Will you buy it there ?
Yay! And the epic monopoly doesn't have developer generated keys, so it's an even more monopolyish monopoly. 3 cheers for ... NO more bundles... NO more trading... NO more steamgifts. I can hardly wait!
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Epic won't come close to a monopoly. Steam is/was one. Steam can and should co-exist with other platforms. And honestly, it's good that Steam gets some competition. That's better for all of us. And don't worry, it won't kill Steamgifts. ;)
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Steam is a monopoly of platform maybe, but not a monopoly of choice, as we can buy steam keys from a lot of places, allowing for competition amongst retailers, and things like game bundles. The danger with Epic is that unless they allow keys to be sold anywhere with no payment to themselves, and if they keep pursuing exclusive deals with third party devs, we as consumers will end up worse for it, with literally 1 store controlling pricing on a bunch of games. (Which would be a genuine monopoly)
Yes it may not get to that place, and I hope there's enough consumer pushback for devs and epic to realise they need to offer consumers a better deal, but I was responding to Javetus, who was being funny.
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How will this be better for all of us? Seriously, I'm really interested. Aside from purging thousands of horrible indie games from the store and not letting them back ever again I can't see anything that could improve the average steam users' life.
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The Steam store is a giant that does not care about anything, especially the buyers, because it knows people did not have any other choice but to use it. It is like Internet Explorer was in the nineties. And when Steam's market share drops as drastically as IE's did, then we can get a competitive environment for stores that try to cater to the needs of the customers, like modern browsers do, not just be comfortable with the knowledge of "you have to give us money since we are the only one".
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Ok, what are the needs of the customers? That's what I'm really interested in. What can the existing or potential future stores really improve on? Because when people say it will be better I assume there are some things they want and hope they can get it some time by someone.
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A client not held together with the digital equivalent of a shipping crate worth of duct tape.
Support people. As in, actual people. Who do not close all your tickets with stock canned answers without doing anything.
A store that does not let any shit through just because they pay them money.
A community where a known extortionist cannot run the biggest reviewer group artificially faking game scores for some money.
Heck, a forum with actual moderation would be a good start.
Servers that do not shit themselves at each week or at every larger sale event.
Also, a company that does not go as far as breaking laws to hide how much money they make on overpriced texture files because they actively let an underground illegal gambling microeconomy grow out of their lootboxes, as it artificially inflates the prices of their imaginary products.
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I never had any serious issues with the steam client though I can imagine not everyone was that lucky. On the other hand my experience with the other clients were not so good and those don't have tenth of the features of steam. Origin repeatedly failed to start Battlefield 1. Uplay launcher one time forgot all the games I own for hours and couldn't play anything. Matchmaking with gog galaxy was a pain in the ass when I tried to play shadow warrior 2 with my friend (though that might be the developers' fault). Just a few examples I remembered.
I have experience with steam support and they are really useless. Unfortunately they are not that much worse than all the other support I had 'luck' interacting with. On average 47million users use steam a day. Even if only 0.1% of the users have some issue that is still 47000 tickets a day. Lets assume a real person can reply to a ticket in 15 minutes. In 8 hours that is 32 tickets -> they need at least 1400 support personnel so you can get an answer in a day. I can't really blame them for the automated answers.
Regarding the store we really need some quality control. 5-6 years ago being on steam meant something. Nowdays everyone and their mother can make some shitty asset flip 'game' and sell it.
I didn't know anything about any reviewer (curator?) group that does (did?) it. You can link me to that if you want but I believe it. The problem is influential people can make the masses do whatever they want. If pewdiepie or ninja doesn't like a game and shits all over it on youtube/twitch then people will mass downvote the game and you can't do anything about it. Though it is still better to have a review system to have nothing at all.
Forum moderation has the same problem as the support. Too many people would be needed to be effective. Until then mass report the posts and hope for the best.
Everyone has server issues on every site and platform. Unless you have as much money as google or facebook it is unlikely that you can build a server farm which works 24/7 without issues all across the globe. Moreover these farms cost a lot of money to build and maintain, don't expect valve to increase the server capacity considerably only for a few days a year. No one does that.
Valve was the first one with such a microeconomy. You might say that we can 'thank' them that loot boxes and paid skins became so popular in videogames. I guess no one really knew what the community is capable of until it was too late and it got out of hand. If there will be others who try something like this in the future now at least there will be an example how not to do it. Always expect the worst, what can be exploited will be exploited.
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Oh, you never heard about the Original Trader/Curator Group and their little scumbag of a boss? Here is some evening reading then:
https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/ZMFKN/original-group-network-controversy-thread-updated-8315
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From the top of my head:
Decent support. Steam's support is shit. They often give you copy-paste answers that are no help. And they don't even have phone support. When I have a problem with UPlay, I just call there and a nice guy helps me within minutes. That is good support. Valve is obviously too cheap to ever offer anything close to it.
The Steam browser (steam web helper) is not good. It crashes easily. I can't even look at my own games list with that piece of garbage. They should either improve the browser engine or streamline their websites in order to prevent crashing on their own sites.
Steam Direct. First they tried to save money for quality control by letting the users make the decisions (Greenlight). Now they scrapped that alltogether and let everyone with 100 bucks on the store. Other platforms do quality control. Valve would be able to do it as well.
The "no tolerance" policy regarding VAC is bullshit. There are documented cases where people got banned and marked for life (!) because of a false positive. Support ignores emails and just points to the no tolerance policy. Even threatens to take further action if the user doesn't stop sending mails about it. VAC should never mark anyone for life. That is so absurd. People are treated like an outcast for something they did 10+ years ago.
Bugs. Steam can crash. Steam's web pages / the browser can freeze. I often don't get the notifications properly. Sometimes one is missing. Sometimes it signals when there is no actual notification. It's been like this for a long time. You would think that a big company like Valve would have the money to hire enough good programmers to prevent all that.
Many of the changes of the last years were not made in the interest of the customers.Take the Steam gift inventory, for instance. We users wanted to keep it. They removed it because they could. Because they don't really have to listen to what people want. They can do what makes the most money for them. What reduces the most need for support, so they can save even more money. They are in a position where they can act like that. Hopefully competition like Epic and others will continue to grow, so that Valve has to start to think about how to please customers again, not just how to maximize profit.
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Your points are also valid but the issue is what epic/bethesda/EA/blizzard/etc. doing is not really a competition and it won't make the costumers' life better in any way.
To make it simple to understand:
We have game 'A'. Game 'A' is on store 'X'. Store 'X' is garbage. Game 'A' is exclusive to store 'X'. Even if store 'Y' is much better in everything people will still buy game 'A' on store 'X' because it is only available there. No choice. No matter what improvements store 'Y' makes to its store if game 'A' is not available there people simply won't use it. Is there a competition? Not really. Store 'Y' lost this from the get go. The only way for store 'B' to attract users is to make game 'B' exclusive to their platform. What about the guy who wants both games in one single place? He is fucked. Is he in a better position compared to when there was only one store? Hell no.
What real competition would be: Game 'A' can be bought from store 'X' and 'Y'. Since store 'Y' is much more advanced than 'X' people will rather buy the game there. But wait! Store 'X' has better prices than 'Y'! Now we are talking. The user can decide what is more important to him: better store or better prices.
The exclusivity bullshit is what kills the whole thing. I know that besides free games this is the only way a new store can grow its userbase fast but I still don't like it. If I want to buy a console I don't check the specs, the store, the user count. I only check what games are available. The same goes for the stores. If you want multiple games but some of them are on different platforms then you have no choice but to use every single one of them. Is that good? Instead of one icon now you have 6 on the desktop. Every time you want to play something you have to start a different application. Did this make your life more convenient?
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it isnt better, its exclusive shit, if games are in both stores that would be competition.
p.s. epic are ***** because in the past they said that pc market is dead and abandoned it, they dont deserve anything.
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sad but RIP division 2, steam got marketplace so you can not spend real money on games, epictrash store cares only about profit on hype with fortkid trashroyale, smart move ubi good bye
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The Division 2 is expected to shift millions of copies, so Valve will miss out on some serious cash.- lol, that garbage on launch wont be unplayable in first few months.
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its about time someone stepped up against valve. EA had all the chances in the world but they fumbled origin so spectacularily its become clear they never gave a shit about the platform - they just wanted to stick it to valve... I hope epic actually gets support from publishers and tries to make their platform as great as it can be for gamers.. we can only benefit from there finally being some kind of serious competition happening... make valve step up its efforts for once..
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It is an Ubisoft game, what kind of madman would be willing to buy it at all?
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Ubisoft makes decent games, so people buy them. What's so hard to understand about that? :)
I am currently playing Far Cry 5 and like it a lot (even if it doesn't beat FC3 so far). And I can't wait for the new Anno to come out. Will be a blast, as always.
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Too many services. Not good for the industry. Gamers won't want to keep switching services like viewers don't like so many tv streaming services.
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As much as i would love competition in the gaming industry that could only benefit us customers, but i hate to download boat loads of launchers to play games from different devs. I hope there could be a solution to this, a launcher that has every/any launcher built in to run all the game u own? xD
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The Division 2 is being sold there to bypass bad reviews.
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this, companies dont like players opinions if they know the game is bad or just a cash grab and no review system on epic store which makes it to the a very bad client and even if they say "its coming" they also say it will be only OPTIONAL for companies, so bad game, bad reviews? turn just off so potential customers dont see it!
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out of curiosity, what is the preorder price for division 2 for people out there. for me its saying 70 usd, which is.. well.. pretty pricey. so much for the hope that epic's store would be a more reasonably priced competitor to steam if theyre pulling this regional price gouging shit right from the start..
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Wrong.
No Steam, no Buy, no Games for you.
Big players leave Steam. Simple:where is sense to pay Valve if they can sell games directly?
And you? If you want play games you don't have option. I remember how typical internet idiots kids shouted: I never buy games from EA "because Origin". Muuaaaaaahhhaa. EA sold millions BF series, Mass Effect 3, Dragon Age Inquisition, NFS, etc.
Without big players with big AAA games Steam is trash with all this 5 MB Russians mini games.
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I played the first Division game for a little while with a friend.. and while we do enjoy shoot and loot games, it was too boring to keep our interest for long. Sure, the environment was cool but all the quests were the same thing over and over and the guns and armor were pretty much the same stuff with different numbers. We owned it on Uplay instead of Steam too so the client wasn't the issues as much as the bland, repetitive gameplay. Not to mention the whole thing is basically FEMA martial law propaganda.
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These French.
And now do stupid deal with Epic.
EA showed Valve middle finger long time ago.
Activision with Black Ops 4.
Bethesda with Fallout 76, Doom and Rage 2.
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well i played The Division 1 for 900 hours is Steam, from day 1. Was waiting for steam to pre-order Ultimate Edition paying the full price with some market funds and money from my pocket. Saw that EPIC now have the excluvise so i activated a VPN to Brazil, enter the Ubisoft Store, and preordered the game in his ultimate form for 42,90€ (120€ in Europe). FU Ubi and EPIC, now you have a lot less money from me.
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I can understand how UBI would want to have a piece of that Fortnite playerbase (from what I gather a significant percentage of Fortnite playerbase are not your typical PC gamers so EPG may be the best platform to get such people to notice your game, especially while it still has limited library of products in store). Dunno why this required them to pull out of Steam though, my guess is that they want to try to get all of the pie by making UP the lesser of two evils choice - having people who would otherwise buy the game on Steam buy it on UP since they refuse to buy it on EPG. We will see how that works out for them.
Regarding Steam, Valve definitely grew complacent but I feel like people have the tendency to dismiss all of the improvements that have been done on the platform over the years. Is Valve slow? Sure, but it also has to cater to a userbase of dozens of milions so Valve has to be very careful with implementing new features / reworking old ones. I also appreciate Valve's effort in different fields - hardware, VR, steam link - whether they are succesfull or not. They might not be making games anymore but I believe that Valve / Steam deserves credit for putting PC gaming back on the spotlight and I don't think that Epic's way of bruteforcing it's launcher by shoving money down people's throats, buying exclusivity for their platform in doing so, is the right approach.
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Every company complaining about the Steam monopoly, yet no one actually tries to give a better service just the same as always using the games as hostages.
Ubisoft is the greatest reflection, they have Uplay, they have the money, but instead of trying to improve his client to be a real competition they just grab de money and run
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Only Ubi titles I buy on Steam are the ones with Achievements, like Grow Home, South Park or just the classic titles.
Why would I want the game without all the benefits the Steam platform can provide if I could just pirate the game and get the same shit.
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Meh, not interested in the game anyway but if I was then in this sort of situation I'd just get it directly from Uplay instead of even considering going to Epic.
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