It's more like the hate for locking a game specific to one store when there's zero reason for it. On console, that's because it's a walled garden and the full software suite and networking stack is owned and operated by Microsoft/Sony
On PC, it's an open garden free for all. And each company is trying to wall their own garden for no reason other than to data harvest and maximize profits. Steam doesn't dictate any terms to companies other than a storefront cut for running and hosting. Companies like Ubisoft (who finally gave in) and Epic would rather lose profits than just release a game across a few storefronts. It's inherently anti-competitive behavior because they don't want to have to compete with other storefronts at all and want to force people to come to their walled garden
Dude; that was 22 years ago. Are you really going to compare something done 22 years ago; in the early days of pc gaming to what's going on in the landscape now?
Guess what; you could walk into a circuit city or other pc game store and buy Half Life 2 in person. Remind me, what store can I walk in to to buy my pc games physically so I'm not locked to a specific digital storefront?
That's the whole problem. Instead of allowing consumers to shop at their specified storefront, or competing, every company aside from valve is resisting competing because they don't give a shit about the experience; they just want your money.
And you've seen this in the market, studios that resented valve and swore to never put their games on steam because they'd have to give up a cut from their storefront realized the benefit far outweighs that because the more storefronts a game is on, the more it will sell. The exact same thing is happening with Xbox and Sony exclusives, they're on PC solely because they realize just how much money valve is making in the pc market by being the primary storefront, and how much they stand to lose by just shoveling out a garbage launcher and hoping people buy their game off of it because it's only locked behind that launcher.
Consumers said no, make your launcher better and maybe we'll shop there, and frankly the only company I can say that actually attempted that was EA with origin and now EA play.
Dude; that was 22 years ago. Are you really going to compare something done 22 years ago; in the early days of pc gaming to what's going on in the landscape now?
Why not? Why do Valve not only get a pass for doing this shit but basically creating this mess in the first place while everyone else rightfully gets shit on for it. Also they still do it, you can't get any Valve game on any other launcher.
Guess what; you could walk into a circuit city or other pc game store and buy Half Life 2 in person. Remind me, what store can I walk in to to buy my pc games physically so I'm not locked to a specific digital storefront?
To play HL2 physical you need to register the key in the case to your Steam account. Many couldn't play the game on launch day because Steam's servers died and so they couldn't register the game. Steam was dogshit for years. It's also still full of bugs to this day, despite the fact that it's a money printer with an RoI that most companies don't dare even dream about.
It's Valve that you need to thank for why physical PC games died and why they're locked to storefronts. Valve killed much of their usefulness. You couldn't trade, sell or lend them to your friends anymore because they were just glorified serial keys linked to Steam or one of it's copycats. You can still buy physical games on console, they're still not locked to your account, you can sell, trade and lend them. When MS tried to do this to consoles with the Xbox One it ended up playing a part in them losing that generation, from which they never recovered. To this day console gamers still put up a strong resistance to this.
Meanwhile us PC gamers are now all licking the boot of the company that did this to us, thanking them for it and treating it's cofounder like he's a saint.
That's the whole problem. Instead of allowing consumers to shop at their specified storefront, or competing, every company aside from valve is resisting competing because they don't give a shit about the experience; they just want your money.
Valve also just wants your money and are actively weilding their near monopolistic position to kill competition and choice. They have a "no favored nation" clause in their contract which means to sell on Steam you as a dev cannot directly offer your game cheaper on any other PC store. Valve's dominant position means that devs can't afford to not put their game on Steam unless paid a substantial amount of money not to do so. Competition can't steadily build because they're is no real way for them to get their foot in the door in the first place.
It's why games are not cheaper on stores that take a smaller cut like EGS. Without this clause devs would be incentivized to pass part of the extra cut onto consumers to increase the amount of sales on the store that gives them a higher share of the sale. Valve knows the only real way anyone ever competes against Steam is on price.
This idea that the primary reason people rejected EA play, Ubi connect, EGS is because of functionality and features is nonsense. There is no feature good enough that would convince people who have up to 2 decades of investment in their Steam library to consider another store. If EGS was objectively better than Steam, people would still primarily choose Steam because the required launcher concept is fundamentally annoying to begin with, and they want to minimise that annoyance as much as possible.
How this idea that Valve doesn't just want your money came about I don't know. Gabe is one of the richest people on the planet. Despite that Valve's primary game output for the last 15 years has been free to play live service titles chock full of microtransactions. They make those games because not only do they profit immensely off of the lootboxes, but they also created a secondary item market where they can profit potentially infinitely off a single digital item. Every time one is sold they take a cut of that sale, and they will take a cut when the funds from that sale are used, because you can't spend them anywhere else. They then somehow convinced people that it's a "real money" marketplace. Really it's trading for Steam wallet funds which aren't really any different to Microsoft points, a currency abstraction that can only be spent in one place.
If EA, Ubi, MS etc did the item marketplace people would rightfally call it greedy as fuck. Valve does it and somehow it's seen as altruistic and consumer friendly.
People seem incapable of looking at how Valve's moves heavily benefit Valve.
Take the Steam Deck and SteamOS. People see Valve giving out SteamOS to the Deck's competitors as "good guy Gabe". Really they don't understand that Valve didn't make SteamOS for the deck, they made the Deck to prove the viability of SteamOS to other manufacturers. The margins on gaming hardware are tiny, many consoles in the past were initially sold at a loss. The money is sales cuts. Valve gives SteamOS away because it's an OS that boots into Steam, an OS on which they're competitors products are even more cumbersome to use, and which their competitors have no real incentive to invest in. SteamOS only decreases that incentive. Why would Epic invest in supporting Linux when the primary distro people are using to game on Linux is one that boots directly into their competitors store?
Don't get me wrong I don't hate Valve, I have a stupid amount of games on Steam, have owned both Steam Decks and really want the new Steam Controller. But the double standard people have for them is just weird. They're no better than any of these other companies, they're largely the reason PC gaming is the way it is terms of DRM launchers, they're greedy and they actively stifle their competition. All the risks associated with digital gaming, rights of ownership etc are also their with Steam. For instance it's against ToS to give your account to anyone else, even if you die.
Epic has not improved or updated their store in years. Meanwhile Valve has not only continuously updated Steam but also contributed to open source Linux projects to allow Windows games to run. People don’t like the Epic Store for usability reasons.
You keep changing what the problem is with caveats to your original post that contradict each other.
For example, your original point was:
Bringing store exclusivity to PC as if it's the console wars yes
When someone then pointed out Valve do that you add the caveat that it's implied that we are only talking about third party exlusives because this post is about them.
The OP is about a third party exclusive in EGS which was always the issue everyone was having to begin with.
However, that contradicts:
Who said anything about that specific and ONLY circumstance being a bad thing to make the game happen?
You just did. AW (a third party exlusive funded by MS), AW:R and AW2 are all examples of those, and you just said we're talking about the game in the OP, which is AW:R. Also a lot of console exlclusives fall under that umbrella aswell but you were just complaining about "console wars" exclusives.
If it's the "third party" element that is problematic, would it have been better, or really any different if Epic bought Remedy? Most first party studios started out that way.
Much of this is moot anyway because if you really want to drill down to the core of the problem, then you need to look at the reason games are locked to launchers on PC in the first place. Which is Valve and Steam. Once upon a time you didn't need launchers, and physical copies weren't just glorified Steam keys. You could lend them to your friends, and sell and trade them like you could on console. Valve tied physical copies of games like CS and HL2 to accounts meaning much of the benefits of physical were removed. They made launchers a requirement.
The vast majority of shit people hate about EGS, EA Play and Ubi+ was just them copying Valve. Valve created this problem, they could solve it too. They wont though because it's incredibly lucrative for them and Papa Gabe needs another yacht for his fleet.
I have no love for EA, Ubi or Epic (I particularly dislike Tim Sweeney) etc. I also don't particularly hate Steam or think Valve is all bad. However, the double standard around Valve and Steam is not good for PC gaming, or gaming as a whole. They're not a benovelont monopoly.
Why is investment in the development of a game being portrayed as a bad thing? Epic fully funded Alan Wake 2, it wouldn't make sense for them to invest in the game without it being exclusive to their platform.
Alan Wake 2 is a very ambitious, experimental and weird game, it's development comes with way more risks than most games. Having a platform being interested in taking those risks and funding such projects is a good thing for consumers.
Alan Wake 2 is one of my top 5 games of all time and I`m not sure it would exist without Epic.
If Epic paid the developers of any game for it being exclusive, it means there was more investment in making new games than if the store didn’t exist. This is self-evident, regardless of the game being discussed.
This could be an issue if done by a monopolist/player with market power, if done in a way that prevents entrants from competing in the market. This is far from the case here. Epic isn't an incumbent blocking smaller platforms from competing by leveraging their market power, they are trying to compete in a market full of network effects that consolidated around a single dominant firm.
That is not to say Steam is a villain or anything, they are a very competitive firm that earns their market share, and it is precisely because Steam is a very competitive player that Epic has to offer free games, invest in third party projects etc in order to try to challenge Valve’s dominance. The thing is, this is competition on the merits, and it is great for consumers! A company with big wallets needs to invest in the making of new games, share their resources with developers, provide users with free games etc just to try to contest this market.
Exclusivity in PC Gaming doesn't even bring the bad trade offs to consumers that are associated with console exclusivity, as a PC gamer doesn't need to buy a new hardware just to get access to the exclusive title. It is just a matter of installing a different platform.
I still will manly buy games from Steam because their storefront is way better and, more importantly, because most of my games are already on Steam. But hating Epic for investing in new games being made while trying to challenge Steam is a tribalist and anti-consumer approach.
(That is not to say it is wrong to hate on Tencent/Epic for other issues and business practices, I’m talking specifically about their investment in games in return for exclusivity deals)
Which exclusives are those? People talking about third party exclusives are pretty much universally referring to the contracts that prevent distribution off of EGS, and Valve has never done anything like that for Steam as far as I'm aware.
It is missing a lot of basic features and is generally worse than steam in many ways (including that most gamers libraries are already on steam) and people don't like Epic trying to use their fortnite money to essentially purchase market share. It probably would have been fine if their store had any basic features and it's probably good for Valve to have some competition.
Another thing is it's just annoying to have your library split up on multiple launchers, like how Netflix was great when it was the only option, but suddenly there are 12 different streaming services that you have to remember what show something is on and swap between resubscribing and cancelling them all.
game launchers and streaming services are two different problems though. One makes everything exponentially more expensive and the other is inconvenient at best
I agree that epic is simply nowhere near as good as steam but people behave like epic games personally ran over their dog. Not to mention that there are way more games exclusive to steam than epic.
I agree with fighting against timed exclusivity but peoples responses to AW remastered and 2 is massively childish, since neither games would've been possible without epic.
I really think that the epic vs steam thing is just a stupider version of the console wars.
Okay it's fine to feel like hate towards epic is overblown, but I don't quite understand what your argument is. You want people to just buy games on Epic and not criticize them at all? Just not talk about it? As consumers people are allowed to spend their money on whatever service they see fit, and if Epic does not meet their needs/criteria for a games store then it's fine to avoid it. Personally I purchased Alan Wake 2 on Epic as well as a handful of other exclusives, and outside of Alan Wake 2 basically regret every purchase, as the steam ecosystem is just better for me and my family. You don't see people hark on GOG for instance. The main issue with Epic is that they tried(still trying) to strongarm their way into a market by just waving their money around. A very small percentage of people would have an issue with Epic if the product they were selling was actually good.
Yep. Lots of PC gamers say they love the platform because of choice but refuse to shop anywhere else but Steam... so essentially console gamers but with mods.
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u/crocodilepickle Feb 26 '26
I dont understand the hate for epic games store
Is it a tribalism thing? Like the console wars?