(To be fair - I think some stores like the Epic Games store actively make playing games on them worse, e.g. I played Alan Wake 2 through Epic and the achievements notifications were massively distracting, ruining many scary and dramatic moments, and they turn themselves back on every time you launch the game...)
There have been timed exclusives on Epic that I just waited out, partially out of spite, and mostly because I just wouldn't want to own the game on something that wasn't Steam.
They try to play folk hero when it suits them, but someone who actually cared about individual well-being wouldn't lock Linux players out of their flagship games, or use dark patterns like artificial scarcity to get people to spend more time/money in their ecosystem.
Epic the past couple of years has been a great example of the "a broken clock is correct twice a day" idiom, at best.
It's started to even draw a lot of attention from more general gaming and pc streamers. So many videos of different streamers trying Bazzite lately.
Next year might actually see a tipping point where there can be real pressure to gain support from the likes of Adobe. I expect MS might make some offline version or Office 365 + Electron at some point soon as well.
It definitely helps that it works (almost) flawlessly. If it stopped working well, I would stop using them, but with the current status quo it's a rare example of a company I transact with that I actually feel good about
And now that I have a Steam Deck, this difference is even more stark.
And we who are dependent on steam know how bad things would be if steam wasn’t this unicorn. Gaben is the rare feudal lord whose people show up to battle out because they know it’s good for them. All he had to do was not abuse his monopoly for the past 25 years, as the meme goes.
The user on the other hand doesn’t want 8 different bloated game launchers slowing startup, siphoning bandwidth, constantly updating, using a bunch of memory, and each using 1-2% of CPU at idle doing who knows what.
These clients really have zero respect for users.
Steam came out in 2003, in an era where PC gaming was still very much - go to the store and buy a physical CD. You owned the game.
I still feel uneasy about it, but Steam is the least evil (outside of GOG, but much smaller catalog). But our options for actually owning digital content have all evaporated, unless you sail the high seas.
The next evolution in our journey to non ownership will be game streaming, if latency can be solved to take the non-ownership a step further. We are halfway there with even single player games now requiring an always-on internet connection.
I miss the days of offline and physical media.
* Required you to type in a serial number (at best), or went online to actually download the game binary (at worst).
* Needed to stay in the CD drive in order to play
* Could not be copied as a backup if the disc ever got lost or damaged.
* Was a major cause of scarcity for a digital product.
The concept of ownership was already eroding before Steam was created.
At the time I had dialup. Patching on Valve's schedule simply did not work for me. Patching most games at that point was a multi-stage process involving resume-capable download managers and setting my PC to automatically get online and start downloading at night.
I will say that even those who had broadband did have legitimate grievances. Any kind of background process mattered a lot more back then, and Steam was not particularly light weight thanks in part to its use of a custom UI framework. I also don't recall it being particularly stable early on, nor the servers being able to hold up too well under load as demonstrated almost immediately by the HL2 launch. Neither insurmountable and both in fact surmounted within a few years, but again it was being forced on an existing community.
Had it been optional for CS it still would have had a rough start with HL2 and a lot of gripes from that community but I think it wouldn't have been hated as hard as what resulted from forcing it on CS players.
Proliferation of credit cards, increased internet stability/speed, and more powerful computers have taken the warts away. Steam has also repeatedly shown to be on the side of the consumer, and also very offline friendly.
The first time I did a rebuild and now no longer needed the installation media for games, or the license keys in the manual/game jacket, and I was fully sold.
I don’t fully grasp the hatred, because almost every aspect of it is a vast improvement over what existed 20 years ago. But fortunately there are alternatives.
Except when they only added any sort of return mechanism after violating consumer rights laws in all sorts of jurisdictions for like a decade.
Though that was significantly less painful back in the day when a steam sale was actually meaningful.
Steam's pro-consumer-ness is absurdly overblown, but the rest of consumer facing corporations are so fucking awful in comparison that they look like angels. They're also mostly just trying to keep anyone from looking at the closet full of profits explicitly from enabling underage gambling.
Not that I'm a hater, but people need to keep perspective. Valve is just a company that is slightly less abhorrent in it's practices.
Of course, I’d never use their generous only-superficial-questions-asked-if-you-don’t-play-much return policy to, basically, get a demo of a game. Because that isn’t what it is intended for. But, I wonder if that ability has gotten them more sales…
Curious what you mean by this?
In 2012, Terraria went on sale for 25 cents. Valve sold the entire Half Life family for like two dollars. AAA and big name games would go for 80% off or more, back when that actually got you a full game without microtransactions or significant DLC to buy.
People got excited about the sales because you might wake up to find the game you really wanted for $60 was now a few dollars.
Objectively "Incredible" deals are a lot less common, and old stuff doesn't have massive discounts anymore, sticking with "just" very good discounts.
How much of that is to blame on steam vs. the publishers, though? I would imagine the publishers have much more control over (if not total control?) over pricing. So, unless I'm wrong, it seems misguided to put that at steam's feet.
That's true, but Valve put in the work to make Steam really great.
That said, I still prefer to buy from GOG when possible.
Occasionally I was forced into using others, when a game only released on Epic / Origin / Battle.net. But they all felt worse than Steam. So given a choice for the game, I'll buy it on Steam even at a higher price.
Imagine a world where a PE firm gets its hands on valve
Ended up in a loop of support asking for logs ad infinitum, while ignoring the fact that when I installed the client and game on a separate computer it crashed at the same point. Chalked it up to experience and just decided to not give them any more of my money
I did have to use some obscure tool to extract it being on Linux but it's nice to know I won't have to purchase another copy again. There's a number of games I've had to repeat purchase (mostly from disk to digital), and with modding the forced auto updates on steam can also be a pain
I'll continue supporting Steam over GOG for PC gaming, especially as a Linux user.
In any case, often with these free deals the developer is compensated according to how many installs the game gets. Number of installs during sales is also a metric that helps gain funding for future titles.
So if Epic/GOG give away a game you already have and like, taking the time to add it to your collection, installing and running it briefly may help the developer out.
Valve doesn't feel the need to shovel free games at me to get me to use their services, they're right not to do so because their services are still the best and I'm not begrudgingly using them but happily using them. And again, especially for Linux, where they've given a great deal back to making it a viable gaming platform. For launchers, I use Lutris and Heroic to manage my non-Steam games from Epic, GOG, Amazon directly, Humble Bundle, and Itch.io. I tend to configure these to use the GE fork of proton, again something that wouldn't be where it is without Valve.
But I disagree that it’s unsustainable or unhealthy for the ecosystem. It’s clearly a loss-leader designed to keep you engaging with the platform, yes, but it’s not necessarily worse for the developers or the platform than, say, a hugely-discounted Steam sale (or a subscription service like Gamepass).
Also if Steam started giving away games like Epic do I’m pretty sure they’d be adored for it.
Is that criticism? Because from your comment, so are you. You pay Amazon, and GOG gives you free games.
I refuse to give any money to Amazon, but gladly pay GOG.
Before Valve sponsoring/partnering with Code Weavers on Proton, running anything-but-old-and-stable games via Wine was a fraught affair, now even games that update weekly/monthly run perfectly, without having to fiddle with config files or downloading specific DLLs. For the large and growing library of supported games, Steam made Linux gaming painless.
And if that doesn't work, you can still import the game into Linux, while also still owning it independently from the platform.
The quality of support I've received as a developer on Steam makes Apple's App Store ecosystem look like joke.
Sure, if GOG had even 20% of steams catalog and useability, it be no. 1 without question. But since we‘re sadly limited to this one reality, there is no alternative.
XBOX GamePass is a trap I expect to spring every day, Uplay and EA Origin are just a splash screen I see when starting a game in steam, and I almost forgot the epic store exists, despite their “free game” Marketing campaign.
It’s not perfect, it’s anti-consumer way to often, and it’s for sure a monopoly’s, but steam is still my favorite poison And yes, if they decide to disable me account and cut me off my pile of shame I will have an impact.
But owning games does not seem to be an option generally. Exceptions exist, ofc.
To the second line, systems with a network effect tend to clump people together.
Given Steam's history and market position, they don't need exclusives at this point. I do remember the likes of Outer Wilds and Final Fantasy 7 Remake being EGS exclusives for the first year of their respective PC releases.
Steam is simultaneously hard to like, as a DRM service, but also hard to dislike as they put so much care into getting games running on Linux and have a very reasonable return policy, full refunds for the game not working makes it easy for Linux users especially.
Same point: it’s not good, but that’s reality for you.
I suspect almost all of the games on GoG, if they are also on Steam, also don't have DRM on Steam.
Curious. You don't think that this slippery slope we're on is worth reporting on?
I'm not trying to disparage steam, I actually really like them[1]. I'm pointing it out because it's a business strategy we don't see that often: loyalty. I mean what other billionaire do you know where there's tons of memes of but is also overwhelmingly seen in a positive light? Sure, he doesn't have Elon money but dude has $10bn, I don't think another $290bn is really going to make a big difference in his life[2]. He has way less controversy than Elon had even before all the political stuff. Steam is like Costco, except Gabe is a billionaire.
What I'm trying to say is that you can become a billionaire by building a quality product and through customer loyalty. These things don't have to be mutually exclusive. You can be fucking rich, your employees can be fucking rich, you can build a useful, AND a beloved product. In a time where we live in a Lemon Economy, where it is all about making the s̶h̶i̶t̶t̶i̶e̶s̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶u̶s̶e̶r̶s̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶b̶u̶y̶ minimum viable product, where we rush for the newest feature and loudest bells and whistles (regardless of if they actually work), Steam stands out.
I want more companies like Valve/Steam.
[0] https://upptic.com/valve-structure-employment-numbers-revenu...
[1] Like another user pointed out, they won be over with Linux gaming. I've had a great experience with them, even from the early days. You could tell through github issues they cared. They wouldn't just dismiss things like "oh, we don't support that distro" and actually just figure out what's going on (because your distro doesn't actually matter). They were clearly nerds themselves and nerds that cared.
[2] You just can't spend that kind of money. Fucking MacKenzie Scott is trying to give her wealth away as fast as possible, has already given away half her wealth, but she has the same net worth as when she divorced Bezos. Compound interest is a crazy thing.
[3] P.S. Fuck Visa and Mastercard. Unless my transaction is illegal, you better fucking process it. Anything short of that is holding my own money hostage. That is fucking theft. You created the duopoly. Don't get greedy or you'll lose it.
OS specific stores, consoles, and retrogaming already have more games than I am able to play the rest of my life.
If they were like Loki in the Linux gamming efforts, I would be willing to kind of sponsor it, for Proton I already have Windows at home.
Other than my phone, I would never purchase software from an OS-specific store. Why would you ever choose to do that?
It is already there, has enough choice to keep me entertained, I don't suffer from FOMO.
I'm a Windows user. I don't want to lose my apps if (really, when) I eventually switch to Linux.
Buying my games on Steam means I can play my games anywhere.
Better keep targeting Windows.
With Proton we basically have a common stable runtime that handles all the platform specific needs of a video game. It just so happens that runtime is largely binary-compatible with Windows. It's easier for devs to support when all they have to do is stick to a Proton-compatible subset of the Win32 API. Users get way more games. And anecdotally my experience as a user is generally better than with true native ports. It's a big net win.
It is up to Valve to make it work.
It is a loss for GNU/Linux as gamming platform.
Do you think anyone would be paying for Nintendo and PlayStation consoles, if they were running XBox OS translations, instead of having the games natively target them?
That is why all those cheap Chinese handhelds never go nowhere, being basically MAME devices.
The alternative is that they do not do this at all because it is too much work for too little payoff. Proton is driving real Linux adoption in PC gaming.
Proton is driving the adoption of PC Windows games on Linux.
Plenty of other AAA games have made Proton and Deck-specific compatibility considerations