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Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam

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Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam

#281

Post by smoldesu »

nanidin wrote: post #209
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * Just works I don't game very often, but the way Steam "just works" can't be understated enough. It's not perfect. I've run into weird bugs occasionally, though they were likely the fault of a specific game. However, it's miles ahead of other game launchers I've dealt with. I'm a casual gamer, so if I end up fighting the game launcher and update mechanism for more than a few minutes, I'm just going to give up and…

Along the idea of streamlining and reducing the mental overhead of actually playing a game - it's great to have my entire library in one place. I refused to use any of the other launchers because I don't want to have to hunt down accounts in 5 years when I get a taste for nostalgia from a game that I don't own on Steam. Untitled Goose Game got me back into piracy after 15 years of abstinence because of the anti-Steam…

Ironically, that game was written by Panic, the same studio thats perfectly contented with paying Apple 30% of their revenue on their other apps...

Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam

#282

Post by BbzzbB »

shp0ngle wrote: post #272
usrusr wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First mover is a strong part of Valve's position: they have almost two decades of not failing their users under their belt, very few other digital content purchase platforms have a similar backlog. iTMS appeared a little earlier, but the rebrandings haven't exactly been helpful in terms of perceived seniority and it didn't really start with a wide audience, because non-pirated access to hl2 was much less of a rarity…

Wasn't battle.net the first mover? I think it's way older than Steam. But I am not sure now

It is older by a few years, but it is not a two-sided marketplace, it's Blizzard's (+ Activision's) DRM.

FWIW, I did not mean that Steam is necessarily the literal first game marketplace, but to my (limited) knowledge it was the first one that got large enough to become the "default" option.

Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam

#283

Post by judge2020 »

Strom wrote: post #199
camdenlock wrote: post #171

First reaction: oh cool. Later: … oh NO. If Microsoft is anchoring one of its largest gaming properties to Steam, then what are their eventual intentions for Steam & Valve? :(

Valve is not a public company and Gabe Newell seems pretty happy with Valve. I can't really see him wanting an exit.

This was a concern in 2018 as well, and Newell dispelled it[0]. Newell supposedly holds >50% private equity in Valve[1], so he's the final say.

0: https://gagadget.com/media/cache/9b/6f/9b6f3304b05c9c98449db...

1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2012/03/07/valve-gab...

Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam

#284

Post by LegitShady »

shp0ngle wrote: post #272
usrusr wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First mover is a strong part of Valve's position: they have almost two decades of not failing their users under their belt, very few other digital content purchase platforms have a similar backlog. iTMS appeared a little earlier, but the rebrandings haven't exactly been helpful in terms of perceived seniority and it didn't really start with a wide audience, because non-pirated access to hl2 was much less of a rarity…

Wasn't battle.net the first mover? I think it's way older than Steam. But I am not sure now

but it wasn't a general marketplace for games.

Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam

#285

Post by Talanes »

judge2020 wrote: post #278
sbarre wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the rise of the Epic Game Store, I think there's more competition in the launcher/store space and I bet the big publishers got better deals which removed the need for them to invest in the ongoing development and maintenance of their own stores/launchers. It can't be that cheap to maintain an app like Origin or UPlay and all the associated infrastructure, etc..

The issue with Epic is the pure lack of features (user profiles, reviews[^1], community forums) , and no Mac/Linux support. ^1: I doubt reviews are ever coming since it would mean bad games would get fewer sales; Imagine how many more sales Cyberpunk 2077 has gotten on the Epic store as no potential buyer sees the negative reviews for the game.

I've had to struggle with Epic just to delete a game at times. And the giant tiles in the library are already a pain to navigate through with a library 1/20th the size of my Steam library. I could live without features if the core functionality was nailed in, but it's just not there.

The only people I know using it as a broad Steam replacement are doing so ideologically: they want a competitor to exist so they use it even if it's worse.

Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam

#286

Post by amatecha »

Ekaros wrote: post #93
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than likely Valve has offered better deals to these larger companies to get them back in-house. It's very probable EA, Bethesda, Microsoft, etc. all have gotten more favorable terms now, by proving they were willing to leave Steam and roll their own launcher.

30% from 0 to 10 million 25% from 10 to 50 million and 20% from 50 million on. They might have even better deals, but at some point 20% for handling everything and supporting payments with potential of fraud, chargebacks etc. in nearly every country should start look like not horrible deal. Remembering what the retail margins were back in the day when they needed to make and ship physical boxes...

source for these numbers?

Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam

#287

Post by bombcar »

throwaway09223 wrote: post #204
KiranRao0 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unverified Rumor, so a healthy grain of salt is required: A friend at a large GPU maker was mentioning that a lot of "squeezing all possible compute abilities" for games are in the driver, rather than in the game itself. Which is why you'll often see significant performance improvements with driver updates after a game has launched. It makes sense as it's in the GPU makers' best interest to have the maximum performan…

It is absolutely the case that drivers contain code to fix errors or optimize away mistakes made in top tier games. This is well-known and often can be demonstrated by renaming the game binary or making other changes. Sometimes this happens with the blessing of the game company, and sometimes it doesn't. Or, sometimes GPU folks will send a team over to help the game studios fix performance issues during their develop…

xx:HeapDumpPath=MojangTricksIntelDriversForPerformance_javaw.exe_minecraft.exe.heapdump

Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam

#288

Post by nocturnial »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #223
mywittyname wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, it's that my 20 year old account has games I bought 20 years ago. I can trust that anything I purchase from Steam will be around for a long time. No other company has demonstrated that kind of reliability, except maybe Apple. Plus, I think Steam is a superior product. That being said, I also try to buy on GoG as much as possible, since I really prefer to have DRM-free games and I want some competition in the…

> I can trust that anything I purchase from Steam will be around for a long time. Unless the publisher pulls it or pushes an update cutting music because of license deals expiring. Or gets a stealthy replacement with a worse remaster. Or your OS drops 32 bit / x86 support.

> Unless the publisher pulls it

That's not true. I have a game that was pulled by the publisher (legal issues, don't know the details). But everyone who bought it can still download it and play it. Pulling it in this case just means no one can buy it anymore.

It was actually shocking to me when I found out that stuff I bought on other online stores wasn't available anymore for whatever reason. For this reason I still buy stuff on steam but I don't have enough trust to buy anything in another store.

Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam

#289

Post by LegitShady »

staticman2 wrote: post #144
BbzzbB wrote: post #114

Is there a technical reason why Steam is a such a force in the space? People, myself certainly included, often criticize Apple for taking 30% of developer revenue for merely existing in it's walled garden. Right or wrong, they control the ecosystem, so their ability to monopolize and heavily tax the App Store is unsurprising, they're exercising their pricing power as much as they possibly can. But how is it that on P…

For some reason none of Steam's competitors are willing to match their features. The Microsoft store was obviously not designed by the Xbox division and was hostile to gamers wanting to enable modding or customize the installation. Likely because Microsoft wanted a locked down app store to sell their Surface devices to schools and business. Steam does things like converting Ps4 and Nintendo Switch controller input to…

The xbox app has improved a lot, but even now its kind of garbage. It's been terrible, slow, buggy, bad explore interface, and just sort of bad for literally years. And instead of updating itself, it wants me to launch the microsoft store to update the xbox app, and then the microsoft store bugs me to update the "microsoft tips" app or the "Microsoft people" app or "MSN Weather" stuff I've never used or want on my computer. Oh you updated the xbox app but you didn't update the xbox identity provider, go back to microsoft store or otherwise you can't get into the game because apparently they didn't think to include xbox identity providing into the xbox app.

steam sits in my tray. it asks me to hit the update button when there's an update, and then it updates itself and I don't need to go somewhere or else or get hassled to find out why the heck there's an update to "Your Phone" app that I didn't know was on this computer and why microsoft thinks I should install it.

at least they've managed to get the windows store app itself to run a little better than the last few years. It was as guilty as any app of being a slow unstable POS.

steam just kinds of win by default by not being a massive pile of shit.

Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam

#290

Post by Talanes »

Macha wrote: post #157
sbarre wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the rise of the Epic Game Store, I think there's more competition in the launcher/store space and I bet the big publishers got better deals which removed the need for them to invest in the ongoing development and maintenance of their own stores/launchers. It can't be that cheap to maintain an app like Origin or UPlay and all the associated infrastructure, etc..

It's not just the store cut. From what I understand, a big part of the motivation of Origin was also to avoid having to compete, at least in consumer perception with the sales. Battlefield 3 at €80 while it was a year old looked terrible value when Borderlands 2 had dropped to €50 and was regularly 30% off despite being only a couple of months old.

That seems backwards to how the actual customer perception worked out though. I very quickly noted that Origin prices were worse than Steam prices, and avoided it. If that was their intent, they forgot the storefront itself has a perceived value.
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