![]() ![]() ![]() Why give away revenue to a third-party, right? Notably, we have EA’s Origin store, Ubisoft’s UPlay store and Activision-Blizzard’s. What do you think? Hit me up on Twitter and Facebook with your thoughts.Video games sale: Steam, Origin and Ubisoft are hosting their winter sales don't miss them Epic Games announces its own store, offering developers 88% share of revenueĪs the gaming community has grown and internet speeds increased, big-name developers and publishers have started shying away from Steam and have started promoting their own game stores. It's the near-term shenanigans that worry me. The question is how all this impacts the PC gaming community writ large. The market will adjust. Competitors will adapt and some will win and some will lose. In the end, hopefully competition does the trick. it's kind of exhausting (though at least not as expensive as subscribing to Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, CBS All Access, Disney's upcoming service, Showtime, HBO, Starz etc. How many subscriptions can we maintain just to see the shows we want to watch? How many PC clients can we install and keep track of to play the games we want to play?, Origin, uPlay, Steam, GOG, Epic Game Store, Bethesda. It's like the streaming wars in the TV/movie business. I have enough PC game clients installed as it is. I've been using Steam since it first launched. Nor would Valve ever require a game to release exclusively on Steam (or at least I don't believe they ever have before.) This would mean that developers and publishers could host their games across multiple stores, and gamers would then choose the store they preferred based on its feature set, UI, convenience and so forth. If Valve announced tomorrow that it was now-across the board-only taking 12%, we would not see this developer exodus. That would be the ideal solution in any case. Probably the only solution at this point, beyond Epic backing off this strategy which I don't see happening, is for Valve to adjust its cut ratio. The kind that helps customers is when one of those stores offers better prices for gamers than the others and we get to choose to go there to save money, or to have a better in-store experience. That's not the kind of competition that helps customers. Imagine if you could only buy physical games in specific retail outlets if you could only get Call of Duty at Walmart and Assassin's Creed at GameStop and Dark Souls at Target. The great thing about competition is it creates choice, but what we're seeing here is a restriction of choice. I'm not happy that I have to load Origin to play Mass Effect or Battlefield. I'm not happy that even when I play a Ubisoft title via Steam I need to have uPlay installed (at times making it impossible for the game to even load!) I wish you could play Fortnite on Steam, even if just to have the choice. I don't begrudge any of these companies for having their own stores, but there's no denying that it would be better for consumers if all these games were available in multiple stores. Our only choice now is whether or not to play these games, not where we'll play them. The Epic Games Store is slick but it lacks much of what makes Steam so appealing in many ways, it's just a fledgling shop, a work in progress, and now if we want to play The Division 2 or Metro: Exodus or Hades or any number of other games (surely the list will grow) we'll be forced to do so on EGS instead of Steam. ![]() In this sense, Valve is correct to say that it's unfair to customers, and especially so in the case of Metro: Exodus given that pre-orders were already open on Steam. ![]() Why wouldn't they with such a great cut? But making those titles exclusive restricts consumers' choice, forcing them onto a PC gaming store they may not want to be on for any number of reasons, from pricing to feature sets. By all means, try to get publishers to release their games on your store. It may have a monopoly, but at least that monopoly has remained fairly consumer-friendly over the years.Ĭompetition is almost always good, of course, but I'm not a fan of Epic's strategy in the slightest. More open, more free than the closed ecosystems of consoles. In many ways, Steam is emblematic of the Wild West that is PC gaming. It's a platform that many have rightly criticized for its abundance of shovelware, but it's also a platform that refrains from censorship (most of the time) and gives gamers access to a huge catalog of games. Before EA took its ball home and made Origin and Activision started migrating over to Blizzard's, Steam was a place you could find just about every game. We all play on PCs the only difference is how powerful our rigs are. ![]()
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