Epic isn't making a marketplace where I want to spend my money by being better than Steam, they're just trying to make a place where I have to spend money if I want to play certain games. Good luck with that one.
Content platforms always compete on availability of content. Steam did the exact same thing early on with Half Life. Look at what's happening in the streaming video space. Look at console gaming.
Ultimately, people aren't making Steam accounts because of the Steam workshop or Steam forums or Steam chat or what have you—they're making Steam accounts because there's a game on Steam that they want to play.
If Epic's store had better features but the same games, existing Steam users would still continue to use Steam, because that's where their existing game libraries are. The only way Epic could compete on features alone is if it were possible to migrate Steam purchases to the Epic Store. Since Valve will never let that happen, Epic has to entice users with exclusive games.
And that could be great for everyone—if it caused games to be made that would otherwise never get developed. Consider how much great content the video streaming wars have produced. As annoying as it is to switch between subscriptions, I'd say TV viewers are winning right now.
The problem, of course, is that Epic isn't developing original content—they're paying for existing content to be removed from Steam. My great hope is that this will change in time. Original games take several years to develop, so if any are under way, we wouldn't have heard about them yet. In the meantime, we're getting PC ports of Journey and Detroit, so that's pretty neat!
This is just false. Steam has evolved beyond just a marketplace, and I go there because I enjoy the tools they provide. From VR, to family sharing, home streaming, and more.
Anyway, I wonder how many people are in that position, where they have a giant Steam "library" that's mostly bundle titles and stuff bought on special, that they feel some sense of attachment to, but in reality wouldn't really miss when using a different launcher.
Not necessarily migrate, but offer (for free) the same game on Epic if you already have it on Steam; GOG did this for a few games (not that it helped GOG).
And Valve is?
It depends on how you're defining "original content". I mean, yes they are paying for games to be Epic exclusive, however Epic released Fortnite, so they do have their own big releases
As a broad generalisation this is baldly wrong. I use a Steam account and buy things there because the platform has the things that you mention (on top of a multiplayer API that generally works pretty well). If it didn't have those things, I wouldn't use it anywhere close to how often I use it now. A very high percentage of the games on it are also available on other platforms (publisher-specific, GoG, the dev) and those are not materially worse than Steam if you only consider distribution.
A different streaming platform for Netflix, Hulu, Disney, Universal, HBO, Amazon
A different gaming platform for Steam, Epic, Origin, UPlay
The real loser is the consumer
If Disney doesn't make much content that I want to watch (and they don't), then I don't have to pay them a dime for anything. If HBO only makes one thing that I want to watch, then I can subscribe for a month and then pay them nothing after that. That's a significant improvement over the previous way of doing things.
Why would it be good for a single company to control distribution of all content?
I understand the vitriol from many gamers: the Epic Store is a worse experience as a consumer than Steam. But I think that a more-viable funding model for game development is pretty significant: there are plenty of games that just barely eke out enough to keep studios alive/independent, or that almost do but then result in the studio closing or being sold to a megacorp like EA. A 30% cut for what was effectively a hosting and payments processing service was ridiculous, monopolistic behavior, and needed to be shaken up. As such I support Epic's move into the store space: more money for devs means more, and more interesting, games getting made.
Realistically, exclusive deals were the only way Epic could've made that work. For most people, if they could buy a game on Steam, they would, rather than using yet another launcher, and that fact means that Steam would still have most of their monopoly intact. Multiple launchers (and fewer features) is annoying but IMO worth it to get Steam to give a bigger cut to devs (which they immediately started doing after the Epic Store launched, although the Epic Store is still often a better deal for devs).
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/why-valve-actually-ge...
> Multiple launchers (and fewer features) is annoying
You can't claim steam is just a glorified CDN and payment processor in one breath and then complain about the lack of features in other launchers/platforms in the next.
I agree that 30% was steep, but steam provides both devs and consumers a lot of features that everyone now takes for granted (like cloud saves, household licensing, workshop mod frameworks, friends and chat, and much more). The games that move to epic are either going to have to implement these features themselves, depend on epic to provide a framework for it (sentiment seems to be "don't hold your breath", or release without them.
In one of those articles, they talk about Gabe and Valve employees giving encouraging words (and opportunities that no other indie site got), which also includes this interview with Gabe right before The Orange Box released: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2007/11/21/rps-exclusive-ga...
Valve has had a lot of issues since then. Steam went through horrible growing pains. Steam support is awful. Valve hasn't released a game in years. But, they are where they are because they had passion, and a cavalier DIY sensibility.
Whatever Epic is doing, I want no part of. Every press release I've seen from them since opening their store has given me the willies. Gamers can get really passionate about this stuff, but for me it just boils down to my gut reaction. Epic and any company that signs exclusivity deals with them do not get my money. And I bought Rocket League on three different platforms.
They've recently (this year or the last) released Artifact, a card game, which apparently didn't do very well.
Gamers rage a lot, but they don't do much or stick to their guns often, so this strategy will be fine so long as Epic is working to address some issues. A few updates and patches, a few more games people simply must have, and nobody will remember why they raged.
I'm not thrilled with this, but I'm not going to stop playing Rocket League. I'm going to buy Borderlands 3 (and so are all my friends that grumbled about it being a time exclusive, and they'll buy it from Epic because we all want to play right out the gate together). I still remember people raging against Origin - most of them use it for the EA games they swore they'd never play again.
I'm a VR dev by trade and a gamer by (nearly exclusive) hobby. I'm well deep into Epic and always will be. And it makes me angry. They're intelligent guys and the Unreal engine is fantastic, but the anti-consumer decisions they've made over the last few years have been very frustrating.
The ability to search is a particular sore point. Unless you know the exact name of what you're looking for, you're going to be unsuccessful, and the community have been screaming about this for literal years.
All my friends and I (30+ crowd) are like "fuck that, I got other shit to play" for Borderlands 3 but we all grudgingly used Steam back when CS:Source came out. I wonder if it's an age thing. I know my backlog is years long as this point so waiting 6 months to play it isn't making me lose sleep.
The irony in this statement is kind of ridiculous. You can't play many games without owning a Steam account right now. How is that any different in principle?
Overall, I recognize the Epic Store has some large issues and it definitely deserves criticism, but I just don't see why this shift is such a big deal in the long run. It's a good thing that Valve is getting competition, whose customer support has been a complete joke since its inception and monopoly allowed them to take huge bites from studio profits for years.
I don't believe anyone should be tied to one company's products like we have with Steam and there should never be a monopoly over this kind of stuff; Valve's dominance of the PC gaming marketplace is plain scary. I'm fine with Valve having to prove that people should use their product over the newcomers.
Right now the most frustrating thing will definitely be the split among ecosystems (chat, etc) and feature parity for things like Steam Workshop. That will smooth out over time, but yeah for now that's definitely an annoyance. I think we'll see an intermediary app like Discord fill the social space, just like how XFire used to dominate in the 2000's.
Seems to be working ok for EA's Origin store, Battle.net and Mojang though.
Not hard to see similar limited appeal moves to amass popularity with a particular type of eyeball.
Splitting the install base effectively across another platform just spits in the eye of people who've bought RL and want to make it easy to see/join their friends. They've had years of problems getting a unified platform going, and its still not nearly as simple and straightforward as using steam friends.
Probably going to ask for a refund on Steam when this game is no longer for sale.
However, if you want to break your game after I purchased it and change the rules of how that license works and dont expect me to possibly change my mind about my decision, think again.
All the money I spent buying decryptors and getting wins/losses/placements and having an account where I could easily tell where all my friends are playing in one place also counts.
When its likely that EGS will get features that I wont (even though I funded the original building of all this) it grinds my gears - the vague announcement from a corporate aquihire is a klaxon shouting about the changes that are in the pipeline.
If Psy wants to say "hey, we'd be glad to move all your stuff over without a hassle" I actually wouldn't really be miffed, but that's not what they came to us with.
And if they push out a DVD player firmware so it only works on a brand of DVD player I don't own, I would consider it the same thing.
Breaking something I paid for after the fact means I'm not getting what we agreed upon, and I should get my money back, regardless of whether it was a physical good broken/taken or a digital one.
$20 for years of play time and server resource consumption. Thumbs down!
2,000 hours played? Thumbs down! (see Steam reviews for many examples of this)
Ridiculous.
I really wish the gaming community in general would cool it with the aggressive hyperbole. In no way is a developer being acquired equivalent to someone spitting in your eye.
Psyonix has done a fantastic job and created an amazing game and I think most people are happy for them and hope this works out, but it's hard to see the bright side of this as an avid Rocket League fan.
2. If you played the game for years you cannot get a refund from Stream
> In the meantime, it will continue to be available for purchase on Steam; thereafter it will continue to be supported on Steam for all existing purchasers.
So it sounds like nothing will suddenly stop working?
Epic gets a lot of flack for being a fairly simple store at the moment, but Steam's had ten years to get where it is. Competition was sorely needed and we're finally getting it.
The CEO of Epic is a big fan of open platforms and cross-platform gaming and a loud and outspoken opponent of walled gardens. If there's anyone who will move us out of this model as much as possible, it's probably him. But exclusives is the only way to fight the Stockholm Syndrome people seem to have with Steam.
Stockholm syndrome?
Epic competed for developers on a more competitive split, but have done little to entice users; their platform didn't have even the barest of (edit:) feature* parity with Steam at launch (or even today), and rather than, say, fund new titles for their platform, they've largely paid for existing or in production titles to not appear on their competitor.
They're competing based on attacking their competitor (and/or users of their competitor's platform) rather than by bolstering the merits of their own platform.
It's a shallow distinction but a fair one for consumers to make. "We have helped create this thing for our users" is different than "We paid to prevent their users from having a thing."
I've used Steam chat and voice comms all of about 3 times. Discord is better.
Profile pages and achievements? Couldn't care less.
Streaming? There's Twitch for that.
What I really care about from a platform are the games that are available for it. Valve waved the white flag on that a while ago when they abandoned first party game development.
I don't need forums or screen shot galleries or any of that junk from my store. I just want games.
If I want to talk about a game or interact with other people who play the same game, I'll go on reddit.
That is fundamentally opposed to exclusivity contracts with publishers including when games have already been listed and sold on other stores.
>But exclusives is the only way to fight the Stockholm Syndrome people seem to have with Steam.
It's also a way to insure that some people will never touch Epic.
87.5% of Steam's sales in Asia are from over 90 non-standard payment methods (outside of Visa, MasterCard, American Express, PayPal, PaySafe), and Steam Retail Cards cost Valve 10-15% of the sale. Epic either just don't support them, or charge the customer extra. I don't think it's fair to say Valve are "taxing game developers so hard".
https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/appmgmt/gdc2019/slides/gdc_2... (search "Steam Retail Cards") or https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/resources/gdc2019 (full presentation; 35:40)
Perhaps you're thinking of CD Projekt Red, who have actually been fighting exclusives and walled gardens for quite some time.
Epic has stated it will put it's games on Steam if Valve drops their cut down to 12%. Epic probably is a little more pragmatic than GOG on ensuring they operate profitably, with willingness to offer compensation for exclusive launches, allowing DRM (although not offering any of their own), etc. but if you've followed Tim Sweeney or read things he's said going back for years, it's obvious he's one of the good guys. He's a CEO of a large business and has to make moves to actually be successful and profitable, but he is strongly opinionated about what's "right" and pushes Epic in that direction where possible.
Bear in mind, even if Epic wasn't offering incentives for exclusives, it would still be silly for game developers to release on both: Sales on Steam would hurt their sales on Epic, and they profit vastly more from Epic sales.
Competition is two stores offering incentives to users to come buy the product from them as opposed to the competitor.
This is anti-competitive and anti-consumer. If Steam were doing similar things, no one would stand for it, and I find it really odd that Epic gets a pass from some people.
As the consumer, I want to be able to choose which store I buy from based on the merits of the store and the deals offered.
EDIT2: "Epic clarified to Variety that continued patches, DLC and all other content that hits the PC version of the game through the Epic Game Store will also appear on Steam for those who already own the game."
This will kill off the Steam Workshop and community pages I'm sure, from which Rocket League benefited heartily.
Just, bad. Bad.
> Editor’s Note: We wanted to clarify something for you after today’s news: Rocket League is and remains available on Steam. Anyone who owns Rocket League through Steam can still play it and can look forward to continued support. Thanks!
Haha
Meanwhile I can’t even update my NVIDIA driver without loging into whatever their GeForce platform thing is now called.
Can’t remember your password? Stuck on old driver
https://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us
and download the driver any time you want, just like it always was. GeForce Experience is mostly for the convenience of receiving automatic notifications and download when a new driver version is released.
That said, if someone made an account using your email, can't you trivially "recover" that account and change the password?
Rocket league is a finished and established product. They also don't seem to have any big plans in the near future. They are totally fine with selling season pass and crats/keys. They don't seem to care about new content in form of gameplay changes, or fixing month old bugs for that matter.
I'd argue that it's the perfect time to 'sell out'. They already won, it is now a good point in time to move on and do something else.
Being acquired by Epic could reduce headaches in these areas:
- Logistics behind eSports leagues.
- Managing server scale, stability and performance.
- Managing platform cross-play.
- Managing publishing across multiple platforms.
I think that the logistical overhead of keeping the lights on is at the expense of Psyonix's ability to provide meaningful content updates and keep the core gameplay fresh.
Unless the cost of their server infrastructure got wildly out of control, why would a company that is raking in cash sell out?
Epic needs users.
Epic bought publisher of a highly popular game their users.
Psyonix sold out, because at everything is has its price.
Expect Epic to forcibly migrate Rocket League Steam users. They will turn RL Steam into an Epic launcher and all current RL Steam users are suddenly Epic users.
For Psyonix and Epic there is no real downside. If you care about this decision, you're not in their demographic, and probably didn't help them generate their F-You Money.
I've bought their game in three different platforms.
Exclusivity arrangements certainly seem like potential trust issues, but Steam is a de facto monopoly, as is Amazon, and NetFlix is the clear leader in it's domain.
For example, NetFlix France is a joke, you couldn't watch any netflix shows because they're not available, they sublicensed to canal (the main paid TV service) with exclusively and are left unable to serve their own TV shows.
The Epic Store (and Steam) are global. That's more than 200 jurisdictions with different rules on anti competitive behavior. They are preventing competition globally and systematically, this has to be breaking some rules somewhere.
That said, the DoJ has in more recent times taken the opinion that anything that lowers prices for consumers is implicitly good and anything that raises prices is implicitly bad and used this as the basis for leveraging antitrust complaints against companies that were not in fact the monopoly. In particular I'm thinking about how the monopoly player in ebooks (Amazon) successfully convinced the DoJ to sue the brand new entrant (Apple) because what Apple was doing was causing problems for Amazon's strategy of artificially pricing books lower than they should be in a fair market (even though what Amazon was doing is literally a monopolistic tactic intended to cement a monopoly and prevent anyone from competing, which leads to raising prices down the road once you're sure the competition is gone, i.e. Amazon successfully convinced the DoJ to use antitrust laws to help Amazon cement their monopoly). But since Epic isn't raising prices for games, that doesn't really apply here.
Thousands of developers rely on Steam, Epic, GOG, etc. for multiplayer networking/matchmaking features (all digital stores offer this type of service, AFAIK, but it's not the same service). In Steam's case this isn't limited to services provided in-game, but also inviting people or joining people directly through the Steam interface, which is invaluable.
Achievements are not unimportant. Millions of players play for the achievement; they are an essential part of their entertainment. In addition, they provide important metrics for developers, players and researchers.
The Steam Workshop is the best system out there for players to publish and obtain custom content and mods for games integrated with Steam. It's an essential part of several games; they literally couldn't exist in their current form without it.
The Steam Inventory can be used for holding a collection of meta-items provided by games to other games or for trading with other players who own the same game. It's not just used for trading cards. It would for example allow a Pokemon game to exist on Steam with tradeable Pokemon. It's used by SteamVR for allowing games to provide assets for SteamVR homes (not very important, but still quite interesting).
Steam's categorization, organization and search features are not excessive but insufficient. I want more of those, not fewer.
Family sharing is important for me to share some of my games with a small number of people from my family or close friends. GOG also allows me to share my games in this manner, since they are DRM-free.
Steam community pages/forums are often nowadays the best place to interact with developers and find important information regarding issues, upcoming patches, difficult bits of gameplay, and generally other people talking about that problem you just had.
I'm not saying Epic can't do all of this, and do it well. But saying that "all you need in a game store is to buy games" is incredibly naive. Any digital retailer that requires all of these services to be nonstandard and dispersed is doomed to lose.
To be fair I have basically zero trust of digital storefronts - for example, Steam will no longer run on my still-very-recent MacBook (OS X 10.10), so I can't play any of the hundreds of games I "own" on there anymore.
If Epic can use its reach and resources to promote larger tournaments and higher stakes for Rocket League as an esport, I think that'd be a win for the game.
If they overrun it with more loot crate/f2p stuff and make the game all about the meta, and just use it as an exclusive for their own platform, that will suck.
Congrats to the Psyonix team though. They seem like genuinely great, passionate devs.
Steam needs to halve its 30% commission to 15% for all games, and increase the Steam Direct fee to $2,000 to increase average quality. Developers aren't just leaving because of the high commission, they are leaving because of the deluge of junk launching on the store daily.
People had the same reaction to Uplay (No exclusive games but you still need to have an account) and Origin (Only way to play EA Games) and while the services still don't compare to Steam they were absolutely hated when they came out and now people mostly tolerate them to get access to the big AAA games (Apex Legends came and went but few people complained about Origin Exclusivity).
I'm pretty ambivalent when it comes to Steam, the client has become quite bloated with tons of unused / deprecated features and Steam Marketplace feels super scammy full of bots and phishing attempts, and their Chat leaves a lot to be desired but I still use it daily.
Only other services I can think of that has exclusive games and people have a positive / non negative reaction to is the Blizzard one but that has like 8 games in total.
I have read that Epic has no plans to remove the game from Steam so we shall see about that, but I for one am fine with more competition if it means that:
A) Exclusivity deals result in more stability for the devs in terms of receiving large cash inflow
B) Forces both parties to improve their services
