Steam is the last company that has held out against enshittification.
It feels like all the other corpos are mad and want to sue Valve to force them into enshittification.
I’m all for holding companies accountable - when legal pressure forced Valve into creating a return policy, I was happy for that. But this is a $900 Million nothing burger imo. Publishers are mad they can’t get the exposure and sales numbers on a cheaper platform. Cheaper platforms are mad that they still can’t get people to switch to them by significantly under-cutting Steam. That’s (publishers) customers mad they have to pay a ‘premium’ (basically the ‘market rate’ for the service before epic decided to start under-cutting btw) for a better service and the competition mad that a LOT of (publishers) customers are willing to pay that ‘premium’.
I’m not saying the 30% fee is fair, but every single company charges 30% except Epic and the Microsoft PC store which north charge 12%.
“They charge developers too much!”
“Ok, Tim, so how exactly do you make money for your company, then? Because giving away all the free stuff seems like awfully bad business.”
Never thought I’d be defending a company charging a lot of money but since Steam actually does provide an excellent, stable service with bonuses like Linux development and the Steam Deck I mean, I really ain’t that mad, especially they still offer really good sales.
“They charge developers too much!”
So you should be able to undercut them, right? Right?
Exactly. Epic doesn’t even appear to really provide a particularly good service so you’d think a more bare-bones company could get away with charging less, and yet.
Apparently the epic games store isn’t feeling so good, Mr. Stark .
I’m really tired of seeing this idiot quoted.
Out of all the digital stores Steam arguably offers by far the most actual functionality and features for its cut. It’s still too high, but it’s possibly the least egregious example vs Apple, Google etc
Has he (Tim Sweeney) shown up in the Epstein files yet or are we still waiting?
Tim Epic might not have gotten rich enough early enough to be noticed by Epstein
Well… duh. The guy runs a competing storefront who’s only claims to fame are:
- Spending a bunch of money for timed exclusivity and free giveaways, rather than building out core features.
- They give devs a better cut than Steam to win a moral victory.
… that’s it, that’s all the reasons to use Epic, unless you want to play Fortnite or participate in an Early Access period where they chose Epic to reduce the overwhelming amount of feedback like Hades.
although I like a lot of what Valve does (I have a lot of Steam games, valve games, have a steam deck oled, use steamvr, etc) they are a fairly flawed company. sweeney is so great at shooting himself in the foot though that any opinion he has people will by default believe the opposite of (and probably should)
The only interesting argument I heard about this demand was that when you buy game you are tie to respective store, and you cannot buy content like dlc outside that store. I wpukd be amazing for the customers if thus wasn’t the case
The only reason I had an epic account was for their free giveaway. And now that I’ve switched to bazzite, amc considering their poor Linux support, I’m inclined to just cut bait on them.
TBH, I would take their stuff even if I get it for free.
Isn’t Tim the guy that advocates for pedophelia through AI generation?
And Hitler was a vegetarian, but that tells us literally nothing about whether we should abuse animals in factory farms
Sure, but I think wanting to fuck children does kind of paint a vivid picture about your general moral character in a way your dietary preferences might not.
Hitler actually did both. Several of his “girlfriends” were 14 when they met.
He also managed to become the guardian of his 14 year old niece at one point.
I feel like this isn’t a reciprocal thing though. “Guy does good thing” /=/ “You shouldn’t question his judgement/his other ideas are also good. ” feels fair
However
“Guy does bad thing” = “You should question his judgement/his other ideas tend to also be bad” also feels fair
Stop, stop, I already have so many reasons to hate him, I don’t need more.
Tim… suing everyone else wont make epic store a great place to buy games
Look to GOG for inspiration…
He’s just salty because the only games people “purchase” are the weekly free ones.
Not even. I’ve bought games on Steam that I forgot I had in Epic because Epic is just that trash. Fuck Epic for trying to start their store by bribing developers for exclusivity on their platform. Bitch ass tactics to begin with and then crying and whining when their mob mentality strong arming didn’t work. Best believe if their shit had worked and they became popular those greedy assholes would be asking a higher percentage once everyone was locked in.
I don’t even bother with those anymore. I never play the free ones I have, because I’d have to use Epic’s software.
- Playnite, if you’re on Windows (though Linux might be over the horizon).
- Heroic Games Launcher if you’re on any platform.
Playnite is the better choice if you’re on Windows, but either way, don’t let Tim’s dumb store stop you from ruining his day by generating a bunch of metrics that show you’re only playing freebies!
Keep collecting them. Each one you get costs Epic money and helps counter some of that Fortnite cash that lets Epic keep paying for exclusive contracts. Keep bleeding them and eventually they won’t be able to keep buying exclusive releases.
Epic pays a flat rate to offer games for free, they don’t pay per download.
Downloading them just helps Epic inflate their “active users” number when talking to investors.
I even stopped with those.
Yea. Like one or two good ones and sandwiched with a bunch of trash games no one wants.
Thanks for the reminder
He’s still right in this instance.
Exactly. The number of people on Lenny who simp for Valve’s monopoly just because Epic (along with every game developer, big or small) stands to benefit is kind of shocking.
It doesn’t have anything to do with Epic, it’s because Steam provides a great service with a ton of features nobody else offers, and Valve has demonstrated time and time again that they make policies that benefit consumers.
It would be great if Steam had some competition, but Epic ain’t it. What people want is another service of equal quality to Steam. Instead the best we have is GOG and that still falls well short of feature parity nevermind the anti-consumer cesspool of Epic.
Suing Valve isn’t going to do anything to improve the situation. Realistically what could Valve do to be “less of a monopoly”? Lower the percentage they take of sales? Consumers wouldn’t see any benefit from that only developers. Ironically it would also increase Valves monopoly because if they took a smaller cut there would be even less reason for companies to sell on Epic as Epics lower cut is literally the only reason developers (outside of Epic literally paying some of them mounds of cash by way of exclusivity contracts) pick Epic over Steam.
If Epic really wants to do something about Valves monopoly it’s simple, they just need to offer all the same features that Steam does. Things like family sharing, streaming support, a cross platform store and launcher, and an excellent review system so people can better understand the games they’re thinking about buying. Until that happens yes people will stick with Steam because it’s the objectively superior experience.
You know what annoys me about the people defending Epic’s lawsuit? The fact that there are actually legitimate issues with Valve and somehow they’re hyper-fixated on the non-issues. If they were instead talking about CS2 gambling, lootboxes, etc, I would be in support of it. But no, it’s about how they’re a “monopoly” because they’re one of only two stores that seem to care about their customers…
It isn’t a monopoly because they don’t require you to use their store. Epic has a monopoly of epic exclusive games.
How do you call a corporate driving 75% of the digital distribution market for PC games ?
Its an effective monopoly, that’s not really disputable. This lawsuit isn’t even about them having a monopoly, its about them allegedly abusing it.
And ecommerce sellers don’t “have to” sell on Amazon, so they don’t have any market power they can abuse to extract 40-50% fees from sellers, right?
Amazon requires price matching for most sellers, which is shit and makes this an apples to oranges comparison.
Could Steam back down on their 30% cut? Sure, but not a monopoly.
It’s not apples to oranges, because the network effects (and coercive pressures they create) are in fact incredibly similar: sellers have to go where most customers are, and most PC gamers begin and end their search for games on Steam, just like most online shoppers begin and end their searches on Amazon.
I get I am not the average gamer, but even if I find a game on Steam, I tend to check their website too.
Specially for games I like, I try getting the GoG version despite Steam providing regional pricing, which tends to be 0.2xNow if any of Steam’s contracts is preventing GoG or others from providing regional pricing, that’s a point worth considering.
But Steam is providing a much better game finding experience than Epic and others (although GoG seems to be doing well too, recently), so despite me not being affected by the network effect, I do see some value in Steam.From what I see, Steam does give value to gamers. Whether it’s worth 30% of the game’s price or lesser, depends upon information that I don’t know.
They don’t. My small business sells direct from our site instead of in Amazon, and we do okay.
Anecdotes are not data!
While that’s true, counterexamples are great ways to disprove overreaching implications like “companies must sell on Amazon to be successful”.
It is not a requirement. It might be the most profitable way to run an e-commerce business (in which case you’re obviously benefiting from the system Amazon created).
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Is that the Epic that agreed to six-year $800 million partnership with Google recently?
What everyone else is saying, but god to I hate the fortnite art style.
Has epic games developed anything like Proton? Valve isn’t just a store.
What do you mean? Isn’t Kratos dancing orange justice innovative enough?
They developed the Unreal engine. Not sure how “like Proton” you meant, but it’s used by lots of games and is quite a complex and well-regarded 3D engine.
Epic makes tons of money off licensing Unreal to developers and have since before their store was a thing.
Proton makes direct zero profit, though it does make Steam the best store for anyone on Linux.
Not sure why “direct profit” is important.
Proton is basic infrastructure for Steam Deck (which runs Linux). Valve has sold millions of units that I doubt would have been sold without Proton. There’s just a ton of games that will never be ported to native Linux.
Proton isn’t only Valve’s doing though. It’s heavily built on top of Wine which is a very mature open source project that has seen extensive leadership and contributions by CodeWeavers.
Epic doesn’t do a single thing that doesn’t directly result in profits. Features are only added off they can derive income from them. Lawsuits are filed so they can take a larger percentage of profits. Even his twitter posts are mainly about him getting a larger cut, when he isn’t defending AI child porn.
Valve is very old school in their ‘keep improving your offering and it will work out’ way. Usually companies like that get bought out and their name run into the ground. It sadly happens in all industries, from Samsonite luggage to BioWare games and even service companies.
None of what I wrote was intended as a defence of Epic. I don’t like the company at all these days. The last game of theirs that I played was Gears of War. I loved the original Unreal but that was so long ago they might as well be a completely different company.
Anyway I think Valve has some kind of gamer reality distortion field going on. Gamers step up to defend it the way Apple fanboys defended Apple back in the Steve Jobs days. Have people forgotten that Gabe is a billionaire who just got another megayacht?
Proton is a really cool project and Valve has contributed a lot to it but it’s not charity. Valve profits a ton off Proton because it supports game sales on Steam. Linux and SteamDeck users buy a lot more games because of it, games they otherwise couldn’t even run.
The fact that Proton is open source was only partly Valve’s choice. The project is based on Wine which has an LGPL 2.1+ license, which requires Valve to release the source code to their modifications of Wine itself. The extra Proton parts don’t have to be open source, but in practice it creates a lot more work for Valve if they have to maintain their modifications as a fork rather than upstreaming as much as possible.
Sorry if I took it the wrong way. I can see some common ground in Steam vs others and Apple vs others since both focused on the user experience against really poor competition in that area, though Apple has a helluva stronger walled garden.
I do think fanboying a for profit company is silly, but a lot of this is also driven by hate for Epic’s CEO. Epic’s just another business that wants to make money and that alone isn’t the reason people keep backing Steam on these threads. People shit on them because their CEO is an asshole who spends a lot of time bitching about other storefronts while their own still sucks 7 years after release despite the company raking in billions. Guy tries to act like he’s some underdog despite Unreal engine having a greater stranglehold over game development.
To quote an old comment of mine:
Meanwhile Steam is a feature rich platform with a bunch of features that regular C-suite types would never green light because they don’t have a direct ROI.
Direct profit is the main driving factor for decision making by C-suite types. EGS is a great example of this: it has the very bare bones of what constitutes an online store, you can see products and make purchases. Almost everything else is half assed and tacked on. It’s frankly amazing that a system like Steam exists when they could (and still could) enshittify really badly.
I don’t see how SteamOS is any different from iOS in this regard. Apple spends a ton of resources developing APIs to support all kinds of optional functionality that 3rd party developers can take advantage of. None of it earns any direct profit.
Apple directly makes money off iOS apps and in most of the world you can only buy via their store. On the other hand, I can and do buy games from GoG and run them just fine on my Steam deck and can still benefit from proton.
The only reason I buy most of my games from Steam is they make things even easier than buying from GoG.
That Whataboutism is Not really relevant to the lawsuit.
Just because they made someone useful to expand their control over the games industry, that you happen to like, doesn’t mean them abusing their monopoly position isn’t still bad.
>Open source, publicly available tool to aid in Linux adoption
>“some[thing] to expand their control over the games industry”
Found the Sweeney fanboy. Just because Timmy-boy can’t install kernel-level malware on Linux doesn’t mean Gabe Newell is going to use it to conquer the Earth, bud.
Why are you acting like there aren’t steam games with additional drm?
Steam doesn’t require DRM to publish on their platform.
Neither does epic.
Again with the complete and utter lack of ability to understand that nuance exists, and both can be bad people doing self interested things, and one bad person saying something correct does not mean you agree with everything they stand for just because you agree with the one smart thing.
Like more than one of you are stuck in this moronic binary mindset. It’s pathetic.
Steam also places DRM and states in their EULA that you pay to license the title and not own it. Looks like your a Steam fanboy. We shouldn’t be fanboys of anything but simply notice the good and bagld companies do because either way they aren’t our friends
Developers place DRM, that’s not s requirement of Steam publishing. Also, 99% of digital stores state you’re only buying a license. That’s a problem with modern society, not Steam.
So Steam is part of the problem. They can simply not have that in their EULA. With that attitude no change will ever happen for the better
I don’t think blaming Steam for society’s ills is a valid response.
That’s not what we’re doing. Not giving steam a pass for doing the same bad shit that you hate other companies for doing isn’t putting society’s ills into steam. It’s just not being hypocritical.
They demonized all actions of Valve, for the sake of defending Epic, even to the point of painting something that aids Linux adoption across the board as if it were a secretive, locked-down part of Steam’s environment. I pointed out the failure in that. Yeah, totally the same. 🙄
That’s not remotely what I did, and I weep for the future if this is the level of reading miscomprehension we have to deal with.
Bronzebeard is being objective and certainly not taking the position you’re generalizing here
Lol, no. That was not objective. And on top of that, I was not taking the position you’re generalizing here.
In short, what happened was, Bronzebeard made a cynical and destructive statement about the existence and development of Proton. I called them out by referencing what they said. Then, you came along, picked out some reasons to be angry with Valve, attributed them to me as though I said them, and acted as though pointing them out made you superior. We are not the same.
It is at this point, will be disengaging, as my conversation with you started with you putting words in my mouth, and I have less than no interest in speaking to you further.
🤡
Wine?
I didn’t know epic games developed that.
Wine was never developed by Epic, as far as I know. Wikipedia showed nothing about Epic, not a word.
I think they misspelled “whine”.
That, or they’re saying Proton isn’t Valve’s work alone and that it’s heavily based on WINE. I’m not sure if that’s true, but it’s another way to read that comment.
Proton is a combination of technologies. The main ones are wine and dxvk
I never said epic made wine.
Wine is like 99% of proton. Historically it was mostly sposored by Collabora and I think they were doing it so they clould run some windows programs on mac (my memory is fuzzy, was a long time ago).
Valve came later. There were already out-of-tree pathes speciffically for games. The wine team didn’t put those in because they are hacks while wines aim is 100% compatibility with windows.
As those patches grew, stuff like wine-staging emerged that would massage those patches into what the wine project would accept. And even later proton was born (i think from some guys repo, i think valve hired him).
If you want to attribute something to valve, then ACO is a better option. It’s amazing.
I’m just a bit annoyed that nobody praises wine while everybody speaks like it was all valve.
I never said epic made wine
You implied it by responding with “Wine?” to the question “Has epic developed anything similar to proton?” 🤦♂️
Yes yes whatever i dont care
