I also quite like a lot of the blockbuster games as well as the indie games. An indie dev will never release a game like Red Dead 2, for one example. I definitely play more indie games, but I would rather the blockbuster market be healthy too.

I feel the same about the movie business. Indie films can be awesome, but some kinds of movies are hard to do without a large budget.

Pyramids are hard to build without a super-feudal economy and society. But we got rid of that, losing the practical ability to make pyramids in the process, because we value other things like democracy higher.

Uhh we still build things like pyramids all the time - Three Gorges Dam, Burj Khalifa, One World Trade Center - it's just we don't build pyramids themselves anymore.

The Burj Khalifa was notoriously built with more or less slave labour, so maybe not the best example.

Or maybe that was part of the point, that unfortunately some large structures are still built by people working under slave-like conditions.

I don't think the Three Gorges Dam was built by something most would call a democracy.

Hm. The pyramids were an architectural and supply chain genius stroke considering when they were made. It also took fantastic human sacrifice to achieve that. One world trade center was built with the assistance of trains and semi trucks brining ore to smelters and steel to the construction site, electricity, cranes etc.

Minus the slavery, have we really expended that much human effort and equivalent wealth and time on something in the modern era? The only thing I can think of is Free software products, shit like Linux.

This is only tangentially related, but because you are all leaning on this pyramid analogy so hard, I thought I would mention that many scholars now believe the pyramids to have been built by some type of salaried (and very skilled) labor. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramid_constructio...

Pretty sure Appolo or Space Shuttle both were more expensive projects than the pyramids, even adjusted for inflation.

The Large Hadron Supercollider?

> Pyramids are hard to build without a super-feudal economy and society

[citation needed]

The 10th-tallest pyramid was built in Memphis, TN 30 years ago [0] and it's now used as a Bass Pro shop. Say what you will about working conditions in the US in the 90s, but I don't think it'd be fair to call it "a super-feudal economy and society".

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis_Pyramid

Call me skeptic, but I’m not really sure that pyramid would be able to stand in place 4500 years. Same shape, way less durability.

Yea building a pyramid is easy, you just need to invent the internal combustion engine first.

That said, pyramids seem to have been built with hired labor so the point is pretty muddy regardless.

Huh? Pyramids exist because they are the easiest comparably thing to make. no one makes them because they have better skyscraper designs now and no one cares about making a 4000yr old tomb.

You know what's today's 4000yr long monument to vanity? Elon Musk's orbiting Tesla

> For these big conglomerates, the trendy thing is to have your own games store. Complete with exclusivity deals

How else are they going to get people to use these stores?

Also the fact that the Epic Games Store exists is a step towards countering Steam's monopoly on mainstream titles.

People complain about the loss of functionality like screenshots or the in-game browser when using Epic. And there are exclusivity deals. Complaints against those things are valid, and the actual implementation of the storefront needs a lot of improvement, but I'm wondering if a Steam monopoly would have been any better for consumers and developers.

To me it sounds like a lot of consumers were happy with the monopoly and saw the exclusivity deals as disruptive as they had to migrate their friends list and set up a lot of things just to play that one hyped title. But when it comes down to the hard issue of staying afloat I can see how the money Epic offers to game studios is enticing.

Steam has been good to me with their native Linux client, Linux client support, proton compatibility tools and community tool support (glorious eggroll proton version). Epic has nothing to offer me.

Furthermore, I know some gamedevs personally who release an early access level title with exclusivity deal on epic's playform just so that they gain access to further funding to finish the game and release on Steam for the actual shot at success. They take advantage of the money to fund their work, but have said that the numbers do not compare to that of Steam.

I began gaming for the first time (unless you count playing on my roommates' XBox in college) this past week, mostly for The Witcher 2/3--both on Linux. The Witcher 3 was never supposed to run on my platform, but somehow Steam and Proton/Wine made that not only possible but actually enjoyable.

I know technically they're doing it to make money, but I can't help like feel it's also something of a labor of love as well. It would have been much easier to leave people in my (our?) position behind, so I appreciate the heck out of Valve for putting in the effort. I imagine they're going to have my goodwill for a long time as a result.

If you want to be cynical, Proton was made from the scraps of a contingency plan that was the Steam Machine. When they realized that Microsoft wasn't going to force their platform onto users, they gave up on Steam Machines and I guess they leveraged the tech to something else.

I think that it is a bit more complex than that. Their original plan was for native[1] gaming on Linux.

When it proved hard to bootstrap that and seeing that the Steam Machine itself they started looking for options. Wine was already pretty good but DX11 support was bad. I do not know if it was serendipity that DXVK started showing promises around they same time they started looking into wine or whether it was the reason for them focusing into wine in the first place.

The rest is history, although the side effect is that it pretty much killed native ports for AAA games on Linux [2].

[1] for some values of native. Many, most, ports are based on internal close source equivalent of wine.

[2] I do not really care about native vs proton, but it would be nice if game companies did officially support proton.

That's not being cynical - that's just facts on how and why SteamOS was conceived and developed

Yep, and Post-Its were made from the scraps of what was supposed to be a really strong adhesive.

It speaks more to me that they released Proton rather than shelving it after losing the original motive.

... and unrelatedly, on the other side, the latest appeasing thing called WSL was made from leftovers of a plan to run Android on Windows Phones, which was dropped when Google refused to allow Play Services run there.

Phoenix Point was a game I cared about a lot. Then one day, they announced they would not be making a Linux version. Not long after they announced it will be Epic exclusive for a year.

Is it fair to blame the developers or blame Epic?

Personally I think at the very least the developers deserve equal blame for accepting the bag of money from Epic.

Money is a strong motivator but the Phoenix Point devs chose to break promises from crowdfunding to accept it. I think that reflects worse on them than it does Epic personally.

I feel ya, I dropped it so hard I even forgot the game until reading your post.

> Steam has been good to me with their native Linux client, Linux client support, proton compatibility tools and community tool support (glorious eggroll proton version)

Reminder: Valve was forced to double-down on SteamOS/Linux by Microsoft's then-intention to shutdown 3rd-party storefronts on Windows. I have a complicated relationship with both Steam (as a Proton user) and Epic (for pulling Linux support on a multiplayer game I already own!), but I still appreciate more competition in the arena: GOG alone won't cut it.

Yes, but they have been owning that decision ever since. If that ever changes, I will reconsider. Until then they have me as a customer.

>if a Steam monopoly would have been any better for consumers and developers.

Well steam runs on and is actively supported on linux, Epic takes games that used to support linux then removes linux support and makes the games exclusive to their store.

So for me personally, a steam monopoly would be better. The epic game store's existence has actually caused games to be removed from the platform I use. It's taken away choice from me. If it stopped existing, I'd be happy.

Now I'm curious, what title previously destined to have linux support and distribution on multiple storefronts did Epic do this to?

This was the high profile one a few months ago.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/23/21078989/rocket-league-ma...

The exclusivity deals were disruptive because they took games that were promised to come to steam and made them exclusive.

The customer has no benefit from the lower cut epic charges.

Epic doesn't treat everyone equally. Big games like Cyberpunk 2077 are allowed to also sell on other platforms, while smaller games either go exclusive or go with everyone else.

Competition is good, but I'd rather have GOG be that competition to Steam than Epic purely based on their anti-DRM stance.

I don't much care for EGS, but Epic is paying small developers a lot for that exclusivity. In the current indie market, that chunk of change can be the difference between profitability and failure.

Or, as the above user put it, the difference between making a creative masterpiece or a clone made to exploit the system.

> Epic doesn't treat everyone equally. Big games like Cyberpunk 2077 are allowed to also sell on other platforms, while smaller games either go exclusive or go with everyone else.

There isn't a conspiracy here. Epic pays developers to make certain games (like Control) temporarily exclusive to EGS. Other developers, like CD Project RED, have not made such a deal, and thus Cyberpunk 2077 is available on many different PC game clients.

There are plenty of games on EGS--large and small--which are not and have never been exclusive. Examples include The Unfinished Swan, SuperHot, and Axiom Verge just to pick three off the top of my head.

I meant the case of DARQ, where the developer was specifically told to either go exclusive or every other store with no possibility of selling on EGS and other stores. [1] According to the article other indie games got similar offers, while the big budget ones can go to multiple stores.

[1] https://www.dsogaming.com/news/epic-games-wanted-darq-as-an-...

To me, asking smaller games for exclusivity is just asking for commitment. One of the reason I don't buy games on GoG anymore is that the developers don't commit to updating their GoG version to keep parity with other versions of the game.

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_that_treat_gog_custo...

I didn't know that. Thanks for that list.

Should we also rail against Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo for paying developers to make games exclusive to their platforms?

No, because it's clear from the beginning what platforms their games will support. That wasn't the case with Metro Exodus [1] for example and one other indie game I can't remember the name off.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/metro-exodus-pulled-from-s...

Yes

I have one particular example of this I love since it happened right on the borderline. I own Anno 1800 on steam, but if you don't you can't (at least for the foreseeable and likely future) - Ubisoft pulled Anno from the steam storefront shortly after launch but! Probably due to some contract shinnanegans with steam, they continue to offer expansions + DLC to users who own Anno already on steam while new users remain locked out from buying it anywhere except UPlay + EGS. Ubisoft has moved a few things over to EGS but I love the Anno example because it landed just as EGS was gaining fame so it sits in the weird middle ground of technically being on steam but not really.

Be a bit mindful blaming ubisoft for stuff vanishing from Steam.

A significantly large part of why Ubisoft started cozying up to Epic was not because of the 5% stake tencent has in it.

It was because Steam pulls all kinds of nasty shenanigans but ubisoft will not state any of it publicly because it would hurt their relationship.

Steam has outright pulled all ubisoft games before, and ubisoft took the blame. People assumed it was because ubi wanted to push uplay; but it was all about someone at valve deciding that we'd violated some rule about content distribution.

We gave UK players of AC:Syndicate a country specific hat which wouldn't have made sense to the global market.

They didn't warn, we woke up to see that kotaku[0] had run an article about it before we even knew ourselves.

This is not an isolated incident, just a dramatic one that I remember as my own personal shifting point w.r.t. steam, because I'd only just started working at Ubisoft and was hating on uplay and was quite fond of steam.

[0]: https://kotaku.com/ubisoft-pulls-big-games-from-steam-165567...

Having bought a Ubisoft game on Steam and having to sit there for minutes while uplay updates itself when I just wanted to play for 10 minutes or so, I have very little sympathy for you.

> We gave UK players of AC:Syndicate a country specific hat which wouldn't have made sense to the global market.

So Valve makes sure that players from different countries get the same content? As a UK expat that's something I'm glad of.

Better customer service, user experience, and game selection. All these various online game stores should be required, by law, to allow any publisher to put their games on the platform for a standard publishing rate. No exclusivity, no special rate setting. Those are classic anti-competitive tactics, and this is yet another front to fight that battle on.

> Right now, Steam is still the leader

I wonder how they compare to Apple.

Apple probably doesn't have much revenue from the OS X desktop store, but if we're talking about total gaming revenue, Steam is around $5 billion/year and Apple is around $20 billion/year. Although I'm pretty sure Apple's # represents gross sales, not their 30% cut. I don't know if Steam's # is the revenue they receive after their cut, or if it's gross sales. If their # is the cut they take, they'd be far ahead of the App Store in terms of gross profit.

From a gamedev friend, there is no money on macOS. iOS and apple arcade is a viable option, but on Steam, the macOS sales are not worth the headache support and development gives you. Lots of quirks to work around with macOS, and more to come with the ARM transition as apple will surely blame developers for performance problems with x86 titles. Not to mention that the yearly developer fees that you have to pay to keep a game's long tail on the store. It eats into profits for Indies.

> but on Steam, the macOS sales are not worth the headache support and development gives you. [...] Not to mention that the yearly developer fees that you have to pay to keep a game's long tail on the store.

What yearly developer fees do you need to pay to keep a macOS game on Steam? Is it to Valve?

Nothing yearly for Steam, it's a one-off fee, I think about 100 USD these days (it changed over the years). For the macOS store it is a 100 USD a year or so, and of course they take their cut from your sales. I prefer Valve's way of doing business.

Oh, okay. You started talking about whether it’s worth releasing a Mac game on steam, and then brought up a yearly fee, so I was having trouble following where you transitioned.

The mobile gaming market and PC/console gaming are basically two distinct markets with very little overlap though.

> Right now, Steam is still the leader and obvious home for a lot of these otherwise-independent developers.

HN: TEAR DOWN THE APPLE STORE MONOPOLY! Also HN: Steam is cool and pulls 30% from developers.

It's worth drawing the distinction that Steam, as opposed to Apple and their app store, does not hold an exclusive monopoly and cannot dictate where users can install software from. If a Dev doesn't like Steam, there are other publishers and store fronts that they can peddle their wares through. Similarly users can go elsewhere to buy and install, even direct from the manufacturer.

Steam being the de facto choice is another issue entirely, and yet another discussion for their fee structure.

Also, steam is not as controlled as the apple store.

I bet, if nvidia wanted to, they could publish geforce now there, for example.

Steam does not control Windows, does it?