- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
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Valve and I have trust. 20 years of it. They are there, have fair prices, let me play where and when I want, no gotchas, I trust them. Sure tomorrow they could break that trust, but so far they haven’t.
Then Amazon, who has continuously ruined my trust. Adding ads to an ad free prime tier, lying about delivery times, getting shittier and cheaper products on their store, and oh yeah, just being an evil company. And they wonder why I never even looked at their store.
And Valve is pushing for Linux support, it might not be a major point for most but for me it is.
It’s also a plus for me too.
In my two days with linux ive come to really like it, im annoyed at myself for staying with windows for so long and not even trying it. (Cachyos) I prefer everything about gnome and plasma to windows right now. I was just dealing with their garbage ui and random updates for no reason. Its nice having some control.
For me it’s the reason I started playing games again. Have been using Linux forever, didn’t wanted a dual boot etc. So when games started to work on Linux I stared to buy and play more and more.
Although recently it has mostly been openRTC without steam.
Kinda wish I fully commited, but I can run my windows programs/games off my windows partition fairly easily, so I don’t need to open it to access that data (thought this would be impossible for some reason). I was suprised that embergen worked and seemed to run as well as it does on my windows drive.
Have they tried being trustworthy, adding value, and not fucking over customers?
But we tried everything BUT that.
Did they try removing DRM and selling you a product instead of an option on a subscription service?
Amazon specifically is known for deleting and/or disabling libraries without justification and without recourse for the victim. It’s always a possibility with Steam as well, but I’m not aware of it happening (though I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if it has)
RIP Comixology. I can access lower-quality versions of stuff I bought on kindle but the high quality stuff I paid for is gone.
Why would they? it hasn’t helped gog and valve don’t do that either.
It hasn’t helped GOG? News to me.
It really hasn’t. They had a period where AAA pulbihsers were shipping games there day and date (Sega and Sony) and that’s no longer the case. And if you default to GOG, which I do, it’s easy to notice that fewer indies are defaulting to multilaunching on it.
To be clear, I’m not saying that GOG should start allowing DRM, I’m saying that they are quietly struggling and people won’t prioritize getting their games on GOG over Steam to avoid DRM. Which is a shame.
“It really hasn’t. Also, these are some reasons why it has.” It is literally their whole spiel and what keeps them on the radar, even if the popularity of the platform isn’t what it used to. Which makes sense, since they don’t actively advertise or force their platform but they’ve also been subject to negative press such as their handling of the Devotion devs and "many gamers"in their efforts to prioritize the success of Cyberpunk 2077 over any potential fallout in the region.
You run on an ideological platform, you lose people on ideological grounds, like incorporating titles and forms of DRM into the storefront. Indies can default to whatever storefront they want, that’s should be the norm. Mohjang did it to great success.
Being effectively forced to do it on Steam, that’s basically a statement about their effective monopoly. Your accumulated Steam library is basically an ever increasing sunk cost fallacy, although to the credit of Valve they haven’t acted like massive dickheads (yet). But that will change with time because the people who lead companies change over time whether they would have wanted it or not.
There is zero evidence that this is the case. I guarantee the vast majority of GOG users have never heard of Devotion.
GOG also do advertise. They’ve been reaching out to hardcore users for feedback, they have rolled out campaigns to promote their Capcom old game licensing and their new game request system and they’ve implemented an ad tab in their launcher (that they keep sending people polls about for some reason).
Much more likely what is happening is they are being choked out by Steam and DRM. With large publishers increasingly wanting data streams from their games, AAA releases on GOG are less justifiable. Sony pulled out when they started adding a PSN login to their games. It’s harder to tell Sega’s reasons, but they may have just been a desire to keep their increasingly popular Ryu Ga Gotoku stuff DRMd for longer. Indies, meanwhile, are cash strapped and MUST default to Steam, with support for any other platform being an increasingly unjustifiable spend. With Steam banning competing on prices (beyond free giveaways and subscriptions, it seems), there is just no competing.
So no, the DRM-free hook alone isn’t working for GOG. Working here would mean growing or at least preserving their stake against Steam’s all-consuming rage, and that’s clearly not happening.
Which is why I’d love for people to start acknowledging the issues with Steam and their position and start defaulting to GOG where they can.
To be fair, “gamers” did acknowledge the drm related issues… and insist that Steam is also drm-free and it is only the games that use drm (including steam-drm…) that aren’t.
Which… look, I like gog a lot and do make it a point to buy games there when feasible. But it is hard to get TOO upset with people changing the definition of DRM when cdp already did that for gog (it is basically just GOO with less stardock shitheads).
Which gets back to the bigger issue of people needing to understand what they are and aren’t “giving up” for a given DRM model. But that would involve people thinking critically and… we don’t do that anymore.
I keep reminding people that we “gamers” used to be super mad at Steam. There were boycotts. Every warez group on the planet dropped what they were doing to jailbreak Half Life 2 out of sheer spite.
I don’t worship GOG any more than I do Steam, but I do want a solid competitor keeping Valve in check and I would love it if that competitor was also DRM-free because I like owning stuff.
The “most Steam games are DRM-free” line is baffling, though. Especially since Valve itself seems to disagree. I mean, they’ll tell you to add more DRM on top and use their centralized online services to make backups and pirated copies worse because it’s weak DRM… but it’s DRM both stand-alone and as part of the GaaS model they’re pushing. They even added an entire warning box to remind you that they aren’t selling you anything and they can take all your stuff away whenever and people somehow presented that as a welcome sign of honestly, which was some of the most surreal PR I have seen in my life.
LMFAO, I love when someone says they tried everything when it’s so blatantly obvious they didn’t really try anything.
Both Epic and Amazon seemed to believe that if you gave out enough free games then Steam would just… Disappear? Really really dumb.
Neither company has invested any time into making their launcher any good. They haven’t invested any time into making their ecosystem feature rich like Steam. They have just given away a bunch of games and had sales and hoped that magic would take care of the rest.
Valve doesn’t even have to try to beat the competition when the competition doesn’t put any effort in.
GoG Galaxy is the only decent alternative launcher I’ve used and it’s being maintained (seemingly) by one guy who only works one day a year. It’s not as good as Steam by a long shot, but far far better than any of the launchers that come from companies WAY WAY bigger and wealthier. Even the itch.io launcher is better!!!
Blizzard, Amazon, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, and Rockstar (and more) all have their own launchers and not a single one is decent or necessary. Why make such an inferior product when Steam already exists?
Maybe they should have just made a really great service that people would love?
I mean, he agrees with you:
We needed to build something dramatically better, but we failed to do so. And we needed to validate our assumptions about our customers before starting to build. But we never really did that either.
I can’t recommend enough actually reading the stuff people link in social media.
I like prime gaming, sure I haven’t actually bought anything but Amazon has given me a decent gog library and an ok Amazon games one.
Fighting Steam as it stands now is like trying to fight an uphill battle on an 80° incline with ice covering the whole hill. It’s possible, but I doubt we’ll see anyone able to dethrone Steam so long as Valve keeps their principles and morals about not absolutely enshittifying everything to death on their end.
No they haven’t because not once did I ever consider buying a game from their service. Mainly because I don’t know about it.
Maybe try not being Amazon first?
I’ve never even heard of prime gaming, if they wanted to disrupt steam they should have tried harder.
Regardless, good, fuck Amazon I’m glad this failed.
I know we all want to clown on this because amazon sucks and we all stan Steam as our corporate overlords.
But there are actually a lot of REALLY good insights in the original linkedin post. Particularly the reality that anything that competes with Steam needs to be
It was a store, a social network, a library, and a trophy case all in one. And it worked well.
Epic is a shitshow and barely competent on the store front. But they took a very smart approach of starting from basics and adding what people want… and people want their video game store to be facebook.
Maybe if amazon had more tightly coupled that to twitch it could have worked but it is clear that coupling any services is a shitshow for them (remember when we could do actual watch parties if people bought stuff on amazon video?).
I forgot they even existed.
