re: this article.
The title is a joke. "Free, but you have to make an EGS account" is a bit too rich for me.
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2025
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Ever other platform is just ass. I have played games on Epic, Battlenet, Ubisoft and the EA launcher but they all barely have basic functionality. Meanwhile steam has:
Steam seems to be the only one that actually puts any effort in providing a good user experience. It's more than just a store / launcher and noone else is even trying to compete.
Don’t forget non-profitable free-to-use features such as:
And there’s probably more that I’m forgetting. These things cost Valve money to make and maintain. Only a small portion of users actually use these features and yet it’s not locked behind some subscription or whatever and instead can be used by all users of the platform.
They cost money to make, but the only one of those that costs them a significant chunk to maintain is cloud saves. As far as I can tell their streaming solution is strictly peer-to-peer, in the vein of Moonlight or Parsec.
And all of those are definitely profitable for Steam via... well, look at this thread. Their technological advantage on the client feature set is worth billions to them. They are in the process of spinning it off into a separate hardware platform and OS. That's Microsoft money they stand to make, on top of all the Microsoft money they are already making.
I mean, those are cool, don't get me wrong, they have by far the best feature set in the PC market, and arguably in all of gaming... but it's not a gift, it's either feature parity with competitors or investment in their market position.
Theres also steamvr link to make meta's quest headsets better and also all the steam for linux stuff like proton and gamescope
What do you mean "no forced ads"? It throws up a separate window with store sales every launch?
You can turn that off.
https://majorgeeks.com/content/page/disable_steam_popups_notifications.html
You can turn that off, you know
You can turn that off in Windows as well, yet people still complained. And with good right.
Still think it's a bit different, steam is essentially a store so I'm expecting to see a promotional banner when I walk in. Windows is a "paid" product that shows you more ads on something you already "own".
Those are promotions, really. Not advertisements. Steam is showing me relevant video games that are available, not a sale on Coca-Cola.
Of fucking course Steam isn't advertising soda, they sell games. It's still an advertisement... just because it's relevant to the platform you're on doesn't mean it's not an advertisement.
Turn it off in the settings if it annoys you..
I did turn it off. That doesn't really have anything to do with my comment though.
Go to any other storefront and see if you can turn off the ads
Also not really relevant. My only point was that they are ads.
Yes but the relevant point of the conversation was that they are not forced ads. If you don't like them then turn them off and you'll never see it again. That does not happen on any other storefront.
To be clear, I agree Steam letting you turn off advertisements is great, and that I can't think of any other storefronts that do it. But while that may have been the relevant point to the original topic, it's not the point I was commenting on. Which is why I didn't respond to the first comment.
Exactly, I actually go thru this page every so often, just wish it would show me VR titles only, don't care/have the drive to play flat games anymore. It would be annoying if it were ads for stuff not on steam, promote away steam
I fail to see the distinction. If I want to just play a game, it's still getting in my way.
Turn it off then and quit complaining about something so insignificant.
Up until this thread, I had tried several times to find out how to disable it. That setting name is obviously obfuscating itself.
"notify me about promotions and new releases" is confusing?
I am screaming at the reality distortion field. I can feel my molecules being pulled into a million parallel realities just reading this.
Then stop reading. Some of you people are really aggravating.
Who people? Reality people?
These conversations are always so weird. People are here going "yeah, Steam is the best client, but maybe it's fine to have some competition on PC storefronts" and this army of borderline religious devotees just crawls from under the ground to tell you how when Steam does ads they're not ads, they're the Good Word of Gaben bestowed upon us.
I don't even like the Epic store.
Except what actually was said was:
If you're going to call yourself a "reality person" then stick to what is actually happening in reality.
Yeah, no, that's... all consistent with what I'm saying. Yes, they are all DRM platforms. And the reason you'd want more than one of them is that a monopoly on retail is bad, whether Epic, MS, Valve or whoever else have it.
One thing being said doesn't mean it's the only thing being said. This, as always with this subject, is a very bizarre conversation.
So you're complaining about some phantom conversation you may have had somewhere else?
Show me where in this comment chain someone said "maybe some competition would be good" and got push back on that. Closest I see is "the competition is bad", not "bad that the competition exists" but "it is executed poorly".
I agree that competition is good, nobody is complaining about GoG like they do about Epic. Saying "Fuck Epic" doesn't mean the person doesn't like multiple platforms existing, it means they don't like this specific platform (and they usually say the specific reasons why).
No, not a phantom conversation, a conversation I was actually having. Here. You replied to me, not the other way around.
There are, by the way, several posts in this thread literally stating, and I quote, that "ever [sic] other platform is just ass", "even GOG, which I always shill for, has some pretty dumb faults" and "Not on Steam? (...) the seas will provide".
Sure doesn't sound like it's a Epic-specific issue. Although I'd argue the Epic-specific console wars discourse is equally silly.
It's the sheer fanaticism and the taking of sides that gets weird, considering how inconsistent it is with other narratives often held at the same time. Kudos to Steam's PR, but man, is it weird to see happen online.
That ellipses is doing some heavy lifting for you there:
Why that's not nearly as pro-Steam as you are implying.
Man, I knew I'd get the nitpick if I didn't include the overlong quote. Welcome to the Internet, I suppose.
It is absolutely as pro-Steam as I'm implying and not the only quote in my post. I take nothing back and have nothing to add.
I think there is a toggle for this in the UI settings.