Ex Valve Developer Lashes out about Steam "Steam Killing PC Gaming"
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Rx4speed
bjtag
I've been with valve and steam since day one and I'm a little pissed they haven't released half Life 3.....lol
rl66
ezodagrom
fantaskarsef
https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/global-games-market-reaches-137-9-billion-in-2018-mobile-games-take-half/
So... it says a few interesting things.
First, PC gaming is strong (equal to consoles), yet it is ridden by console's influence (release times, technical possibilities PC vs console). But mobile (Tencent...) is the biggest. So if it's money to be made, devs should actually abondon PC gaming, they did when they embraced consoles as the main selling platform, and fortnite on mobile or Diablo Immortal is just the sign that shows that my impression might not be too far off. And soon we shall see that both consoles and PC will be abondoned because games will have to run on the latest iPhone or Samsung's Galaxy (they have the prices of a gaming PCs anyway). So not sure if our little topic here will matter in the future, at all.
And if somebody wants to make use of their tin foil, be my guest to wonder which publisher will try to keep his store more PC oriented, Steam or Epic (Fortnite mobile, Tencent's money in there)?
Second, that soon a third of the money spent on gaming will come from China. So it's the single most important market... under Tencent's influence. I wonder what synergies they saw when entering Epic's board of investors... since NetEase for instance does come up second place in China, and they seem to have already partnered with ActiBlizz for the Chinese market. Epic might have been smart seeking Tencent's money for the Chinese market, but I'm not sure that this will end up in Sweeney becoming as filthy richt as Newell, no matter how much he'd like that. Although I personally don't feel sympathy towards either.
Generally, thanks guys for responding to my post. As well as to anybody else, feel free to prove me wrong, or better even, help me develop a different opinion or point of view on this topic.
But the way I see it now, Epic is doing nothing to save PC gaming, they're aming to make a better business for themselves. They are not a charity, and what they do to hurt Steam, they do not to give money back to the customers, but only to keep their own business going. That money pushed into those exclusive deals are probably Chinese money to more than 40% anyway, and it's merely a tool to fight a competitor... they don't bring a revolution, they don't bring evolution to PC gaming, they just want to have a bigger cut of the cake for themselves. And that's how I see it.
And sadly, only time will tell if anybody here is right or wrong, me first and foremost, but everybody else as well. NOTHING does point out that Steam will cut it's pricing (although they have done for smaller games which is a good move), that Steam will go bancrupt, that games will remain at their current pricing, that after sales support for games will improve with EGS, or anything else we're talking about here. The only thing certain is that Epic has created a marketing capital with massive spendings into games and their exclusive deals. Besides that... nothing has changed to a year ago. At least not how I see it.
Thanks for elaborating, greatly appreciated.
Yes, such happenings to abondon the persuit of a positive public opinion could be seen as a game changer. But is it a good one? An industry making products which are no longer bound to appeal to it's customers but only to the distribution platform? That sounds quite silly to me to be honest, although it's become the norm. Doesn't mean one's got to like it, or got to support it.
If the game changer is that those 12% of the cut stay with the dev, I'm actually all positive on the condition that the money is used for game development. And that's what I honestly doubt, every dev that does not use Epic as a publisher but has another publisher in between (isn't this the case with Metro?) will NOT get those 12%. Worst case, they won't see ANY quid of those 12%... and then it's just an extra bonus for the publisher, and those aren't angels either. They force their crap onto devs at every chance they get, and now we want to feed them with more money? I honestly doubt that this is a good idea. And it only catches on to the small publisher / dev situations, since bigger publishers already have their distribution platform... ike with Ubsioft, their going for Epic is pretty boring actually, since the biggest cut ends up with Ubisoft in any way, and I honestly doubt more money lands with the devs, be it if the Division 2 is released on Steam, or not.
As with console exclusives, m$ is doing the same with Xbox titles like Gears of War, Quantum Break etc. While this is all nice and such, unless we see this happening with more console exclusives in the future (like, next gen console's launch) it's merely a cash grab... I'm not impressed by Playstation titles of PS3 now being available in the Epic store, way to late to be significant for PC gaming, I have to say. On launch, that I agree with, is a good thing, but years afterwards no one cares if Heavy Rain is on PC now, or flower, at least not in my opinion. People don't buy a PC to play last gen's console titles... BUT I have to say, if this trend continues, I'm all with you @cryohellinc
So... where does Epic have lower prices? You mean for devs / publishers, yes... for a consumer, we couldn't care less (at least on first thought) where that cut goes or how big it is... our games will always cost 60 quid... at least until deals like Metro mean that EVERYBODY gets a price cut. Honestly, doing it for US only is blatantly telling everybody else they're irrelevant (another FU move in the Metro story by Metro's publisher / Epic), and second, how many of the sales can this truely hit? 25% of sales? 30% of sales of Metro in general (see the link below to note, NA gaming market is about ~20%)? That's also not a real cut... it's a US bonus to calm down people, nothing more than a PR stunt. The rest of the world just got a fat finger, figuratively speaking.
I hope to see Steam lower their cut, I agree with you fully on that, only that this won't be happening. Epic can't keep this up forever, Steam can, they already have that money... Epic / Tencent probably too, but look at this, Tencent launched it's own platform these days. Not sure Epic will be able to keep up with Valve's practice as Valve can keep this up for years and years, while Epic has already said, they won't do such deals forever (I personally think, 12-24 months after they launched EGS, and then it's done, prices the same everywhere, no matter what cut is going to be paid). I just wholeheartedly doubt that anybody is in the position to force Valve / Steam to do anything short to mid term. And long term, Epic will just be like any other store, they take their cut for releases and that's the end of their involvement. Maybe I'm wrong, we will see, but I honestly doubt Epic's "savior" footprint in the gaming industry to form anytime soon.
Absolutely true. AAA titles do cost a lot more than they used to, they're closer to movie budgets these days, with 200.000.000,- E/€ easily. And like I said above, if 12% more of sales revenue ends up with the developer, I'm actually for it.
Only that I doubt that this will be the case. Publishers will eat up that cut, and if not, they give devs the leftovers...
As for pricing... why should prices not rise? I don't see any distribution platform (in that I see EGS) care what number's on there, if the game doesn't cost 60 quid but 65 Steam's cut grows, but Epic's does as well... I'm not sure if I can follow how Epic is keeping the prices low since we already saw, IF there is a cut in sales prices, it does first not apply to everybody (for that alone one should boycot Metro's release, but that's my opinion), and if so, you could have had the same price for the game if buying at a keyseller... not sure this is going to change because Metro's publisher gets 12% more of the revenue did NOT end up in the customer's poket. And I doubt it ended up in Metro's dev's pockets, and if so, I can not see it being more than 2 or 3%, so most of it all probably the publisher still takes, and that doesn't help PC gaming at all.
It might have helped keep (general) dev costs lower after release, that's true. But after release sales of DLCs and updates etc. are only there because they cut out game content from the main game, for either monetary reasons (and that I don't support either way), or for timely reasons (because they have to release at a certain time).
If it's for money, they will soon learn that they can release at EGS with a base game for 60€, 3 DLCs for € each, AND take the bigger cut. Nothing right now says that this won't happen. On the contrary, you will see this will be happening very soon.
If it's for timely reasons, why do they have such preasure? Normally that comes from a game's release to be forced for a certain time and date... and if it's not released by that time, it's a big issue. Does a bigger cut on sales help there? Not sure, since those are costs spent before the game's release. Does it help to pay crunch times? Not sure either since no matter how much you pay, I don't see people suddenly working 112 hours a week for any meaningful time or with the required quality... It would make more sense to postpone a launch if a good product's what one's after (me, as a customer, would rather wait longer for a game than buy a bugridden mess that I have to wait to enjoy anyway).
As for sales numbers, I found this thing here:
fantaskarsef
Kaarme
fantaskarsef
nhlkoho
Privacy concerns and questionable business practices aside, what negatives does having yet another launcher really have? It's annoying? All these launchers have auto sign in capabilities so it's not like you have to type a password every time. I just don't see all the hate. I guess I'm just too old to care about this nonsense. I just like to play games and don't really care what platform it's on.
Kool64
I can't even remember the last time I bought an AAA game let alone cared where I purchased it from. The closest thing to AAA I bought most recently was Elex which I would no count as a AAA game but more of a AA. I've bought from GoG and Origin recently but the games I bought there were many years old. BL3 would have been the only AAA game I would have bought right away but I'm not a huge fan of them jumping ship being as closely related to Valve as they are.
ezodagrom
EspHack
as ars points out, it isnt as simple as 30% vs 10% hence X is greedier than Y; https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/why-valve-actually-gets-less-than-30-percent-of-steam-game-sales/
competition is great, but exclusivity should be outlawed, when we go down that route it actually hurts the consumer; you no longer have a free choice, your only choice becomes ALL OF IT because its essentially a bunch of separate monopolies, so hows that different than a single monopoly that asks for 5x the price, at least with the latter you get a single thing to deal with
only way forward is to ban "exclusives" , so if you want to sell whatever stuff, you must sell to everyone interested, then we can have 10+ stores and be free to take one over the other based on the store experience itself, as it should be
Solfaur
I don't know how many realized this, but this whole EPIC vs Steam/gamers exclusivity thing sparked flame wars of a magnitude, that I haven't seen since the good old days with nvidia vs ati or intel vs amd etc. If nothing else, they did achieve this much, to polarize PC gamers.
I really don't get all the Steam hate from gamers though (I can understand developers), in all my years I haven't had a single issue with the platform. Hell, it was Steam that converted me to "legit" gaming. I don't hate EPIC, and I guarantee that there would not be any drama, if their launcher would be even half what Steam is. I never had a problem buying games from Origin/Uplay, because while not Steam quality level, they have decent working features.
Like others said, it's not even a lower fees thing, it's the literal BRIBING (sometimes the devs don't even get anything, only the publishers) and FORCING adoption on an unfinished platform. I read countless threads with EPIC issues that are so basic, and then the lack of, again, some very, very basic features, that's it's no surprise that people got angry.
As for this guy, I wish him good luck getting a job at EPIC. At this point it's a PR war, so like in politics, I don't pay too much attention to firecrackers.
Moofachuka
They should just make it available on Steam for higher price but making the same profit margin as ES. This will show consumers how much more money Valve is making off of the developers vs ES, while at the same time gives gamers a choice to which "platform"...
Toadstool
All the recent games I've gotten have been from GoG. Yeah, they don't have a ton of recent titles but I greatly appreciate the lack of DRM.
Valve/Steam has felt stagnant for a while now. I don't use any of the 'community' type features on steam (other than the mod workshop which was a great idea), and even something simple like reviews has turned into a shitshow where tons of negative reviews are not even about the game itself but bellyaching about the Dev, sometimes even about something the Dev/Publisher is doing with a completely different title. It's also a bit concerning that Valve could say 'frack it' and shut down steam and most of my game library would be flushed with seemingly no recourse (not that I expect that to ever happen).
I don't know man, I'm no fan of EPic right now but Steam doesn't seem to be doing anything all that great for me other than being an established and stable platform. Sure, it's great that we don't need to have a disk in anymore, but I'm not a fan of being attached to 5+ launchers when all I really need it for is to update and launch the damn game.
EspHack
warezme
The Laughing Ma
nhlkoho
fantaskarsef
Two points I've read in other guru's posts here that I kind of / partially disagree with:
@The Laughing Ma : I agree with you that the steam store is horribly filled with utter rubbish games that wouldn't have made it into a box ever. But I don't see this as Epic's advantage, if anything, it's Steam's disadvantage... and to be fair, it depends on what people themselves see as rubbish. One's junk is another man's gem, and in the EGS I see quite some games I simply could not be interested in, due to various reasons. And in the beginning, there was no steam greenlight, there was no early access on Steam... let's check on EGS again in a few years, shall we? When they have gone a third of the way we as PC gamers have suffered / travelled with Steam...
Also, not sure how people use steam, but I only search for games I want... I already know what's released... I don't need to check my queue, so I don't see 95% of the crap that's on steam... I can't be offended by what I don't see, so I'm not sure why I'd object. But I can see it being annoying if you check your discovery queue daily and all... but honestly, I don't suffer such things as being shown too much of the crop there. At least you have settings to dodge games you don't fancy.
@EspHack and @nhlkoho : Exclusives are a thing, that's true. Nobody was offended by UT requiring the Epic launcher to start, I too did not object. Because we're used to it. Remember, like other's said, that Valve forced Steam onto us with HL2? Or Origin and Battlefield? Or Blizzard with Battlenet? They are effectively exclusive titles. And I was pissed about Steam back then as well. Or with Origin, since it still can't live up to the prime, which is Steam.
BUT they are on their own publisher's platform... they were never announced anywhere else, no launch on other platforms, never ever a chance to get around those publisher's launchers. So they were not bribed to switch, baited away from the competition (as a distribution platform), or simply got their money thrown at... they were taking the hit of possibly missing sales to strengthen their own publisher's launcher / game store, and saving on the money that was supposed to be Valve's cut and keep that money in their own houses. But Epic, just like Steam, only profits of other publisher's / dev's work... so they're actually just as bad as Steam in that matter, and now put timed exclusives on top of that.
Like I said before, too, why didn't those publishers wanting a bigger cut switch to GOG? Which offers a bigger margin for the publishers / devs for years now? Because Epic is throwing money at them. Saving on the cut is... well, I don't believe that's the main reason in this whole thing. It's hard cash that's coming in, not the cut they make or save months or years down the road. And that's where I agree with you, @nhlkoho , it's all about who has the most money in their pockets. And Epic's got money from UE and / or Tencent (they certainly aren't going to make millions off of UT), whereas Steam's source engine is pretty much dead. (Except that Valve is probably working on porting it fully to Vulkan, so they can use it for mobile gaming in the future.)