I wish Steam supported hidpi.
It's kind of ridiculous they don't.
So You Want to Compete with Steam
101–110 of 223 posts
Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam
#102Discord could do it. Discord SHOULD do it. There needs to be a serious competitor to Steam, something with significant enough market share that Steam gets scared. Steam could be so much better than it is -- I'm not saying that it's a bad product, just that it could be better. Discord seems perfectly positioned to take on Steam. They already have incredible adoption in the gaming community. And they have quite a bit o…
I really hope they don't, they have a crappy memory and cpu hog client which takes an age to start up, a very questionable privacy policy and monetization method, and their software just annoys me. I don't want my programs to spam memes at me.
I haven't experienced those issues with the client (on iOS or Windows). What's wrong with their privacy policy as compared to other chat services? Same question for monetization. And I don't understand the memes comment.
Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam
#103Discord could do it. Discord SHOULD do it. There needs to be a serious competitor to Steam, something with significant enough market share that Steam gets scared. Steam could be so much better than it is -- I'm not saying that it's a bad product, just that it could be better. Discord seems perfectly positioned to take on Steam. They already have incredible adoption in the gaming community. And they have quite a bit o…
Twitch is trying to do it. They turned the Curse application into a game/mod store that also integrated custom servers that essentially mirrored Discord's application. They also are using Twitch Prime and other service integrations to promote it. And they are well backed, which isn't something that could be said about Discord.
Twitch/Curse hasn't really taken off with the community as much as Discord has. It's hard for me to pin down exactly what has put people off of it...
Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
GOG links to your Steam Account and will add games to your library that exist in your Steam Library. It only does this for participating publishers but it's still an effective way to copy your library.
Well, I guess that explains why people like GOG and hate Origin.
origin has something similar. Letting you activate old games on their.
Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam
#105Really, Steam seems to be the closest thing Windows has to an application/package manager[0]. It's almost kind of a shame that it's more or less entirely for games and game development software - something like it with sourceforge/github integration or an API for general purpose Windows installers would be nice. [0]notwithstanding whatever Windows 10 might have, because I still refuse to touch that, but it's probably…
> Really, Steam seems to be the closest thing Windows has to an application/package manager
I don't understand this obsession with package managers. You guys really have less trouble with package managers than Windows installers? It was literally just 2-3 days ago I was trying to update Ubuntu and I couldn't, because of some stupid error (I don't remember exactly) along the lines of "libgl1-mesa-glx depends libglapi-mesa XX.YY but ZZ.WW is present" (again: I don't remember the error exactly). And no matter which packages I tried to upgrade/fix/uninstall/whatever or in what order I tried it, it wouldn't budge. I guess the package dependency graph was somehow impossible to satisfy? I assume because different packages required different versions of the same package? This was not the first time I've ran into problems like this... eventually I just wiped it and restored from a backup. (Which I had made from moments earlier, because, well, did I mention this wasn't the first time this has happened?) To say I don't see what all the fuss and obsession with package managers is about is putting it very... mildly.
Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam
#106The convenience of having your game licenses all in one place over the long term is too great. The only way you could shut down Steam at this point is create an open industry standard that would allow a license to play a game to transfer seamlessly across platforms. No one wants to buy a game from a website that isn't going to exist in a year and will take your game with you. And no one wants to have 10 different pla…
I wonder if you could write a wrapper over Steam (and other services) that allows the same benefits of them, but lets you have your own store too. You'd have a launcher that could launch any game on your computer, whether it's on Steam or GOG or Itch or your own service, and a global storefront that merges them all (and prioritizes yours). Would that even be legal?
there have been plenty of meta launchers, but the social aspect and mods, etc are much more important than that and are never provided.
Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Article's author here. GOG.com got started in 2008 , which was critical to their success. Steam had much lower market share back then. If GOG started today I would give them much, much, lower odds of succeeding. And consider also that Desura, Direct2Drive, Impulse, etc, which also were around in that rough time period, are all dead and gone.
GOG only started selling newer games in 2012, and even then it started only selling a few. Before that, it was a place to buy old games (hence the original name, Good Old Games). I think GOG's success was because for its first few years, it was selling games that simply weren't available on Steam or anywhere else at the time. When it did finally go up against Steam, it already had a decently large customer base, and…
Indeed. First they got a market which was unserved (old games), then they got the CD Project Red games (Witcher series), then they branched into third-party games.
Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitch is trying to do it. They turned the Curse application into a game/mod store that also integrated custom servers that essentially mirrored Discord's application. They also are using Twitch Prime and other service integrations to promote it. And they are well backed, which isn't something that could be said about Discord.
Twitch/Curse hasn't really taken off with the community as much as Discord has. It's hard for me to pin down exactly what has put people off of it...
I wasn't even aware it does VC/text chat. Discord puts it front and center and does it extremely well.
Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam
#109The convenience of having your game licenses all in one place over the long term is too great. The only way you could shut down Steam at this point is create an open industry standard that would allow a license to play a game to transfer seamlessly across platforms. No one wants to buy a game from a website that isn't going to exist in a year and will take your game with you. And no one wants to have 10 different pla…
No one wants a game that requires a "platform", they just don't realize it or care enough to boycott over it.
I do.
Before Steam, when I bought a game, the purchase was tied to a physical disc. I'm very bad with physical things: I break them, misplace them, give them to friends and forget about it forever. I don't have any of those physical games now.
I still have Half-life 2 that I bought in 2004 on Steam though.
Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam
#110Really, Steam seems to be the closest thing Windows has to an application/package manager[0]. It's almost kind of a shame that it's more or less entirely for games and game development software - something like it with sourceforge/github integration or an API for general purpose Windows installers would be nice. [0]notwithstanding whatever Windows 10 might have, because I still refuse to touch that, but it's probably…
> Really, Steam seems to be the closest thing Windows has to an application/package manager I don't understand this obsession with package managers. You guys really have less trouble with package managers than Windows installers? It was literally just 2-3 days ago I was trying to update Ubuntu and I couldn't, because of some stupid error (I don't remember exactly) along the lines of "libgl1-mesa-glx depends libglapi-…
Well the problem is it sounds like you are dealing with a proprietary gl package. Which sucks because the package mangers can't do anything about that. Blame your graphics chip provider.
You wouldn't have this problem if you didn't give up your freedoms to mega corps (only some snark).