It seems big game companies are starting to leave Steam.(Activation, Bethesda, Epic Games) Thoughts?

How do SG users feel about all this?

It would be fun if Steam turned into an indie-only (or mostly) portal, after they enabled the Rise of the Indies.

As for AAA, it is well known that they cannot just be happy with "an insane truckload of money" because they want "all of the monnies", which is one of the key differences between Valve and them.

While I personally don't have a lot of interest in AAA games, no doubt these walled gardens are going to make like more inconvenient, and very likely more expensive, too.

It's also kind of funny, in a perverse way, that some gamers are going "HOORAY competition", when the switch to walled gardens obviously is in the spirit of reducing competition, as well as increasing margins. If the big names could turn the market into 100% oligopolistic collusion at the snap of their fingers, kill Steam in the process, they would do so without batting an eyelash, so they can squeeze even the last drop of blood out of gamers (perhaps someone remembers not very fondly the state of PC gaming before Steam brought on its renaissance?)

One's got to appreciate the irony of the poor applauding the Robber Barons like they were the next Robin Hood, who's going to steal money from Valve to give it to poor gamers.

Most publishers/developers take their game to Steam because it will give them good exposure and sales. Activision Blizzard honestly doesn't need to do put their games on Steam, they have Battlenet which gives plenty of exposure and they don't need to give anyone a % of their sales. Not everyone is Activision Blizzard though. There's plenty of AAA studios working with massively popular IPs that still needs Valve/Steam to help bring in sales.

Then there's the beast known as Fortnite. The Epic Games Store/Launcher is where you are going to see a lot of devs gravitate towards. With Fortnite being such a huge success all eyes are on them which puts their store/launcher in the spotlight as well. Throw in the fact that Epic only takes 12% compared to Valve who takes 20-30% game revenue and devs/publishers are going to want to start dealing with them more.

I admit I would prefer Steam for the PC releases, but I won't blame other companies for choosing to use their own clients. Valve collects up to a third of the profits, understandable that companies would rather build their own client for less.

Still, I already play games on various services. I have both Sony and Nintendo systems, along with an original XBox (though gave up on the later ones since my experience with the 360 was so poor), and I tend to just want to play and enjoy my games. Where I play it doesn't matter as much as that. PC, console, handheld, even my phone, if I'm having fun, it is doing the job it needs to do.

If you want to buy and play game X, you browse places Y where it's available, and you buy it from Z based on your choice, which is very likely to be affected by offered price, discounts, platform preferences, popularity and more.

If over time more publishers decide to release on Epic (assuming Valve won't introduce any changes), more AAA games will be available there, with less being available on Steam. This will result in you by definition getting more games from Epic than on Steam, eventually switching to Epic being your preference. This won't happen over one week or a month, but it will happen across years if people start to ditch Steam for other platforms. Just because right now I have 8k+ library on Steam doesn't mean that I can't have another 8k library on Epic if I decide that I'm interested enough to buy there.

I don't see any problem with this. If game being exclusive in store X is too much for one person to handle, then you're free to not buy it to begin with. Every publisher has a choice where he wants to make his game available for purchase, and you as a customer either agree with this, or move on. Steam won't be an easy enemy to overcome for Epic, but I already said that more competition is always good for the customers, even if you'll outright refuse to use it ever in the future, it'll still improve your relations with the company you decided to stick with.

My opinion is simple, I'll buy the game where it's available for the cheapest, where I'll enjoy the service and where I'll agree with the policy. If this means that my Steam becomes Indie store with all AAA releases being available from Epic, I don't see anything bad in this outcome. If anything, it'll push big fat Gabe to actually do something and try to fight for the market instead of assuming it's given to him. This can only result in better conditions for everybody, except companies that are fighting for their market share. I'm not losing anything in the process, it's not like there will be less games available because Epic opened their store. Let them prove being worthy enemy, and then we'll all enjoy the division of Steam's monopoly, which I'm looking very forward to. As a customer, nothing better can happen to me, because I vote with my wallet and if I can further define which platform gets a cut out of that wallet, it increases the possibilities and convenience for me because more companies fight for that cut.

In principle, i don't really care, being as most of those studios only release one or two big titles a year, and honestly I'm not that interested in them anyway. I don't mind having them installed and running when I want to play a game. BUT... I have 30 games on origin, 5 exclusively on uplay, 2 on blizzard and 2500 on steam. Guess which platform I open whenever I feel like gaming. I have not played or installed one of those other games outside of overwatch for the last 2 years at least.
Steam is a mess at times, but there's also a lot of things it does right, that other platforms will need to match if ever they hope to gain a proper foothold. They are holding onto this idea that they can launch a store on the strength of their exclusives, and people will buy other third party games while they are there. But it doesn't happen. People have the launchers only for the exclusives and get all their third party games on steam. For me, the reasons why I do that are simple...

Valve made it easy for developers to get keys (at no cost to them as well). So I find it funny that they are complaining about the cut valve takes, when they can generate keys, and sell them on their own storefronts without valve making a cent. But anyway, the result of this is bundles. So many bundles. So many cheap games I will never play, but I love going through my library when I've finished a game and finding the next one to play.

There's a very active community, and each game has a host of community features available. I've yet to see game exclusive guides, discussion forums, artwork and screenshots for each game easily available on the other platforms.

Personal profiles and achievements. None of the other platforms really give me the feeling that my profile is mine. I enjoy beating games, so I love being able to show that on my profile. I love that I can change the look of my profile. It feels like this is my little PC gaming home. All the others feel a bit too clinical and constricted.

A public api. It's the reason a site like this can exist. It also means I can track my progress through excellent third party sites like completionist.

Lack of moderation. This is a bad thing in many ways, especially for developers, as it can mean they feel like their games are drowning in other rubbish. But it also means as gamers, just about every genre is awash with games to play. And there are just so many amazing indie games and golden oldies on steam, it would take another platform a lot to rival that.

The trading cards and community market. Less enticing for me, but honestly as by product of the bundles, I've turned a lot of cheap trading cards into decent games, especially come sale time. Money for nothing? yes please.

So yeah I think a little competition might actually be good, but it's going to take something exceptional for me to convert my main platform from steam at this point.

Thoughts: I almost exclusively play indie and smaller publishers games these days, so if all the big ones leave, oh well ¯_(ツ)_/¯

But more seriously; Steams complete lack of quality control has made it so even if someone only wanted to play AAA games they may have a hard time finding out some of them exist on the store. The 30% cut is only one aspect of why these publishers/developers are deciding to jump ship.

I use Steam because 90% of my digital games are there. If it's necessary to migrate, I'll do so but I have a lot of unfinished and fun online games on Steam so..

I am boycotting EA, Ubisoft and Activision Blizzard. Bethesda's games are not interesting to me. Accordingly I don't care if these companies are on Steam or not. I hope they all crash and burn because of all their cancerous policies.

As if I'd ever use the Epic Games store--

Ah, fuck, they got me.

I've invested too much in Steam to leave Steam, and I don't want tons of launchers so... They just lose my money. Only way I'll move to another launcher is if they give me all the games I own on steam.

Let's just go back to discs.

Competition is good. If enough heat is brought to Steam, they will improve in the areas that need to be improved upon to keep up with competition. The problem is, there hasn't been much serious competition Steam's had to deal with. Hopefully, that will keep changing for the better.

do i want their game?
NO

then there's that

As most people here I'd also like to have all my games in one launcher but I ultimatelly can live with the fragmentation, is not that big of a deal. On the other hand, despite bugs and what not steam continues to offer the best client and the most services of any of the multiple alternatives out there only really being rivaled by gog in some areas. Other clients will continue to be a minor annoyance I have to deal with for certain exclusives, but they won't become a replacement for steam (also my library is so large that valve has me by the balls in essence).

Don't really care about their games.
But I'm curious if any JP publisher would follow (i.e. making it exclusive to their own store/launcher, cutting steam out).
Would they even do it?

It's not just video games, take look at media streaming services. Everyone wants to have their own direct conduit to their customers. The proof is in the pudding.

So I've been wondering: If worst case scenario happens, the companies leave steam and the site/launcher sinks into oblivion one day, what would happen to the games in the library? I haven't invested much in the steam store, but I'm sure some people out there have collections that are worth a fortune. Many of the games don't require internet to run. Would they become lost and inaccessible?

everyone wants to be the next steam, everyone thinks they'll have the potential to take down the behemoth..

As for Beth, i'm almost 100% sure the one game they haven't released on steam Fallout 76 will eventually get brought to steam and released, much like TESO,,, will just be 6 months to a year until it's there.. Makes almost no sense to not release on steam, even if its after a period of time..

I like having my PC games all in one place, so I'm not going to jump ship from Steam lightly. I could see it happening in the far future if some other launcher/store has exclusively managed to grab more than a couple of titles I'm interested in, but so far Steam still has big enough selection coming onto it.

Doesn't really bother me, I care more about playing a game I want to play, than where do I need to go to play it. Though like 4/5 AAA game doesn't interest me, so not that huge of an issue.

there was a time when p2p ruled the digital music.
then itunes came and was the incumbent.
then other players came to propose different formulas and died (ISP, small internet radios). a few resisted and became bigger (spotify, deezer).
then other big players came with a business plan to battle the incumbent using formulas that proven successful and proposing different pay schemes (amazon music, google music). even the incumbent had to evolve the classic pay scheme.
now digital music is flat tariffs, you can still buy digital downloads, but I guess just a few do that.
itunes is still limited to one platform, the others are multiplatform and, without job's rdf, have simply too many advantages to be denied.
I see a parallelism with digital gaming; and one of these days someone with power will transition to flat tariff model, and all the pack behind.

Instead of playing with Valve's ball, now everybody is getting a ball! and taking it home

I have games in so many places that I don't even know what games I have. Which is fine because I hardly play anything anyway.

In the end, I think it's like with the current video streaming market, where companies like Disney and CBS are trying their own services and taking content out of Netflix and the like. It's interesting to see how it will end up, in both cases.