I think the point being made is that the industry trusts epic. As in publishers, studios and developers. Not customers.
This is a succinct way to put it, and the real distinction at the heart of this controversy that has made all of the EGS apologists look completely out of touch with dedicated PC players. From a consumer's standpoint, Steam's purported monopoly
is not a problem in need of solving, so throughout this whole mess, players on Steam have justly felt pushed around by forces and interests totally out of their control.
For one thing, it's certainly not the case that Valve has been sitting on their cash and not investing in the platform. Whatever you think of Pitchford, the premise that Steam is a lumbering monolith riding off momentum simply does not ring true (contrary to how it might for, say, Facebook, an unmitigated catastrophe of software and services that everyone has wanted to desert for an eternity now, only they can't afford to lose the networks they have built). It's easy to point at Valve as a stagnant company that doesn't make games anymore and can't count to three, a perception that has stuck to their game development side for almost a decade now, but it's not even remotely true of the services, which have been refined and iterated upon in minute and meaningful ways that are only possible on a mature platform where all of the basics can already be taken for granted. Steam is now at the point where it is able to attend to extremely specific demands, essential to a tiny number of corner-case players and invisible to everyone else.
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I've mainly stayed out of the EGS/Steam threads as there isn't much for me to add that hasn't already been said, but the situation with Borderlands 3 has been on my mind lately, as my main game all April has been The Pre-Sequel, and I think walking through my anecdotal "user story" is illustrative here.
In March, the Handsome Collection went on sale. I looked up a third-party price tracker to see how often this went on sale, how deeply, and for how long (and this isn't a Steam service, I know, but a side benefit of public access to this data over a long stretch of time). I checked whether there was a bundle price adjustment for already owning vanilla Borderlands 2. I looked over the activity stats just out of curiosity, even though I mainly intended to play solo. I scanned over reviews of The Pre-Sequel, the main draw for me here and a game I've been putting off for five years, mostly to estimate how much playtime I could expect and be alert to any known issues. (Steam reviews may not be that useful as review content, but they're exceptionally useful for getting a picture of what the experience is like after X hours, as games aren't the same experience at 10 hours as they are at 50 or 500.) I saw that reviews were mostly negative, but was also presented with a convenient bar graph illustrating a recent spike in negative reviews, informing me that some form of review-bombing was going on so I could look into the cause myself and assess if it would affect my decision (as it sometimes does, in the case of game-breaking patches or rough transitions from early access to release).
Then I bought the game, in my regional currency—knowing that a two-hour refund window would be there if I needed it, with zero overhead of dealing with customer service. Now, one thing you have to know about me is that I am an
extremely (some would say irrationally) fussy player when it comes to controls. I resent dual-analogue controls for FPS and have always played them with a mouse and keyboard, but was also frustrated with how Borderlands 2 was so visibly designed for controllers first that the KB+M experience was dreadful for both vehicles and UI/inventory navigation. As a Nintendo player I also can't abide the backwards ABXY layout and confirm/cancel placement on the Xbox pad. Luckily, Steam allows me to link up my Switch Pro Controller with out-of-the-box support for the Nintendo layout, and with a vast range of configurability for gyro controls that first came in with support for the Steam Controller.
So I put about 50 hours into TPS with motion controls and Nintendo buttons—a happy compromise between tolerable aiming and Borderlands' controller-centric menus/driving—and it was
by far the best FPS experience I have ever had with a controller. I plan to replay Borderlands 2 this way later in the year, and it has also done more than anything else to pique my interest in Borderlands 3, which I
will want to play this way, or not at all.
I never considered picking up BL3 on the Epic Games Store anyway, as I'm patient and would be happy to wait several years for DLC-complete editions and steep discounts to kick in (all on Steam). I expect to play it in 2024, and we'll see how the platform war looks then. But looking over my entire history with TPS this month—from the initial purchasing decision to the configuration to the playing experience (and not even getting into benefits I take for granted like cloud saves that work over PC/Mac cross-buy)—it has become forcefully clear to me that Steam is an even more critical piece of the puzzle than I took it for. Steam is a part of this story from start to finish.
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Now, something like playing with motion controls and the Nintendo layout is the kind of highly specific use case that individual developers will practically never address themselves; you need a services-level solution. And maybe it's the kind of thing that EGS will implement eventually, if we credulously buy into Pitchford's bet that Epic's investment in services will outpace Valve's. But the key to why PC players are so attached to Steam is that while they might not be dependent on
this feature set, many of them rely on
some feature set at this level of obscurity. And much of what I've talked about here, from user-configurable gyro support to review-bombing protection, comes from recent and active support of Steam for benefits that many people won't ever think about—things we never knew we wanted but now can't live without.
No, none of this was there when I first installed Steam on the promise of a free Portal giveaway and a looming Civilization V exclusive back in 2010. But EGS isn't competing with the Steam of 2010, the platform of free Portal and flash sales. It's competing with the modern PC ecosystem itself.
This is not a crumbling platform that anyone is desperate to leave on the consumer side, not even with the hook of freebies and exclusives, and for all the lip service we're getting about how the features might be there someday once the players are there, it should be incredibly clear to anyone looking at this with their head on straight that Epic isn't even particularly interested in established PC players as their market. They're pulling in the Fortnite crowd and perhaps younger players with no money to spend and no accumulated backlogs or friends lists to worry about. I find it very telling that I've seen Epic's free giveaways promoted and circulated by people on my social networks that have never touched a video game in their lives and have no idea a storefront conflict is going on, just in case their friends were interested. All the implicit messaging suggests to me is that existing PC players on Steam are
not the audience.
