A benevolent monopolist/dictator who knows how to please everyone is better than open market/democracy that are inevitably controlled by greed and Idiocracy.
Funny thing is Steam is SO GOOD if it just EXPERIMENTED on Android and IOS, Google play and the AppleStore both would instantly become NUMBER TWO for App Distribution on their OWN devices by a land slide and its not due to them having a monopoly. QUALITY will always trump Quantity.
It's cos no one needs it. Everyone is disillusioned with games as a service: so much so that another storefront for this sh% would just go unused (same as Epic currently does, despite their business model relying on literally handing out free stuff).
eLeCtrOn """""APPS""""" (yikes) (also, Steam could totally still have automatic client updates, but download them in the background and only apply them for the next time you open it, that would definitely speed things up. Though I kind of understand why that's not the case)
@@alandunaway3000 this dude and one other guy really be crying because of auto update let's be honest those kind of people would complain if there weren't auto update whiners
Also Tim Sweeney detests Linux as a platform, just to spite even more possible consumers that use linux on the desktop, or maybe have a steam deck. How one could even consider supporting a a storefront / company if they outright spit in your face (EGS games work under linux granted, But it's COMMUNITY programs that make this possible, not directly EGS. Valve does make a serious effort of support, devs and customers alike!) If you despite all continue to use EGS (most likely for free games like i am and let's face it most people) and want the games to work under Linux, use Heroic Launcher, you can launch and play EGS, GOG and Amazon games with little to no thinkering
I remember when he bought out that Linux team that was working alongside Valve, just to prevent them from working with them any further, and then he has them doing nothing. I was absolutely livid at how selfish and assholish Timmy can get.
@@TheRockNatural He really is, especially with how he rages non stop on Twitter to this day. Possibly the cringiest, most childish CEO I have ever seen.
It pisses me off that so many companies and people complain about Steam having a monopoly when Valve is playing totally fair and just provides an incredible service. If you want to compete you have to provide a service that is at least comparable to Steam and nothing comes close, it is honestly like no one is even trying.
@@AxleTradebut why invest money or time if they can just slander the opposition. Cone on guys, out storefront that lacks a lot of features js just as good as steam *wink*. It is sad when people come to the Steam forums to talk about games because epic lacks their own.
That’s exactly why they are complaining. Steam sets the rules and the rules are fair but they want the rules to be unfair so they can make even more money.
It's because Valve doesn't have investors to please. They can just run Steam sustainably and fairly, and so long as they make a profit (doesn't need to growth) they are fine. They have no reason to get greedy and fuck people over.
@@chestertamayo1894 Personally I dislike the client because it performs worse than steam for me and has less features, but I like that they have a lot of older games
Steam just recently released their family sharing feature which was insanely good. It probably saved a ton of people so much money. Steam also launched a new screen recording beta. What are other launchers doing? Nothing. Most are simply content with just existing.
Steam is just constantly adding new, consumer-friendly features that enhance and simplify the PC gaming experience. And they aren't even under any pressure to do it. They just do it because they can. Screen recording was most likely added because the Steam Deck community was constantly asking for it, but they didn't have to add it. Local network game transfers was another thing the Steam Deck community kept asking for and was obviously only added because of that. It's saved me a lot of time and bandwidth when it comes to downloading games on my other devices. My internet isn't slow but a local network transfer is faster than my internet. And this is a godsend for people with data caps. Why would I want to use anything else when Steam has all these features?
Its had this family sharing feature for a while, just made it simplier to use Though with a new policy, i cant share with people outside my country now. Still i find it better now cause they no longer restrict one member playing the games of its owner while the owner is playing something else
You are correct that for many PC gamers like myself, if it's an Epic exclusive, as far as I'm concerned it doesn't exist on the platform. I have nothing but contempt for Epic, and Tim Sweeney. I will happily transact with other consumer friendly storefronts than Steam. Never Epic.
Games that goes exclusive on EPIC will get the silent treatment even when it finally comes to Steam. I might pick it up on a sale, but with some like Borderlands 3, EPIC in fact saved my from buying a steaming pile of horse manure!😂
Honestly, who would even consider making an epic EXCLUSIVE game? If you want a fair cut of money, release on steam AND humble bundle, where the humble bundle release may have exrra goodies. Best way to release indie games imo. Edit: also use itch
@todesziege I know and that's the most ridiculous thing, why go from making money to making nothing? Just invites piracy. It's nintendo all over again.
An important thing to note as well is the animosity tim sweeny has for linux gaming. they have on purpose stopped EGS from working on linux multiple times and I do not forgot when They bought Kamu (Easy Anti-Cheat) and halted development in making it work on linux. They only continued development of it due to pressure from the steamdeck.
I'll never forget that Sweeney likened people going to Linux from Windows to people fleeing/abandoning their country because they're unhappy with how it's being run. It's not that his comparison is entirely unjust, but it demonstrates a mindboggling level of detachment. Like, yes, these things happen, but they do not happen _on a whim_ because people _lack commitment._ Yet he's still banned Linux support from the platform because of his deluded hateboner. Fuck Tim Sweeney.
Also it should be noted, if something gets delisted on Steam, you can still download and play it and thus actually you still own it. But if something gets delisted on EGS you can't even download it anymore.
@@neonsynthosc Huh. So if you owned the Unreal Tournament games on EGS they can't be downloaded anymore? I actually own them on Steam and I can still play them since they were delisted. Actually, I believe those games were never even available on EGS now that I think about it.
@@Moskeeto I think they meant the UT4 beta, which was a free game so you never really "owned" it. Like you, said, the older Unreal games were never available on EGS (for some ridiculous reason).
EGS is more like a beta testing place for games rather than a real store. On the other hand, in addition to Steam's strengths, I'd add Steam Input and everything behind it (compatibility with tons of controllers, not to mention controller remapping on a game basis). Epic lags behind this feature systematically
I cannot over state my love for steam input. Been playing mass effect 1 again. By default the controller bindings allow for 1 power to be mapped for quick access to a tap of the RB button. But with PC bindings you can map power to the 1-8 keys without needing to pause the game to cast. Thanks to steam input I can play with a controller while setting a custome binding that makes it when I ADS, my face buttons and D-pad turn into the 1-8 keys and activated the Gyro on my PS4 controller for more precision aiming. I could never go back to playing on a console while steam allows me all that freedom.
@@Unoriginal1deas pro tip: map several actions in the same button via holding and doing double tap (in Mass Effect for instance, I binded 1 to RB tapping, 2 to RB holding and so on)
I was gonna say, calling Valve a monopoly would imply that they are trying to prevent any competitors, when in reality, their competitors keep shooting themselves in the foot like the meme says Gabe Newell does nothing and wins again
@@blacklisted756 VALVe is also 100% self-owned. They do not accept nobody's fucking money for stakes in the company. They do whatever the fuck they want. They answer to venture capital investors and their retarded ideas.
fuck egs but tencent is mostly chill. played a battle royale made by them(ring of elysium) years ago and while it was hot, it was the funnest shit to me(over 1k hours clocked in), and they kept updating it even while it was dying. god i'll never forget flying around on the kite and dive bombing guys while spraying my smg or racing around the map on a speedboat emptying my machine gun into guys on shore or other boats.
When Epic bought Rocket League and Fall Guys and removed them from Steam, they lost me. That’s some bullshit that film corporations did when they started the streaming wars, and consumers got screwed with the streaming wars.
I use gog too, but here is how convenient steam is: I bought the Resident Evil bundle on GOG, good stuff, RE1 is running out of the box, but i wanted something better, so i downloaded the mods Classic Rebirth and Seamless HD to make the game prettier (tough im regretting that last choice after seeing some of the messier AI backgrounds) the thing is, these mods somehow broke the controller support for the switch pro controller i use on my PC The solution? I added the game as a non-steam game to steam, steam input solved all controller issues and even allowed me to map F9 (quit game button) to a long press of the start button
@@HealyHQ it add controller support even for games that don't support controllers it's crazy , you can bind and emulate mouse via controller, what valve did for pc gaming is amazing
@@gabrielandy9272 Not only that, but you can also use community presets if you don't feel like doing it yourself. Steam input is genuinely one of the best features on PC as a whole lmao. It has better controller support than every current console at this point
It wouldn't surprise me if the slow rollout of the shopping cart and user reviews on EPS was also a result of Epic Games not allocating enough employees to the store's development and maintenance full-time. The firing of nearly 1000 employees last year does not give me confidence in their management.
don't forget that the studios they acquire usually end up getting cannibalized and the employees who don't get sacked are thrown into the fortnite grinder.
EGS was deliberately developed as a Minimum Viable Product. You can buy games on it? No major security breaches? Downloads are actually working? Good enough, ship it. They are of course within their right to do this, but doing it while trying to demonize Steam and Valve's way of doing business is like trying to sell your high school sketchbook doodles for $20 apiece while complaining that the actual professional artists making commissions for $180 are ripping people off.
You know when comparing steam and GOG there are some things I like about GOG galaxy. Like I can connect both steam and epic games to the owned games section and start it there. A better interface when adding individual games. The extras to download the soundtrack and other goodies other on my computer or phone. And of course a selection of old games (running well) and fairly new games DRM free. With steam it has a better way of organising your games, a better review system. Workshop and community hub. And lastly controller mapping and controller/steam deck interface. With the epic game store I just can't find good reason to be the go to for playing games.
I like the fact that GOG doesn't force me to install an update the instant it's made available. The availability of rollback versions could certainly use some work, but it's also at least kind of there.
Something i got to disagree is, Steams review bombing problem, review bombing is not a bad thing or a problem, is a tool the costumer has to show dissatisfaction, exemple, helldivers, or when plenty of live services receive a bad update you can usually see recent reviews taking a dip towards negative. Review bombing is never a random event, there is always a reason behind it, even if some disagree as to the why.
Depends. Your example of Helldivers 2 is an instance where we see it as a good thing, due to the bait & switch action taken by Sony that directly impact the game. But there are also plenty of instances taken by state actors and snowflakes that are problem instances. Devotion got review bombed so badly by PRC state actors it ended up getting pulled off Steam, for reasons that are unrelated to the game's quality. Life is Strange: True Colors had the issue of mass downvoting (from guess who) due to simply show a Tibetan flag. CoD: MW (2019) also got hit by Russian state actors for it's depiction of the Russian military. Then comes the many dumb instances where a game gets mass downvoted for simply not having the language for the region, something that is listed before you buy a game. It's a difficult challenge that aggregators like Metacritic and Steam face since not all instance of mass down voting are malicious but definitely not a black-and-white issue.
And I think Valve already address the review bombing by creating a calendar thingy so everyone could see the day review bombing happen. Still, I think Steam's user review is way ahead better than what EGS has. EGS wants to be the playstore or appstore so bad that they mimic their awful review rating. It's so shit
Say that to Red Candle Games when their game got review bombed off platform by the red army and Chinese bots just because it included a satire image of Winnie the Pooh
@@corywalker7903 While most consumers might not care, the real damage really is only for smaller/midsize developers that depend on the store for their marketing, rather than AAA devs who honestly for all intents and purposes don't need the platform to actually promote their game. Overwatch 2 is the most extreme example of this, it's reviewed viciously but it's no-harm done because it magically still has tons of revenue. Even then I feel like I'm not really in the minority with this when I say that I don't really use the platform in general to buy a game. I mostly go through word of mouth and followings on other social media. I feel like this conversation is only relevant with people who buy games whose development falls within the size I mentioned previously.
I refude to use EGS over UT. Not only did they pull the team working on UT4 (well basically 4) to work on fortnite, but then they turn around and completely nuked the series into the ground.
Suppressing the possibility of negative reviews is the kind of majorly short-term thinking that only hurts the one doing it. From an intensely myopic perspective, it might make it more likely for a customer to buy a *particular* game, but it won't take long at all before your storefront has a reputation of pushing a ton of garbage like it's gold.
It pisses me off that Epic Games tries to always paint a false image of themselves as some kind of hero’s. Like they improve the 10% and fuck up the 90%. We sued Google and Apple but bought a bunch of games off competing platforms and made them exclusive on our own. Sick, fuck rocket league then
That is my biggest problem with them. Sweeny acts like he is doing all of this out of the goodness of his heart. His actual actions look like someone take market share by force. There was an indie dev of a popular game, I cannot find the Tweets, that called Sweeny out for this. They would take a larger cut from Valve for the services they provided and at worst were "benevolently lethargic" than what they saw a Sweeny trying to take market control. I believe the concern was what usually happens when a publicly traded company take up almost the whole market, they start to squeeze everyone because the line has to go up.
One thing i like about steam, is that it automatically accepts my PlayStation controller without needing any other software, I don't think the other stores do that
Epic has a complete disregard for its own history. They delisted all the Unreal games, the games that put them on the map, saying they'd rerelease them but then never did. Then the whole project got memory holed and there's been no news since. This level of disrespect is insane to me. It would be like If Valve, once it hit it big, decided to completely remove and forget about all of half life. They may not know how to count to three but they don't forget where they came from.
Tim Sweeny is part of the establishment (rich people in control). He despises anything that doesn't actively eat away a poor peoples money, or just outright shit on franchises (Borderlands 3, looking at you). He is no different than Ubisoft or EA.
@@Dr.Freeman... They put out Alyx and that anniversary update for half life one and all their games are still playable. But you're not wrong either. There's some negligence in the multi-player sphere of their games and dispute how stupidly huge they are it would be nice to see some of those resources go to new games at a stronger rate than 'when we feel like it'.
@@Thehotdogman yeah true, but obviously alyx is vr exclusive meaning that not everyone will be able to play it since you require a valve index and not everyone is going to blow £919 to play a vr game (and for common folk, the oculus quest provides a better deal), not every half-life fan will be able to play it, plus the cliffhanger also sets up half-life 3, which of course is still to be announced, but I agree with your point about the 25th anniversary, and the abandonment of some of their multiplayer games. I am a relatively new half-life fan (started playing the games about 2 years ago) but I understand that people have been waiting for hl3 for longer that I have existed so I just my former favourite games developer to release a game so many people have been waiting for.
@@Dr.Freeman... Valve uses the Half-Life franchise to show off new tech. 2 was to show off the Source engine and Alyx was to show off Source 2 and their VR hardware. I don't know if they even want to try to make HL3, considering how long it has been. The longer it takes the more it will have to wow people. If it doesn't people will go, "It took them X years to make this?" Really Alyx was HL3 if not that, it was at least Half-Life 2: Episode 3.
@@tablettablete186 absolutely, you have to go a bit out of your way with Steam (not sure about EGS) but GoG has always been amazing when it comes to DRM free games and giving you control. It's the main reason I used to always buy from GoG over Steam.
Sadly, your conclusion of what EGS is good for is no longer valid. EGS dropped the "pre-sale" gimmick and are just dropping to a 0% fee during their exclusivity period now. Needless to say, I think that's why so many companies have outright abandoned any exclusivity deals with them.
I mean my Desktop OS is Linux. I couldn't even use EGS if I wanted to for some insane reason. Steam meanwhile actually seems to be keenly interested in helping me run the games it carries on Linux. Makes the decision a no brainer
I switched to Linux Mint a few months ago. I've had a few bumps to smooth out such as Hogwarts Legacy crashing (too small.of a default page file) and older games such as Supreme Commander:FA, and Hyper Dimension Neptunia running poorly on a higher end system. Ive sorted out most problems and almost NEVER boot into Windows. In fact I'm looking to wipe windows off almost exclusively unless I want to get back into MSFS
I didn't specifically like Valve when they announced Linux support. If they followed through Desura was a gonner, but I didn't understand Valve's commitment. They don't actually abandoned things on a whim. Purchasing games on Steam has been the greatest future proofing of game purchases.
One thing I remember hearing about early on when people were trying out EGS was that there were a lot of payment options that would require the customer to pay extra transaction fees. This one of the ways Epic keeps their cut at 12%, they pass on the transaction costs to the consumers in these cases.
I was actually okay with Epic when it first launched. It was until Metro: Exodus got pulled last minute from Steam to make it an Epic exclusive (if you pre ordered the game on Steam before a certain date you still kept it, but they did this decision 2 weeks before launch.) I then vowed I wouldn't use EGS. Whats crazy is the original physical copies had literal stickers of the EGS logo over the Steam store logo, truly showing how last second this decision was. I think another major W Steam/Valve has is Trading and the Steam Market place between these two things you get attached to the Steam Economy financially, it's a sunken cost fallacy for sure, but in my opinion keeps players far more invested then a free game every month.
I was interested when Voidtrain was almost to release on Steam, then they took an exclusivity deal a few weeks before the release on Steam, never bought it.
for me it was Phoenix point. I had heard lots about it during development and was excited for it. Then they took the exclusive deal and I was PISSED. it is the only game I ever paid for on EGS. And I will never give them another dollar.
I remember Metro: Exodus had problems at launch. Epic doesn't have forums so the people that bought the game on Epic were using the Steam forums to solve their problems.
@@ThatGuy-bz2in I had backed Phoenix point on Kickstarter. Then they made the announcement they took the Epic deal. The lead even made a video where he looked like he was on the edge of tears he looked so happy about it. I feel for him but, I didn't back the game for an Epic key. I backed a Steam key. I emailed them that I am either going to get a Steam key or they are going to give me a refund. They eventually announced they would still be giving out Steam keys as well as Epic keys. They sent me an Epic key, which I still have some where never used. That reminds me that Epic was using the Steam "Most Wishlisted" charts to figure out what games to snipe. It was consistently happening that anything rising up the charts would at least be made an offer. Eventually, I think people just stopped accepting. There was even one dev that publicly turned down the offer, because they new the customers wanted their copy on Steam, to a massive increase in sales.
I think a big thing is also that Steam has built up years and years of consumer goodwill. in the era of enshittification across all industries, of perpetually being offered a good product, then almost getting gaslit by the companies behind the product to pay more for it, or get less, or suddenly being nickel-and-dimed for everything that was previously free of charge... within that context, the willingness of Steam to not just stay the same, but actually markedly and continually improve their storefront over the years, with not a single step in the other direction, ever, is basically the singular best thing that could happen to consumers. And another company that _very clearly_ sees this merely as a business opportunity trying to strongarm their way into the industry, and trying to build up a countermonopoly to the seeming "monopoly" of Steam, is just about the worst possible look you can have. why, exactly, does Epic go to such lengths to make the consumers not part of their strategy? why are they trying to bribe you into coming over to them and then hopefully staying in their ecosystem, if not because they want to ensnare you into becoming an income stream for them in the future, no matter what you think about the quality of their service? From the way Sweeney is talking about it, it is very clear, that to Epic, you are a product to be sold, whereas Steam treats you like a consumer. In the end, it's as simple as that.
I was pretty excited to play Alan Wake 2 but the seccond I heard it was an EGS exclusive my interest died on the spot. I tried using EGS before but it just doesnt even come close to steam in any regard. Its even slower than steam, so so so many features that are missing and just confusing UI layout in general. I dont think EGS will ever be real competition to steam, not if they keep going at the current rate at least.
That’s because Remedy didn’t fund Alan Wake 2. After Remedy bought the rights from Microsoft, Epic offered to fund the sequel in exchange for handling distribution. This unsurprisingly backfired because Epic made the game an exclusive to EGS and digital only for consoles, so 6 months after release the game still wasn’t profitable with Remedy receiving no royalties as of March. Remedy also agreed to fund the Alan Wake remaster at a loss which is another EGS exclusive. So Remedy basically got repeatedly screwed by Epic and can’t do anything about it
By the way, the video makes it seem like the new revenue split of Steam was a consequence of Epic Games announcing the revenue split of their store, but if I remember correctly, the Epic Games Store was announced and launched a few days after Steam announced their new revenue split. The Epic Games Store has nothing to do with why Steam changed the revenue split of their store.
Potentially yes but from my memory Sweeney was talking about the whole revenue split for a while before the store was announced publically and it's a safe bet valve was aware ahead of time that EGS was coming. It may have been pre-planned anyway but I'm sure Sweeney's actions were a factor in that decision to some degree and I would guess the largest.
I remember several developers talking about the revenue split in the App Store. I don’t know anything about Steam. But I might be wrong. It’s been a while, and I tend to click off gaming news too often because it is always the same thing. “X gaming company added something to squeeze more money out of people.” It gets tiring after a while. 😪
@@sp3edy787 Valve was already pressured by developers and distributors to lower the fees way before Sweeney started to open his mouth. It's been a recurrent known topic for a decade or more already.
EGS lost a lot of goodwill when they paid off developers to 180 on Steam release promises to got EGS exclusive. Some Kickstarters even had to refund buyers for ultimately lying about what platforms they released on.
I’ve never used Epic but every time I hear about them they sound incredibly stupid. I’d love to have a beer with their ceo so I could see if they’re self-aware or if they actually believe their own BS.
Sweeney is far from self-aware. The dude's most famous quote goes along the lines of "PC gamers are pirates and PC isn't a sustainable platform so why bother?" and now he's doubling down on blaming Valve as a monopoly when he's the one enforcing the practice via exclusivity.
In the before times Tim Sweeney and John Carmack were on a lot of panels together and it was always kinda shocking how different they looked at everything. Carmack always had boundless enthusiasm. He'd go off on a tangent and just be all smiles to be talking about some esoteric thing, there was joy in just communicating what he was passionate about which maybe only 1% of the audience even understood. Then there was Sweeney. When he started talking joy died. He was always the business person behind Epic. But to be fair to Tim he kinda had to be, his partner was Chuck, and Chuck seemed to have no concept of money.
@@AxleTrade Yes I think I remember, he was basically hating on pc gaming when he was working on Gears of War I think ? and he came on PC and want our money like GTFO dude 😂
Here’s some of the stuff Steam has that no other platform has, or is just way better at. Community market. Customer reviews. Wide profile customisation. Custom emoticons. Achievements and badges. Community workshops. Quick and easy to use game library (that is also customisable). Controller support. Fan-games and smaller indie titles. Customer support. Smooth and quick launcher in general.
Another thing to consider. Valve takes their 30% cut and reinvests it into Steam and its features, making it a better platform for both developers and customers. Epic takes their 12% cut and uses to pay exclusivity bribes. Benefiting only themselves at the cost of the customer. Steam treats its customers like royalty compared to other platforms/storefronts. Meanwhile EGS will happily siphon resources away from making the storefront better for customers, just so they can invest more into exclusivity. It's no wonder why people avoid using the EGS out of principle.
Really? No bugs at all? Regardless it doesn't make the argument against steam any stronger. Any live service will run into bugs, and some bugs are minor enough and non-detrimental to the user experience that it's not worth dedicating ressources towards debugging it. Anecdotally the bugs I've encountered are very minor. And everything you pointed out in support of steam is still correct. They consistently make improvements to the storefront and actually invest in making a consumer friendly (mostly) experience that blows any competition out of the water.
its actually better then a 30% cut that's just for the game bought on steam, if a dev tells steam to make some steam keys for their game and they sell them elsewhere, steam doesnt get any of the money from that sale of the key
Steam does not treat its users as Royalty, that would be GOG. GOG gives you a 30 day refund policy. Steam reduced their refund window from 3 hours down to 2, and they only give you up to a week to refund after purchasing. Very anti-consumer imo.
When it comes to the lack of a shopping cart and reviews, Sweeney even said when EGS launched that it was feature complete, it was perfect. So they had no intention of ever adding those things in. And I can see it at the start when the EGS launched why developers would take the deal. It had Fortnite so alot of people using it so a potential large customer base but in a odd turn of events, people don't buy games on Epic. Out of all the exclusives that Epic got, only 1 ever turned a profit while being exclusive and that was Satisfactory. Even one company went under due to the exclusivity money not being enough to keep them going. And thern there is the perception issue since alot of the exclusives(not all but most) were either a buggy mess or really mid quality. This created the image that games that go exclusive were games that the developers had no confidence in so they rather just take the Epic money and launch it on a store that has no reviews. These days, well few people are buying games off EGS still. So multiplayer games are dead on arrival if they go exclusive since nobody is buying them. And I would not recommend devs to go exclusive these days since it is a very very risky move. First of it will piss people off and that's not a good way to launch a game. And second, if your game has any momentum or hype then going EGS will kill the hype/momentum dead in it's track and you will not get that back. So by the time you can release the game on Steam, the sales will be lower then it would have been if you had launched the game on Steam from the start since the hype is gone and people in general would have moved on. Afterall, the game was suppose to come out a year prior, it didn't so they moved on to other games and getting those people back will be very difficult.
Factual error: The revenue share for steam is not per game but per developer/ publisher. So once a publisher makes 10 million in sales it drops and then again. This makes this cut much more widespread than this video implies. Yes all AAA Publishers will get the cheapest one, but also AA Developers easily crack that number and even Sucessful Indie Studios, with a couple of good performing games, will reach the tier with the lowest cut. Even the source that was shown actually has written this down correctly and the video doesn't.
It's very simple really. What can you provide as a store? And if you are doing exclusives, what better deal you can give in return that can neutralize this annoyance? Tim Sweeney's answer is "Nope. Fuck you Steam" The gamers replied with "Nope. Fuck you Epic". All of a sudden, making the game exclusive for 12% cut makes no sense since nobody is buying the game anyway It's funny that devs are using EGS as an alpha testing place. You can be a total asshole and take the money. Do a "closed" beta launch. Make no marketing whatsoever until the Steam launch
Noticed the same effect on Stardock's more recent games. They use the EGS for early access releases like GalCiv 4 and Sins 2, and very few if anyone spoke about them until their Steam releases drew near. The effect is even stronger in the Windows Store. Quantum Break and Shadow of the Tomb Raider were originally exclusives, and their earnings were less than 10% than what they earned when they came out on Steam. The dead weight that was the infamous UWP didn't help either. I used to use EGS, but I abandoned it after they wiped the entire Unreal series from it. Being so ungrateful to what made you big in the first place is a big no-no. They also gave space to the monstrosity that are NFTs, and I deleted it permanently from my PC:
Frankly, indie devs who might complain about Steam's cut... I do not understand. I say this as an indie dev, and an indie author. You know what you get on Amazon, as a self-published author, in exchange for their cut? Uh, the store page, which you can't really customise beyond basic text. You know what you get on Steam in exchange for their cut? Total control over updates without needing to wait for them to greenlight it, control over store imagery, with support for embedded images/gifs, community hub, forums, a very responsive support team, free entry into the famous Steam sales, detailed analytics, built-in support for the Steam controller stuff even if your game doesn't really hook into Steam much (if you've chosen to go DRM-free, which is an option on Steam)...
30% is a whole fucking lot for basically just providing a page and some community services. All of which you can get for a lot less on other sites. The only reason to go to Steam is the average gamer being too lazy to get games on other stores.
@@GordonSeal "a page and some community services" Well that's a disingenuous way to sum up the actual feature list on offer. But okay, share with the class. Tell us about these "other stores" that offer an equal feature list for a "lot less"... and points deducted if they require paypal, frankly.
Why did you bring up amazon? Totally unrelated and just makes your argument seem muddy, we are talkinf about steam which you got right, and EPIC GAMES STORE which youve seemed to miss, too busy humble bragging about being an author?
@@allison6883 "Totally unrelated" Uh... you think a digital distribution platform that accepts indies is totally unrelated in the discussion of digital distribution and the services provided/cut they take in exchange for hosting digital content? Mmkay. "and EPIC GAMES STORE which youve seemed to miss" Well I rather thought we were all aware of the existence of the epic games store and its dubious practices, and the fact that it was inciting people to whine about Steam's cut... I mean surely that's the basic context of all this, always? Didn't really think we needed to state the painfully, tediously obvious and mention it every... single... time. But it's okay, if you're having a bad day and you want to be petulant and lash out at a total stranger so they can be a punching bag for whatever passing mood struck you. Only human.
I'd also like to point out that EGS attempts to do what streaming services like Netflix and Hulu do - poach IPs as exclusives to pull consumers towards their product. The issue is people are *tired* of having to try and keep track of what they have access to over several storefronts/services. People already have an expansive library on Steam - if your storefront doesn't just sell keys that you can activate on Steam, why would anyone use it? Nobody wants two storefronts running in the background. Nobody wants to go "Was this game on EGS or Steam?" Having everything centralized to one app is just way more convenient.
Review bombing isn't a problem unless you're a bad developer. It's not even a real term. If you've played the game and have a negative impression of it, you are entitled to leave a negative review no matter the reason. It's a loaded term pushed by garbage publishers.
Review bombing is a tool, and like all tools, it's not always used effectively or with good intentions. Worst case, it's a band-aid or a total distraction from the root issue. The Helldivers 2 situation might've saved that game specifically, but Sony's still making PSN mandatory on all future PC ports, even single-player games. Then you have people review bombing a game over something that has nothing to do with the quality of the game, which is fundamentally a misuse of reviews. And then people who review bomb but don't have the decency to go back and change it if the developer does what the people ask. Makes the community look like power-tripping crybabies.
@@os6829 It wasn't even called "review bombing "until journos cited it in multiple articles since EGS showed up, before then it was just "negative reviews" or "mass negative reviews". The way it's coined now is always regarded as a net negative, just like how writers used the term "fanboy" to negatively describe a fan. Journos being useless brats as usual.
@@os6829 You are allowed to give a negative review for ANY reason, there is no misuse. If the developers of a game I own make some shitty tweets supporting heinous stuff, I am going to leave a negative review and tell people why. I am going to tell people that the developers should not be supported because of their shitty views. If enough people agree, people are going to boycott the game. Or, people will disagree with my negative review and it will have no effect. As for not updating reviews after changes are made, I am under no obligation to have to update my reviews to the developers whims. You can see the date of the reviews. Nowadays, games are never finished. Even supposedly finished games get a random content drop 2+ years after release. What am I supposed to do? Re-play and and re-review every single game in my 300+ library for every update I see? If I leave negative review for your game because of X, and you fix X a year later, I've probably already forgotten about your sh*tty game.
Valve's passionate about what they create and they also make money. Epic's passionate about money and they also create. That's the difference in my eyes.
Valve is still working to make pc gaming better. Notable examples being steam input, making controllers more uniform on the platform and making huge strides to make Linux an actual viable gaming platform.
4:23 Steam has had those those splits for years, long before EGS came around. It's almost as new as Steam itself. Any dev would prefer lower cuts, but it's been accepted by most of us, given the services Steam provides. Not to mention you can sell Steam keys elsewhere and keep 100% of the revenue, as long as you're not making it cheaper on other platforms by doing so.
I refuse to use EGS based on how they rather spend money on exclusives then putting that money into the storefront to make it better. I want EGS to be better because I believe completion is a good thing and the consumer can only benefit from it. I have no issue with other non-steam launchers, the main issue I have is how just feels like Epic is trying to bring the terrible aspects of console gaming to the PC platform.
I deleted my EGS account back in 2019 when all the shit started to go down. And still today I have no desire to make another account for exclusive games that mostly not interested for me (Mainly Racing/Slice of life/Arcade classics games) and for the "FREE GAMES" that the shills keep hollering about which seems like a bride to use their shitty platform anyways. I even encounter some shills calling me an idiot for not taking the "FREE GAMES" offer which I just laugh and continue on playing Bejeweled 3 on Steam.
Fun fact. About a year ago i was having a friend over for a few days and we are planning on playing GTA online. I have two PCs but none had it installed yet. It took me 9 hours to download the game due to my slow internet. But when i tried to install it on the other PC steam promted up a massage that basically says. " We detected that you already have GTA V installed on your other machine. Would you like to install it via LAN transfer?" Like bro! It's such a niche feature that i don't think anyone asked for. Yet steam has it. For people like me who either have slow/limited internet, this is 100% a life saver. People usually transfer big games via external hard drives, but this little feature removes the need for it.
@@diamondhamster4320If you wait for a Sale you get the entire thing for like 99 cents. Or you can get dozens of games in a bundle including half life, and HL2 +the episodes and expansions for like less than 4 dollars. While being able to easily mod it.
@@diamondhamster4320I support piracy, I pirate all epic exclusives. If I don’t support the company then they don’t deserve my money. If you primarily use epic and never use steam (oddball) then yeah that’s justifiable.
Epic sales are great when they offer the 33% off coupon that works on things already on sale. But without that coupon there's no reason to buy from them.
The thing with Steam is it has so many useful features outside of just the storefront like the Steam input stuff, the Workshop and even big picture mode. They all make PC gaming more accessible and customizable. Steam input has saved me many hours trying to add controller support for ancient games that never even thought of it. They also seem to really care about the usability of Steam. The way things are laid out is just functionally better than the competition. Even the ability to launch non-Steam games through Steam is great. The way they really started supporting gaming on Linux with both Proton and the Steam Deck shows that they are reinvesting the money they make into making Steam better and better.
EGS/Tim Sweeney are anti-consumer. His long term play with exclusives is to hopefully get the younger generations hooked into the EGS ecosystem before they realize how great Steam is. As you pointed out, there is zero reason to use EGS. Publishers who cry about review bombing are afraid of being called out for a bad product or bad decisions post launch. (ie Sony)
It's pretty alarming when a company admits to and states as part of their long-term goal is basically grooming users into accepting dark patterns and freeloading. If the EU authorities were as upright as they held themselves to be vs Apple and Google, they would also be questioning this.
I will be very honest, before EGS I was a very open PC gamer, Steam, GOG, Origin, Uplay, Itch, Microsoft Store, Battlenet... Even own some games from websites like Gamesplanet, but after EGS came out, I simply stopped supporting these launchers because it opened my eyes on how important basic features are and how much damage a bad intended store can make to the PC ecosystem. We had a healthy ecosystem for years without enforced exclusivity, Valve Games are exclusive to Steam becasue they are from Valve's, GOG has exclusive ports of old games because they go out of their way to make sure these ports work on modern PCs, they bring something cool to the table. If Epic just SHUT UP, released a store with the 12% cut, and released Alan Wake II exclusive to their store I wouldn't mind, they backed the project and I would gladly fork some cash for them, but years of buying out exclusives that even had a Steam page has left a sour taste in my mouth, I even stopped playing Rocket League after 1000h due to this stupid company. Hope they crash and burn. In the end, I only have Steam and GOG installed, but regularly download indie stuff from Itch too. All the others I don't even bother anymore, and if their game is not on one of these three, it may as well not exist.
Private Vs Publicly Traded Companies... Valve can focus on customer experience, whereas Epic resorts to manipulation and dark patterns to extract as much profit as possible for shareholders.
What i find ridiculous is shareholders approving that, ah yes i put money here i want to risk losing it even more so they can make less than if i waited
@@furinick you'd be surprised how many investors only care about short term gains, invest in on a d as soon as it's not an immediate line go up anymore they switch to another company and do it all again
If you are saying something about how long it took too long to add something like a shoping cart just remember that epic had all these years to see what steam has and add those systems
I personally see EGS as that store that gifts games every week, every single game in my EGS library came from either one of their giveaways or something like Prime games. On the other hand I've been buying games on Steam for more than a decade and don't intend on stopping any time soon. I just hope that when EGS closes at some point in the future they have an option to transfer the games to somewhere else like how the Bethesda store did, or individual developers/publishers offer solutions like when Desura was collapsing and some devs provided Steam keys.
A shopping cart function for your digital game store? Noooo that's too hard, tummy hort, we'll add it in 3 years. Scanning your steam files without your knowledge or consent? Ez, get that shit done within a year.
Releasing your game exclusively on EGS is great for developers because it's like getting extra year of early access and when you finally get to Steam the polished product get's hype
The thing is, Steam is an ecosystem, with discussion forums, achievements, and tons of other features for both customers and publishers/developers. On top of that, there's SteamVR and Proton. No other store front (ignoring Oculus here, as they are straying away from PC VR) has VR integrated. Beside SteamVR, there's only really Monado as an alternative compositor.
My reason to avoid Epic is that they bribe devs for exclusivity in some cases. It is not a "deal" it is a bribe to have exclusivity, one the dev takes at the expense of the customer. This can be seen as disrespecting your customers, so I can't safely buy your product and should wait for reviews from sites and sources not related to either party involved with the bribe. By this point it is typically already on Steam, so I safely avoid any scams.
i would also like to add, that you can recover your steam account with a few clicks when you get hacked. while epic, uplay and all others take years to even respond or help you at all
Uplay sucks. If you uninstall an AC game it is basically impossible to play it again. Forced updates every few weeks only due to DRM reasons. No internet connectiob, no ability to play. Random problems with connectivity even if your Internet is perfectly fine
If you were going to create a store and try to compete with steam you better move fast and put a lot of money behind it and use a lot of customer feedback to build it. it better be truly epic no pun intended
What we want as comsumers, is for every game to be on every platform. EGS acts more like a monopoly than steam does. With their exclusives and their constant lawsuits.
It's hilarious to me that Remedy, one of the current best development houses out there, is struggling to break even on one of the best games they've ever made. They should never have partnered with Epic, and I await their announced split in the next 3 years.
i think that Remedy is conquering their independence with epic games, I don't believe that epic will hold their IPs like Microsoft did with quantum break, 505 with Control and (sort of) Rockstar with Max Payne They bought control back from 505 and having epic games as a publisher is a big deal, even with those caveats!
I legitimately forget I have games on EGS, what makes the problem worse is the fact that EGS makes you log back in if you fail to launch it within a certain timeframe. I have all of my PC’s launch with as few programs as possible because I hate bloat and I’d much rather launch things as needed, so when I finally think about a game on EGS I’m met with a login screen requiring 2fa, I usually just close EGS and find something else to play lol.
Another thing to keep in mind is our financial investment on Steam. I have a massive library there and my continued access to it depends on Valve doing well enough to keep steams massive infrastructure chugging. Therefore I have a vested interest in Valves future (and thus my Steam Library's) and the safest thing would be for Valve to be completely dominant and virutually unchallenged This get compounded as my library grows and my Steam Account gets older (its 16 years old now) so on Steam you actually feel ownership of digital goods. I still have plenty of delisted games there. I dont trust any other digital service for any media to still be around with my stuff accesible 16 years from now. I do believe Steam will. It already has, after all. And the way ti safeguard that is to do everything i can to protect valves position on the pc market. This is why I and many others DESPISED Epic from the get go. Serious competition to Valve could threaten my Steam library. Better it goes away.
The whole lawsuit in a nutshell: - steam: delivers a quality service - everyone else: delivers absolute shit tier service, costs more, spies on you, has constant breaches The lawsuit: - "Yeah so we don't like how steam is doing so well, they are raising the bar too high for us to reach, with their cheap prices and reliability, customers should be taught to bend over and get fucked more by other companies, like Epic, or Ubisoft, or Sony, how dare Steam treat it's customers so well, it's just not fair."
Anyone who calls Steam a Monopoly is restarted. Steam is the ONLY thing keeping Microsoft AND Sony from having a Duopoly. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Sony are fighting for a Monoply. Also, the main reason Tim Sweeney fears putting Fortnite on Steam is the Community Ratings.
At the end of the day, Tim Sweeney comes off as being extremely insincere because his business model with EGS is aimed at publishers while using the smoke screen "for developers" designed to pit consumers against developers. And it's not working, which is why the EGS budget has been running in the red since it launched like, what, 8 years ago? GOG have established themselves in a niche because of their staunch anti-DRM position. GOG Galaxy 2.0 is also a pretty decent launcher that imports all your games from different platforms into one place. However, it still lacks so many important features of Steam, including a built-in modding platform (e.g. Workshop), a controller-friendly interface mode (e.g. Big Picture), matchmaking, communities, and more. I actually would prefer to use GOG Galaxy exclusively because of how it brings everything together, except for the fact that my primary gaming is a more living room/couch setup where Big Picture is critically useful. But at least Steam is more than competent.
8:40 Wrong. It is NOT a problem on Steam, because it's NOT a problem at all. It's the FIX for a problem (a company not losing revenue due to bad behavior). If you're against review-bombing, you're actually part of the problem
To put it bluntly I despise exclusive games. As a consumer there is no reason to support practice that doesn't benefit anyone but the big corpos. I could somewhat understand why it isn't so simple for console vs pc but pc to pc gamestore is inexcusable to me and I pretend epic doesn't exist on principle
This is a real problen for d.l.c that listed on multiple stores/platform but you locked to one store/platform that you bought thame main game from. This just is completely unaccpable. Like telling me i can out bacon my my sandwatich cause i bought it a different groecy store.
Have you tried moving around games in-between your drives on epic store? Steam unintentionally has a monopoly on pc gaming because they earned it. They are the reason that market exits after all meanwhile epic is actively trying to have a monopoly on the market, and failing spectacularly. Gamers don't care weather the devs get a 30% or 10% cut. They wat their shit to work.
Review bombing is the best tool to show dissatisfaction with a game. If it wasn't there, most of the negative sentiments would just be chalked up to loud minority. It helps in showcasing that a considerable amount of people are actually against the changes and it was significant enough that they decided to review the game.
It makes sense for Valve for 30% because they only have Steam, they barely make games. While Apple and Google are giant corporations with multiple different products and can take that cut. While Epic makes games and has the Unreal Engine. Valve's Steam also has a lot of benefits: Steam Input Market Cloud Saves Review System Forum Guides News Mod Page and Host Non-Windows Support through Proton SteamVR Etc.
I'll admit it, Steam is the game store platform, I use it mainly because there's no company (except GOG) trying their feet first into Linux compatibility, and Steam provided a better gaming experience on that semi-niche part of the market
it's very simple. You just use steam and that's it. At one point for PC Gaming, you would use the Disc to install and play the game and not have to go on steam at all. This is how I played CoD 2 on PC when I was like 10-11 if my brother let me. No steam at all. Steam fixes every aspect you can think of when you want to game on PC.
At 19:30, there are a few more points you forgot to mention: 1. Chinese company Tencent owns 40% of Epic Games. 2. There have been data breaches on EGS. 3. The Chinese government holds a "golden share" in Tencent, which gives them a board seat, other rights, and shareholder veto power over changes to the company's charter. As a result, Epic, being nearly half-owned by Tencent, may be compelled to follow the Chinese government's directives if their "golden share" overrides certain decisions. In contrast, Valve is a 100% U.S. company not beholden to any foreign government.
what people don't notice is that Steam isn't just sitting on their laurels and gobbling up 30% for no reason. They're always up to some new projects that are meant to improve Steam as a platform. We've seen a few experimental failures in the past like the Steam Machines, but we've also seen huge successes like the Steam Deck and SteamVR that has been nothing but an absolute benefit to devs and customers alike. The question isn't whether or not the 30% cut is fair, but whether there is value in paying that 30% fee at all. Valve's strategy has always been to increase the value you get out of that 30% instead of going for the obvious and simple route of decreasing that 30% cut.
it's one of the few software products where i actually always read their news that's hidden behind a small button, because more often than not it's something i want to know. most other stuff in the sphere could use an adblocker for their "news".
For what it's worth, I know you meant review bombing is a "problem" (note the quotations) in relation to Epic's point of view, not that you personally think it's a problem. I think you just didn't make it obvious enough lol
@@herdoman5169 Personality I never cared about steam review system, it's as bad if not worse than any website you can rate games (obviously they can't check if you played it). Watching reviews on UA-cam & gameplay video gives me a better idea of the game anyway. That said I know small indies are affected a lot by reviews.
My initial problem with EGS is that the download manager doesn't work properly. My download doesn't resume to the downloaded percentage after restarting.
Steam unquestionably has a functional monopoly. With that being said they deserve it. And The ugly reality of it is they deserve it. Their product is levels beyond any of their competition. To the point where I can get free games on epic and still buy them on steam because the launcher is that much better.
19:06 I don't know if it is out of convenience. It might be out of ignorance. I don't think any item tells you it is from a vender let alone which one. It would love it if it did, so I don't have to look online. Now if I can get something for a lesser price than it would cost to teleport to the vender and buy it, I could see a use.
I bought one single game on EGS, Horizon Zero Dawn, good price, thought i’d finally play it… it didn’t have controller support, no matter what i did, the EGS version of horizon simple doesn’t have controller support… on a game designed and made to be played with a controller. That and their constant HUGEEEEE notifications on free games that no one cares about drove me the hell away from EGS
I don't want Steam to be a monopoly but God damn no one is even trying to compete.
A benevolent monopolist/dictator who knows how to please everyone is better than open market/democracy that are inevitably controlled by greed and Idiocracy.
Funny thing is Steam is SO GOOD if it just EXPERIMENTED on Android and IOS, Google play and the AppleStore both would instantly become NUMBER TWO for App Distribution on their OWN devices by a land slide and its not due to them having a monopoly. QUALITY will always trump Quantity.
@@snintendog this comment is one of the most delusional things I've ever read
@@StephenYuan Prove it.
It's cos no one needs it. Everyone is disillusioned with games as a service: so much so that another storefront for this sh% would just go unused (same as Epic currently does, despite their business model relying on literally handing out free stuff).
You know your store is shit, when opening the same website in chrome loads 100x faster, while the app runs like a windows 95 era program
eLeCtrOn """""APPS""""" (yikes) (also, Steam could totally still have automatic client updates, but download them in the background and only apply them for the next time you open it, that would definitely speed things up. Though I kind of understand why that's not the case)
that's an insult to windows 95 era programs
@@julioau Wish they abandoned automatic updates for games. Hell, consoles can do this, why can't Steam???
@@julioausteam still loads for 15-20 seconds on maximal CPU available (7800x3d). Btw web discord version is pretty fast btw
@@alandunaway3000 this dude and one other guy really be crying because of auto update
let's be honest those kind of people would complain if there weren't auto update
whiners
Also Tim Sweeney detests Linux as a platform, just to spite even more possible consumers that use linux on the desktop, or maybe have a steam deck. How one could even consider supporting a a storefront / company if they outright spit in your face (EGS games work under linux granted, But it's COMMUNITY programs that make this possible, not directly EGS. Valve does make a serious effort of support, devs and customers alike!) If you despite all continue to use EGS (most likely for free games like i am and let's face it most people) and want the games to work under Linux, use Heroic Launcher, you can launch and play EGS, GOG and Amazon games with little to no thinkering
yeah thats why im never giving them money no matter what games they have on their platform
I remember when he bought out that Linux team that was working alongside Valve, just to prevent them from working with them any further, and then he has them doing nothing. I was absolutely livid at how selfish and assholish Timmy can get.
@@dirge7459 Would be fun if they all quit, form a new company and got back under Valve just to spite Swiney.
Tim Sweeney is the Karen of the game industry
@@TheRockNatural He really is, especially with how he rages non stop on Twitter to this day.
Possibly the cringiest, most childish CEO I have ever seen.
It pisses me off that so many companies and people complain about Steam having a monopoly when Valve is playing totally fair and just provides an incredible service. If you want to compete you have to provide a service that is at least comparable to Steam and nothing comes close, it is honestly like no one is even trying.
Sweeney and epic want the benefits and reputation of Valve and Steam without actually putting in the work.
@@AxleTradebut why invest money or time if they can just slander the opposition. Cone on guys, out storefront that lacks a lot of features js just as good as steam *wink*. It is sad when people come to the Steam forums to talk about games because epic lacks their own.
That’s exactly why they are complaining. Steam sets the rules and the rules are fair but they want the rules to be unfair so they can make even more money.
It's because Valve doesn't have investors to please. They can just run Steam sustainably and fairly, and so long as they make a profit (doesn't need to growth) they are fine. They have no reason to get greedy and fuck people over.
GOG gives a 30 day refund policy, they are very much competing in that aspect. Wish more games were sold on GOG.
Steam is a monopoly not out of greed or malice, but because everyone else can’t make a good competitor at all
What is GOG
@@PariahmaryGOG is basically DRM free steam.
Its a amazing store, but DRM free games means your missing out on a ton of games due to many having DRM
@@PariahmarySeems like people rate it lesser in other areas, with the only thing going for it is Non-DRM games
@@chestertamayo1894 Their sale prices usually beat steam sale prices too.
@@chestertamayo1894 Personally I dislike the client because it performs worse than steam for me and has less features, but I like that they have a lot of older games
Steam just recently released their family sharing feature which was insanely good. It probably saved a ton of people so much money. Steam also launched a new screen recording beta. What are other launchers doing? Nothing. Most are simply content with just existing.
Steam is just constantly adding new, consumer-friendly features that enhance and simplify the PC gaming experience. And they aren't even under any pressure to do it. They just do it because they can.
Screen recording was most likely added because the Steam Deck community was constantly asking for it, but they didn't have to add it.
Local network game transfers was another thing the Steam Deck community kept asking for and was obviously only added because of that. It's saved me a lot of time and bandwidth when it comes to downloading games on my other devices. My internet isn't slow but a local network transfer is faster than my internet. And this is a godsend for people with data caps.
Why would I want to use anything else when Steam has all these features?
The fact that the 30% cut is actually doing something for both the platform and consumers. A fact the epic shills love to ignore.
Steam doing a feature Windows already has, unless you're still on 7.
@@alandunaway3000 Again, what other launchers doing? Nothing.
Its had this family sharing feature for a while, just made it simplier to use
Though with a new policy, i cant share with people outside my country now. Still i find it better now cause they no longer restrict one member playing the games of its owner while the owner is playing something else
You are correct that for many PC gamers like myself, if it's an Epic exclusive, as far as I'm concerned it doesn't exist on the platform. I have nothing but contempt for Epic, and Tim Sweeney. I will happily transact with other consumer friendly storefronts than Steam. Never Epic.
This is 100% how me and my wife feel
Games that goes exclusive on EPIC will get the silent treatment even when it finally comes to Steam. I might pick it up on a sale, but with some like Borderlands 3, EPIC in fact saved my from buying a steaming pile of horse manure!😂
Honestly, who would even consider making an epic EXCLUSIVE game? If you want a fair cut of money, release on steam AND humble bundle, where the humble bundle release may have exrra goodies. Best way to release indie games imo. Edit: also use itch
implying there are lots of "friendly" storefronts... what, origins ? lmao
GOG is... okay, some bad, some good
cool that there's no DRM though
For me, if there is no non-DRM alternative, it doesn't exist.
Epic took classic pc game Unreal away from steam. That was my first pc game ever, it showed me the power a pc has over any consoles.
They don't even offer it -- or their other classic PC titles -- on their own store.
@todesziege I know and that's the most ridiculous thing, why go from making money to making nothing? Just invites piracy. It's nintendo all over again.
They killed unreal tournament on every store steam and gog
@@LunaRosalie a true fucking crime
Fan fact I play unreal tournament 4 for time to time with unofficial server's.
Seen epic don't let people play the game I use unofficial pach to play.
An important thing to note as well is the animosity tim sweeny has for linux gaming.
they have on purpose stopped EGS from working on linux multiple times and I do not forgot when They bought Kamu (Easy Anti-Cheat) and halted development in making it work on linux.
They only continued development of it due to pressure from the steamdeck.
Exactly this
I'll never forget that Sweeney likened people going to Linux from Windows to people fleeing/abandoning their country because they're unhappy with how it's being run.
It's not that his comparison is entirely unjust, but it demonstrates a mindboggling level of detachment. Like, yes, these things happen, but they do not happen _on a whim_ because people _lack commitment._ Yet he's still banned Linux support from the platform because of his deluded hateboner.
Fuck Tim Sweeney.
Another reason I refuse to ever give Epic any of my money. I will never use Windows.
Also it should be noted, if something gets delisted on Steam, you can still download and play it and thus actually you still own it. But if something gets delisted on EGS you can't even download it anymore.
Wait, is that true? I've never heard of games being delisted from EGS also getting removed from your library.
@@Moskeeto Yeah, Unreal Tournament for example
@@neonsynthosc Huh. So if you owned the Unreal Tournament games on EGS they can't be downloaded anymore? I actually own them on Steam and I can still play them since they were delisted.
Actually, I believe those games were never even available on EGS now that I think about it.
@@Moskeeto In any case, just buy games on Steam just to be safe. x)
@@Moskeeto I think they meant the UT4 beta, which was a free game so you never really "owned" it. Like you, said, the older Unreal games were never available on EGS (for some ridiculous reason).
EGS is more like a beta testing place for games rather than a real store.
On the other hand, in addition to Steam's strengths, I'd add Steam Input and everything behind it (compatibility with tons of controllers, not to mention controller remapping on a game basis). Epic lags behind this feature systematically
I cannot over state my love for steam input.
Been playing mass effect 1 again. By default the controller bindings allow for 1 power to be mapped for quick access to a tap of the RB button. But with PC bindings you can map power to the 1-8 keys without needing to pause the game to cast.
Thanks to steam input I can play with a controller while setting a custome binding that makes it when I ADS, my face buttons and D-pad turn into the 1-8 keys and activated the Gyro on my PS4 controller for more precision aiming.
I could never go back to playing on a console while steam allows me all that freedom.
@@Unoriginal1deas pro tip: map several actions in the same button via holding and doing double tap (in Mass Effect for instance, I binded 1 to RB tapping, 2 to RB holding and so on)
Valve isn’t a monopoly but a market leader while Epic is using dubious tactics to gain market share while bankrolled by Tencent.
I was gonna say, calling Valve a monopoly would imply that they are trying to prevent any competitors, when in reality, their competitors keep shooting themselves in the foot
like the meme says
Gabe Newell does nothing and wins again
@@blacklisted756 VALVe is also 100% self-owned. They do not accept nobody's fucking money for stakes in the company. They do whatever the fuck they want. They answer to venture capital investors and their retarded ideas.
fuck egs but tencent is mostly chill. played a battle royale made by them(ring of elysium) years ago and while it was hot, it was the funnest shit to me(over 1k hours clocked in), and they kept updating it even while it was dying. god i'll never forget flying around on the kite and dive bombing guys while spraying my smg or racing around the map on a speedboat emptying my machine gun into guys on shore or other boats.
When Epic bought Rocket League and Fall Guys and removed them from Steam, they lost me. That’s some bullshit that film corporations did when they started the streaming wars, and consumers got screwed with the streaming wars.
@@HarryPujols removed rocket league? guess its only from storefronts, cuz i still got that on steam.
I use gog too, but here is how convenient steam is:
I bought the Resident Evil bundle on GOG, good stuff, RE1 is running out of the box, but i wanted something better, so i downloaded the mods Classic Rebirth and Seamless HD to make the game prettier (tough im regretting that last choice after seeing some of the messier AI backgrounds) the thing is, these mods somehow broke the controller support for the switch pro controller i use on my PC
The solution? I added the game as a non-steam game to steam, steam input solved all controller issues and even allowed me to map F9 (quit game button) to a long press of the start button
steam input is a god send.
Steam Input is Valve's secret sauce, it makes every game better with infinite customization and works with practically any input device. Big fan!
@@HealyHQ it add controller support even for games that don't support controllers it's crazy , you can bind and emulate mouse via controller, what valve did for pc gaming is amazing
@@gabrielandy9272doing something like inst hsrd ad you think. Infact widnows had hidden option for using two mice at one.
@@gabrielandy9272 Not only that, but you can also use community presets if you don't feel like doing it yourself. Steam input is genuinely one of the best features on PC as a whole lmao. It has better controller support than every current console at this point
It wouldn't surprise me if the slow rollout of the shopping cart and user reviews on EPS was also a result of Epic Games not allocating enough employees to the store's development and maintenance full-time. The firing of nearly 1000 employees last year does not give me confidence in their management.
don't forget that the studios they acquire usually end up getting cannibalized and the employees who don't get sacked are thrown into the fortnite grinder.
EGS was deliberately developed as a Minimum Viable Product. You can buy games on it? No major security breaches? Downloads are actually working? Good enough, ship it. They are of course within their right to do this, but doing it while trying to demonize Steam and Valve's way of doing business is like trying to sell your high school sketchbook doodles for $20 apiece while complaining that the actual professional artists making commissions for $180 are ripping people off.
Meanwhile Valve has around 70 people working full time on Steam and it's enough lol
You know when comparing steam and GOG there are some things I like about GOG galaxy. Like I can connect both steam and epic games to the owned games section and start it there. A better interface when adding individual games. The extras to download the soundtrack and other goodies other on my computer or phone. And of course a selection of old games (running well) and fairly new games DRM free.
With steam it has a better way of organising your games, a better review system. Workshop and community hub. And lastly controller mapping and controller/steam deck interface.
With the epic game store I just can't find good reason to be the go to for playing games.
don't forget GOG's 30 day refund policy
I like the fact that GOG doesn't force me to install an update the instant it's made available. The availability of rollback versions could certainly use some work, but it's also at least kind of there.
Something i got to disagree is, Steams review bombing problem, review bombing is not a bad thing or a problem, is a tool the costumer has to show dissatisfaction, exemple, helldivers, or when plenty of live services receive a bad update you can usually see recent reviews taking a dip towards negative. Review bombing is never a random event, there is always a reason behind it, even if some disagree as to the why.
Depends. Your example of Helldivers 2 is an instance where we see it as a good thing, due to the bait & switch action taken by Sony that directly impact the game. But there are also plenty of instances taken by state actors and snowflakes that are problem instances. Devotion got review bombed so badly by PRC state actors it ended up getting pulled off Steam, for reasons that are unrelated to the game's quality. Life is Strange: True Colors had the issue of mass downvoting (from guess who) due to simply show a Tibetan flag. CoD: MW (2019) also got hit by Russian state actors for it's depiction of the Russian military. Then comes the many dumb instances where a game gets mass downvoted for simply not having the language for the region, something that is listed before you buy a game.
It's a difficult challenge that aggregators like Metacritic and Steam face since not all instance of mass down voting are malicious but definitely not a black-and-white issue.
And I think Valve already address the review bombing by creating a calendar thingy so everyone could see the day review bombing happen. Still, I think Steam's user review is way ahead better than what EGS has. EGS wants to be the playstore or appstore so bad that they mimic their awful review rating. It's so shit
Say that to Red Candle Games when their game got review bombed off platform by the red army and Chinese bots just because it included a satire image of Winnie the Pooh
@@corywalker7903 While most consumers might not care, the real damage really is only for smaller/midsize developers that depend on the store for their marketing, rather than AAA devs who honestly for all intents and purposes don't need the platform to actually promote their game. Overwatch 2 is the most extreme example of this, it's reviewed viciously but it's no-harm done because it magically still has tons of revenue.
Even then I feel like I'm not really in the minority with this when I say that I don't really use the platform in general to buy a game. I mostly go through word of mouth and followings on other social media. I feel like this conversation is only relevant with people who buy games whose development falls within the size I mentioned previously.
Those case are the exception not the norm,
I refude to use EGS over UT. Not only did they pull the team working on UT4 (well basically 4) to work on fortnite, but then they turn around and completely nuked the series into the ground.
UT4 was looking so good too! The version they released for people to play was so damn polished, I was so excited for the final product...
Still not even Unreal Skins in Fortnite at least...
Suppressing the possibility of negative reviews is the kind of majorly short-term thinking that only hurts the one doing it. From an intensely myopic perspective, it might make it more likely for a customer to buy a *particular* game, but it won't take long at all before your storefront has a reputation of pushing a ton of garbage like it's gold.
Too late on the warning dude, I'm already typing.
Yah, hate clickbait or outright false titles, I'm sure it was an interesting 20 minute video but now I'm not watching.
@@ARockRaider Boo hoo
@@ARockRaider DeArrow Extension
@@ARockRaider ...and then THIS happened!
"Tim Sweeney, who I like to call John Carmack's Wario" holy shit that's so true
the best nickname fit the person's trait perfectly
I'm absolutely stealing this.
It pisses me off that Epic Games tries to always paint a false image of themselves as some kind of hero’s. Like they improve the 10% and fuck up the 90%. We sued Google and Apple but bought a bunch of games off competing platforms and made them exclusive on our own. Sick, fuck rocket league then
That is my biggest problem with them. Sweeny acts like he is doing all of this out of the goodness of his heart. His actual actions look like someone take market share by force. There was an indie dev of a popular game, I cannot find the Tweets, that called Sweeny out for this. They would take a larger cut from Valve for the services they provided and at worst were "benevolently lethargic" than what they saw a Sweeny trying to take market control. I believe the concern was what usually happens when a publicly traded company take up almost the whole market, they start to squeeze everyone because the line has to go up.
One thing i like about steam, is that it automatically accepts my PlayStation controller without needing any other software, I don't think the other stores do that
@@Luizanimado The Steam input stuff is so useful. I love how it adds controller support to games that never even thought about it.
Epic has a complete disregard for its own history. They delisted all the Unreal games, the games that put them on the map, saying they'd rerelease them but then never did. Then the whole project got memory holed and there's been no news since. This level of disrespect is insane to me.
It would be like If Valve, once it hit it big, decided to completely remove and forget about all of half life. They may not know how to count to three but they don't forget where they came from.
Tim Sweeny is part of the establishment (rich people in control). He despises anything that doesn't actively eat away a poor peoples money, or just outright shit on franchises (Borderlands 3, looking at you). He is no different than Ubisoft or EA.
I mean it feels like the half-life franchise is being forgotten by valve but your point still stands
@@Dr.Freeman... They put out Alyx and that anniversary update for half life one and all their games are still playable. But you're not wrong either. There's some negligence in the multi-player sphere of their games and dispute how stupidly huge they are it would be nice to see some of those resources go to new games at a stronger rate than 'when we feel like it'.
@@Thehotdogman yeah true, but obviously alyx is vr exclusive meaning that not everyone will be able to play it since you require a valve index and not everyone is going to blow £919 to play a vr game (and for common folk, the oculus quest provides a better deal), not every half-life fan will be able to play it, plus the cliffhanger also sets up half-life 3, which of course is still to be announced, but I agree with your point about the 25th anniversary, and the abandonment of some of their multiplayer games. I am a relatively new half-life fan (started playing the games about 2 years ago) but I understand that people have been waiting for hl3 for longer that I have existed so I just my former favourite games developer to release a game so many people have been waiting for.
@@Dr.Freeman... Valve uses the Half-Life franchise to show off new tech. 2 was to show off the Source engine and Alyx was to show off Source 2 and their VR hardware. I don't know if they even want to try to make HL3, considering how long it has been. The longer it takes the more it will have to wow people. If it doesn't people will go, "It took them X years to make this?"
Really Alyx was HL3 if not that, it was at least Half-Life 2: Episode 3.
Worth noting many games on Steam are DRM free as well and you don't need the steam client to launch it once you download.
True, but the same is also valid for EGS.
Although, GOG might be the best
@@tablettablete186 absolutely, you have to go a bit out of your way with Steam (not sure about EGS) but GoG has always been amazing when it comes to DRM free games and giving you control. It's the main reason I used to always buy from GoG over Steam.
@@tablettablete186 GOG is absolute dogshit nowadays, unfortunately they couldn’t keep up with Steam
Yes, but it is a rarity outside of visual novels.
true drm free is having an offline installer of the game you bought similar to gog's
Sadly, your conclusion of what EGS is good for is no longer valid. EGS dropped the "pre-sale" gimmick and are just dropping to a 0% fee during their exclusivity period now. Needless to say, I think that's why so many companies have outright abandoned any exclusivity deals with them.
100% of nothing still nothing.
Never chalk up to incompetence what can be explained by malice, especially when dealing with corporations, bureaucracies, and NGO's.
~~That saying usually goes backwards ~~
@@VelvetIcematoro
No shit, he reversed it for a reason.
And chinese slave labor money
@@Web720 The real lesson is that malice and incompetence are a case-by-case thing, and rules like that don't really apply to real life.
I mean my Desktop OS is Linux. I couldn't even use EGS if I wanted to for some insane reason. Steam meanwhile actually seems to be keenly interested in helping me run the games it carries on Linux. Makes the decision a no brainer
Sweeny compared using Linux to moving to Canada because you don't like American politics. He has the smoothest of brains.
EGS works through wine/proton just fine. There's even nice integrations like heroic launcher or NSGL.
I switched to Linux Mint a few months ago. I've had a few bumps to smooth out such as Hogwarts Legacy crashing (too small.of a default page file) and older games such as Supreme Commander:FA, and Hyper Dimension Neptunia running poorly on a higher end system.
Ive sorted out most problems and almost NEVER boot into Windows. In fact I'm looking to wipe windows off almost exclusively unless I want to get back into MSFS
I didn't specifically like Valve when they announced Linux support. If they followed through Desura was a gonner, but I didn't understand Valve's commitment. They don't actually abandoned things on a whim.
Purchasing games on Steam has been the greatest future proofing of game purchases.
One thing I remember hearing about early on when people were trying out EGS was that there were a lot of payment options that would require the customer to pay extra transaction fees. This one of the ways Epic keeps their cut at 12%, they pass on the transaction costs to the consumers in these cases.
I was actually okay with Epic when it first launched. It was until Metro: Exodus got pulled last minute from Steam to make it an Epic exclusive (if you pre ordered the game on Steam before a certain date you still kept it, but they did this decision 2 weeks before launch.) I then vowed I wouldn't use EGS. Whats crazy is the original physical copies had literal stickers of the EGS logo over the Steam store logo, truly showing how last second this decision was. I think another major W Steam/Valve has is Trading and the Steam Market place between these two things you get attached to the Steam Economy financially, it's a sunken cost fallacy for sure, but in my opinion keeps players far more invested then a free game every month.
I was interested when Voidtrain was almost to release on Steam, then they took an exclusivity deal a few weeks before the release on Steam, never bought it.
for me it was Phoenix point. I had heard lots about it during development and was excited for it. Then they took the exclusive deal and I was PISSED. it is the only game I ever paid for on EGS. And I will never give them another dollar.
I totally forgot Metro Exodus and Phoenix Point exists. Thanks EGS for helping me save money.
I remember Metro: Exodus had problems at launch. Epic doesn't have forums so the people that bought the game on Epic were using the Steam forums to solve their problems.
@@ThatGuy-bz2in I had backed Phoenix point on Kickstarter. Then they made the announcement they took the Epic deal. The lead even made a video where he looked like he was on the edge of tears he looked so happy about it. I feel for him but, I didn't back the game for an Epic key. I backed a Steam key. I emailed them that I am either going to get a Steam key or they are going to give me a refund. They eventually announced they would still be giving out Steam keys as well as Epic keys. They sent me an Epic key, which I still have some where never used.
That reminds me that Epic was using the Steam "Most Wishlisted" charts to figure out what games to snipe. It was consistently happening that anything rising up the charts would at least be made an offer. Eventually, I think people just stopped accepting. There was even one dev that publicly turned down the offer, because they new the customers wanted their copy on Steam, to a massive increase in sales.
I think a big thing is also that Steam has built up years and years of consumer goodwill. in the era of enshittification across all industries, of perpetually being offered a good product, then almost getting gaslit by the companies behind the product to pay more for it, or get less, or suddenly being nickel-and-dimed for everything that was previously free of charge... within that context, the willingness of Steam to not just stay the same, but actually markedly and continually improve their storefront over the years, with not a single step in the other direction, ever, is basically the singular best thing that could happen to consumers.
And another company that _very clearly_ sees this merely as a business opportunity trying to strongarm their way into the industry, and trying to build up a countermonopoly to the seeming "monopoly" of Steam, is just about the worst possible look you can have. why, exactly, does Epic go to such lengths to make the consumers not part of their strategy? why are they trying to bribe you into coming over to them and then hopefully staying in their ecosystem, if not because they want to ensnare you into becoming an income stream for them in the future, no matter what you think about the quality of their service?
From the way Sweeney is talking about it, it is very clear, that to Epic, you are a product to be sold, whereas Steam treats you like a consumer. In the end, it's as simple as that.
Review bombing hasn't been a problem on Steam since they effectively made it opt-in to see a surge of reviews in a short amount of time
It's a nonsense term anyway. People are allowed to dislike a game. That term is only used by salty devs who make bad products.
I was pretty excited to play Alan Wake 2 but the seccond I heard it was an EGS exclusive my interest died on the spot. I tried using EGS before but it just doesnt even come close to steam in any regard. Its even slower than steam, so so so many features that are missing and just confusing UI layout in general. I dont think EGS will ever be real competition to steam, not if they keep going at the current rate at least.
my experience exactly.
That’s because Remedy didn’t fund Alan Wake 2. After Remedy bought the rights from Microsoft, Epic offered to fund the sequel in exchange for handling distribution. This unsurprisingly backfired because Epic made the game an exclusive to EGS and digital only for consoles, so 6 months after release the game still wasn’t profitable with Remedy receiving no royalties as of March. Remedy also agreed to fund the Alan Wake remaster at a loss which is another EGS exclusive. So Remedy basically got repeatedly screwed by Epic and can’t do anything about it
Sweeney looks at a lemonade stand on an empty street and complains that they've created a monopoly. Why is he trying to make this a moral thing?
@@daruddock Because everything is a “moral” thing these days. Whenever I see a moral argument, I know it’s about money lol.
By the way, the video makes it seem like the new revenue split of Steam was a consequence of Epic Games announcing the revenue split of their store, but if I remember correctly, the Epic Games Store was announced and launched a few days after Steam announced their new revenue split. The Epic Games Store has nothing to do with why Steam changed the revenue split of their store.
Potentially yes but from my memory Sweeney was talking about the whole revenue split for a while before the store was announced publically and it's a safe bet valve was aware ahead of time that EGS was coming. It may have been pre-planned anyway but I'm sure Sweeney's actions were a factor in that decision to some degree and I would guess the largest.
I remember several developers talking about the revenue split in the App Store. I don’t know anything about Steam. But I might be wrong. It’s been a while, and I tend to click off gaming news too often because it is always the same thing. “X gaming company added something to squeeze more money out of people.” It gets tiring after a while. 😪
@@sp3edy787 Valve was already pressured by developers and distributors to lower the fees way before Sweeney started to open his mouth. It's been a recurrent known topic for a decade or more already.
@@MBSteinNL And Valve kept giving them steaming manure in return for the past 'decade or more'.
EGS lost a lot of goodwill when they paid off developers to 180 on Steam release promises to got EGS exclusive. Some Kickstarters even had to refund buyers for ultimately lying about what platforms they released on.
I’ve never used Epic but every time I hear about them they sound incredibly stupid. I’d love to have a beer with their ceo so I could see if they’re self-aware or if they actually believe their own BS.
Sweeney is far from self-aware. The dude's most famous quote goes along the lines of "PC gamers are pirates and PC isn't a sustainable platform so why bother?" and now he's doubling down on blaming Valve as a monopoly when he's the one enforcing the practice via exclusivity.
In the before times Tim Sweeney and John Carmack were on a lot of panels together and it was always kinda shocking how different they looked at everything. Carmack always had boundless enthusiasm. He'd go off on a tangent and just be all smiles to be talking about some esoteric thing, there was joy in just communicating what he was passionate about which maybe only 1% of the audience even understood. Then there was Sweeney. When he started talking joy died. He was always the business person behind Epic. But to be fair to Tim he kinda had to be, his partner was Chuck, and Chuck seemed to have no concept of money.
@@AxleTrade Yes I think I remember, he was basically hating on pc gaming when he was working on Gears of War I think ? and he came on PC and want our money like GTFO dude 😂
I’ll quote Dave Oshry of NewBlood Games “the EGS is a marketing black hole.”
I've been banned from epic since their own security failure and subsequent account leaks in 2013
I refuse to make a new email to use their service.
Here’s some of the stuff Steam has that no other platform has, or is just way better at.
Community market.
Customer reviews.
Wide profile customisation.
Custom emoticons.
Achievements and badges.
Community workshops.
Quick and easy to use game library (that is also customisable).
Controller support.
Fan-games and smaller indie titles.
Customer support.
Smooth and quick launcher in general.
Profile customization on Steam alone makes it the superior platform lol, some profiles are genuine pieces of art
Another thing to consider.
Valve takes their 30% cut and reinvests it into Steam and its features, making it a better platform for both developers and customers.
Epic takes their 12% cut and uses to pay exclusivity bribes. Benefiting only themselves at the cost of the customer.
Steam treats its customers like royalty compared to other platforms/storefronts. Meanwhile EGS will happily siphon resources away from making the storefront better for customers, just so they can invest more into exclusivity. It's no wonder why people avoid using the EGS out of principle.
Yeah, right. Invests so much that bugs from 2015 are still present.
@@alandunaway3000 Fake news. Been using Steam for well over a decade, never encountered any bugs. Quit blowing smoke...
Really? No bugs at all? Regardless it doesn't make the argument against steam any stronger. Any live service will run into bugs, and some bugs are minor enough and non-detrimental to the user experience that it's not worth dedicating ressources towards debugging it. Anecdotally the bugs I've encountered are very minor. And everything you pointed out in support of steam is still correct. They consistently make improvements to the storefront and actually invest in making a consumer friendly (mostly) experience that blows any competition out of the water.
its actually better then a 30% cut that's just for the game bought on steam, if a dev tells steam to make some steam keys for their game and they sell them elsewhere, steam doesnt get any of the money from that sale of the key
Steam does not treat its users as Royalty, that would be GOG. GOG gives you a 30 day refund policy. Steam reduced their refund window from 3 hours down to 2, and they only give you up to a week to refund after purchasing. Very anti-consumer imo.
When it comes to the lack of a shopping cart and reviews, Sweeney even said when EGS launched that it was feature complete, it was perfect. So they had no intention of ever adding those things in.
And I can see it at the start when the EGS launched why developers would take the deal. It had Fortnite so alot of people using it so a potential large customer base but in a odd turn of events, people don't buy games on Epic.
Out of all the exclusives that Epic got, only 1 ever turned a profit while being exclusive and that was Satisfactory. Even one company went under due to the exclusivity money not being enough to keep them going.
And thern there is the perception issue since alot of the exclusives(not all but most) were either a buggy mess or really mid quality. This created the image that games that go exclusive were games that the developers had no confidence in so they rather just take the Epic money and launch it on a store that has no reviews.
These days, well few people are buying games off EGS still. So multiplayer games are dead on arrival if they go exclusive since nobody is buying them.
And I would not recommend devs to go exclusive these days since it is a very very risky move. First of it will piss people off and that's not a good way to launch a game.
And second, if your game has any momentum or hype then going EGS will kill the hype/momentum dead in it's track and you will not get that back.
So by the time you can release the game on Steam, the sales will be lower then it would have been if you had launched the game on Steam from the start since the hype is gone and people in general would have moved on. Afterall, the game was suppose to come out a year prior, it didn't so they moved on to other games and getting those people back will be very difficult.
Factual error: The revenue share for steam is not per game but per developer/ publisher. So once a publisher makes 10 million in sales it drops and then again. This makes this cut much more widespread than this video implies. Yes all AAA Publishers will get the cheapest one, but also AA Developers easily crack that number and even Sucessful Indie Studios, with a couple of good performing games, will reach the tier with the lowest cut. Even the source that was shown actually has written this down correctly and the video doesn't.
EGS has so many features that are just missing community tab, guides, PROFILES AND THE WORKSHOP like wtf are they even trying to be a competitor?
It's very simple really. What can you provide as a store? And if you are doing exclusives, what better deal you can give in return that can neutralize this annoyance?
Tim Sweeney's answer is "Nope. Fuck you Steam"
The gamers replied with "Nope. Fuck you Epic". All of a sudden, making the game exclusive for 12% cut makes no sense since nobody is buying the game anyway
It's funny that devs are using EGS as an alpha testing place. You can be a total asshole and take the money. Do a "closed" beta launch. Make no marketing whatsoever until the Steam launch
Noticed the same effect on Stardock's more recent games. They use the EGS for early access releases like GalCiv 4 and Sins 2, and very few if anyone spoke about them until their Steam releases drew near.
The effect is even stronger in the Windows Store. Quantum Break and Shadow of the Tomb Raider were originally exclusives, and their earnings were less than 10% than what they earned when they came out on Steam. The dead weight that was the infamous UWP didn't help either.
I used to use EGS, but I abandoned it after they wiped the entire Unreal series from it. Being so ungrateful to what made you big in the first place is a big no-no. They also gave space to the monstrosity that are NFTs, and I deleted it permanently from my PC:
Frankly, indie devs who might complain about Steam's cut... I do not understand. I say this as an indie dev, and an indie author. You know what you get on Amazon, as a self-published author, in exchange for their cut?
Uh, the store page, which you can't really customise beyond basic text.
You know what you get on Steam in exchange for their cut? Total control over updates without needing to wait for them to greenlight it, control over store imagery, with support for embedded images/gifs, community hub, forums, a very responsive support team, free entry into the famous Steam sales, detailed analytics, built-in support for the Steam controller stuff even if your game doesn't really hook into Steam much (if you've chosen to go DRM-free, which is an option on Steam)...
30% is a whole fucking lot for basically just providing a page and some community services. All of which you can get for a lot less on other sites.
The only reason to go to Steam is the average gamer being too lazy to get games on other stores.
@@GordonSeal "a page and some community services"
Well that's a disingenuous way to sum up the actual feature list on offer.
But okay, share with the class. Tell us about these "other stores" that offer an equal feature list for a "lot less"... and points deducted if they require paypal, frankly.
Why did you bring up amazon? Totally unrelated and just makes your argument seem muddy, we are talkinf about steam which you got right, and EPIC GAMES STORE which youve seemed to miss, too busy humble bragging about being an author?
@@allison6883 "Totally unrelated"
Uh... you think a digital distribution platform that accepts indies is totally unrelated in the discussion of digital distribution and the services provided/cut they take in exchange for hosting digital content?
Mmkay.
"and EPIC GAMES STORE which youve seemed to miss"
Well I rather thought we were all aware of the existence of the epic games store and its dubious practices, and the fact that it was inciting people to whine about Steam's cut... I mean surely that's the basic context of all this, always? Didn't really think we needed to state the painfully, tediously obvious and mention it every... single... time.
But it's okay, if you're having a bad day and you want to be petulant and lash out at a total stranger so they can be a punching bag for whatever passing mood struck you. Only human.
@@NicholasBrakespear notice how neither responded after days.
I'd also like to point out that EGS attempts to do what streaming services like Netflix and Hulu do - poach IPs as exclusives to pull consumers towards their product. The issue is people are *tired* of having to try and keep track of what they have access to over several storefronts/services. People already have an expansive library on Steam - if your storefront doesn't just sell keys that you can activate on Steam, why would anyone use it? Nobody wants two storefronts running in the background. Nobody wants to go "Was this game on EGS or Steam?"
Having everything centralized to one app is just way more convenient.
Review bombing isn't a problem unless you're a bad developer. It's not even a real term. If you've played the game and have a negative impression of it, you are entitled to leave a negative review no matter the reason. It's a loaded term pushed by garbage publishers.
Review bombing is a tool, and like all tools, it's not always used effectively or with good intentions. Worst case, it's a band-aid or a total distraction from the root issue. The Helldivers 2 situation might've saved that game specifically, but Sony's still making PSN mandatory on all future PC ports, even single-player games. Then you have people review bombing a game over something that has nothing to do with the quality of the game, which is fundamentally a misuse of reviews. And then people who review bomb but don't have the decency to go back and change it if the developer does what the people ask. Makes the community look like power-tripping crybabies.
Sony's gonna learn fast that steam users won't put up with it
@@os6829 It wasn't even called "review bombing "until journos cited it in multiple articles since EGS showed up, before then it was just "negative reviews" or "mass negative reviews".
The way it's coined now is always regarded as a net negative, just like how writers used the term "fanboy" to negatively describe a fan. Journos being useless brats as usual.
@@os6829I have not seen a single instance of bad review bombing
@@os6829 You are allowed to give a negative review for ANY reason, there is no misuse. If the developers of a game I own make some shitty tweets supporting heinous stuff, I am going to leave a negative review and tell people why. I am going to tell people that the developers should not be supported because of their shitty views. If enough people agree, people are going to boycott the game. Or, people will disagree with my negative review and it will have no effect.
As for not updating reviews after changes are made, I am under no obligation to have to update my reviews to the developers whims. You can see the date of the reviews. Nowadays, games are never finished. Even supposedly finished games get a random content drop 2+ years after release. What am I supposed to do? Re-play and and re-review every single game in my 300+ library for every update I see? If I leave negative review for your game because of X, and you fix X a year later, I've probably already forgotten about your sh*tty game.
Valve's passionate about what they create and they also make money.
Epic's passionate about money and they also create.
That's the difference in my eyes.
Valve is still working to make pc gaming better. Notable examples being steam input, making controllers more uniform on the platform and making huge strides to make Linux an actual viable gaming platform.
I fully switched to Linux because of Valve. No longer under the thumb of Micro$oft.
4:23 Steam has had those those splits for years, long before EGS came around. It's almost as new as Steam itself. Any dev would prefer lower cuts, but it's been accepted by most of us, given the services Steam provides. Not to mention you can sell Steam keys elsewhere and keep 100% of the revenue, as long as you're not making it cheaper on other platforms by doing so.
"grrr, I would rather take Valve to court than meet the standards set by Steam."
-Tom Greedy
I refuse to use EGS based on how they rather spend money on exclusives then putting that money into the storefront to make it better. I want EGS to be better because I believe completion is a good thing and the consumer can only benefit from it.
I have no issue with other non-steam launchers, the main issue I have is how just feels like Epic is trying to bring the terrible aspects of console gaming to the PC platform.
I deleted my EGS account back in 2019 when all the shit started to go down. And still today I have no desire to make another account for exclusive games that mostly not interested for me (Mainly Racing/Slice of life/Arcade classics games) and for the "FREE GAMES" that the shills keep hollering about which seems like a bride to use their shitty platform anyways. I even encounter some shills calling me an idiot for not taking the "FREE GAMES" offer which I just laugh and continue on playing Bejeweled 3 on Steam.
Fun fact. About a year ago i was having a friend over for a few days and we are planning on playing GTA online. I have two PCs but none had it installed yet.
It took me 9 hours to download the game due to my slow internet. But when i tried to install it on the other PC steam promted up a massage that basically says. " We detected that you already have GTA V installed on your other machine. Would you like to install it via LAN transfer?" Like bro! It's such a niche feature that i don't think anyone asked for. Yet steam has it.
For people like me who either have slow/limited internet, this is 100% a life saver. People usually transfer big games via external hard drives, but this little feature removes the need for it.
Its morally okay to pirate games which are exclusive on Epic, Tim Sweeny already paid the developers :)
It is OK to pirate Valve games too. Especially Half-Life.
@@diamondhamster4320 sure buddy
@@Darnk715 Got an rational, well grounded argument against it, mate???
@@diamondhamster4320If you wait for a Sale you get the entire thing for like 99 cents. Or you can get dozens of games in a bundle including half life, and HL2 +the episodes and expansions for like less than 4 dollars. While being able to easily mod it.
@@diamondhamster4320I support piracy, I pirate all epic exclusives. If I don’t support the company then they don’t deserve my money. If you primarily use epic and never use steam (oddball) then yeah that’s justifiable.
Epic sales are great when they offer the 33% off coupon that works on things already on sale. But without that coupon there's no reason to buy from them.
still isn't worth it when you can buy steam keys .
The thing with Steam is it has so many useful features outside of just the storefront like the Steam input stuff, the Workshop and even big picture mode. They all make PC gaming more accessible and customizable. Steam input has saved me many hours trying to add controller support for ancient games that never even thought of it. They also seem to really care about the usability of Steam. The way things are laid out is just functionally better than the competition. Even the ability to launch non-Steam games through Steam is great. The way they really started supporting gaming on Linux with both Proton and the Steam Deck shows that they are reinvesting the money they make into making Steam better and better.
EGS/Tim Sweeney are anti-consumer. His long term play with exclusives is to hopefully get the younger generations hooked into the EGS ecosystem before they realize how great Steam is. As you pointed out, there is zero reason to use EGS.
Publishers who cry about review bombing are afraid of being called out for a bad product or bad decisions post launch. (ie Sony)
It's pretty alarming when a company admits to and states as part of their long-term goal is basically grooming users into accepting dark patterns and freeloading. If the EU authorities were as upright as they held themselves to be vs Apple and Google, they would also be questioning this.
I will be very honest, before EGS I was a very open PC gamer, Steam, GOG, Origin, Uplay, Itch, Microsoft Store, Battlenet... Even own some games from websites like Gamesplanet, but after EGS came out, I simply stopped supporting these launchers because it opened my eyes on how important basic features are and how much damage a bad intended store can make to the PC ecosystem. We had a healthy ecosystem for years without enforced exclusivity, Valve Games are exclusive to Steam becasue they are from Valve's, GOG has exclusive ports of old games because they go out of their way to make sure these ports work on modern PCs, they bring something cool to the table.
If Epic just SHUT UP, released a store with the 12% cut, and released Alan Wake II exclusive to their store I wouldn't mind, they backed the project and I would gladly fork some cash for them, but years of buying out exclusives that even had a Steam page has left a sour taste in my mouth, I even stopped playing Rocket League after 1000h due to this stupid company. Hope they crash and burn.
In the end, I only have Steam and GOG installed, but regularly download indie stuff from Itch too. All the others I don't even bother anymore, and if their game is not on one of these three, it may as well not exist.
Private Vs Publicly Traded Companies... Valve can focus on customer experience, whereas Epic resorts to manipulation and dark patterns to extract as much profit as possible for shareholders.
What i find ridiculous is shareholders approving that, ah yes i put money here i want to risk losing it even more so they can make less than if i waited
@@furinick you'd be surprised how many investors only care about short term gains, invest in on a d as soon as it's not an immediate line go up anymore they switch to another company and do it all again
If you are saying something about how long it took too long to add something like a shoping cart just remember that epic had all these years to see what steam has and add those systems
I personally see EGS as that store that gifts games every week, every single game in my EGS library came from either one of their giveaways or something like Prime games. On the other hand I've been buying games on Steam for more than a decade and don't intend on stopping any time soon.
I just hope that when EGS closes at some point in the future they have an option to transfer the games to somewhere else like how the Bethesda store did, or individual developers/publishers offer solutions like when Desura was collapsing and some devs provided Steam keys.
A shopping cart function for your digital game store? Noooo that's too hard, tummy hort, we'll add it in 3 years.
Scanning your steam files without your knowledge or consent? Ez, get that shit done within a year.
Releasing your game exclusively on EGS is great for developers because it's like getting extra year of early access and when you finally get to Steam the polished product get's hype
The thing is, Steam is an ecosystem, with discussion forums, achievements, and tons of other features for both customers and publishers/developers. On top of that, there's SteamVR and Proton. No other store front (ignoring Oculus here, as they are straying away from PC VR) has VR integrated. Beside SteamVR, there's only really Monado as an alternative compositor.
My reason to avoid Epic is that they bribe devs for exclusivity in some cases.
It is not a "deal" it is a bribe to have exclusivity, one the dev takes at the expense of the customer. This can be seen as disrespecting your customers, so I can't safely buy your product and should wait for reviews from sites and sources not related to either party involved with the bribe.
By this point it is typically already on Steam, so I safely avoid any scams.
i would also like to add, that you can recover your steam account with a few clicks when you get hacked. while epic, uplay and all others take years to even respond or help you at all
Uplay sucks. If you uninstall an AC game it is basically impossible to play it again. Forced updates every few weeks only due to DRM reasons. No internet connectiob, no ability to play. Random problems with connectivity even if your Internet is perfectly fine
>be Steam
>does nothing
>competition just keeps shooting themselves in the foot
What is this business strategy called?
GOG doesn't just sell old games. That's why they ditched the long name. A decent number of games launch there day one.
If you were going to create a store and try to compete with steam you better move fast and put a lot of money behind it and use a lot of customer feedback to build it. it better be truly epic no pun intended
What we want as comsumers, is for every game to be on every platform. EGS acts more like a monopoly than steam does. With their exclusives and their constant lawsuits.
It's hilarious to me that Remedy, one of the current best development houses out there, is struggling to break even on one of the best games they've ever made. They should never have partnered with Epic, and I await their announced split in the next 3 years.
i think that Remedy is conquering their independence with epic games, I don't believe that epic will hold their IPs like Microsoft did with quantum break, 505 with Control and (sort of) Rockstar with Max Payne
They bought control back from 505 and having epic games as a publisher is a big deal, even with those caveats!
I legitimately forget I have games on EGS, what makes the problem worse is the fact that EGS makes you log back in if you fail to launch it within a certain timeframe. I have all of my PC’s launch with as few programs as possible because I hate bloat and I’d much rather launch things as needed, so when I finally think about a game on EGS I’m met with a login screen requiring 2fa, I usually just close EGS and find something else to play lol.
Another thing to keep in mind is our financial investment on Steam. I have a massive library there and my continued access to it depends on Valve doing well enough to keep steams massive infrastructure chugging. Therefore I have a vested interest in Valves future (and thus my Steam Library's) and the safest thing would be for Valve to be completely dominant and virutually unchallenged
This get compounded as my library grows and my Steam Account gets older (its 16 years old now) so on Steam you actually feel ownership of digital goods. I still have plenty of delisted games there. I dont trust any other digital service for any media to still be around with my stuff accesible 16 years from now. I do believe Steam will. It already has, after all.
And the way ti safeguard that is to do everything i can to protect valves position on the pc market. This is why I and many others DESPISED Epic from the get go. Serious competition to Valve could threaten my Steam library. Better it goes away.
The whole lawsuit in a nutshell:
- steam: delivers a quality service
- everyone else: delivers absolute shit tier service, costs more, spies on you, has constant breaches
The lawsuit:
- "Yeah so we don't like how steam is doing so well, they are raising the bar too high for us to reach, with their cheap prices and reliability, customers should be taught to bend over and get fucked more by other companies, like Epic, or Ubisoft, or Sony, how dare Steam treat it's customers so well, it's just not fair."
Anyone who calls Steam a Monopoly is restarted.
Steam is the ONLY thing keeping Microsoft AND Sony from having a Duopoly.
Meanwhile, Microsoft and Sony are fighting for a Monoply.
Also, the main reason Tim Sweeney fears putting Fortnite on Steam is the Community Ratings.
And nude mods.
i think game not seen is prolly sort of region perspective coz we in asia likes to use epic just for discount purposes.
At the end of the day, Tim Sweeney comes off as being extremely insincere because his business model with EGS is aimed at publishers while using the smoke screen "for developers" designed to pit consumers against developers.
And it's not working, which is why the EGS budget has been running in the red since it launched like, what, 8 years ago?
GOG have established themselves in a niche because of their staunch anti-DRM position. GOG Galaxy 2.0 is also a pretty decent launcher that imports all your games from different platforms into one place. However, it still lacks so many important features of Steam, including a built-in modding platform (e.g. Workshop), a controller-friendly interface mode (e.g. Big Picture), matchmaking, communities, and more. I actually would prefer to use GOG Galaxy exclusively because of how it brings everything together, except for the fact that my primary gaming is a more living room/couch setup where Big Picture is critically useful. But at least Steam is more than competent.
8:40
Wrong.
It is NOT a problem on Steam, because it's NOT a problem at all. It's the FIX for a problem (a company not losing revenue due to bad behavior).
If you're against review-bombing, you're actually part of the problem
To put it bluntly I despise exclusive games. As a consumer there is no reason to support practice that doesn't benefit anyone but the big corpos. I could somewhat understand why it isn't so simple for console vs pc but pc to pc gamestore is inexcusable to me and I pretend epic doesn't exist on principle
This is a real problen for d.l.c that listed on multiple stores/platform but you locked to one store/platform that you bought thame main game from. This just is completely unaccpable.
Like telling me i can out bacon my my sandwatich cause i bought it a different groecy store.
it's ironic how EGS crying about steam being monopoly while they are the ones who are trying to make it monopoly
You know what's funny? Inside the unreal marketplace, there's a proper review and comment section. It's inside the same app =]
Have you tried moving around games in-between your drives on epic store? Steam unintentionally has a monopoly on pc gaming because they earned it. They are the reason that market exits after all meanwhile epic is actively trying to have a monopoly on the market, and failing spectacularly. Gamers don't care weather the devs get a 30% or 10% cut. They wat their shit to work.
Being the market leader doesn't make Steam a monopoly.
What Epic makes easy is ignoring games that are exclusive on it. I certainly don't perceive them.
In other words, EGS's approach to competing with Steam is all stick, no carrot on the consumer side.
Id say that GOG is also pretty good, tho i guess its not exactly a competitor, due to occupying a slightly different niche.
Witchfire being stuck in that hellhole is MENTAL. It was one of my most awaited games, now people barely knows it exists.
Review bombing is the best tool to show dissatisfaction with a game. If it wasn't there, most of the negative sentiments would just be chalked up to loud minority. It helps in showcasing that a considerable amount of people are actually against the changes and it was significant enough that they decided to review the game.
It makes sense for Valve for 30% because they only have Steam, they barely make games. While Apple and Google are giant corporations with multiple different products and can take that cut.
While Epic makes games and has the Unreal Engine.
Valve's Steam also has a lot of benefits:
Steam Input
Market
Cloud Saves
Review System
Forum
Guides
News
Mod Page and Host
Non-Windows Support through Proton
SteamVR
Etc.
I'll admit it, Steam is the game store platform, I use it mainly because there's no company (except GOG) trying their feet first into Linux compatibility, and Steam provided a better gaming experience on that semi-niche part of the market
it's very simple. You just use steam and that's it.
At one point for PC Gaming, you would use the Disc to install and play the game and not have to go on steam at all. This is how I played CoD 2 on PC when I was like 10-11 if my brother let me. No steam at all.
Steam fixes every aspect you can think of when you want to game on PC.
At 19:30, there are a few more points you forgot to mention:
1. Chinese company Tencent owns 40% of Epic Games.
2. There have been data breaches on EGS.
3. The Chinese government holds a "golden share" in Tencent, which gives them a board seat, other rights, and shareholder veto power over changes to the company's charter. As a result, Epic, being nearly half-owned by Tencent, may be compelled to follow the Chinese government's directives if their "golden share" overrides certain decisions. In contrast, Valve is a 100% U.S. company not beholden to any foreign government.
Nobody would care if egs was actually good, most of these points apply to a loud minority online. Make a good product and people will eat it up.
EGS is not a good product. It objectively inferior to Steam and GOG.
@@kxmode Exactly
What is the EGS good for? Absolutely nothing. Nod in shame if you didn't get the reference.
what people don't notice is that Steam isn't just sitting on their laurels and gobbling up 30% for no reason. They're always up to some new projects that are meant to improve Steam as a platform. We've seen a few experimental failures in the past like the Steam Machines, but we've also seen huge successes like the Steam Deck and SteamVR that has been nothing but an absolute benefit to devs and customers alike.
The question isn't whether or not the 30% cut is fair, but whether there is value in paying that 30% fee at all. Valve's strategy has always been to increase the value you get out of that 30% instead of going for the obvious and simple route of decreasing that 30% cut.
it's one of the few software products where i actually always read their news that's hidden behind a small button, because more often than not it's something i want to know. most other stuff in the sphere could use an adblocker for their "news".
For what it's worth, I know you meant review bombing is a "problem" (note the quotations) in relation to Epic's point of view, not that you personally think it's a problem. I think you just didn't make it obvious enough lol
It can definitly be problematic. Especially when games get reviewbombed for political reasons or not having a localization.
@@herdoman5169 Personality I never cared about steam review system, it's as bad if not worse than any website you can rate games (obviously they can't check if you played it). Watching reviews on UA-cam & gameplay video gives me a better idea of the game anyway.
That said I know small indies are affected a lot by reviews.
My initial problem with EGS is that the download manager doesn't work properly. My download doesn't resume to the downloaded percentage after restarting.
Steam unquestionably has a functional monopoly. With that being said they deserve it. And The ugly reality of it is they deserve it. Their product is levels beyond any of their competition. To the point where I can get free games on epic and still buy them on steam because the launcher is that much better.
19:06 I don't know if it is out of convenience. It might be out of ignorance. I don't think any item tells you it is from a vender let alone which one. It would love it if it did, so I don't have to look online. Now if I can get something for a lesser price than it would cost to teleport to the vender and buy it, I could see a use.
I bought one single game on EGS, Horizon Zero Dawn, good price, thought i’d finally play it… it didn’t have controller support, no matter what i did, the EGS version of horizon simple doesn’t have controller support… on a game designed and made to be played with a controller. That and their constant HUGEEEEE notifications on free games that no one cares about drove me the hell away from EGS