MudMan

That is irrelevant, and I realize that attempting to explain this to you is now reflecting poorly on me, but here we are.

Any first party submission is a first party submission. It has some cost and generates some profit. Believe or not, game publishers have these things called speadsheets. They can sum like nobody’s business.

They can count how much money they can make by porting something and how much money they can make from, say, putting those same engineers to work on something else. And they will typically do the thing that yields the most money.

Not that it matters because these days most games are on middleware engines targeting effectively a few iterations of the same rebadged mid-spec PC, so a bunch of ports ARE in fact mostly pushing a button to make the game go. Hell, most of the work across the current-gen consoles comes down to sorting out all the APIs and metadata nonsense from all the first party services.

Of course it’s cheaper to put a PC game in more than one storefront, but it’s also irrelevant because, and I can’t stress this enough, all storefronts are running on the same computers, so you’re typically not blocked from any of your userbase. Next to zero cost, next to zero reward.

You aren’t even arguing about exclusivity to a platform, you are arguing about the layer of download management software that installs the same files to the same computer. It’s the stupidest fanboyism I have encountered in all my years of paying attention to videogames for fun and profit. It’s baffling.

You can even boot your Epic games from inside the Steam interface and use all the Steam features on them. This is such a nonsense debate it doesn’t even begin to justify all this back and forth you and I are having here, let alone however long it took to put together this meme. I swear, man, gamers are exhausting sometimes. I am done here.

No, you’re imagining that games are like fuel. Games are not, in fact, like fuel. It’s not like you’re picturing it.

I’m tempted to give you a different simile, but it’s clearly pointless. Games are like games. You put them on platforms if it makes more money to sell them there than it costs to port them, and modern hardware is very similar across the board, so that’s most of the time, unless you have something more profitable for your programmers to be doing OR somebody pays you to change that math.

There I am, giving you the TED talk. And you know what? You don’t deserve it. You’re confidently wrong on the Internet, it’s kind of on you at this point. You can figure it out or not, but under no circumstanes will exclusivity deals, co-marketing or co-development deals be anticompetitive just because you want to shill for a random company online. It just doesn’t track at all and it’s weird that people keep parroting it.

Dude, no, you really don’t. You’re Dunning-Krugering the crap out of this one.

Look, you don’t need to take my word for it, but I also don’t need to give you my bona fides or give you a TED talk about how platform targets are chosen in most modern games. You can go look it up.

It’s… really not how you’re picturing it. And you’re picturing it that way to justify your chosen platform as a home team. You should really stop doing that and just enjoy the games you want to enjoy wherever you want to enjoy them.

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.

The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy (i.e. copying all game files to another computer) and has some obfuscation, but it is easily removed by a motivated attacker.

We suggest enhancing the value of legitimate copies of your game by using Steamworks features which won’t work on non-legitimate copies (e.g. online multiplayer, achievements, leaderboards, trading cards, etc.).

The Steam wrapper can and should be used in combination with other DRM solutions. To do so, apply the Steam wrapper in compatibility mode first before applying any other DRM. Apply it first so that it does not interfere with the DRM solution. Compatibility mode will disable DRM capabilities of the wrapper.

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.

They are the same thing on the business side, absolutely. I mean, games are developed on PC anyway, so those are the same thing today for sure. I promise you there is a PC version of Bloodborne in a FromSoft computer somewhere, even though it’s stuck as a PS4 exclusive. Not because there is some mystery technical reason, but because somebody signed a deal to make it that way.

There has never been a technical reason a port of Ratchet & Clank or Uncharted couldn’t work on a PC (or a GameCube, previously), even when there was more porting work to be done, the game would have sold more than enough to make it worth the porting costs. Those games were stuck on their platforms because Insomniac and Naughty Dog had a business relationship with Sony. And then Sony said it was fine for them to be on Epic, Steam and GoG. And then they decided they wanted to have online authentication DRM, so they were only on Epic and Steam after that point.

Hell, if you go backwards, there was an uproar among Nintendo fanboys when Resident Evil 4 stopped being a Gamecube exclusive and showed up on PS2 (and then on everything else). And that, again, was not a technical issue, but a deal that was in place until it wasn’t. Because this conversation has been dumb both ways for a very long time.

The third option is you don’t understand how games are made or exclusivity deals signed and you’re only latching onto them as a backwards justification for your foregone conclusion because you want to root for Steam as a platform.

Which is the wild part.

That’s not even a little bit what a monopoly is.

Which is obvious. Nobody is out there arguing that signing an exclusivity deal between a first party and a developer is somehow a monopolistic situation. Nobody has argued that in forty years of gaming exclusives and nobody has argued it in a century of television or music recording labels.

So the question becomes why argue it now, right? Why weren’t you mad when Ratchet & Clank could only be purchased an played on a PlayStation or Final Fantasy was only on a SNES? What overzealous, cult-like situation leads to a whole host of people going to bat for this ass-backwards concept on behalf of Steam? Who, I should add, have not argued this themselves or asked for this at all, although thanks to the power of lawsuits we do have a decent indication that they do approve of it.

One has to assume the cart is being put before the horse, given the timeline. People were bashing Ubisoft and EA’s previous competitors for less defined, more ambiguous reasons, and often no reason at all beyond brand loyalty. The whole “exclusives are bad now” argument happens to be the narrative that stuck with Epic specifically because it’s the one thing they’re doing that the previous ones weren’t.

So all of this has been a ton of typing to come back to the only statement this conversation ever needed:

Seeing the console wars play out on the basis of which DRM platform you want to put in your PC is wild.

I am aggressively hoping that this also means they release them on GOG like they did with early PC ports. It is genuinely why I’ve been holding out on most recent Sony ports (and Yakuza games, Sega, I did notice).

You are wrong about what a monpolistic position is, at least in a world in which people don’t get pedantic and call it a “position of market dominance” because that’s not how real people talk unless they are dicks.

So yeah, Steam does have a position of market dominance that they are using to force conditions and prices on providers and customers. Whether that is done to a degree that it infringes on US antitrust regulation is currently in the process of being determined in court, but for the purposes of our conversation it is bad and getting worse.

And I can’t stress enough how exclusivity deals are signed with both first and third parties all the time. I’m old enough to remember when gamers were rioting at the concept that Metal Gear or Final Fantasy would show up on Xbox. Insomniac only got purchased by Sony in 2020, they had made Playstation exclusives for twenty years by that point. From the end user perspective there isn’t, and has never been, any difference between a game being made by a first party or being signed as an exclusive from a third party.

This is not a reason to get mad in any sane reading of a marketplace, period. Didn’t stop schoolchildren in the 90s from fighting over Sonic versus Mario, but I’m not a schoolchild now and I find it extremely tiresome.

And as for your last point… so don’t frickin use Epic, who gives a crap. You have so many ways around this entire non-issue. Go play Fortnite on the Switch, or Alan Wake on a PlayStation. Or don’t play them. Or play them on Epic and quit the launcher after. I can’t describe the subatomic size of the violin I’m playing on behalf of your ordeal, my friend.

Nobody should care about this. Epic has decided to compete by giving away freebies and signing up exclusives, which is frankly, a lot more freebies than every other first party in the past thirty years. Mediocre as their software is I have very little to no patience for anybody genuinely complaining about this state of affairs.

Yeah, that only works if you wildly misrepresent a monopoly. It’s not about “you can only purchase from one service”, it’s one service having a dominant position in the market. Not the same thing.

Exclusives are a competitive proposition. That’s why Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft have first party studios. Because… you know, they want exclusive games to their platforms. And Netflix, and every other TV station that has ever existed.

It’s not as convernient, necessarily, but it does preserve competition in a way that having a single entity deciding the prices of all games does not.

Those are the long term effects of supporting them. There’s no “winning” here. It’s not a zero sum game. The idea is that multiple (two is also bad) players are in the market, all competing to give you a better deal and attract you to their option. Steam gives you a better deal because the competitors exist. If they are the only game in town they don’t have a reason to give you a better deal.

And even if you assumed Gaben is a saint (he isn’t, he’d just rather squeeze the devs than the users, which makes him smart, not nice), he’s not going to be around forever and you don’t want a world where Steam is the next Microsoft. Does that register to you at all?

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.

Man, I knew I’d get the nitpick if I didn’t include the overlong quote. Welcome to the Internet, I suppose.

It is absolutely as pro-Steam as I’m implying and not the only quote in my post. I take nothing back and have nothing to add.

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.

No, not a phantom conversation, a conversation I was actually having. Here. You replied to me, not the other way around.

There are, by the way, several posts in this thread literally stating, and I quote, that “ever [sic] other platform is just ass”, “even GOG, which I always shill for, has some pretty dumb faults” and “Not on Steam? (…) the seas will provide”.

Sure doesn’t sound like it’s a Epic-specific issue. Although I’d argue the Epic-specific console wars discourse is equally silly.

It’s the sheer fanaticism and the taking of sides that gets weird, considering how inconsistent it is with other narratives often held at the same time. Kudos to Steam’s PR, but man, is it weird to see happen online.

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.

Yeah, no, that’s… all consistent with what I’m saying. Yes, they are all DRM platforms. And the reason you’d want more than one of them is that a monopoly on retail is bad, whether Epic, MS, Valve or whoever else have it.

One thing being said doesn’t mean it’s the only thing being said. This, as always with this subject, is a very bizarre conversation.

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.

I am screaming at the reality distortion field. I can feel my molecules being pulled into a million parallel realities just reading this.

I mean, most people would say free games are pretty consumer-friendly, but whatever, these goalposts have been moving for ages.

Steam was threatening game devs with pulling them from the store if they undercut Steam prices just last year (see above). They restated that you don’t own your games and that you can’t transfer them to anybody on your death just last year. They rolled out additional revenue share improvements for big publishers in 2018, keeping the worse conditions for smaller games. I personally saw a Steam rep tell a roomful of indie devs that they should be translating their games to Chinese out of pocket or risk not getting as prominent store positioning well within this decade. Steam also keeps selling loot boxes today, which I’ve always been less concerned about, but most people seem to think is a bad thing. That’s extra funny in this context because Epic specifically was shamed into removing them from their games a while ago and severely punished for what was seen as selling those to kids just as Steam was keeping that whole thing in place for CS2. Like I said, would kill for the MiB ray Gaben invented.

Look, I’m not here to say that Valve is a dark empire bent on world domination, but they are a money-printing machine privately owned by a billionaire that sure would like to keep growing his yatch collection. I think Valve has been more successful than anybody else at making their platform software and a lot of their money comes from cutting cost via automation and squeezing captive devs while focusing hard on their user-facing feature set. On the big picture, though (no pun intended) I don’t see that much air between them and any other large publisher or first party platform holder.

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.