Will you buy it there ?
Agreed, I'm all for for it when it means the Indie Devs will make more money but i will not be supporting all of this crap with numerous launchers, fun thing about PC gaming is that there are thousands of games so skipping out on one here and there isn't a big loss.
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There exist monopolies in varying degrees and Steam definitely fit all the techinical critearia of a monopoly:
Text book definiton of a monopoly.
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That text book is wrong. And you as well.
Steam doesn't control the supply as it is not the only one on the market. Not as a distributor and neither as a platform. Mono means one, Steam can't be monopoly as long as you can get the same product elsewhere. Which you can. Not only there's a huge console market of digital games, not even as a PC platform they are the monopoly.
It is not. There is no way Steam can prevent other companies to join the venture. Exhibit A - Epic Game Store. Steam was a pioneer of digital distribution of video games but since then, many other joined and a little side note - Steam never pulled any exclusivity bullshit on them. And their user base and its loyalty is not an entry barrier, neither applicable or relevant aspect in that matter. Customers can leave whenever they want, they can freely buy and use products from other companies. How can you quality of service and customer loyalty classify as "huge entry barrier". I mean - I don't even.
They didn't restricted key distribution - they limited it and for reasons obvious. Nothing against the law there. I wouldn't even label it as a move against competition as they were only protecting themselves. Again, they didn't restricted anything and they still allow 3rd party resellers to distribute their keys. They just don't want it to be exploited which is understandable and the way they did it, was reasonable as far as I'm concerned. The only developers who suffered from that, were the ones exploiting Steam.
Debatable and I would argue against it. Little or no responsiveness is nowhere near what Steam is doing. They don't need to keep innovating (you're right there) but they still do. They innovate much more than their competition, namely Uplay, Origin, Battle.net and the whole console market. Compared to rest of the market, they are whipping out new features left and right.
So yea, Steam is nowhere near being a monopoly.
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Valve even admitted that they are:
https://venturebeat.com/2017/02/13/valve-wont-manually-curate-steam-because-it-dominates-pc-gaming/
Although, you are free to go to them and say "Hey guys, I know you have your data about dominating the market, but I know better how big you are than you yourselves."
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In the US, a market share of greater than fifty percent has been necessary for courts to find the existence of monopoly power. In 2011, Forbes estimated Steam market share to be between 50-70%. This article from 2017 says it controls 50 to 80% of the global games distribution market.
Therefore, yes, Steam has monopoly power over the PC gaming market and somehow, facts are wrong, but you're are right. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I highly recommend you to read the first article, if you wanna learn more about monopolies. I could sent you some papers on the subject as well, if you want. Just let me know. :)
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Thanks for the links but these are not facts but estimates provided by journalists so yeah, these 'facts' might as well be wrong. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I wasn't talking about resellers. I was talking about direct competition in field of digital distribution of video games, e.g. Uplay, Origin, GoG, battle.net, Microsoft Store, PSN, Bethesda Launcher, Epic Game Store and even more niche platforms like Nutaku, itch.io and so on. About solely a DD of PC gaming - I don't know (as I don't have the numbers) but I would tend to believe that might easily have more than 50% share of the market, mostly thanks to the opening their platform for indie developers via Steam Direct (and previously Steam Greenlight). So in terms of PC gaming only, I might agree with you, but we could still both be wrong.
Aaaand I never said so. Those were your words. You specifically stated this being one of the criteria of monopoly definition:
"Entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted."
It was a clever line about me not ever reading microeconomics textbook, but it looks like you didn't read one and neither what you wrote.
And no, Steam is not so big that others are discouraged others from even trying. That's why there is Uplay, Origin, GoG, battle.net, Microsoft Store and two new digital distribution platforms that opened their services in mere what... last two months or so? And we will definitely see more coming soon. If something, major publishers seem to be more and more encouraged to start their own platforms and depart from Steam altogether. Unfortunately, they all are failing to provide a better service than Steam does, which is main reason why Steam remains at the top.
"They had to respond to this exploit, but what stops them from "protecting themselves" against other people in the future as well? "
Well the thing is that I don't see into future so I can only talk about past or preferably present.
About the GOG thing... if the CDPR denied GMG the distribution rights, what does that have to do with Steam? I fail to see a connection between CDPR not choosing GMG as the distribution rights holder and therefore direct and official reseller and Steam being monopoly, but hey, maybe I just didn't read enough textbooks :)
I'm genuinely glad we can agree on something :) Yes, MS and Sony use the money to make first party titles, but those are mostly exclusive titles and they are not making them to make gaming industry better. They are making them only to gain a bigger share of the market and crush the opposition. Steam does have many exclusive titles in its library (definitely more than anyone) but note that all of them are exclusive by a choice of the developer. They are all still free to distribute their games anywhere else and most of them do. SONY and MS on the other hand, are doing the exact opposite and hurting the gaming industry with their exclusivity deals much more than Steam with anything else.
Be that as it may, I don't think Steam is necessarily hurting PC gaming industry by it's huge market share (PC gaming is blooming more than ever and Steam is one of the reasons why PC gaming had its renaissance a decade ago), but I am definitely afraid it might one day.
And I'm gonna go ahead and take a raincheck on those papers mate :) That has to a be a douchiest thing anybody ever wrote to me here :D
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If you don't consider sites like Forbes as a trustful source of information, I really don't know what kind of publications I'd have to list for you...
Neither do I, but I'm always pro competition for the sake of customers and Valve controlling such a huge portion of the market isn't good for anyone, but Gabe and his colleagues.
That text book is wrong. And you as well.
And this has to a be a douchiest thing anybody ever wrote to me here :D
I guess, we should stop here because this isn't leading anywhere. Have a good day.
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I want as many different launchers on my desktop as possible and all my games are spread out so I can't see them all at once !
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ya same here. i want 20 different friend lists. and i want to forget what platform has witch games i own. and i also want to eat up more hard drive space with many different platforms. and i want my comp constantly updating at least 1 of my 20 platforms.
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oh i also want my games to sell different dlc's and give out different bonus's depending on where i buy it from.
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oh ya. i also want to sign as many licensing agreements as possible.
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Yes you want as many different company's having you details as possible, It's safer that way.
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I tried Playnite but I wouldn't recommend it if you have 10k+ games on Steam as it just freezes up when trying to collect all the metadata.
Also seems to be some issues with resizing the window and waste of space like this: https://i.imgur.com/U0f9V9p.png
Another annoyance that understandably isn't really the fault of the program, but still: https://i.imgur.com/8fweD4D.jpg
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So... Instead of having a Ubi game in only one (S/U) "not-steam" platform, we'll need to have it in two (E/U) now? Community isn't a "thing" nowadays for Steam, but Epic have nothing to add and this strike isn't smart because the reason that lots of people buy Ubi games is because they can have it on Steam.
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I'm thinking more about something that can handle the lanchers "dll's" to skip their need, but the app you suggested can do the possible better than i thought! I'm already giving it a try!
Edit: WOW! I've been using Despressurizer for a long time to manage my library and it still working like a charm, but Playnite can do Tag Search and it's something that aren't present in Steam. It can help me find some local-coop games easily. (I have Rambo and it's split screen!)
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Lately I like Uplay more and more so I don't see any point if Epic won't make some great deal and even that isn't such great posibility to make Epic platform competitive against Steam/Uplay/Origin etc. Epic should think more on exclusives if they want to get users money.
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Uplay launcher isn't that bad and the community works fine, from where I'm looking at, i think Ubi is investing in a way to bring people DIRECTLY for them instead of having a mediator (Steam) that have the "ways" to enchant costumers.
EPIC: Nothing
Steam: A lot
Uplay: Enough
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Even now every Ubi game available on Steam needs to run Uplay and any other way of buying Ubi games other than Steam gives Uplay key. So I rather play Ubi games on Uplay(and have those coins for in game items or 20% discount). Epic want's to get nice pice of cake called digital market but imo at this point they don't have means to bite it.
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Indeed.
What bothers me is the fact of having many launchers, i don't mind if Epic bite Steam share of anything else, but the costumers are being neglected. In other hand, we can all be rewarded with their fight for preference, which isn't happening yet i guess.
Steam's Hello Neighbor (Share of 20%) - $29.99
Epic's Hello Neighbor (Share of 12%) - $29.99
Discord is also offering all of their service with just 10% of share and i think they are pretty more "equipped" than Epic.
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After region pricing most of the times it's better in Poland to buy physical copy of the game on relase then even on steam sale(Monster Hunter World is quite good example). xD
Launchers don't bother me that much but if every publisher will make one it will be a joke.
And price on Hello Neighbor here is lower on Epic about 30% - it costs about 20$. :O
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mostly reason i buy on steam store becuz i make some money on market to buy game instead top up steam wallet
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Epic Games Launcher is the worse DRM trash I've ever had the unfortunate chance of using. So no. I'll never buy anything from there.
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Oooh, new viewpoint. If you have the time, feel free to go into it a bit more.
Next to all the "Too many launchers", "Steam monopoly" and "Epic is the best", this is a breath of fresh air.
I've had some shitty experiences with them (mainly by them literally not letting me uninstall their shitty launcher from my old PC, wish I was kidding.) but i'm guessing you have a different issue with them.
But yeah, if you have the time, feel free to go into detail, because I think I'm not the only one who wants to hear something other than the 3 main talking points.
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Aside from the fact that it can never hope to compete with other DRMs in term of features (lack of community-driven features such as reviews/ratings, chats, forums, achievements, guides, groups, wishlists, proper searching/categorizing, etc), the launcher itself uses all of my processor's power at all times it is open on my screen. It is also extremely slow in general, probably for the same reason. Games sometimes crash when launching games from EGL, and although I can't confirm if the launcher is the case and not the game, I have suspicions that EGL is the cause of the issue as well.
I honestly haven't used it much, but the few times I've tried launching some of the free games it offered, my experience was very disappointing. Until they actually put effort in making a fully functioning platform for launching games, I won't bother with it - and until they actually implement features which people are looking for (as mentioned above), people will be reluctant to consider using, even more switching to EGL as their primary DRM. But I digress - all I want is a DRM that actually lets me play my games without being an inconvenient to my entire system.
Obviously, not all people are having similar experiences with the launcher - I'm confident that some people may think that EGL is a decent DRM - not I, for my experience was bad. First impressions are very important, and now that my first impression has been "a broken piece of garbage DRM with nothing to offer", it won't be easy gaining my trust.
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Nah, I think that's completely fair and there's no reason to preface everything by saying that you haven't used it too much or that others might have a different experience.
If they're dumb enough to think that personal experiences are automatically presented as universal, then they won't be smart enough to understand the prefacing anyways.
But yeah, I can see the issue. I haven't checked the resource usage myself, but I wouldn't be too surprised. While Steam, UPlay and Origin aren't amazing with their launchers/clients, they have the advantage of being polished up enough that issues like that aren't common. Epic hasn't had that yet, so seeing issues like this makes sense to me.
Thanks for elaborating.
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A lot of big companies are uncomfortable with Steam as it is almost a monopoly. This is obvious. But Ubisoft is capitalist as fuck. They don't want Steam as monopoly but they welcome their revenue from it. Even EA Games have more foot in Origin. So i think, Ubi want to see how it goes. If Steam's crown shakes, they will try to go ahead with the decision to the next step. If not, they will be the first to go away from Epic store back to Steam.
Even though i didn't work at these companies, i worked at a reseller company which made me communicate with them all. So.. it's an educated guess..
Btw i hate Ubisoft for what they have done to Might & Magic franchise
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I never wanna use it, I'm so tired of adding more and more launchers to the point where you have more store launchers installed than actual games. And in this case who cares, you have to use Uplay anyway so it doesn't make a difference to us.
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I actually think that game developers that decide to put their game only on another platform but steam damage themself more than steam. Of course if a big title like a GTA, a Final Fantasy, a The Witcher or a Football Manager would come out elsewhere it would have the same success but the division 2 is not that big
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If the Epic Launcher does not provide anything usefull to the customer i can understand at least why they try so hard with exclusives.
But for that? Whats the Point?
It is not sold on Steam period.
Why should someone take the Epic launcher that does not add anything on top of the uplay one for this game?
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They should include a stick of 16gb of ram(free of charge) with every Division 2 purchase if they want us to have another launcher clogging our PCs.
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uPlay is actually very lightweight. 70 MB on the background. Considering I have 16 GB RAM rig I wouldn't complain.
To put it into perspective, when all launchers are put on the background:
Steam: 200 MB+
Discord: 190 MB
Dropbox: 130 MB
Spotify: 193 MB
Outlook: 85 MB
Battle Net: 80 MB
Bonus: Chrome 2 GB
Firefox 1.5 GB
Yep that's on my machine. 45% memory used and can still load Overwatch + Dead by Daylight no issue. All at once.
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What I meant was that there are so many apps that I have to run on my PC that it starts eating the memory, I'm using 8gb.
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Oh no... Not Tom Clancy's The Division 2 as brought to us by Ubisoft... What if all the AAA sandboxes and games advertised by slapping on dead people's names disappear from Steam? It'll be the end of Valve for sure.
I feel an emotion coming on... no wait, that was a yawn. False alarm everyone, as you were.
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Funny note: from Steam Top Sellers Ubisoft have 3 games in Platinium Tier (and two of them from 2018, beside Monster Hunter they are the only 2018 games on that list), additional one in Golden Tier, one in Silver and few more in Bronze.
They made Valve tons of money.
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I'm not saying them being gone from Steam is a bad development (if they start doing this consistently). Valve could definitely stand to earn less money, as far as I'm concerned. They've grown fat and complacent. (Unfortunately, the things they'd have to do to bind AAA publishers/developers more tightly to them wouldn't have anything to do with improving things for consumers, but that's another matter.)
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Nope, won't buy it on the Epic store. But I wouldn't buy this on UPlay or Steam either. Don't have an interest in the game ;)
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Hmm that's bit strange. I would think a big company would want their games on as many stores as possible. But I guess unlike the other games epic has captured, at least ubi has their own launcher which allows the sale of keys, so we won't be forced to use the crapfest that is the epic launcher. Most third party stores only sell uplay keys now anyway, so not that much will change unless you only ever exclusively buy from valve.
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You miss the point. You can have 999 stores if you want. But if each product is available exclusively at its respective store, you literally have no competition. Literally. This is, believe it or not, called monopoly. - when only one place has/controls one particular product.
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It won't be 2 big ones.
It will be One big one and Another One big one.
They will offer different products (I'll be suprised if Valve won't start their exclusive deals) and it will end with us having to decide if you want Epic Exclusive or Steam Exclusive.
And only campaigns they will be able to do is "yes, we don't have Game You Want, but we have Some Similar Game".
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Replying to all of you: Steam has the advantage, so they dont need exclusives, they wont go there coz they are well established.
Steam will probably exploit some advantage they already have or make new ones.
Exclusive wars arent feasible in distribution, havent you guys seen Origin? they have something going but its not a major distribution platform coz they only sell their own stuff, that isnt the case with EPIC, they want the market, so they will sell p much all the games.
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But developers set the discounts for their games, not the store. Why would a developer offer bigger discounts based on how many stores there are? I can see why developers with their own store would offer better discounts if you buy directly from them (i.e, GOG and The Witcher games), but for the rest of the games it wouldn't make much sense.
I think that even the Epic revenue share won't make a difference on prices. If I'm a developer and I choose Epic over Steam to get that extra 18% from the sale, if I sell the game cheaper on Epic I'm losing money.
Also, PC games get discounted really fast and much more often than on other platforms, so I wouldn't expect any significant change on discounts in the future.
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ya sry, i dont like being a wikipenis but every1 throws around the word dev's. dev's never do anything shitty. its the publishers the bend us gamers over backwards.
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I don't understand the hate towards steam. Every major store Psn, Xbox live takes a 30% cut. About steams monopoly ...what did they do wrong ? are they selling a 60$ games at 120$ price because of that monopoly?No....... Not to mention free online option on steam where in psn and Xbox live the customer has to pay a certain amount. Not to mention epic is own by Tencent. Just search in google about Tencent scandal.
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its because of monopoly and open market, on consoles you cant run other launcher, so you cant change those 30%,
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Shit/nonexistant community
Shit forums (two SG users got banned because developers abusing their power)
Steam Direct
Troll reviews with Steam not caring (not even about death-threats)
Steam still not caring about anything, as long as they get money.
Steam caring more about how the store looks than making the client stable, way too many problems with it from the end-user, and from the developers' side too.
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Shit forums
Steam still not caring about anything
If you don't offer the functionality then you don't have to care, so that's good for Epic.
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because it's cool to hate popular things.
nvidia? valve? microsoft? bethesda? apple? (ok, i'm kidding, apple is trash 😁)
hate them or you're out of fashion. :3
it's seems it's also cool to constantly bash steam and say they prefer gog and epic, while at the same time spend 10 hours on sg leeching...... steam games. 🤦♀️🤷
that's how some of the sg-userbase operates. ^^
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Sony and MS use this 30% fee to fund first party titles and improve PSN and Xbox Live respectively. On the other hand, Steam have't made a real game in forever and take forever to even update their client. Improved chat was one of the most requested things and took them years. Same for refunds. Big devs don't think they have a right to take the same cut. Neither does Steam because they just announced that they'll reduce their cut, but apparently it's not working as they expected.
I don't agree 100% with this, but that's what I heard from a dev. They think Valve grew too complacent. Instead of adjusting their cut, they chased after Hardware RIP Steam Machines, VR and stupid card games.
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take forever to even update their client
Even if they take forever they still offer more functionality than any other client. They were one of the first offering refunds, so even if they took their time they still did it before most.
They have also kept improving Steam, maybe the UI has been largely unchanged. But they did add Big picture, Steam controller (were you can pretty much use any controller and they'll work), family sharing, stream link (does any other PC store even offer this or would you have to use third party software?), workshop, VR functionality (that you mentioned), they just recently released Proton and probably other improvements I'm forgetting.
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Exactly, new stores will never compete with steam without a lot of steam's features. Instead of actually making a good new store with review systems, discussion forums, mod support etc, they just go the lazy and easy way - exclusive game titles.
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They were one of the first offering refunds
They were the last pc gaming store to offer them... They did that June 3, 2015. By that time all other stores already had some kind of refund. Origin and GOG being the first and still the best refund policies out there.
Anyway, as I said at the end, this is not my opnion, but what I heard from a dev that work for a mid-size publisher. Apparently, in their opnion none of these features you listed justify a 30% cut. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Origin only offered refunds for their own games not games they were selling from other publishers at the beginning (they do offer more games now).
And I really they doubt they were the last of the pc stores. And even then there are still the console companies which also sold digital games.
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I have no idea about console companies. I don't follow them. I was only talking about pc. Well, even it were just for their games, at least they had some kind of refund policy. Not sure about the date, but I remember refunding Dragon Age IIRC because I found a cheaper copy on Uplay.
I only remember this because I was really surprised to see that game being sold there. xD
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"Steam have't made a real game in forever"
They just had Artifact, which might be good or not, i dont know but it follows modern cash grab traditions, but card collecting games always worked like this and IRL card collecting games much worse.
Its also official that they working on 3 other games... since ages.
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That's exactly why I added the "real" part, instead of another microtransaction ridden game.
Besides, the fact that they keep saying that they're "working on x games", but haven't released anything worthwhile since forever corroborates to the argument.
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Sony and MS use this 30% fee to fund first party titles and improve PSN and Xbox Live respectively.
And I am sure the devs are thrilled that Sony and MS that are selling their games to funding their competition. /s
Also what is the PSN or Xbox Live subscription for? Steam doesn't have a subscription.
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AFAIK, first party titles are more than just a game. They're a "necessery evil" because they bring new customers to a platform, therefore, even if they are direct competitors, they are still preferable than no exclusive titles at all. Think about how many people bought a PS4 just for God of War or Spider-man. I'm sure they'll end up buying other games later. Afterall, the console is already there.
I'm not saying that I like it, I hate exclusives as a pc gamer, but that's how capitalism works. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Again, I'm not a console gamer, but I'm pretty sure both PSN and Live have a list of games you get every month like the HB Monthly.
Anyway, it was more about how they see that MS and Sony are using their cut better than Steam whose ventures all failed - some of them spectacularly - like the Steam Machines.
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Gamestop and other retail stores that take a cut of sales don't use that money to develop games, either. It seems more neutral if they don't. This is kind of like a publisher saying their game will only be sold at Best Buy and having the advertisements at Walmart taken down.
On the other hand, I doubt Steam and other digital stores approach the cost of renting physical storefronts, so maybe it would be reasonable to lower that cut.
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How come no one made an exclusive client for preordering yet? Like, you have to download a dedicated client if you want to preorder a game for 20%, otherwise, you have to buy it at full price. I tell you, it's a next big thing. Screencap this!
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