Has Valve successfully cornered Epic?

They dangled a carrot for Publishers at the expense of the consumer, fully, and to a degee correctly, expecting them to jump at it and gamers bros to follow suit like big dumb-dumbs.

Tarring Epic store as a negative connotation seems to be a social media aspect their marketing team didn't predict. And no damage control from positive media coverage or develops sucking Epic off seems to have helped.

It seems to be a lasting stigma they will have a hard time ever getting rid of. Announcing a game is going to be Epic Store exclusive is like announcing your a racist who thought Jeffrey Epstein was a pretty cool guy. Especially damming if you've been crowd-funded.

I don't really care for either company.

Steam is really open and I love some of its features (workshop integration)

Epic offers a ton of free games and it's understandable that devs would side with them since they get a bigger piece of the pie.

But honestly I just want the freedom to buy and play my games wherever I damn please. This isn't console gaming!

I don't think so, at least not yet. Epic has a big war chest due to Fortnite but time is not on their side. Valve can ride them out by doing nothing.

As for EA returning, my assumption is that they are actually trying to convert Steam's user base to their client. Always remember the hardest part is some one to convince to install your app/client etc.

Yes

the new Half Life game being VR exclusive is not a popular move and isn't exactly helping Valve win back fans.

remote co-op games is a great feature but only applies to a small number of games.

given how many major games Valve has lost to Epic over the last year, I think its closer to the other way around.

STEAM > EPIC GAMES STORE which is crap

EPIC is cornered right now they got a decent engine but thats about it

Time will tell, it’s a bit too early to count out an Epic success but it does seem their bribing spree has lost some steam (haha). I for one enjoy the thought of all the shilling game journalists did about how Epic Exclusives were the greatest thing ever and would save PC gaming, going to waste.

@pc_rocks: EA weren't the only ones returning to steam this year. Bethesda and Microsoft also returned this year after leaving the platform.

Yes, and the reason is exactly what I said. Steam and China, they want the Steam user base to install/use their platform. Once the large portion becomes accustomed to it they will ditch Steam again. Outright competing with Steam didn't work in their favor so they want to trojan horse their platform via Steam.

@pc_rocks: Exactly. Buying EA games still means using origin and Bethesda games work through bethesda.net

MS seems to be the only one that sells its games on steam with no strings attached.

People still care about EA?

No

No lol steam is just as lazy as epic is, niether company is to he trusted, but id say epic throwing around bags of money has only helped the service, is it corporate and scummy? Yeah, but so is steam refusing to give similiar cuts to developers epic is offering, or giving us shitty card games no one asked for filled with micro transactions (artifact) or turning CS into a lootbox machine,

Now I'm supposed to think valve is great because they are bringing back half life.

Ohhh its VR, ohhh steam is pushing thier own VR head sets, good thing I dont gaf about VR, thanks steam... For bringing back one the most requested returns in gaming, and proving you are only doing it as a way to push your goofy vr headsets.

Gaben can **** off on his yacht, I dont care about Epic either, steam makes so much god damn money and they continuously give thier fans trash.

I say bring on more launchers.

Nice THread..

The idea from the outset was a great one, but forced exclusivity with cheques written to cover potential "lost" sales shot them in the foot. Adding to that, the distinct lack of even the most basic features, makes the Epic launcher a large pile of poo. Not even touching on the Tencent thing...

Valve (and other companies) will weather the storm, and hopefully learn a few things in the process.

Premier Origin could potentially work with Steam in the future? If so, that would be pretty damn cool cause I try to keep all my games on Steam only and I don't use more than half the launchers out now...

I don't think Valve has really done much new - I think Epic just is not doing a good job playing their hand. It works in fits and starts, but pisses as many people off as it scores hits.

I notice a lot of people are really anti-Valve (which I don't get) but Epic is failing to capitalize on that by creating their own ill will.

Interesting observation Steam has grown significantly over the past couple of years due to the growing Chinese player base. But would companies like EA really be able keep this player base if they pulled away from Steam again? Most gamers in China only learn about these foreign games through Steam and there are still many that don't even know that Steam exist how are significantly less popular platforms going to hold up? They're gonna have to stay with Steam for at least 4 years to get a large enough Chinese base familiar enough with them to feel confident enough to pull out of Steam or find a Chinese company to partner with that can bring a good amount of their games officially to China. But games like Battlefield likely won't ever be brought over officially.

When Ubisoft pulled out of Steam they we're at least smart enough to partner with Tencent to get Rainbow Six Siege and other games officially published there. Then there is fact that some games have no chance in hell being approved of by the Chinese government such as GTA V and Fallout. Gears 4 got banned on the Windows store in China so any chance of playing the Gears series in China will have to be through Steam versions so Microsoft really can't pull the Trojan horse on Valve if they want games like that to continue selling to the Chinese demographic. Speaking of which I wonder if Watch Dogs Legions will even be allowed officially in China since the theme of the game is almost a mirror of China's surveillance state.

Everywhere I look videos related to Half Life: Alyx are well received even people upset over the game being VR can't really bring themselves to hate it because it still looks great and anticipate it will be groundbreaking just like the other Half Life games. But yeah I do see some angry fans but not enough to make the game massively hated. Meanwhile Diablo Immortal videos still get heavily disliked even though Diablo 4 has been revealed now.

The main point of me bringing up remote local multiplayer is that Steam is continuing to evolve while Epic is still struggling with implementing basic industry standards to the point they've done away with their roadmap which Epic defenders used as justification for the platform being subpar because the features were "coming" at schedule times in order. 4,000+ games on Steam currently support local multiplayer so not really a small number of games.

I'm pretty sure Steam has more recent and upcoming major games than the Epic Store if not they're about even. For example Steam has and is getting Destiny 2, Halo MCC, Halo Infinite, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Gears 5, Age Of Empires 4, Apex Legends, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Doom: Eternal, Ghostwire, FIFA 20, The Sims 4 and Battlefield V.

The major games Epic store has currently and upcoming are Borderlands 3, Control, Metro Exodus, Detroit Become Human, Heavy Rain, Beyond Two Souls, The Outer Worlds, The Division 2, Auto Chess and World War Z. Epic's exclusives mostly consist of indies and AA games since they're easier and cheaper to bribe into exclusivity. Some of the games on the Steam side listed can carry a lot more weight than that what Epic has like the Master Chief Collection and Destiny 2 which already has 100K peak players per day. And for some games on the Epic side they aren't even a full year exclusive such as Borderlands 3 only being six months and RDR2 only being 1 month.

There is also the fact that since some of these games are sold on their own launchers despite partnering with Epic and people just go that way like how Ubisoft's Uplay sales gone up drastically since everyone who plays Ubisoft games on Steam likely has a Uplay account so why bother going through the subpar Epic launcher. I wouldn't be surprised if most people currently bought RDR2 through the Rockstar launcher since they already have a Rockstar account if they played recent Rockstar games and Rockstar had a promotion for buying RDR2 where getting the deluxe edition and/or a couple of other games with it was cheaper through their platform. Then games like Metro Exodus and The Outer Worlds were not only put on the Microsoft Store but allowed on Xbox Gamepass which is having dirt cheap promotions for the past couple of months. Remedy's recent sales statement about Control leans towards it being a flop but they couldn't outright say it because of the millions Epic gave them.

Probably not, but I hope Epic hurts Steam even more because the competition is good for the end-user.

Valve became super lazy in the past several years.

More like Epic made a huge dent into steam library. They are not getting the top titles anymore which most people care about at this point that sit on that platform.

Its even so dire they had to release a freaking half life game and had to sell there soul to EA to push there store and subscription forwards to get any content at all while EA probably pays little to nothing for it. Because they need some games on there client that isn't of indie quality.

Easy expansion from EA and there subscription services versus all the other publishers.

So far u want to play new top titles u will need epic.

Epic giving away games every week also creates a ton of goodwill unlike steam that does practically nothing.

And about its features on steam, i bet people buy a PS4 because of its features and not its games.

As long as epic stays investing into games and publishers to pull them into there platform first it will a bigger name every year from now.

It also helps them having publicity everywhere which steams lacks more and more.

Steam at this point is pretty much a portal for other game clients with endless indie trash. Because devs are fleeing from them with there own shops from the left and the right.

And about pc game sales, link me one game that didn't sold well. I believe metro did better then any game of there's before on steam, anno did incredible well etc etc.

The reality is people don't care about clients, only steamboy fanboys do. yet they most likely have multiple clients anyway but are just hypocrites at the day.

No.

And also, who gives a shit?

The Epic Store has a bad business model and terrible marketing. They've cornered themselves, and as soon as Fortnight loses popularity...goodbye Epic Store?

Meanwhile, does anyone know how well Shenmue 3 sold on the Epic Store? I can't find any announcements anywhere about that.

The way I look at it is this:

You have this one guy who is selling carrots, and has been doing it for quite some time. Over the years he has developed not just a market for all kinds of carrots, but has encouraged other carrot farmers to join him and sell the carrots together, splitting the profits. He has also developed all kinds of community stuff around the carrots, like carrot forums and carrot workships and carrot guides.

Across the street, a petty little shit says "Damn, carrot business be booming!" and he wants a piece of that action. So he calls his rich Chinese uncle and asks for some money to open up his own carrot stand.

But that's not good enough for the petty little shit. No no no, he doesn't want to earn his share of the market through hard work and honest business practices, he needs to resort to skulduggery; so with some well-placed bribes, he gets some carrot farmers to sell carrots to him and only him so he can sell them at a bigger price (the farmers are not dumb; they know 10 dollars guaranteed today is better than a possible 12 dollars tomorrow).

But that's OK, because the honest guy knows that good business practices coupled with not being a greedy **** pays off; meanwhile, the petty shit across the way only has a few kind of carrots, can't afford to offer discounts, and has absolutely no services because he is in it for the money only.

I agree with you in theory, but the problem is the competition is not honest. If Epic offered something that actually competes with Valve--good prices, a large library, community-driven forums and guides and so on, mod support, and all that stuff--that would be fine.

But they don't. All they offer is exclusives, and that's fucking horseshit.

Yeah the "anti-Valve" folks are just negative people that want to see the big guy fall, even if the big guy is the best thing they have going for them.

They'd rather eat shit and get two free handfuls of shit each month from a store that isn't a major player than enjoy a selection of any kind of food they want at reasonable prices with services to boot.

In short, the anti-valve folks are hipsters.

Your whole argument could essentially be reduced to "Epic has exclusives which is why they are better than Valve" ...

...and that is freaking dumb.

You people can't claim that "competition is good blah blah blah" and then cite exclusivity as competition. It's not! It's shortchanging the customer and removing the element of choice. I would call it "Cheating".

You would rather assuage your ego by supporting an alleged David in a "David vs Goliath", but the truth is the Goliath in the fight is Tencent-Epic!!!

I mean who do you really think is on your side?

...The Chinese-state-owned Tencent-Epic that is publicly traded and profit-driven, who's only real success up until the storefront was draining the piggy banks of tweens that play Fortnite?...

...Or the privately-owned, pro-gaming company from Washington that offers the best products coupled with great service and community?

And frankly, Tencent-Epic makes me feel dirty. "Ooooooh hey there, come over to the Epic store. I'll give you a free game or two. Oh look, we have this one game you want but can only get here and no where else. Yeah you little shit, you know yo uwant it, come to daddy. Buy it from me. Buy it from Tencent-Epic! Yeah"

Epic cornered Epic. There was absolutely no demand for anything the Epic store was offering. Anything Steam doesn't do other sites like Humble Bundle and GOG can do. All Epic did was try to rope in a bunch of exclusives to force people over to their site, and gamers saw right through it. Keep that exclusivity crap on consoles.

Yep it seems like at this point even if Valve completely returned to making the games they want they'd still be unsatisfied. Funny how some people think that Epic giving free games is somehow a major win over Steam not realizing the possibility that a lot of people like me are simply just logging into the Epic Store only to get the free games and not buy anything.

Also Epic paid for exclusivity of Rune 2 which turned out to be a huge flop. The devs claimed that the money Epic gave them helped them speed up production and release a much better quality game when all we get is this.

Valve can't really win with curation complaints. When they curate games indie devs complain that they don't get on the store and when they relax the requirements to get on the store indie devs and gamers both complain that there is too many other games on the store thus making it harder for them to be discovered. I think indie devs need to start getting over this. It isn't the late 2000s/early 2010s anymore where your game could be simple and short and sell a million copies. The market is a lot more competitive and Steam is an old and established platform so even with higher curation there'd still be tons of games you have to compete with for discoverability. If you think you can get by with just having your game on the store frontpage think again because a ton of other indie devs are thinking the same. Funny that some of these indie devs supported/defended the Epic Store thinking they were going to be allowed on so they could take advantage of its currently small library to get discovered only for them to get rejected too and jump on the Epic hate bandwagon. Even GOG which curates as well almost rejected some good indie titles.

Yeah, I agree. Forums, guides, mod support is what's definitely missing at Epic Store at this time. Also, their sales aren't that great either.

But, they're a good, solid competition which made Valve do SOMETHING. I believe Epic did a great job as a competing side on this market because Valve got EA back, and they got Microsoft on their storefront.

Personally, I don't give a shit about having my games on one platform. I already have probably all the clients installed on my PC. But I do understand some people might be against that.

But monopoly is never good for the customer. Never. I seriously want Epic to do more. This competition is great for the customer.

Epic made Valve finally realize that there's no such thing as loyalty among gamers. Gamers will buy games where they can get them and if a game is on Epic Store, but not on Steam, people will buy it from Epic. Not wait a year. Valve finally started to make their own deals.

I'm with you on this. I too have never issues about having different Clients install into my PC despite Steam & GoG are my go to Clients. I do use Origin more so due to being an EA Origin Premier which has it's uses, I only use EGS "if" there's a game I want to play that I cannot get it anywhere else (consoles isn't an option) and Control happens to be my most played game on the EGS.

EGS wouldn't be this bad if they stop buying timely exclusive on the damn client and spend that money on having missing features like they are supposed to. Epic ruin Epic for being mismanage.

Haha, my thoughts exactly everytime I open the EGS and grab the free games. I can't resist the free games, but above is the reason why I refuse to buy anything from EGS.

Thanks for the 30-ish free games I've gotten so far. But that's not gonna make me feed the Fortnite driven pigs that are actively trying to make PC gaming worse for their own profit.

It was lame to not play Borderlands 3 with my friends. But my friends are bored of it now, and I'll live without it just fine.

I don't care that much about having all my games on one client, but I do worry about having them spread out among too many clients. I really hated all the dev-specific platforms like EA origin, especially when there didn't seem to be any benefit to using them. GOG and Humble Bundle offer enough that's different from Steam to keep them going and keep Valve on their heels. I don't see what Epic Store does in that regard, and I especially hated the exclusivity aspect. It's like most of what I hated about Origin combined with nothing of what I liked from GOG/Humble.

Yeah I really don't mind the various clients out of principle--after all, I grocery shop at five different stores--I just don't like two things:

1. Publisher-only stores. It's not that bad, but I really just don't like only being able to get an EA game only at EA Origin. Origin has improved, but it just doesn't offer that much in terms of service. Uplay+ is slightly better as well as they have forums and news, but again not as good as GoG or Steam.

2. And as much as I dislike Publisher-only stores, I hate the next extreme which is bought exclusivity. At it's most basic, purchasing the rights to something you did not have a hand in creating, only to limit the availability of that product strictly for financial gains, is very unethical.

Couple that with a inferior service like Tencent-Epic Game Store, and it's just a lose-lose-lose situation. I also question their sales numbers; it's easy to say something sold well when the developer is paid a lump-sum that is the equivelent of 500,000 copies, but did it actually sell 500,000 copies?

-------

If there were more services like Steam and GoG, I'd be happy with that. I'd willingly install 10 different clients if they had a truly open marketplace, with services to boot (forums, player guides, mod support if supported by game, and so on).

I can sometimes come off a little rabid in my defense of Steam/Valve, but that is only because they are still the best option, and I refuse to let some pissant little Chinese-state-owned game store bring it down because a bunch of hipsters just like taking the piss out of the best and most popular thing.

@mrbojangles25: For all their faults, Valve is really good at what they do. Steam's definitely got some problems here and there, but they've built up a really user-friendly ecosystem with an amazing selection and good support features. A big part of the reason why they're still on top is because no one's done anything that would dethrone them.

We don't need Alyx, we have fake factory.

Basically Halflife 4.

It's interesting watching companies that aren't even the manufacturer trying to section off users.

It's like PC really wants a first party and it's embarrassing to watch it all happen in public so messily.

@uninspiredcup: That's incredibly ugly. What the hell did they do to Alyx's face?

Fakefactory modeled a fully 3D vagina even though you never see it in game.

Mans a perfectionist.

Apparently this was cancelled due to Boneworks being so gud-gud it made teleportation look trash, with Valve yet to properly implement locomotive movement.