The meme of “Valve maintains dominance by doing nothing but waits for competition to trip over itself” is funny but they do put part of the billions they make towards beneficial products for their customers.
- Remote Play (stream your own game from another PC)
- Remote Play Together (can stream a game to friends without a copy of the game and play together)
- Linux, Proton
- Well designed hardware innovations
Not out of the goodness of their heart but to drive sales and foster a customer base willing to return.
GOG and itch do try in their own way so I have bought from them, IMO they are the only competitors making serious efforts to build a mutually benefical gaming ecosystem.
Epic, Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA and the rest are like a trapdoor with a wooden board over it. Tim Sweeney is standing there hoping you won’t think he’s trying to find the right time to swipe the board away and get you to fall in.
Family sharing got a huge upgrade recently too where now only the game you’re actually playing is locked instead of your whole library.
- Steam multiplayer networking
- Steam Input
Valve reinvests and does more work then basically every other major studio. It’s just a lot of back end stuff they don’t market.
Since valve doesn’t care about selling anything. Their service sells it self so they don’t need to shove it in your face.
They are a hardware and software RnD company more then a game studio too. Which is just boring to most gamers till there is a finished product or someone points out that x y or z was because of a decade of effort by valve in the back ground.
I have never had remote play together work smoothly enough to actually play. Even when on the same network the input lag is problematic.
It works great for me on wifie 6e, I did have issues using remote play from my PC to my deck until I disabled AX for the 2.4/5ghz networks on my router tho
Tim Swiney said on the game product page there should be no disclosure of Ai usage in the games, in response to Steam “forcing” the disclosure of what is being used Ai for. Just shows how I will avoid Epic Games Store even more than before. There are plenty other reasons. Epic will not buy me as a “user” by giving me free games (however I do not blame anyone else doing so, free is a great deal to be honest).
I check their free games once a week, and take any that pique my curiosity - after all, Epic still has to pay the actual publishers of the games, right? Then, if I enjoy the game enough, I buy it on Steam. Yes, for the cheevies.
I collected free games for sure. I don’t even know if I played many of them. Tbh most of them were older and would go on sale on steam and I’d just buy them there.
Also steams Linux support is so good, I just can’t do epic
It’s a moving target. Everything I care about video game stores now I did not care when it was new. Steam itself in 2003, need it to update to latest counter strike. By 2014 years later, I’m done managing updates for individual games by looking on websites online for downlads. I want a store client like Steam to handle that. Didn’t care for the first half of Steams life. I was still buying physical PC games when I could up to 2014. That’s why I said 2014
Didn’t care about linux Steam because it sucked until Proton. Since Proton I care. Didn’t care about big picture mode because steam machines bombed the first time and I didn’t use remote play. Now I use remote play and regularly use big picture mode because I buy big phones with OLEDs and remote play is great now because of that. Phones are why I care about 21:9 support as much as I do now.
Didn’t care about Steam Input because I was kb/m all day type of person. I play with gamepads more now. Steam Input is major. Indie games were less common in 2008 and a lot less complex than they are today. Easy to get the good ones because everyone talked about them. Now most good indie games have no reviews on open/metacritic. Steam reviews and curators point me to the majority of my purchased indie games. Also even the studio/publisher pages that Steam has now showing what they have released. That’s the other way I find games. Steam has brand pages for a while now. I actually use those like here for koei tecmo
https://store.steampowered.com/developer/KOEITECMO
Or smaller game XD. Played Icey and ended up trying a couple games under them through the publisher Steam page
https://store.steampowered.com/developer/XD
Library organization. Did not care about the collections feature until this year. Same with the user submitted store page tags. The collections feature can create from those tags and I make custom collections too to organize my big library. I just recently learned you can drag and drop rather than right click add to collection.
Sounds simple but it sucks on pretty much every PC store platform software besides steam. Managing multiple drives. Moving game folders between drives and the store client handling it well
numerous other things that come in handy from time to time. Like user created guides. SteamOS is more featureful than the OS’s on a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series before even exiting out to the desktop mode. Remember Mixer on Xbox. Steam has broadcasts and has had it for a long time now and it’s never been popular but they never killed it and now I occasionally use it to check out how a new game looks. MS would have killed broadcasts like they killed Mixer when it didn’t become a mega hit. Steam keeps it’s niche features ongoing and generally improves over time even if at a snails pace. MS and other companies, they just kill the feature
Latest thing that is just as much Valve as it is community. PC gaming on Android. Valve initiated funding for Fex emu and it’s paying dividends now that you can run a lot of Steam games on Android now. Same with recent versions of Proton/Wine that now have ARM builds for them. Major boon to Android PC game emulation. Eventually going to be a major plus for Steam in user friendliness compared to the storefronts not putting resources towards easy x86 to ARM translation support
Almost a decade ago I was playing a game called paragon in development by epic games. The game was amazing, and then epic forced the devs away from what the game was, a MOBA, and forced the devs to make it more like a brawler with smaller and smaller maps. Epic ignored the community playing the game and acted shocked when the community left. While all this was going down, they were alpha testing fortnight, which was a plants, zombies clone with base building. When PubG took off, they killed Paragon, rolled the assets into fornite, and abandoned what fortnite was to turn it into a PubG copycat. (Highly recommend predecessor, a fan made remake from the released paragon assets with og heros, it’s on steam.)
Epic doesn’t have an original thought rattling around in the heads of their MBAs and C-suite. They copy what others are doing, and pray that some of the shit they fling against the wall will stick. They don’t want to take chances or innovate. Plenty of other options out there besides their game engine too. I’m looking forward to the fall of epic and EGS.
At the end of your first paragraph I thought that if Epic are taking other ideas and implementing in their own games would work well in the long game. Just do what competition does, but better.
By the time my eyes flew to the first word of a second paragraph my mind acknowledged that Epic would never actually do something good for industry cause all they know is how to leech.
It only took maybe 0.04 seconds or so.
They got SO lucky with that Fortnite pivot, the original game was in development hell
EGS is a laggy mess and I can’t even play Fortnite, one of the top 5 most popular games, on Linux, because Epic Games decided they don’t like Linux. Other games have Easy Anticheat that works on Linux, but Epic intentionally chose to exclude those users, this is an encapsulation of why they suck ass compared to Steam.
I mean, I got a bunch of free games off epic, and have never touched any of them.
They don’t even do the shop or library right or well. Come on, their whole app is a joke. I’m glad their (epic’s) anti-competitiveness hasn’t worked so well.
I mean isn’t replacing community with consumerism one of the main goals of modern capitalism?
Epic also has a shitty UI. Steam’s isn’t great, but at least it’s mostly intuitive.
News flash: epic was never anyones friend or any type of “good guy”.
But a shop is all I want Steam to be.
The Steam “Community”
I feel like there’s a bunch of choosing beggars in here. Grabbed a crapload of free games, games they didn’t pay for, and complaining about how they’re delivered.
I have a crapload of free games from EGS that I never play because I hate starting that thing up.
