I have some personal qualms about supporting “the biggest fish” in the pond, since that tends to lead to the Apples, the Googles, and the Microsofts.
However, Steam hasn’t particularly abused its market power, and has even used it to create a very successful Linux handheld that has both helped propel Linux desktop adoption and added upstream improvements to Linux in general.
I’ll revise my opinion when Valve changes to a more overtly predatory model of capitalism, but for now, I’ll enjoy only needing to keep a partial eye open.
I’ll revise my opinion when Valve changes to a more overtly predatory model of capitalism
I believe as long they’re not publicly traded )and Gabe is in charge), that’s not a concern.
Being public (or owned by a publicly traded company) tend to bring out these nasty traits. It’s more about finding ways to bring value to shareholders than the customers.
I’m terrified of Gabe retiring or passing away. He’s been amazing for the company and I don’t trust anyone else to not want to use Valve for their own greedy purposes. The next president of Valve will likely ruin all the good things about it, thanks to late-stage capitalism.
I firmly believe in voting with your wallet; I normally don’t invest much long-term interest into businesses because you never know how they’ll change over time, but I’ve been so happy with Valve that I’ve gladly given them thousands of dollars over the decades for Steam games. My library is sitting at just over 3,500 games right now. I don’t know what I’m gonna do when Valve crumbles one day. I really hope they give me an option to download and play offline all the games I’ve bought, because that’s a massive library to lose.
I’ve never given a penny to Epic Games, and unless they get on-par with Steam’s functionality, I won’t ever buy or play any of their games. The one thing that might make Epic Games competitive (and could convince me to use their platform) is letting Steam users copy their libraries over, so we’re not just starting over from scratch with a new service.
That’s what got me on Steam in the first place. Back around 2010 or so, I discovered that if you had a physical PC game that was also in Steam’s store, you could type in the serial number on the game box and it would register and add it to your Steam library. That’s how I got my collection of early Call of Duty titles on Steam, as well as Half-Life and some others. I moved my physical game library over to Steam and I’ve been a Steam loyalist ever since.
Back around 2010 or so, I discovered that if you had a physical PC game that was also in Steam’s store, you could type in the serial number on the game box and it would register and add it to your Steam library.
There were a few older games I owned that had trouble with running well on newer hardware because of the messy manual updates. Did the seriel bumber i to steam and it installed and updated to a smooth running version on steam at no cost.
Yes, this tied the hard copy to the steam account so there was a loss of reselling unless they changed that at some point. But I never bothered with selling used games and these were old enough that nobody wanted them anyway so I got some free use out of something I was almost ready to throw out.
Back around 2010 or so, I discovered that if you had a physical PC game that was also in Steam’s store, you could type in the serial number on the game box and it would register and add it to your Steam library.
WAIT WHAT.
Does this happen even if the game wasn’t on Steam at time of purchase so long as it has a Steam version now? Because that would be amazing.
Anyone in charge of a non-publicly traded company will want to do what’s best for the company in the long term instead of milking as much from it as fast as they can, so I don’t think that replacing Gabe by someone else will be the end of Valve like so many people claim.
The problem is that you can never be certain about someone’s ability to stand their morals atop money until it is truly offered to them. Supposedly Gaben has turned down Billion dollar offers for steam. It is certainly not every person who will do so and it is hard to know how a person will react until that is truly offered to them. I don’t know that I’d turn it down (though I also don’t know how much Gaben makes).
I’ll revise my opinion when Valve changes to a more overtly predatory model of capitalism, but for now, I’ll enjoy only needing to keep a partial eye open.
this is the correct approach towards how a society should support big buisnesses. the companies that don’t fuck us over will continue to get my public support and money
GoG exists and I always check there before going to Steam. I just won’t deal Epic.
GOG is great, but they need to make a Linux launcher, already. Or if they can’t, they should make it so the community can.
Yes. It’s not like you can’t even buy linux games on it. It was some jumping through hoops, but if you buy Factorio on GoG, you can get the linux version.
The one thing I like about them is they recognized why people really wanted to stick with steam: they have a large established library and don’t want to bounce back and forth.
They took that and said “ok we’ll give you free games every week until you have a large library here and won’t want to leave!”
Jokes on them, I now have a large library of completely free games on epic and still use steam for the games I want to buy because I refuse to support their exclusivity bullshit.
I get the games on epic but I haven’t even bothered playing them because I game exclusively on linux and just have not bothered with lutris / heroic etc. Proton with steam is just effortless and after years of tinkering with wine back in the day I want the simplicity
You can send a snail mail to opt out, which is scummy at best, but technically you can opt out.
This is what’s known as a dark pattern and is the exact thing the US government is suing Adobe over.
Making service cancellation or opt-out deliberately difficult is exploitative and something that should be illegal. Any company that does it doesn’t deserve a cent from you.
You don’t need a subscription like Prime to get the free games? I was under the impression you do.
There are even more free games from prime for the epic store, but the epic store has it’s own free games too that don’t require any subscription to anything.
Can you also launch the games through steam to get features like the overlay and stuff
I believe you can, I haven’t tried though. The games install like any other and have an .exe you can point to through steam so it would probably just be a matter of having the epic launcher open as well when you go to play.
Let’s see…
The launcher itself ran poorly compared to Steam’s. I’ve had instances of it freezing performance down just downloading 1 game through Epic’s launcher.
You’ve locked down games behind multi-year exclusives, pissing off many people along the way that we’re now just seeing their Steam releases.
You’ve spent years giving free games away, promising not to do anymore, going back to doing it again.
The launcher and storefront are incredibly barebones compared to Steam’s. In fact, any launcher not Steam, has incredibly minimal to go with other than just running games through them.
WTF. I would fucking love barebones launcher. I was holding off using epic launcher because it was so laggy and slow when it first came out. I was using legendary before, but stopped using Epic altogether. Might just give it a try again.
I’m starting to feel steam is getting bloated and plain annoying. I just want a launcher to launch a game and pair with my friends after a long day at work. I don’t want a crappy browser following me around in the background. I already have a browser if I need it. We use a different app for voice so could do away with all the other bs as well.
The Epic Games Launcher is so far behind on features compared to Steam it’s not even funny. Epic chose not to try and compete with Steam on that front and to try and force users onto the platform with exclusivity deals and sweeten the deal with free games.
The one user-centric killer feature Epic has in their stack IMHO is the built-in multiplayer crossplay. Except it’s not even exclusive to their store ironically (you do need an Epic account for it though).
Epic chose not to try and compete with Steam on that front
Forget competing, they lack even the basics.
What do you consider basic that it’s still missing? To be honest I’ve felt content with it as a game launcher for a while now, but I admittedly don’t use it that often either.
For me it’s the inability to set my status to “invisible”.
It’s not that I don’t want to game with people, but sometimes I want to practice alone without being bombarded by invites.
Steam is the only game store that is on linux
