Valve “made a better product than we ever could” former Epic dev says “I don’t think we can ever build something that isn’t slop”

To quote the article: “Competition in this space is not only uninteresting to most Steam users, it’s actively denigrated!” He then says.

And then: “As long as Valve is independent and not a publicly traded company,” it looks impossible for Steam to be overthrown as the de-facto PC gaming marketplace.

(Sorry I don’t know how to do quotes)

This entire article tongue in cheek shows the thinking behind these ceos and how out of touch they are. The vibes I get from just scrolling here and listening, plus listening to the market in general, people are moving away from the evil, and ai whomever is least evil, wins the attention.

This guy compeletely ignores the inbetween the lines of his own words, Steam isn’t publicly traded, so doesn’t put shareholders above the actual product and it’s users. The ai isn’t used in the same ways, it’s pretty obvious to anyone who isn’t actively hallucinating , everyone hates ai.

They want an equal share of the market, and instead of listening this article (not bagging the article) highlights how much he instead sucks on sour grapes, and blames the gamers for being rusted on fans, rather than examining where they might have gone wrong, acknowledging and listening. The fact he’s unable to listen is going to actively keep users from Epic.

People just want to feel like they aren’t seen as cows to milk, in ever decreasingly comfortable and trapped ways. They want to feel listened to and be able to use the product. They don’t want to be force fed pigs pigswill and told to like it. There almost seems to be a fetish level hate towards the customers / consumers from these elitist idiot ceos etc. On a base level anyone could tell you that’s not a good business model.

The market is so fed up with all the things said out loud that previously weren’t. The whole “we own you” spiel from the top companies and ceos around the world. Gamers would more likely pack in the internet and retro game or build their own infrastructure (like has been done here) and ignore them all.

This guys egomaniacal take is just absolutely going to sink the entirely ship.

There’s an argument that steam take too high a cut from developers, but if that keeps it stable as is for a very long time, instead of tipping the scale and leading to a publicly traded company, so be it.

Capitalism breeds innovation crowd seems awfully silent

Remember when epic invented proton and fex and epic input and made cloud save standard and kept in game advertising to a minimum and …

Of course it’s not fixable! It would have to be broken first.

Unless he’s referring to the failure of EGS. That’s not fixable for other reasons.

I want steam hardware division to put their heads down and do what they did on the movie Ready Player One… like they can do it. They have the $!

😅- sorry should’ve mentioned that I want the suit part - wasn’t intending this horrible direction

“fixable”? There is nothing to fix. It gives consumers an incredible and rare means to access to a market product. When Gabe goes, steam will begin it’s slow and assured decline into yet another greedy corporate business model.

Even on Lemmy people talking about stock value fluctuations as if that’s the whole of the game for businesses.

To beat Valve you need to actually be trying to make a better store and delivery mechanism that meets customer needs. Valve is already very deep into meeting what most customers want and have asked for over 25 years or so, that is hard to compete with but there are gaps and its not impossible. Its impossible for Sweeney because he has no interest in anything other than keeping more money for himself.

Mfs do you think this is a game ?

But seriously, he’s not entirely wrong. Steam is an established monopoly and while now it’s fine as a platform it will inevitably enshittify and at that point it will be hard for customers to drop steam for a better alternative (if one will even pop up at all).

Completely unrelated related to epic. Did everyone see that itch.io got their own launcher. Also most indie games that have a steam version come with a steam key if you buy them on itch.

Well let me think some reasons to actually support Valve:

• Supports open source
• Doesn’t try to fuck up their customer base
• Produces nonrestrictive hardware
• Invents things to make gaming better
• Their own games actually optimized and work on older hardware
• Optimizes the gaming experience and helps 3rd party developers to be successful (literally opposite of Nintendo)
• Customer support actually work
• Non invasive opt in data collection / telemetry to make products better
• Filters away the adware customer is product bs
• Supports older hardware by updating / upgrading drivers that original manifacturer doesn’t anymore (less evaste, more opportunities to game)
• Developed SteamOS (Linux distribution) to keep Microsoft from vendor locking gaming

It’s the logical continuation of Gabe’s law. He said piracy was a service issue and that people would be willing to pay for the product is the service was good.

Epic tried and win by the venture capitalist playbook and give away free shit and undercut the incumbents to steal away their customers. Unfortunately that doesn’t work because their service is shit, and Valve has incredible soft capital built up.

Epic actually make a good product challenge

level: impossible

Yeah, and their unknowable secret sauce to win capitalism was to not overdo it and enshittify. Wild stuff. Who could tell that keeping your userbase happy is more productive in the long term than chasing “growth” at every turn?