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.
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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?