User Banned (3 Days): Repeatedly making inflammatory and antagonistic topics with no personal engagement
Richard Geldreich was working at Valve from 2009 to 2014. On Twitter he wrote a lot of stuff so it's better to just quote him than to insert all these links.
https://twitter.com/richgel999
https://twitter.com/richgel999
Steam was killing PC gaming. It was a 30% tax on an entire industry. It was unsustainable. You have no idea how profitable Steam was for Valve. It was a virtual printing press. It distorted the entire company. Epic is fixing this for all gamers.
It's not potential spyware, that's insane. Anyone with procmon and some knowledge can see this. I worked for Valve and believe me they gather huge amounts of data about virtually everything you do with the Steam client. Yet no one calls Steam spyware.
If it wasn't for Epic the entire industry would still be crunching away to support Valve's 30% revshare. Most of these profits went to a tiny handful of people who could care less about the industry or working conditions. Thank the gaming gods for Epic.
Gamers believe that the PC is somehow special and immune to market dynamics and market forces. It's not. It's been defacto monopolized by a single greedy storefront for a long time and gamers grew used to it. Change was inevitable. Even if EGS fails something else will pop up.
Developers and publishers wouldn't take these deals unless they were excited to do so. Clearly, Epic has cut them a fair deal, and Valve didn't. Gamers have been blindly supporting a corporation (Valve) that eventually started to take its partners and employees for granted.
I think gamers are going to remain mad for a long time, as these exclusives won't stop anytime soon. Could last 1 year or more. Steam will be for indy/2nd tier/shovelware/porn, Epic and other launchers for AAA. This seems to be where the market is heading at the moment.
Even if Epic suddenly matched 80% of Steam's features it still would need to make competitive bids for exclusives. There's a social glue of sorts that holds Steam users to the platform. Inertia would prevent users from migrating. This would be very costly to publishers.
To be fair, Epic isn't forcing you to do anything. You can wait to play BL3 on Steam. Steam's terms to developers aren't compelling anymore, so they don't get the best releases. Gabe can fix this quickly by lowering Steam's rev share to something fair like 15% or so.
Another way of looking at it: Steam's robust features are currently way overpriced (to publishers/devs). So you get cloud saves etc., but you don't get the latest releases anymore. Once Steam fixes its out of kilter revshare it'll be more competitive again.
Publishers gladly favored Steam vs. retail because they made a lot more money. Today the costs of digital distribution have plummeted and Steam hasn't adjusted. This isn't a competition over features- it's a competition for who gets the privilege of publishing specific releases.
I don't think it will hurt much because this exclusive trend was already in motion anyway (with publisher-specific launchers). If EGS fails more and more pubs will just use their own launchers or other non-Steam storefronts like Discord or Origin.
I would love for there to be a real alternative to Steam (from a feature perspective). Maybe the Discord people are sitting back and watching. Storefronts aren't rocket science - just copy & paste Steam's best features.
Much more on TwitterI think what's likely is that Sweeney will push his team to add features to EGS until it's somewhat at parity vs. Steam's key features. The exclusive backlash will only cost them a few percent of sales (maybe 5-10%?)