this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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I'm one of the few who actually like the existence of Epic. Like, not necessarily Epic itself, but some serious competition is needed. I personally would've loved it if the competition was GOG, but it seems consumers don't particularly care about ownership, so we have Epic.
The problem is that all the competition to steam is far far inferior to steam in technology and ideology and future prospects. Steam isn't a publicly traded company, has features that are pro consumers, is supporting other OS's and doesn't have a CEO that is a prick like epic.
Sure. But what if Gabe newel decided to sell tomorrow. Just wants to retire maybe he's pretty old. What if Microsoft buys it and you're left with a monopoly you don't like. That's the eventuality of every unhealthy industry.
Well it will be a sad day and Ubisoft, Microsoft and Epic competition won't fix anything if steam goes to shit. Steam is basically the unicorn and once it becomes extinct we won't get anything half decent to replace it with. Publicly traded companies are the bedrock of unhealthy industries.
Competition in the marketplace is the only thing that has any chance of saving you when that day comes.
You are in lucky days today. Tomorrow won't be so good, but you can choose to support an industry controlled by a monopoly, or you can support an industry with healthy competition.
I would hope that Gamers aren't so near sighted, but I've been proven wrong over and over again.
"Supporting competition" is not a good enough reason to use a shitty service. If I start a service that charges twice as much as Steam and has none of the features would you use it in order to "support competition"?
If the only reason to purchase from Epic is "they exist" that's not good enough.
I will happily avoid Epic's attempts to be a monopoly now over worrying that Steam might be shitty in the future.
It's super weird to me that you guys think epic is trying to be a monopoly. Epic had 0.00001% of the market. In their wildest dreams they might expect to get ten percent.
The numbers for Fortnite, available on EGS but not Steam, tell otherwise.
Just because they aren't good at it doesn't mean they aren't trying very hard to do so, and will clearly be very shitty if they ever achieve it.
When steam shuts down and we have Ubisoft and Epic to replace it with I'm just moving to itch.io and probably torrenting my steam library if it comes to the worst. Also I might actually stop playing games since steam is pushing proton development forward and without them I have no reason to play or buy anything new. Epic's shitty CEO has made toxic remarks against linux before and Ubisoft just couldn't care less. I'll support a company that supports my interests, epic doesn't so I don't simple as.
That would be helpful if they actually tried to be competitive on the same level.
Unfortunately they're only competing for profit, not as a service. Which is why they're failing.
Competition bettering service only works if people want to compete to create a better service. That clearly isn't the case.
Then we'd go back to sailing the high seas, until a better alternative shows up; as Gabe said, piracy is a service problem.
I feel Steam vs competitors is like how after 1st wave MCU, everyone was jumping on that bandwagon, but instead of putting in the groundwork just skipped ahead, or like the monsters one just abandoned it because of one bad movie.
Epic launches my games, Steam is full of bloat that I never use... 🤷
That "bloat" is 99% of the reason people use it.
No, 99% of the reason they use it is that they were first to market, made it mandatory for their first party games that were extremely popular at the time (and even today) and became defacto mandatory for many third party games as it made it simpler to control piracy to just sell through them or include a key in the physical copy and force people to install Steam. The majority of Steam users are casuals that couldn't care less about their forums, cards, social profiles and so on. It's the same thing in everything, there's enthusiasts that think everyone is as crazy as they are about their hobby, the majority are just casual users that will never know/use half of the possibilities available to them because they don't care.
Lol. You think 99% of people give a shit about forums or Linux support?
Hey!
Linux has almost a 2% market share on Steam, I have you know!
So it is only 98% who don't care.
I personally don't include Linux support in the bloat, but forums, social profiles, trading cards, reviews, achievements... Yes, that's bloat.
i would love for steam to have some competition. i will gladly switch over to the first competitor that has
and doesn't
particularly now that steam has switched over to electron, so the client runs like shit
i do sometimes use gog because i like their ideology, but they're missing quite a few from this list. any gog or itch.io games i buy, i inevitably add to steam as a non-steam game. which adds a lot of these handy features, but not all
unfortunately, until a competitor brings along something new to the table, i'm quite happy to wait and pay more for a game on steam. it just has too many features i can't give up
It uses CEF not Electron, which it has used for over 13 years. This isn't something they just added. If it's running slow for you you probably have an issue with hardware acceleration.
fine. i was simplifying. that wasn't the main point of my comment. forgive me.
no...?
you mean that the store has been an embedded browser? in that case yes
but the whole steam client? has always been vgui, not ~~electron~~ cef. did you even read the link you sent? just because there is reference to chromium in the commit log doesn't mean the whole thing's built in chromium, and just because a programme can render web content also doesn't mean it's built in chromium. when firefox switched from xul to html did you go "akshyually, it was always able to render html content so it hasn't switched at all"
it's not just me who has performance issues. at one point it was everyone on linux with an nvidia gpu. which is supposedly fixed (and it's definitely better) but it's still unusably slow on both linux and windows. also, so what. "it works on my machine" isn't a great excuse to ignore the biggest gaming gpu brand, and electron is notoriously non-performant (if my pc can handle playing a video in ffx whilst playing recent 3d games, i think it should also be able to display my list of owned games without stuttering). my point was that i never had issues with vgui, and now i do.
edit: ah, i've just looked through your comment history. i don't believe anyone who's not a troll has -10 karma and no negative comments (especially with some comments with >100 points), and i also suspect vote manipulation. i should never have engaged. sorry. i won't engage any more.
The "whole client" hasn't been VGUI. Yes now every element is CEF but many, many pieces have been CEF for a very long time. "Switched over to Electron" implies it was entirely changed but it's just using more of the thing it was already using. Those are two different things.
The issue you linked had nothing to do with Steam it was a bug with the Nvidia driver itself. Not sure what that's supposed to prove.
And my point is that is not an inherent problem with Steam, that is something specific to your configuration. If it runs fine for other people it can run fine for you. I'm on Arch with an Nvidia GPU. I have zero issues with the performance.
How is a competitor ever supposed to compete with a feature list like that? It has to come out of the gate with all those things? This is why monopolies exist.
honestly? i kind of agree. but gog spent a lot of dev time revamping their client into "gog galaxy 2.0" just to make it less controller accessible; and the epic client is just unusable
i would have more sympathy if they were little indie companies. but the itch.io client is better than either. these companies are pouring money into breaking into a market, but not bothering to develop features
that comment was more an example of why the egs isn't yet a real competitor than a criticism of any as yet nonexistent competitors
What the fuck are you saying? Of course consumers care about ownership, otherwise Stadia would be dominating the market, and we can see that it's not.
Ownership is not why Stadia failed.
If you are trying to argue that ownership was not even a part of the multitude reasons Stadia failed and is off the table, you should seriously need to consider evaluating your critical thinking skills.
It wasn't, it works for Nvidia, people just don't want to pay for their games twice and that broke Stadias neck...
Their point being that if true ownership was the priority for consumers then they would be exclusively using GoG, since it’s the only store that gives you your games to actually own.
and itch.io which is far better than GOG but even more niche.
First time hearing of them, after browsing a bit I’m not sure I’d agree they’re better than GOG, but they seem to focus on indie games which is super neat.
If they cared only about true ownership yea. But GoG doesn't have every game Steam has. If they had the same selection i could easily see more people switching. I and I'm sure many others use both.
It's a self-reinforcing cycle, unfortunately. GOG doesn't have the market share that Steam does, so publishers don't release games on it, which leads to people continuing to use Steam and maintaining its dominant market share.