Frustration: Game doesn't even appear in the store unless you search of it

The steam community for the kinds of games that I like seems to often be the absolute bottom of the barrel - dumb, entitled, outraged, completely unaware of any technical or financial aspect of making games. Honestly, the less I have to see from other people on the epic store, the better it is I think. I'll be able to find solution to problems via google on reddit and I'll find reviews on youtube, metacritic or elsewhere. I'm not convinced the reviews accurately reflect what I care about in games and nowadays it's almost more of an outrage-meter that has more to do with the public image of the dev than the merit of the game.

 

And know what to hide

 

I absolutely agree it was a mess, but you could usually find a pretty darned detailed review of just about any game if you looked hard enough. Even the stuff I thought was complete trash, somebody took seriously enough to give a thorough perspective on it. You can usually tell when someone's being honest.

I totally understand that for the developer it's not fun at all.

But I wonder if this is a bit like the refund system - seems crazy, no doubt abused a substantial amount, but in the end kind of makes something possible that probably wouldn't otherwise be.

Anyway, we'll see. It's good to see something different being tried, and the best thing about it is the quality bar, that will hopefully be upheld from here on.

 

The thing about curated content is, somebody (i.e. some person or persons) is doing the judgement. This will inevitably be corrupted, and worthy gems will be lost while mediocre junk with money and influence supporting it will rise.

In other words, I prefer steams wild west. It's usually not hard for me to find something interesting, if I try. And the only times I've regretted spending money on a game was from overhyped AAA games. Still I am bitter about spending 60 bucks on red dead 2. Worst game I played in years.

I trade convenience for freedom any day of the week.

 

The way I see it, you need a general store before you can have boutique. It should never be one or the other - that's a sign of an unhealthy market.

 

Yea, generally I agree. Also, companies like steam are just a plain 'ole downer.

My only concern, and it kinda mimics stuff @angrypenguin has commented on before (I think), is the diversity of storefronts. Right now it has been pretty much Steam. Almost any PC/Mac game I have bought in last decade+ is in my steam account. I have ancient games there, it is kinda my place to go for games on my PC. It would be frustrating to have have a dozen launchers.

 

Right with you on that one! I try to limit my "library" to the least amount of launchers possible. Right now on the epic store I just add their weekly free games to my account (I have a calendar reminder set for it) but if I want to buy something I'll likely wait till it hits steam. Never installed origin or bethesda's launcher even once, and not planning to. I begrudgingly agreed to use uplay, but I would have preferred staying on steam for those games.

But frankly I'm looking forward to getting a PS5 one day, because ultimately I remember my console gaming time on xbox 360 and ps3 as some of the most stress free compared to PC gaming. I've had issues with every launcher so far, including steam.

 

I'm similar. If possible I get the game on Steam. Most of my games are there, my group of friends all use it, and over the last few years it has been pretty easy to deal with. I have a few games on Origin and a few other launchers, but I typically disable them from my startup unless I want to play the game. A dozen launchers all running in the background starts to add up bloat wise, and at least one of them would need an update I for some reason have to manually click on about every day or two.

That said, the Epic Store is the closest thing Steam has had to actual competition since Steam was primarily battling for market share with brick and mortar store shelves. This most likely will be a good thing for Steam users in the long run, as they focus more on improving the experience and keeping game developers happy enough to maintain a healthy inflow of new titles, in order to combat Epic.

 

I have raised it before, but my position on it is that I'm fine with multiple stores and launchers. Ideally we could do away with the launcher part, but even with it... it has basically zero impact on my quality of life. It's ~15 seconds when I sit down to play something. I see no practical reason to care.

Same deal with streaming services. People get upset at the idea of "needing" more than one, but I happily just switch between them depending on what I want to watch. It's far more convenient than when we used to go buy armloads of DVDs, it saves a bunch of physical resources, takes less space, and saves a bunch of money.

Edit: Oh! Perhaps you're referring to my gripe with the launchers chewing up resources for zero benefit of my own?

 

I'm with you there. It's not realistic to expect to be able to get everything from one shop. I don't do much multiplayer or social gaming so that might change things, but I'm perfectly happy to go wherever the good stuff is.

 

I'd argue your game would be worst off if everyone got equal share of the App store. Also some SEO wouldn't go astray so when someone search fro driving game or whatever yours would come up. Unless you've named it something obscure with a poor description.

 

Oh, no, I was thinking your comments on streaming services like Netflix. I was conflating the two.

 

I don't think this is... really true. Steam (and Valve) don't exactly have great reaction times. Usually when there's a problem on Steam, it's a problem for years, often over a decade before they reluctantly sigh and go "fine, I GUESS." EGS could have come out with nothing but the top 10% of all games on Steam, twice as many exclusives, a perfect storefront, and a team of fifty thousand moderators and Valve would still go "today we have slightly tweaked the colour of the notification indicator."

 

Well, they haven't had to have great reaction times due to a lack of competition.

 

They didn't have a great reaction time even when they were the competition back in 2003.

 

You dont think a major co.pany has learned anything in.almost 20 years? Havent you learned anything in the last 20 years? Why would you expect no one else too.

 

Streaming services are a completely different thing since they take money per month even if you do not watch anything. If you need both netflix, prime, HBO, etc,etc it do become pretty expensive..
And dont get me started on bitrates, I have a 7k USD projector, anything but bluray bitrates are a no go.

 

You say this like there isn't nearly 20 years of evidence pointing toward how Valve works incredibly slowly and rarely responds in time to anything. Remember how, after a year, the writing was on the wall for Greenlight being pretty much just an awful system that was getting next to no meaningful updates from Valve and how, despite that, it took another four years before they went "welp?"

It's not like that was even new behaviour for them, since people had been desperately asking for a new submission process for nearly a decade, since with the old submission process it was impossible to tell if anyone had even seen your submission?

These are problems where they hem and haw and, when it's much too late, they implement a half-assed solution for. This has been Valve's MO for ages.

 

Right... But during those "ages" they have been a dominant force with little reason to change. They could be as pondering as they want... where else are people going to go?

 

Yeah. it make sense that if you hold the market, you don't innovate. If it broke, don't fix it. It's not laziness, it's smart. Why make a change when things are under your control?

You only get off your ass and do S*** if somebody elses forces you to.

 

Once again, they were even this slow to react when they were competing with big box stores. The closest thing Valve has had to a fast reaction time was when they first launched the client and had to deal with the traffic.

 

You may well be correct, but Steam has never faced a threat like the Epic Store before. Their response to previous problems has been from a position of de facto monopoly, so there was never really any motivation to address those issues.

Steam will respond or slowly lose market share. The bean counters at Valve will at some point sound the alarm.

 

Or it will stay, as garbage collector bin
I am not seeing much positiveness, in EPIC exclusiveness requirements. For that reason, I don't think is real thread to Steam. At least for now. But as well, I may be blind. So far, I am not impressed.
I don't know if there is a tool to proper search in EPIC, but unless you know what you are looking for (type in), scrolling through 100+ titles is just ridiculous, to find anything. At current state, is worse than going to physical store in my opinion. But yeah sure, is at least online.

But then I can just do that
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=lp_229575_nr_n_1?fst=asff&rh=n:468642,n:!11846801,n:229575,n:4924894011&bbn=229575&ie=UTF8&qid=1566322703&rnid=229575
Or that
https://www.ebay.com/b/PC-Video-Games/139973/bn_339763
Or similar search ...

 

Nothing will ever make people "leave" steam imho. They have "first-mover advantage". Every avid pc gamer has between dozens and hundreds of games bound to their steam account, they can't just leave. And if they can't leave, it's just more convenient to keep buying everything they can there. I can't imagine any force disruptive enough to really de-throne steam.

 

EGS is not a real competition. There is no good answer to buying up games to be exclusive other than buying up games to be exclusive. Valve won't have any other options after a while but start to buy games basically.
So Steam storefront will be another retail shop just like EGS instead of a thriving indie place where anyone can try themselves.
(If they start to buy up games, they will need to start to promote them more prominently and it will mean indie games go to a secondary landing page)

 

Right, but they already had a huge innovation over those stores, one which has proved to be near dominating. Making comparatively small tweaks to their customer experience was unlikely to win over customers from bricks and mortar stores, because those customers didn't know what the experience was like anyway.

You're thinking from a designer's perspective of "this could be executed better" - and in that context you're right. Back in the early 2000s, however, the customer perspective was mostly either "yikes, I can get new games without leaving my house" or "I seriously need this online thing to be able to play Half Life?" Later the customer perspective became "wow, cheap!"

Honestly, from a customer perspective I don't even know what these huge problems they take so long to fix are. But I just use it to find, buy, download and run games.

 

Epic is doing exclusives right now to give Steam users who aren't playing Fortnite a reason to start buying games on the Epic store. If the games are available on both, and you only have Steam installed, people will just buy it on Steam. I guarantee the Epic store is in the red with all these exclusive deals they are throwing around, doing it all on the back of Fortnite revenue.

Fortnite won't last forever, and capturing lightning in a bottle twice in a row is not likely a good business strategy. Epic is most likely gambling that they can pull enough Steam users over to the Epic store so the Epic store can become self sustaining and be seen as a legitimate place to buy most any game, at least on par with Steam. Then they can cut back on the Epic exclusives spending. With a user base approaching Steam's and the more favorable revenue share deal to developers, Steam would begin to look a lot less attractive compared to Epic when choosing a platform to release your game on at that point.

 

Exactly, exclusives is Epics ambush on the fortress Steam has built. It will only last until it is no longer effective, they even said as much.

 

Which also won't last forever. They said that too, people just forget to mention that. The problem is that at this point we cannot believe in a word Tim tells us in my opinion. So whatever.

 

Or we haven't seen or heard it? I for one am unaware of such a statement. I haven't quite managed to achieve omnipresence yet... ;-)

 

I would argue they are forgetting things instead of learning. They used to know how to make and manage games. Recently they made artifact.

 

The sad thing about this to me is that Artifact is a pretty fun game. The lane system is a neat addition to card combat games, but they completely botched the launch with their "pay for the game but ALSO pay for cards" thing. If they charged money and you just get All The Cards until the next big expac, after which you can pay to get all those cards? That'd be pretty great. Not only would it completely change the card economy (really, destroy it, but that'll make less money) but it'd make it so that they'd need to take into consideration the viability of all cards in the context of the meta.

Instead it's pay to play and then also pay to win, because they wanted to have their cake and eat it too.

 

People wont leave steam because they have a large game library on their platform. How does epic beat that? Offer free games and exclusives to build up a library on their new platform. Plus, a wave of new young gamers only play fortnight and now have a library of free games on the egs. It might take years but its possible to phase steam out by catering to the new generation of gamers and leaving the old stubborn steam gamers shaking their fists at the "youths".

 

Case in point: Ion Fury

From all what I've read about how valve operates, I'm not even sure if they have dedicated people that persue nothing but the financial and strategic aspects. I imagine it more like people begrudgingly doing that work when it starts to become a real issue that no one takes care of it. At least that would explain a couple of things.



Imagine this hypothetical for a second: Epic manages to buy a 1 year EGS exclusivity deal from every single pc game to be released in 2020... now what? Valve can just run their biggest sale ever, and people can dig through their gaming backlog for 2 years. It would barely be a "minor inconvenience" for me if this happened. I can be patient, I rarely buy anything at launch, and I have tons of unfinished games. Granted, patience seems to be dying out, but I still think that after that time steam would still have the bigger marketshare, people would still love steam and still hate the epic game store.

Imho valve could say "By the way, we've been keeping our servers running by sacrificing a kitten each day for the past decade." and they would barely lose marketshare because people would find a way to rationalize and justify it. "Well at least steam works, most of the time. You gotta do what you gotta do to keep things running, dogs are better anyway." or something like that.

Yeah, that's actually the first scenario that I've seen that sounds plausible to me for how epic could win this.

 

I never played Artifact, I was completely not interested (after being burnt out on Hearthstone I wasn't looking forward to another one), then as I saw more things about the game I became interested and then completely lost interest when I found out about the monetization.

Which is another thing I don't get about Valve. They have a horizontal structure supposedly and everyone is free to work on whatever they want... Why aren't we seeing more and smaller passion projects then? And why is everything that comes out a "live service"? After taking 30% from a whole market, you'd think they could easily afford to release a few passion projects that don't need to make all the money.

Eh, the people that so vocally and passionately hate EGS are a very small vocal minority and I would argue some of them still use it anyway (for some games they really like) and I imagine with enough time people will have less and less of an issue with it.

 

Funny thing about that...

 

IDK about others, I for one am actively boycotting EPIC, except for the Unreal Engine, but I do not have any games in my library over there, not even one, not even the free ones. Obviously I'm just one person, so probably I don't matter at all.

 

Somehow that makes sense...

Good luck with that.

 

What does "win" mean here? I'll summon the cliche'd Coke vs. Pepsi example. Pepsi are doing just fine without beating Coke, and deliberately positioning themselves against it.

 

I think we've gotten to a weird point when a business is seen as 'bad' because they pursue the ability to have exclusive products on their store. They are not being devious or lying. They simply want what they want, and some people want to give it to them. No business is required to be concerned about whether the customers of another business can continue to buy stuff at some other store.

 

An excellent question! I would say having the highest marketshare and being on an upwards trajectory would be a clear win. Remaining insignificant in the big picture but getting steam to improve what they offer and lower the cut they take to remain competitive would also be a win, based on the goals Epic said they persue.

Oh boy, yes we have...

 

The real problem isn't that the industry is flooding with crap. The real problem is that the industry is flooding with good games. Worrying about asset flips and the like is overrated sensationalism.

The problem is that the bar is being pushed upward for what constitutes a good game, and users are more and more finicky because they have so many options. This goes hand in hand with competition dropping the income floor to near nill.

Simply, the quality bar to make money on Steam has gone up really, really considerably in the last 4 years. That isn't because of crap, it's because there are too many gems.

 

Yes, and at the same time people get jaded at such a pace that overall excitement for the "gems" goes down too.

I have 50+ titles on my steam wishlist and nothing that I'm genuinely excited for like I used to be over a decade ago. Top of that list are "I like the theme but hope it isn't as boring as the witcher" and "it's probably a lot like dark souls, so I hope I'll like it as well". It's just not the same anymore, for me at least.

And I do think that what was said regarding risk of not enjoying something still has a lot of truth to it. Indie games have been a lot more hit and miss for me than AAA games to be honest. The reliable mediocrity of an ubisoft sandbox game will often be preferable to me than games that I "love on paper" but don't enjoy nearly as much as I wanted to, like Teleglitch, Hellblade, Ronin, Brigador, etc..

And they crank those open world games out faster than I can play them and they sell them at ridiculously low prices. For all intents and purposes that might as well be an infinite supply of AAA games at negligable cost that you all are competing with now for time and attention. I'm even tempted to buy GTA5 again and play through it on PC, because I never got to experience it with proper first person mode and running on decent hardware. I know I'll like the game because I've played through it before. That'd be another couple dozen ours that I'm not playing indie games. Sometimes I think all I really want is something to keep my eyes and hands busy while I listen to a podcast or video, and the Dark Souls series alone could probably fill that void for years to come.

What's needed to get me out of that rut are games like Into The Breach that promise something totally unique, well thought out, well tested/balanced, and that I actually do end up enjoying a lot. That's why I never managed to settle for trying to make a simpler game, because I wouldn't have any interest in it as a buyer either.

 

I think there are tensions between these two statements.

Most of the time, I look for genre staples in games. I like most of the stuff I like, and I don't really want much that's outside of my basic genre preferences. I don't want much that's 'new and unique', what I want is 'the same old' with a slightly different spin.

What the vast majority of people want from their entertainment is reliability and comfort. You see this in almost every form of entertainment, from TV to movies to books to myths and stories.

There are some exceptions, some really unique gems, but I donno if i would call 'into the breach' something new and unique. I think probably the closest thing to new and unique i've seen in the last decade is Doki Doki Literature Club: https://store.steampowered.com/app/698780/Doki_Doki_Literature_Club/

Now that game is a truly unique gem.

 

Yes, they have every right to throw around their money and they have every right to buy up games which supposed to be on the competitive store front, so basically pay up the developers to deceive their audience.

I also have the right to be upset about it. End of story. They're lying, they aren't honest about anything at all, they don't look out for their customers, on the contrary. So customers have every right to be upset with them. You don't have to agree with it, you don't have to even understand it. If you like them as they do, then purchase there, if you don't don't.
I don't, so I don't.

 

Haven't watched the full video, but seems very relevant to the EGS discussion.

 

That's fair I guess. As long as something I purchased is always available as long as practical. I don't mind purchasing virtual content as long it doesn't disappear. Big Fish (several years back now), did a big change on their rules and structure, dozens of games I had purchased were "lost". They offered to restore any games if I provided sales receipts which was more trouble than it was worth. (and many of the games didn't work on modern computers). Conversely, everything I have ever bought on the iTunes store is still available, same with Steam. I haven't bought any assets from the asset store in years because the stuff has a tendency to disappear.

Unlikely Epic is going away anytime soon, so it is likely a safe purchase, though I will likely still buy it in Steam if available.

 

So what?

No, honestly, so what? Who cares? We all knew they were paying for exclusivity, and it's clear they're focusing on exclusivity because that's the most effective way for Epic to carve out a niche in a Steam dominated market. This isn't illegal or even unethical. Plenty of stores have products you can only get there. This happens all the way from the smallest shops to big box stores, for any range of products.

Why is it specifically bad now?

 

I agree. I just thought it looked relevant to the discussion, that's all.