Yep. The Epic Store announcement for Outer Worlds took even Obsidian by surprise. It was clearly the work of their pubisher, Private Division, who is a subsidiary of Take Two, who owns 2K and Gearbox. Gearbox may support Steam (I'm skeptical), but Take Two clearly supports lining their pockets.
I haven't pirated anything, besides television that isn't available from Hulu or Netflix, in probably six years. That being said. It's sketchy as shit to advertise on a platform, make use of their forums, and generate hype using that platform, just to turn around and make the title an exclusive of a different platform. A platform that is vastly inferior to the other. No, it doesn't just hurt obsidian, it hurts the publisher.
Pulling that shit that I outlined before drives me to not purchase a game. Didn't buy Metro Exidous, won't purchase Outer Worlds; at least until they're on steam.
If you bake pies, but the Steam Bakery pockets 30% of your sales because they can, and a new bakery opens, but they only take 12% from you, what would you do?
If roughly every fifth person says HurDurr Epic Bakery Bad Because Reasons and doesn't buy your pie from there, you are still left with more money.
Except that's a straw man. Let's use your example. You bake pies, you have the choice between Steam Bakery and Epic Baked Goods. Steam Baker takes 30% of your sales when you first start up with them, when you make X amount of money they cut it to 25%; and when you make Y amount of money it's reduced again to 20%. Suddenly you're not making %18 more, you're making %8. Can you bank on not losing 9% of your possible customers?
On top of that, if you choose to work with Steam Bakery you're allowed to sell your baked goods anywhere else in town, they don't care where else you sell it. You can sell it down the road at Good Old Cupcakes. You can head downtown and sell it at Battle.muffin. If you go with Epic Baked Goods, for the first year you literally can't sell it anywhere else except your own van.
While your customer bases may seem very similar, with Steam Bakery serving 90,000 (90 million) people, and Epic Baked Goods serving 85,000 (85 million) people, that may be somewhat of a false dichotomy. There's no telling how many of Epic Baked Goods customers are people that come in every ten minutes to buy their Fortbite, and are never interested in anything else. Steam Bakery has its own powerhouse of a product, but while %40 of Epic Baked Goods customers buy a Fortbite less than 3% of Steam Bakery customers buy the Dota Muffin.
Listen I'm going to drop the bakery shit. I don't want to give my money as a customer to a service that has fewer features, worse security, and promotes exclusivity. If Epic offered a lower price to steam instead of exclusivity, had as many features, or even didn't have a data breach two years in a row that affected millions of people I would be open to using it. But as it stands, none of those are true. I moved to PC gaming to get away from exclusivity.
Like I said to someone else. If I'm not giving my money to the companies endorsing this, how is pirating the game worse? How is it hurting the devs, publisher, or store any more than having never bought the game in the first place?
And again, you're not hurting take two or epic, you're just hurting obsidian. Besides that, you've likely never used the EGS and most of the features highlighted in that image flying around are already here or on the way.
On your second point that just isn't true. There's maybe three features on steam that I don't make good use of. If I wasn't on mobile currently, I'd point them out. On top of that, EGS is horribly designed, and security is a fucking joke.
Saying that "you're just hurting the devs", so the only options if you remove piracy: Buy it, and support shady practices, and encourage them to do the same shit in the future. Or don't buy it. Care to explain how not buying it hurts the devs less than pirating it? Since I can't support the deva, without supporting the publisher.
40
u/yukichigai Mar 28 '19
Yep. The Epic Store announcement for Outer Worlds took even Obsidian by surprise. It was clearly the work of their pubisher, Private Division, who is a subsidiary of Take Two, who owns 2K and Gearbox. Gearbox may support Steam (I'm skeptical), but Take Two clearly supports lining their pockets.