copies from Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, or wherever else. In that way you could argue Steam already has tons of effective competition putting pressure on prices, just outside of the specific PC digital storefront space.
So maybe if Valve had more competition, Steam might be forced to reduce their fees to publishers, but there’s no reason to believe that cost savings would be passed on to consumers.
If anything, having competition just repeats the fixed costs, or in other words reduces the population of users that fixed costs are spread over, driving up the total and per-unit costs of the whole system.
Now I certainly am not saying anything so dumb as “In GabeN we trust” or “I have faith in Valve to conduct business fairly as a monopoly in the long-term”. But the solution is regulation, not competition.
The other notable place monopolies fail is servicing less profitable populations. Valve has so far done the opposite. Epic has outright refused to support Linux, while Valve has made their own free gaming Linux distro, with tons of work put into Proton for free to ensure compatibility. VR is a tiny niche, but Valve still put out one of the best VR systems kn the market. The “handheld” PC market was incredibly niche, but Valve released the Steam Deck and I would guess sold an order of magnitude or two more units than anything before or since in that space. I don’t really see any underserved niches asking for a competitor.
I really hate it when I launch a game from Steam and another launcher pops up (looking at you, Funcom)
Yeah, people say this. And sometimes they say this even if the “other launcher” just pops up for a second, does a thing and automatically goes away, because that’s how Ubisoft’s one has worked for a while and people still complain about it A LOT.
I don’t get it.
The other launcher prevents me from playing games.
I bought Titanfall 2 on Origin shortly after release. A couple years later, it was very cheap on Steam with DLC included, so I bought it again.
I can’t start the Steam version, because the EA App tells me I didn’t buy the DLC.
I can’t be the first person with this issue, but EA doesn’t care. Their launcher prevents me from playing the games I bought because they don’t care.
Works for me in that exact same scenario.
But in any case, that’s a bug. I’ve encountered games that have gamebreaking bugs, second launcher or not, and with both EA and Steam. They both will give you a refund automatically, at the very least. That’s neither here nor there.
Yes, it’s a bug. You can find many reports on the internet, it’s existed for years and EA doesn’t care.
Oh, awesome, so I just have to accept that the second launcher prevents me from playing the game? I have to buy the DLC for a higher price in the EA store if I want to play them?
Awesome, who doesn’t want such a great second launcher! Please give me one in front of all my games, I’d hate being able to use Steam as my primary launcher!
Well, no, you found a bug in a poorly maintained game. You don’t have to accept anything, but if the customer support for both of the affected companies won’t help you fix it then the recourse is to get a refund.
But that is true regardless of whether the bug is on Steam, whatever EA is calling their authorization system these days or the game itself. It’s not a problem with the concept of a game featuring its own login flow, it’s a problem with the concept of not maintaining games properly. There are plenty of games in that same situation with no second launcher in them.
