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A similar thing is happening in PC gaming. Tons of new stores making exclusivity deals to try to take from Steam which I don't think has ever had an exclusive

A similar thing is happening in PC gaming. Tons of new stores making exclusivity deals to try to take from Steam which I don't think has ever had an exclusive title. It's quickly ruining PC gaming for me. Thanks DRM.

ericd 7y ago
Yeah, I just no longer play EA games, even when I receive free keys, because it would require that I download Origin. And it seems like Ubi is starting to try to do the same thing.
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  Same here. I can play South Park: Stick of Truth on Steam, but to play South Park: Fractured But Whole, it has to be on Uplay. I wasn't going to buy it because of that, but then I got it as a gift anyway. I could handle Steam and GOG Galaxy as game aggregation programs, and sometimes check out Humble for bargain bin stuff, but after being forced to install Uplay to access the content, it would appear that three stores is my limit. Uplay, Origin, et al, with their platform-exclusive titles, can all suck it. If I need a library to manage my games libraries, I might as well put all the games in the top-level library in the first place. They are removing themselves from even the possibility that I might think about buying. I just don't shop there. If I can't find something that interests me on Steam, GOG, or Humble, I stop looking. And I also didn't really appreciate the constant upsell for SP:FBW DRM, and other Ubisoft titles, while I was still playing. They pulled out from Steam to not pay the "Steam tax", but they didn't lower their prices to compensate; they just made the "Steam tax" into the "Ubi tax". If consumers still have to pay it no matter where they go, they don't really have any incentive to shop at a different store.
subway 7y ago
> Steam which I don't think has ever had an exclusive title Aren't all of Valve's titles exclusive to Steam? I remember being annoyed that I had to install steam for some version of Counter Strike in the early 00s, and didn't think the situation had changed.
- denkmoon 7y ago
  There are definitely steam exclusive titles. Just like how people get upset now when they buy a physical copy of a game and it's just a license to download from the eshop, Steam did this first. I have a bunch of physical pc games that just include the steam installer.
  - denimnerd42 7y ago
    yeah this was big drama with Half Life 2. You bought the game and then had to wait hours and hours to download it on steam.
    - majewsky 7y ago
      I vividly remember game journalists writing angry columns on how Steam will be gone in a year because it's just too inconvenient. :)
      - denimnerd42 7y ago
        while that may not have been true I certainly didn't buy another steam game until I was on college broadband 3 or 4 years later
- Aeolun 7y ago
  I don’t think they are ‘steam exclusive’ titles so much as they are only released on Steam. They’re allowed to release elsewhere, it’s just such a pain compared to steam that nobody does so.
  - cjhopman 7y ago
    This comment doesn't really seem to make sense in context. Maybe you didn't realize that Valve makes Steam?
    - Aeolun 7y ago
gsich 7y ago
It's not really comparable though. You don't pay for the extra store itself, just for the game. With streaming services, you need to pay each one of them, each month to watch your stuff.
vkou 7y ago
As crappy as many of the proprietary storefronts are, I don't think that a Steam monoculture, with Valve taking a 30 percent cut off the sale price of every PC game sold in the known universe was exactly healthy.
- flukus 7y ago
  A mono-culture is not good, but most alternatives aren't competition to steam but monopolies on their own content, their own little fiefdoms. This is the same problem with video streaming, we don't have competition on who can create the best UI, the highest bitrate, the best recommendation algorithm, just multiple monopolies.
- agildehaus 7y ago
  I don't care about multiple storefronts. What I do care is games artificially being sold on one of them because the studio was paid to do that.
- Faark 7y ago
  I think that Steam monoculture was quite healthy. Probably a bit stagnant, but definitively not as bad as it could have been. Valve had/has considerable power but didn't go evil. I'll give them a lot of respect for that. Epic on the other hand scares me. They spend heavily on exclusives and will have to make that money back. I doubt this will be possible on just their share in a highly competitive market. Thus I doubt their long term plan coming to fruition will be in us cumstomers best interest.
  - vkou 7y ago
    > I think that Steam monoculture was quite healthy. It wasn't healthy if you were a developer, and were forking over a monopolistic 'PC game tax' to Valve. Or if you cared about discovery. Or if you cared about curation (Steam is full of crap!), or approval of games (Steam won't approve my game!). (These are two extremes of the same problem, and many people have issue with Steam's handling of it - they either want it to be stricter, or less strict.) Mind you, it's entirely possible that you were perfectly content with all of Steam's positions on this (As well as how capriciously they changed, year, over year... But if you claim that, you stretch my credulity.) However, if you were not 100% satisfied with the state of that storefront, its searchability, discoverability, recommendation engine, curation policies, and refund policies, then it would have been in your best interests, as a consumer, to have multiple competing storefronts. GoG gave Steam a kick in the ass about a number of its consumer-unfriendly policies. Epic is giving Steam a kick in the ass about its market-gouging 30% tax. The Satan-spawn of Origin, UPlay, GFWL are giving Steam an example of how not to run a storefront. I don't even know what Twitch and Discord are doing.
theclaw 7y ago
While I agree that all these PC storefronts are a complete PITA, none of them charge a subscription fee like these streaming TV services do. The added cost is in terms CPU, RAM and convenience. The multitude of stores is proving very difficult for independent developers that would ideally release on every store, because each one comes with different APIs, DRM and community features that require bespoke integrations in both the game and game server (if you have one). The documentation for this stuff is rarely great due in part to the secrecy surrounding the industry, and the speed at which publishers are knocking their own stores together.
- falcolas 7y ago
  > none of them charge a subscription fee Don't worry, they're working on that. EA Access, Microsoft All Access, and others are looking to fill that "missing feature".
  - gruez 7y ago
    You can still buy the games outright, and it doesn't look like that's going to change anytime soon.
    - falcolas 7y ago
      With some caveats today: You get them later than those with the subscriptions. Sometimes up to a week later. I'd also point out that on the Nintendo Switch subscription program, there are a number of games (such as Tetris 99) that you can't buy or play without being a subscriber. And so, I'd argue that the change is underway, today.
  - strig 7y ago
    These subscription services are a great way to try out games without paying full price. I spent 10 bucks on EA access to try out Anthem and it saved me 50 bucks in the end since it wasn't worth buying.
alanfranz 7y ago
But, afaik, there's no store with a subscription fee or a regional lock. So yeah, it's annoying to install multiple stores, but it's possible, and it's not a cost.
skocznymroczny 7y ago
Depends on what you mean by Steam exclusive. Most of the AAA games released in the last 10 years or so uses Steamworks. Steamworks is a Valve provided library that offers support for achievements in the Steam client, DRM, multiplayer etc. It also means that if you have a Steamworks game, you have to activate and play it through Steam client, even if you buy it in a different store. So technically, it's not an exclusive, because you can buy games in different stores. But even if you buy your game in a box, most of the time what you get inside is a Steam key and instructions on how to download and activate the game.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  "Most of the AAA games"? There's quite a few AAA games that, if bought / launched from Steam, will open up their own Steam-like application (notably, Ubisoft games).
- gruez 7y ago
  >Depends on what you mean by Steam exclusive. [...] So technically, it's not an exclusive, because you can buy games in different stores. Sounds like an exclusive to me. You could buy Days Gone (a "ps4 exclusive") from walmart and gamestop (so there's competition at the retail level), but you're still locked to the PS4 platform. It's slightly different for PC because you could conceivably get the cracked version without steam and that steam is free, but arguing it's not an exclusive because you can buy at multiple retailers is a weak argument.
- FeepingCreature 7y ago
  Sure but it's not like Valve forces or pays the devs to exclusively ship with Steamworks.
jcadam 7y ago
I haven't bought a new PC game in at least 5 years. I rarely play console games anymore either. As a kid I was addicted to video games and dreamed of working in the industry (that dream is what got me started programming at 8). Now, at 39, I've lost all interest.

ericd 7y ago

Yeah, I just no longer play EA games, even when I receive free keys, because it would require that I download Origin. And it seems like Ubi is starting to try to do the same thing.

logfromblammo 7y ago
Same here. I can play South Park: Stick of Truth on Steam, but to play South Park: Fractured But Whole, it has to be on Uplay. I wasn't going to buy it because of that, but then I got it as a gift anyway. I could handle Steam and GOG Galaxy as game aggregation programs, and sometimes check out Humble for bargain bin stuff, but after being forced to install Uplay to access the content, it would appear that three stores is my limit. Uplay, Origin, et al, with their platform-exclusive titles, can all suck it. If I need a library to manage my games libraries, I might as well put all the games in the top-level library in the first place. They are removing themselves from even the possibility that I might think about buying. I just don't shop there. If I can't find something that interests me on Steam, GOG, or Humble, I stop looking. And I also didn't really appreciate the constant upsell for SP:FBW DRM, and other Ubisoft titles, while I was still playing. They pulled out from Steam to not pay the "Steam tax", but they didn't lower their prices to compensate; they just made the "Steam tax" into the "Ubi tax". If consumers still have to pay it no matter where they go, they don't really have any incentive to shop at a different store.

subway 7y ago

> Steam which I don't think has ever had an exclusive title Aren't all of Valve's titles exclusive to Steam? I remember being annoyed that I had to install steam for some version of Counter Strike in the early 00s, and didn't think the situation had changed.

denkmoon 7y ago
There are definitely steam exclusive titles. Just like how people get upset now when they buy a physical copy of a game and it's just a license to download from the eshop, Steam did this first. I have a bunch of physical pc games that just include the steam installer.
- denimnerd42 7y ago
  yeah this was big drama with Half Life 2. You bought the game and then had to wait hours and hours to download it on steam.
  - majewsky 7y ago
    I vividly remember game journalists writing angry columns on how Steam will be gone in a year because it's just too inconvenient. :)
    - denimnerd42 7y ago
      while that may not have been true I certainly didn't buy another steam game until I was on college broadband 3 or 4 years later
Aeolun 7y ago
I don’t think they are ‘steam exclusive’ titles so much as they are only released on Steam. They’re allowed to release elsewhere, it’s just such a pain compared to steam that nobody does so.
- cjhopman 7y ago
  This comment doesn't really seem to make sense in context. Maybe you didn't realize that Valve makes Steam?
  - Aeolun 7y ago

gsich 7y ago

It's not really comparable though. You don't pay for the extra store itself, just for the game. With streaming services, you need to pay each one of them, each month to watch your stuff.

vkou 7y ago

As crappy as many of the proprietary storefronts are, I don't think that a Steam monoculture, with Valve taking a 30 percent cut off the sale price of every PC game sold in the known universe was exactly healthy.

flukus 7y ago
A mono-culture is not good, but most alternatives aren't competition to steam but monopolies on their own content, their own little fiefdoms. This is the same problem with video streaming, we don't have competition on who can create the best UI, the highest bitrate, the best recommendation algorithm, just multiple monopolies.
agildehaus 7y ago
I don't care about multiple storefronts. What I do care is games artificially being sold on one of them because the studio was paid to do that.
Faark 7y ago
I think that Steam monoculture was quite healthy. Probably a bit stagnant, but definitively not as bad as it could have been. Valve had/has considerable power but didn't go evil. I'll give them a lot of respect for that. Epic on the other hand scares me. They spend heavily on exclusives and will have to make that money back. I doubt this will be possible on just their share in a highly competitive market. Thus I doubt their long term plan coming to fruition will be in us cumstomers best interest.
- vkou 7y ago
  > I think that Steam monoculture was quite healthy. It wasn't healthy if you were a developer, and were forking over a monopolistic 'PC game tax' to Valve. Or if you cared about discovery. Or if you cared about curation (Steam is full of crap!), or approval of games (Steam won't approve my game!). (These are two extremes of the same problem, and many people have issue with Steam's handling of it - they either want it to be stricter, or less strict.) Mind you, it's entirely possible that you were perfectly content with all of Steam's positions on this (As well as how capriciously they changed, year, over year... But if you claim that, you stretch my credulity.) However, if you were not 100% satisfied with the state of that storefront, its searchability, discoverability, recommendation engine, curation policies, and refund policies, then it would have been in your best interests, as a consumer, to have multiple competing storefronts. GoG gave Steam a kick in the ass about a number of its consumer-unfriendly policies. Epic is giving Steam a kick in the ass about its market-gouging 30% tax. The Satan-spawn of Origin, UPlay, GFWL are giving Steam an example of how not to run a storefront. I don't even know what Twitch and Discord are doing.

theclaw 7y ago

While I agree that all these PC storefronts are a complete PITA, none of them charge a subscription fee like these streaming TV services do. The added cost is in terms CPU, RAM and convenience. The multitude of stores is proving very difficult for independent developers that would ideally release on every store, because each one comes with different APIs, DRM and community features that require bespoke integrations in both the game and game server (if you have one). The documentation for this stuff is rarely great due in part to the secrecy surrounding the industry, and the speed at which publishers are knocking their own stores together.

falcolas 7y ago
> none of them charge a subscription fee Don't worry, they're working on that. EA Access, Microsoft All Access, and others are looking to fill that "missing feature".
- gruez 7y ago
  You can still buy the games outright, and it doesn't look like that's going to change anytime soon.
  - falcolas 7y ago
    With some caveats today: You get them later than those with the subscriptions. Sometimes up to a week later. I'd also point out that on the Nintendo Switch subscription program, there are a number of games (such as Tetris 99) that you can't buy or play without being a subscriber. And so, I'd argue that the change is underway, today.
- strig 7y ago
  These subscription services are a great way to try out games without paying full price. I spent 10 bucks on EA access to try out Anthem and it saved me 50 bucks in the end since it wasn't worth buying.

alanfranz 7y ago

But, afaik, there's no store with a subscription fee or a regional lock. So yeah, it's annoying to install multiple stores, but it's possible, and it's not a cost.

skocznymroczny 7y ago

Depends on what you mean by Steam exclusive. Most of the AAA games released in the last 10 years or so uses Steamworks. Steamworks is a Valve provided library that offers support for achievements in the Steam client, DRM, multiplayer etc. It also means that if you have a Steamworks game, you have to activate and play it through Steam client, even if you buy it in a different store. So technically, it's not an exclusive, because you can buy games in different stores. But even if you buy your game in a box, most of the time what you get inside is a Steam key and instructions on how to download and activate the game.

Cthulhu_ 7y ago
"Most of the AAA games"? There's quite a few AAA games that, if bought / launched from Steam, will open up their own Steam-like application (notably, Ubisoft games).
gruez 7y ago
>Depends on what you mean by Steam exclusive. [...] So technically, it's not an exclusive, because you can buy games in different stores. Sounds like an exclusive to me. You could buy Days Gone (a "ps4 exclusive") from walmart and gamestop (so there's competition at the retail level), but you're still locked to the PS4 platform. It's slightly different for PC because you could conceivably get the cracked version without steam and that steam is free, but arguing it's not an exclusive because you can buy at multiple retailers is a weak argument.
FeepingCreature 7y ago
Sure but it's not like Valve forces or pays the devs to exclusively ship with Steamworks.

jcadam 7y ago

I haven't bought a new PC game in at least 5 years. I rarely play console games anymore either. As a kid I was addicted to video games and dreamed of working in the industry (that dream is what got me started programming at 8). Now, at 39, I've lost all interest.