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We've had decades of exclusivity deals for one console or another. Those actually prevented people from playing the games without shelling out for an extra cons

We've had decades of exclusivity deals for one console or another. Those actually prevented people from playing the games without shelling out for an extra console. Total War: Troy is exclusive to Epic Games Store for one year before it comes to Steam. If you got the game on its release date, Epic gave it to you for free. To play it, you need one more launcher to go along with Steam, Battle.net, GOG, and various custom launchers. What is the harm being done here? I like Steam, but I doubt that it will be good in the long term for it to be completely dominant. It needs a solid competitor.

MikeKusold 6y ago
That’s a false equivalency. A more apt comparison would be if you could only buy a game at GameStop for one year, while all the Best But shoppers weren’t able to buy the game from their preferred retail store.
- jasonlotito 6y ago
  This is fairly common in retail. I've never heard a complaint about it before in that regard.
  - Macha 6y ago
    You never heard complaints about physical store exclusive DLC? It was a big topic for a year or two before Gamestop decided they weren't getting their ROI and it became less common again.
mrgordon 6y ago
Well not everyone wants to have to have ten game stores with ten custom launchers if they only have ten games installed Also Epic may control the release in some ways. For example, Civ 6 on Epic is PC only but on Steam it’s PC & Mac. So I bought it on Epic and then realized I can’t play with my friends who are on Macs. Why would I want an entire new game store, an app that they’ve chosen to make incompatible with one of the two major computing platforms, and yet another thing to keep updated, minimized, and logged into. I’m all for competition but exclusivity deals are overall negative for the consumer. It’s worth $10 million to get a new game exclusively for Epic to force everyone to use a store they don’t want to install or use because they’ll end up spending $100 million on other games. It’s an effective business tactic but it’s not exactly in my interest.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  Are any of the exclusives permanent? Because consumers can wait of they really can't stand a second launcher. I'd say the choice of launchers and stores is fine. Especially with tools like GOG Galaxy which can aggregate them too. Would consumers prefer paying 30% more for games to stay on the most dominate launcher/store?
  - damnyou 6y ago
    Epic exclusivity deals are typically for one year. Steam exclusivity for games like Portal 2 is forever. Of course, Portal 2 was a sequel to a game created by a studio that Valve simply bought outright.
    - mrgordon 6y ago
      No one expects Steam to put their own titles in a rival store. You don’t buy Halo on Mac
      - damnyou 6y ago
        Why should that not be more of an expectation? Sony has started putting out formerly PlayStation-exclusive first-party games on PC. Even Bloodborne may show up on Steam soon if rumors are to be believed. It would be a good thing if Half-Life Alyx came out on other PC game stores, in exactly the same way that it would be a good thing if a game like Control came out on other PC game stores. Our expectations are socially constructed and we should question them more.
        mrgordon 6y ago
        Look I think they’d sell more copies and it’d be good for everyone to have the content more widely available but it’s not always feasible to require it. A PlayStation game doesn’t just automatically work on PC and it probably takes numerous hours to get a PC game ready to submit to the Steam store. I’ve certainly wasted many hours localizing text for iOS app submissions and the like. With so many different stores to download apps, it gets increasingly unlikely anyone is going to take the time to cross list on all of them. If we wanted to change how this worked, I feel like we’d need to consolidate on fewer marketplaces. For example, apt-get has access to a huge variety of packages so I don’t find myself using the Ubuntu App Store or random third party marketplaces as much as I do with games.
therouwboat 6y ago
I dont care about free games, I have more money than free time. All I want is that games work on my platform, which is linux. They killed rocket league, because its not worth it to support platform that is used by 0.3% of the playerbase. Somehow they managed to do it before epic monies, but now its just too expensive or something. So fuck em.
- drkstr 6y ago
  TotalWar franchise works great in native Linux/Steam. I think I even got better performance than when I played the same (Shogun 2) in Windows on the same laptop. Kudos to CreativeAssembly for backporting all the old releases to the platform. One day all my old purchases just showed up under Linux and was installable without any fuss using the steam interface. Oh yeah, Civilization 5/6 showed up as well. You may want to take a look at what's been added recently. You might find something you like!
  - nacs 6y ago
    Epic launcher isn't even available on Linux unlike Steam..

MikeKusold 6y ago

That’s a false equivalency. A more apt comparison would be if you could only buy a game at GameStop for one year, while all the Best But shoppers weren’t able to buy the game from their preferred retail store.

jasonlotito 6y ago
This is fairly common in retail. I've never heard a complaint about it before in that regard.
- Macha 6y ago
  You never heard complaints about physical store exclusive DLC? It was a big topic for a year or two before Gamestop decided they weren't getting their ROI and it became less common again.

mrgordon 6y ago

Well not everyone wants to have to have ten game stores with ten custom launchers if they only have ten games installed Also Epic may control the release in some ways. For example, Civ 6 on Epic is PC only but on Steam it’s PC & Mac. So I bought it on Epic and then realized I can’t play with my friends who are on Macs. Why would I want an entire new game store, an app that they’ve chosen to make incompatible with one of the two major computing platforms, and yet another thing to keep updated, minimized, and logged into. I’m all for competition but exclusivity deals are overall negative for the consumer. It’s worth $10 million to get a new game exclusively for Epic to force everyone to use a store they don’t want to install or use because they’ll end up spending $100 million on other games. It’s an effective business tactic but it’s not exactly in my interest.

paulryanrogers 6y ago
Are any of the exclusives permanent? Because consumers can wait of they really can't stand a second launcher. I'd say the choice of launchers and stores is fine. Especially with tools like GOG Galaxy which can aggregate them too. Would consumers prefer paying 30% more for games to stay on the most dominate launcher/store?
- damnyou 6y ago
  Epic exclusivity deals are typically for one year. Steam exclusivity for games like Portal 2 is forever. Of course, Portal 2 was a sequel to a game created by a studio that Valve simply bought outright.
  - mrgordon 6y ago
    No one expects Steam to put their own titles in a rival store. You don’t buy Halo on Mac
    - damnyou 6y ago
      Why should that not be more of an expectation? Sony has started putting out formerly PlayStation-exclusive first-party games on PC. Even Bloodborne may show up on Steam soon if rumors are to be believed. It would be a good thing if Half-Life Alyx came out on other PC game stores, in exactly the same way that it would be a good thing if a game like Control came out on other PC game stores. Our expectations are socially constructed and we should question them more.
      - mrgordon 6y ago
        Look I think they’d sell more copies and it’d be good for everyone to have the content more widely available but it’s not always feasible to require it. A PlayStation game doesn’t just automatically work on PC and it probably takes numerous hours to get a PC game ready to submit to the Steam store. I’ve certainly wasted many hours localizing text for iOS app submissions and the like. With so many different stores to download apps, it gets increasingly unlikely anyone is going to take the time to cross list on all of them. If we wanted to change how this worked, I feel like we’d need to consolidate on fewer marketplaces. For example, apt-get has access to a huge variety of packages so I don’t find myself using the Ubuntu App Store or random third party marketplaces as much as I do with games.

therouwboat 6y ago

I dont care about free games, I have more money than free time. All I want is that games work on my platform, which is linux. They killed rocket league, because its not worth it to support platform that is used by 0.3% of the playerbase. Somehow they managed to do it before epic monies, but now its just too expensive or something. So fuck em.

drkstr 6y ago
TotalWar franchise works great in native Linux/Steam. I think I even got better performance than when I played the same (Shogun 2) in Windows on the same laptop. Kudos to CreativeAssembly for backporting all the old releases to the platform. One day all my old purchases just showed up under Linux and was installable without any fuss using the steam interface. Oh yeah, Civilization 5/6 showed up as well. You may want to take a look at what's been added recently. You might find something you like!
- nacs 6y ago
  Epic launcher isn't even available on Linux unlike Steam..