Sheepy

joined 2 weeks ago
[–] [email protected] 57 points 18 hours ago (4 children)

This is so painfully close to being Loss. There's got to be a way to juggle those squares around just right.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 23 hours ago (10 children)

Oh come on, comparing Steam to telecoms is a bit of a leap. Nobody needs access to video games on a day-to-day basis. Video games are a luxury item at the end of the day.

Their breaking up also assumes that hosting video games for downloads is a thing only Steam can do. Steam hosting the game files and Steam as a service for the customer have little to no relation to each other. Steam, or anyone else for that matter, could just as easily use AWS. Breaking up Steam into many, smaller Steams might lead to lower prices, or devs will choose one, that one will become the dominant one, and we're back to square one.

The best way to drive prices down is competition. It's economics 101. Do not blame Steam for being successful, blame their competition (Epic in this case) for being inept. Epic was the VC baby everybody was banking on going toe-to-toe with Steam, but they couldn't even get basic shit like a cart or a wishlist working for far too long.

Steam's 30% cut is a different problem altogether. Yeah, it's probably excessive, and would ideally be tiered by sales. However, all the games (that I have seen) that released on Epic first, with their paid exclusivity, eventually came out on Steam. So what does that tell us about how impactful that 30% cut is. Steam's pre-existing userbase is a factor. Userbase they have, and maintain, due to their wide array of features. And, all those features Steam provides aren't free to maintain. They host the game on their own servers, they host all the user generated content on their servers, Steamworks matchmaking is ran by Steam. Game devs aren't just getting their game sold through Steam, Steam does much much more than that.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 day ago (19 children)

Nah mate, Steam is just the best game platform on PC. A game has access to so many features like cloud saves, community, workshop, matchmaking when it comes out on Steam, while the users have access to user reviews, curators, guides, sales, bundles etc etc. Epic doesn't have most of those features. And yes, a game dev can go out of their way to create those features for their game, on Steam they don't have to. Epic had all the time in the world to implement even half of them, but they still haven't. GOG is an alternative because it offers something Steam won't, and it's been going great for them. Epic is just a bootleg version of Steam. Their only claim to fame is their free game giveaways, but even then you're stuck playing the game without the features Steam users have.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

I keep it pretty light with around 500 mods.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 week ago (4 children)

I'm still waiting for all the 2A people to resist that tyranny. Any day now, take your time.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Only 70? You gotta pump those numbers up, those are rookie numbers.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

He did sign an executive order making everyone in the US a woman, so this makes sense.