this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2025
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i don't get the "steam good, other launchers bad". it's still a launcher and drm...
Ever other platform is just ass. I have played games on Epic, Battlenet, Ubisoft and the EA launcher but they all barely have basic functionality. Meanwhile steam has:
Steam seems to be the only one that actually puts any effort in providing a good user experience. It's more than just a store / launcher and noone else is even trying to compete.
Don’t forget non-profitable free-to-use features such as:
And there’s probably more that I’m forgetting. These things cost Valve money to make and maintain. Only a small portion of users actually use these features and yet it’s not locked behind some subscription or whatever and instead can be used by all users of the platform.
Theres also steamvr link to make meta's quest headsets better and also all the steam for linux stuff like proton and gamescope
They cost money to make, but the only one of those that costs them a significant chunk to maintain is cloud saves. As far as I can tell their streaming solution is strictly peer-to-peer, in the vein of Moonlight or Parsec.
And all of those are definitely profitable for Steam via... well, look at this thread. Their technological advantage on the client feature set is worth billions to them. They are in the process of spinning it off into a separate hardware platform and OS. That's Microsoft money they stand to make, on top of all the Microsoft money they are already making.
I mean, those are cool, don't get me wrong, they have by far the best feature set in the PC market, and arguably in all of gaming... but it's not a gift, it's either feature parity with competitors or investment in their market position.
What do you mean "no forced ads"? It throws up a separate window with store sales every launch?
You can turn that off.
https://majorgeeks.com/content/page/disable_steam_popups_notifications.html
You can turn that off, you know
Still think it's a bit different, steam is essentially a store so I'm expecting to see a promotional banner when I walk in. Windows is a "paid" product that shows you more ads on something you already "own".
Those are promotions, really. Not advertisements. Steam is showing me relevant video games that are available, not a sale on Coca-Cola.
I fail to see the distinction. If I want to just play a game, it's still getting in my way.
Turn it off then and quit complaining about something so insignificant.
Up until this thread, I had tried several times to find out how to disable it. That setting name is obviously obfuscating itself.
"notify me about promotions and new releases" is confusing?
Of fucking course Steam isn't advertising soda, they sell games. It's still an advertisement... just because it's relevant to the platform you're on doesn't mean it's not an advertisement.
Turn it off in the settings if it annoys you..
I am screaming at the reality distortion field. I can feel my molecules being pulled into a million parallel realities just reading this.
Then stop reading. Some of you people are really aggravating.
Who people? Reality people?
These conversations are always so weird. People are here going "yeah, Steam is the best client, but maybe it's fine to have some competition on PC storefronts" and this army of borderline religious devotees just crawls from under the ground to tell you how when Steam does ads they're not ads, they're the Good Word of Gaben bestowed upon us.
I don't even like the Epic store.
Except what actually was said was:
If you're going to call yourself a "reality person" then stick to what is actually happening in reality.
Exactly, I actually go thru this page every so often, just wish it would show me VR titles only, don't care/have the drive to play flat games anymore. It would be annoying if it were ads for stuff not on steam, promote away steam
I think there is a toggle for this in the UI settings.
no other platform gives as much of a shit as valve does about linux gaming. proton made pretty much every windows game in my library Just Work™ (and no, just wine still isn't enough), meanwhile tim sweeney is actively hostile to linux as a platform.
The DRM is optional for use by the devs. Rimworld is one game I know doesn't use it, you can just zip the entire thing up and put it somewhere else and it'll run fine. It's still a launcher. But the only better alternative to a launcher is plain installers to download and hold onto like GOG provides as an alternative to its Galaxy launcher.
To be fair, "it just works" and they haven't tried to screw us over, which is almost unprecedented.
Man, I want whatever MiB forget beam they have at Valve. I remember plenty of "trying to screw us over", starting with rolling out Steam in the first place.
Maybe you had to be there before all the Gaben memes and the digital distribution.
The thing is, the OP's meme is right, all these arguments always devolve into bashing Valve in a reactionary manner... but man, it's because the cultish memory holing gets so weird that it's not about whether Epic is successful or good software or about any other store. Whether you want to or not you end up reality checking the Good Guy Valve myth.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to criticise Valve. I still strongly disagree with being forced to update a game before I can launch it. Greenlight and Steam Direct were/are consistently a pit of scum and shovelware. I still haven't forgotten their attempt together with Bethesda to introduce paid mods to the Workshop. I wasn't around when Steam itself was introduced (we still traded game CDs on the playground at the time), but I understand it was a horrid service and software. Then there's the matter of actual gambling in Counter-Strike and TF2 and the massive secondary market attached to them that Valve refuse to acknowledge.
Nothing's ever only one way or the opposite, though. There's always a spectrum of what a customer is willing to put up with, weighed against what a customer gains by putting up with a company's behaviour. For putting up with Valve's bullshit, as a gamer, I get a reliable service, a massive library of games, unparalleled download speed, free cloud storage for saves and settings, content management, community integration, and benefits too numerous to recount. As a Linux gamer, I get all of their work on Proton, on upstream Wine, Gamescope, DXVK and VKD3D, many of which I use even outside gaming, for free.
When Steam's quasi-monopoly was threatened by the EGS, Valve did not try to lock down developers. The only policy change they enacted was requiring games that are advertised on Steam Steam to actually launch on Steam, after people who preordered Metro Exodus were shafted, in order not to become an advertisement platform for their competition. Then they released publicity videos about the Steam Deck that appealed to Linux enthusiasts, handheld gamers, and right-to-repair advocates. Even as a "DRM platform", they've captured that niche.
I've said many times that success is not illegal. I was excited and hopeful when I heard that Steam was getting a competitor with a company backing it that had a chance of challenging the status quo. Epic and the EGS were given the best opportunity anyone was ever going to get and they fumbled it. They alienated their potential customerbase when they poached Metro Exodus and early third-party-exclusive titles, showed that they did not have a solid foundation when Borderlands 3 was launched without the ability to preload, gave us reason to question their security practices when a data scraper was found in the installed application, and drew further criticism when they would only accept indie titles if they were made EGS-exclusive while allowing Cyberpunk 2077 to launch on multiple platforms. Since then, it's become a haven for AI and NFT shovelware that Valve have rejected based on legal/moral issues.
I will acknowledge that some good came of their actions. Apple was forced to remove their anti-competitive policy that prevented developers from placing links and buttons that directed users to other payment processors. Still, it is the fruit of the poisonous tree: they intentionally broke ToS and had an eighty-page lawsuit and an animated short film prepared, acting like they were the innocent "for the players" party set upon by the evil corporations, rallying children as their uncritical lynch mob.
In conclusion, Valve has done things I dislike, but I have reason to conditionally accept and tolerate them; as I have reason to distrust and dislike Epic and the EGS. My choice whenever possible, though, is GOG, which I didn't mention as it was not part of the conversation and is mostly doing its own thing.
I rambled too much, and I'm too lazy to proofread, so I hope I make some kind of sense.
See, that's a very even keeled summary.
And you still missed the fact that yes, it turns out Valve was aggressively locking down developers by forbidding other platforms from competing on price by holding store discoverability hostage. Which may have been illegal, we still have to wait on that particular class action to resolve. And that regulators had to force them to hand out refunds after a lot of the "evil" competition was already doing it.
Look, the fact is these are massive corporations fighting for who gets to milk money from gamers. I have zero need to root for either Fortnite guy or Digital Distribution Inventor Monopoly Haver guy. Steam is undeniably the better software by a mile, but considering their margins I don't think it's unreasonable for people to ask them not to do the shitty things they do (and they do do shitty things, as you point out).
I do root for GoG, but let me be perfectly honest here, it's because they're the only semi-viable 100% DRM-free option. And even then, you can tell they absolutely hate that they are grandfathered into that branding and increasingly unable to compete because of it. I will have no need to root for Cyberpunk guys the moment they cave and/or are forced to drop that policy.
It's not about "my billionaire is better than your billionaire". Epic could gain complete supremacy overnight and my position wouldn't change.
Can you give me a case number or some other reference? I know of only one class action lawsuit, but that one is concerning the resale of Steam activation codes.
Nah, it's weird how many people missed that during discovery in that one (the one everybody was saying was irrelevant and vacuous and only about code resellers) emails came out where Steam reps were outright telling devs that either they kept price parity on Steam or they wouldn't get store placement. Not just resellers, but for Humble and UPlay as well.
It's nuts how long it took me to find the quotes and documents, by the way. It's all about how few employees Valve has and that one time Tim Sweeny called them assholes in an email for having a 30% cut and they shared it internally with "Are you mad, bro?". Barely any specific coverage about the fact that... yeah, Steam will pressure you to never have the game cheaper anywhere else, resale keys or not.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F778bbf05-f937-4f50-a8a5-90de4185172e_1000x677.jpeg
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bwajZMNAof74mSNRMcTAVlF8m0fplHkA/view
For the record, my position WOULD change if Epic gained total dominance because I want the gaming market to be competitive. Any of these people having a monopoly is a bad thing in my book, so in our reality that'd be Steam.
My publisher once asked me to remove my game from itch.io, saying it was needed to negotiate some deal with valve. I don't know how much of it was true though. I had set up that itch.io before signing with the publisher.
Steam is good mostly because the competition is unbelievably incompetent. I cannot see a single good reason for EGS to be a fucking Unreal app, for starters, and a couple of reasons that it shouldn't (the store is just web pages, the text rendering sometimes gets blurry, it uses too many computer resources to run).
Even GOG, which I always shill for, has some pretty dumb faults, like how it lists different editions of the same game, like a base/deluxe/platinum, as completely different: if you own the platinum version, you might still see the base game on the store page without the "Owned" sticker; more than once I added a game to the cart only to double check and realize that I already owned it. This also happens to games that GOG sells in bundles.
Steam's DRM is not mandatory to release a game on Steam. Its there in fact to provide a necessary lesser evil than to encourage every developer/publisher to produce their own. They still unfortunately do, which Steam at least warns customers about, but them providing their own minimal DRM is a good thing, given the context.
(That said, I still respect gog)
Valve does not discourage third party DRM at all. I wanna say there are dev FAQs where they actively encourage it, in fact. Let me look for the quote...
...Here we go. They straight up point out that their DRM isn't enough and recommend making GaaS games and leaning into their platform features to make pirate copies and non-DRMd copies not work or work worse. And they support third party DRM explicitly.
I don't see how this is consistent with discouraging DRM use. People project a lot on the go-to defenses for this particular argument, and it's weird.
G*mers are Stockholmed crazy style.
Fun fact:
The origin of the term "Stockholm Syndrome" comes from a hostage situation in which the police did not seem to care about the well being of the hostages and were actively taking actions that were dangerous to them, while the hostage takers started taking actions to protect the hostages from police.
Instead of running the story "police fucked up" news outlets exaggerated the behaviour of hostages that were just trying to survive.
Most games on steam have no drm. Once you've installed them, you can do whatever you want with them. Steam isn't adding drm to everything. The number one best thing about steam is the social integration, the pure simplicity of being able to right click on a friend and hit join game to be able to play with them is amazing. Basically, steam makes things simpler, and other "launchers" are simply ad platforms forced in as a layer between you clicking play and the game opening.
i honestly believe the biggest part to this is steam having been around for a long time, and being a kind of the default video game store. people dont like being forced to get another launcher for a game, so whenever a game isnt on steam, they get mad at the whichever launcher its on.
i dont think there is very much critical thinking about drm, expoitative store platforms and capitalism going on.
I think if a Dev decided to only release their game on GoG because they prefer GoGs business practices there wouldn't be a lot of complaints about it.
That is extremely disingenuous. It wouldn't be commercially viable to do that (as seen by... you know, CDPR not even doing that). The way to make that commercially viable would be to get paid for an exclusivity deal by GOG... at which point I'm pretty sure people would, in fact, complain.
Yes, I'm sure they would. Note how in your scenario here people aren't complaining about it but being on Steam, they are complaining about the exclusivity deal.
Man, it's really hard to say this without sounding condescending, so let me say I absolutely am not trying to be, but I don't really understand what you're trying to say here. I think something got cut in that sentence somewhere.
I am agreeing with you that if someone signed and exclusivity deal with GoG people would complain.
I am pointing out that in order to get people to complain (in this hypothetical scenario) about something only being available on GoG, we had to introduce an exclusivity deal.
So people aren't complaining about it not being on Steam, they are complaining about exclusivity deals.
Yes? Because if the game isn't exclusive then it's on Steam.
That's what a monopoly gets ya. Especially if you have policies in place preventing competing storefronts from competing on price.
Exclusivity deals aren't a particularly bad thing. Nerddom in general also keeps complaining when other first parties don't have enough exclusives, often at the same time they make the opposite argument when it comes to Steam, which is part of the weirdness.
It's a weirdly circular argument that you're okay with Epic exclusives as long as the devs aren't profiting from it, even if the end result is the same for you. And it's definitely not what people here are arguing. That's a very forced, disingenuous stance.
Seeing the console wars play out on the basis of which DRM platform you want to put in your PC is wild.