551–560 of 584 posts
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The big "test" there for Steam will be when "Gabe goes away". It's gonna happen sooner or later.
One thing to keep in mind is that Valve is fully private so Gabe can not just be replaced by some random person by a board of directors like in other companies. He probably already has a will set up that details how ownership should be transferred.
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> The reason nobody competes with Steam is simply the sheer number of integration and platform features that make it easy to buy, play and share games with my friends. I don't agree. The reason I personally prefer Steam is that all my existing games are on Steam so if I keep buying on Steam I don't have to make and maintain accounts on other stores, if I keep buying my games on Steam I can keep using Steam as my only…
Another big thing is trust. With any of these digital markets I'm not truly buying games, I'm purchasing a revocable license. That requires a certain amount of trust that the platform isn't going to screw me over. Steam isn't perfect: they initially had to be forced to offer refunds, and their item economy enables barely disguised gambling. But by and large they have behaved very predictably and consumer-friendly. So…
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But I don't want all these app stores!! The ideal number of app stores I want installed on my computer is ZERO. I don't want to have to load a damn "store" just to obtain and run your game. I am willing to angrily live with ONE store on my computer, Steam, but no way in hell am I going to tolerate having to have an Epic Store and a Microsoft Store and an Activision Store and a goddamn Rockstar Store and an Ubi Store…
I don't know why "zero" is ideal. That means going back to the old days where every single company would need their own launcher. Having a separate company focus on distribution sounds more ideal. Epic Games had an opportunity here to erode the app store margins through standardization, instead, they've become a copycat of what they resented with a slightly smaller cut.
Just install the damn game, ask if you want icons on the desktop as well as in the start menu.
OS handles it all for you.
Perhaps some multiplayer functionality and such makes sense to share cross-game, but I miss the bad old days of every game having a bunch of privately maintained servers and its own server browser list etc. You could eventually find a few servers that fit your playstyle and make online gamer friends that way.
The only benefit steam brings to the table as far as I can tell is making it easy to reinstall your library on a fresh PC.
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The industry will adapt quickly, especially the part that's using multiplatform mainstream engines like UE/Unity. Lots of new/recent native MacOS releases nowadays: https://store.steampowered.com/macos
The same that support Linux and yet Valve has to come up with Proton.
Proton as a project let's valve hedge on the heir apparent OS without upfront developer cost. If the Linux player base grows, developers will follow and valve is poised to remain dominant.
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It's still funny to me that they would rather burn 9 figures in cash on these silly deals to try and 'trap' gamers on their platform instead of just... I don't know... making a better platform? The reason nobody competes with Steam is simply the sheer number of integration and platform features that make it easy to buy, play and share games with my friends. It's not that hard, stop trying to 'force' me to use your pl…
Steam has been around for 20 years and gamers really, really care about their Steam profiles. Valve has created a kind of gaming Facebook. You can't replace that.
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> The reason nobody competes with Steam is simply the sheer number of integration and platform features that make it easy to buy, play and share games with my friends. I don't agree. The reason I personally prefer Steam is that all my existing games are on Steam so if I keep buying on Steam I don't have to make and maintain accounts on other stores, if I keep buying my games on Steam I can keep using Steam as my only…
I've rebought games on Steam I had on Epic for free, just because the platform is so terrible. As far as a metric goes, that's pretty clear. It's definitely not about lock-in for me. It's everything from local streaming, to linux support, to cloud saving working properly, to 100s of other things that become apparent if you try to do anything other than launch a game in a bog standard way on a windows machine.
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I don’t think this is necessarily what is happening. Roblox predates Fortnite by a decade and is only getting more popular over time
Tbf, "just make the next Roblox" is kind of an insane business proposition. Roblox has enjoyed unprecedented success at engaging the same age range for 20 years. Most games that are anywhere near that old have for the most part followed their playerbase as they aged. Runescape is a great example, where enough of their playerbase in 2013 were the same people who were playing 2007 that they demanded a reversion. Roblox…
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One thing to keep in mind is that Valve is fully private so Gabe can not just be replaced by some random person by a board of directors like in other companies. He probably already has a will set up that details how ownership should be transferred.
Isn't Epic private?
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15 years is not some insane gap that you can't get around. The biggest issue is that the EGS is just an inferior experience compared to steam, that's simply it. If Epic games really wanted to start eating away at steams market share, they would do one thing. Make EGS not shitty for the user
15 years is a humongous gap. Almost an entire generation. Do you expect to make a Facebook killer in 2022? A WOW killer in 2017? Make a DOTA killer right now? There's so many people who aren't even your market, they are an "one game player". You can't target that realistically unless that one game shits the bed.
Snapchat was a Facebook killer until Facebook bought a VPN service and tracked every user without consent then stole half its features
I guess you could say LoL is a DOTA killer since its significantly more popular now, although some of that is likely to do with the Russian/Ukraine war
Giving actual compelling reasons to get users on your platform is the only way and the best way and that isn't really a function of time. TeamSpeak, Ventrilo and Mumble got eaten up by Discord and also most game forums
One of the biggest issues with all these stores that are other than steam is that they suck in terms of UI/UX and they are HUGE resource hogs, I am more inclined to kill off the epic games launcher from running in the background because it taking up gigabytes of my system memory and that annoys me
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15 years is a humongous gap. Almost an entire generation. Do you expect to make a Facebook killer in 2022? A WOW killer in 2017? Make a DOTA killer right now? There's so many people who aren't even your market, they are an "one game player". You can't target that realistically unless that one game shits the bed.
Instagram was a Facebook killer until Facebook bought it. Snapchat was a Facebook killer until Facebook bought a VPN service and tracked every user without consent then stole half its features I guess you could say LoL is a DOTA killer since its significantly more popular now, although some of that is likely to do with the Russian/Ukraine war Giving actual compelling reasons to get users on your platform is the only…
>Giving actual compelling reasons to get users on your platform is the only way
And sometimes there is no compelling reason. People may only want 1 or 2 things and they bias towards what they are familiar with.i suspect that's why Twitter is still technically a market leader (despite falling apart behind the scenes).
I also think it's really funny that talk about offering a good platform then mention an example where the market leader just gobbles them up.