I did not realize they were trying to compete in the first place.
steam pros: a store that always has a sale or big holiday sale right around the corner, a social network, a library for game info and game modding, and a trophy case etc.
what was amazon offering? full priced games, no sales that beat steams (a free game offer now and then only if you give them $140 a year and forget about it), and shitty cloud streaming of few games? so they tried nothing actually meaningful, were all out of ideas, but shocked they lost
oh and also on a platform notorious for making e-books unable to work on pcs, forcing their proprietary hardware for a PDF. and now they’re actually going in and changing/censoring whats written in books without authors consent.
You are twisting it a bit. Amazon is not censoring books (yet). It just made impossible to transfer books from the Kindle to a PC.
i wish i was, if you’d watch the video he cites and reads a list of examples.
Much like Epic, they also did free games for people with Amazon Prime, but they undercut that by offering free games on other platforms as well.
Not that I’m complaining, but nothing to make themselves stand out.
not like epic, epic offers free games, Prime’s games are paid for by subscription.
Doesn’t Prime give away GoG games?
don’t you have to pay for prime? then its not free.
Yes, but you keep the game even if you cancal prime. As opposed to e.g. PlayStation Plus where you loose access to the free games when you cancel your subscription.
The only launcher I use the same amount if not more is gog.com. Give me those good old games.
GoG is just the best. They don’t have all the nice things Steam has, like workshop for example, but they compensate for it by actually selling you a game, not just renting it out with drm.
GOG providing installers is absolutely amazing.
Maybe it’s nice on windows, but on other systems, got still relies on steam.
GOG + Lutris
Lutris is just a pain compared to proton. I’m not going to say that its terrible anymore but 90% of the games that I play regularly on steam just work straight out of the box.
I use gog, but fuck the launcher. Fuck all launchers. An icon on desktop is all I want.
Thankfully it’s easy to get no matter the storefront.
Pretty ballsy to put up a long LinkedIn post that boils down to “I am incompetent and should not be hired under any circumstances.”
Not when you’re retired
I do like steam
Do nothing. Win.
I knew they were trying to compete, but at the end of the day fuck bezos. Useless shit on the world.
Who would’ve imagined given your disaster apps like the Appstore and your shitty “free app” giveaways. Even the FAQs you posted after shutting down the service were purposely vague and irresolute.
Of course I will consume digital products from you again! Said fucking no one.
Also it was just brazenly clear they never talked to gamers and were aiming for a nonexistent customer. Cloud based gaming (i think that’s what they were trying to sell) might attract a few people, but it’s obviously a bad idea and it was clearly being phoned in as part of a “we have decided this is what we will tell thr customer to want” type deal.
You can see why Amazon’s efforts suck just by using it. That isn’t to say I defend Steam, or Epic, or GOG, or UPlay, or Origin, or Battle.net, or Microsoft Store because they all suck. They suck for existing as separate things that all do the same thing but each eating 500Mb of space on my computer.
The ideal situation would be a federated platform where everyone shares a single sign on, everyone shares the same update, backup & restore mechanisms, everyone can join the same lobbies and matchmaking. But that’s too sensible.
Or they stop trying to lock people in with exclusive games and instead attempt to actually compete by the quality of the service. I know it will never happen but I can dream.
Amazon who? Never heard of them.
It’s a rainforest, I think.
I thought it was a matriarchal warrior society?
Some book website that thought it would branch out into games for some reason
Then there’s me on Gog buying DRM free games that I can download and keep at my leisure.
You’re not the only one.
Whilst I do have a small collection of games in Steam, my collection of games in GoG is about 30x larger, because I prefer buying from GoG when I have the chance.
As the old saying goes “Possession is 9/10 of the Law” - when the installer of a game is in your hands (kept in storage media under your control) such as with games in physical media or offline installers downloaded from GoG, even if they wanted to take it away from you, they would have to take you to Court for it, whilst if the installer of a game is in somebody else’s hands (in Steam’s servers or in GoG’s servers if you only ever use their launcher and don’t download offline installers) they can take it way from you (even what happenned was that they just mistakenly locked you out of your account) and now it’s your problem and you have to throw yourself at their mercy to get what’s supposedly your stuff back and if that fails take them to Court (which for most people costs more than the games are worth).
It’s hilarious that people think “Steam is great” because they don’t often lock people out of their game collections or remove games from people’s collections and when they do and people throw themselves at their mercy to get it reversed they’re generally understanding, when Steam themselves were the ones who created a system where they have all the power and you have none, it’s just that so far they’ve not purposefully abused it and are generally nice when their own mistakes cause problems which one wouldn’t have in a different system - they’re comparativelly better than most other stores because those other stores are so shit (except GoG, IMHO), but they’re still worse than good old physical media when it comes to consumer rights.
Absolutelly, use Steam when it’s worth it for you, just do it with your eyes wide open, aware that you’re chosing to be at their mercy because the system they designed for digital game sales makes sure all customers are at their mercy, so they’re definitelly not your buddies, just (so far) nowhere as abusive as most faceless companies out there.
PS: Back to the post of the OP, amongst all the digital stores with “it’s not really yours” systems, with all the power over gamers than entails, Steam are by far the ones that least abuse it (I think they never did on purpose, though some people have been locked out of their accounts and couldn’t recover access to them) so comparativelly are way above the rest, especially Amazon as demonstrated by their practices when it comes to digital books.
I don’t use the Amazon launcher, but I’m pretty sure the Amazon games are DRM free as well. Not sure if it’s all of them but I know a lot are
Amazon launcher requires an internet connection for games, at least the free ones.
Yep. GOG is good. I’ve been getting a bit more into itch.io as well though. itch is packed with small simple experimental indie stuff. I’ve got no interest in most of it; but there’s a surprising amount of good stuff there too. (At least, it was surprising to me when I started visiting it more frequently.)
I’ll take all the free Amazon and Epic games. I’ve never bought a game from either one but they are 95% of my collection.
correction you never bought from epic, you’ve paid 15 a month for amazons.
nothings ever free if there’s a subscription fee
Yes, but in my case I pay Prime for the shipping and the shows. Not for the games, I don’t even care about them, I just have a hoarder impulse.
paying for a subscription/service doesn’t matter what you do or want from it, you’re still paying for everything included. thats like ordering a combo meal and saying “i only paid for the food and not the drink. that i still get… with the combo…”
Valve wins by doing nothing… it’s a tale as old as time.
Steam’s market share is a huge factor in why their competition never succeeds, but it’s hardly the only reason. Steam is a whole platform, not just a launcher or storefront. And they’re also cognizant that the consumers are not just a revenue source to be milked, but actually long-term customers whose loyalty is important.
It really shouldn’t be a surprise that when you enter an established market, you’re not going to accomplish shit by providing a lesser service while simultaneously treating the consumer worse.
MBAs walk into this arena thinking they’ve got their quarterly agile reports synergized outside the box to the max.
Somehow none of them have learned the concept of long term customers
Gaben and Steam: does nothing, wins
It always baffles me when I see an established company fail to understand long-term customers and still expect any kind of meaningful growth.
It’s because the stock market doesn’t care about anything except the next quarter. Valve can think long term because they’re privately owned.
Us corporate MO is to treated the end user as stupid fucking bitch that you boss around with ToS.
I mean it works, look at EA and sports ball gamers…
But PC gamer has some shread of respect left. Granted a lot of it comes from knowing better from using steam
The loyalty thing is what kept me.
I was wary of another gaming platform, there were so many and they all seemed the same, I never liked one over the other - they were just means to an end.
A few years back I really wanted to play RDR2 with my friends. It was expensive and I never pre-order, but as soon as it came out on (a small) sale I bought it for all 4 of us.
It was a lot of money for me, but I really wanted the story to play with everyone.
All was well at first, until we had each completed the tutorial and met up in open world. That’s when we learned that the game was based on GTA and the devs do not care about hackers.
We had one fucking with us for over an hour, teleporting us into the air and dropping us, setting us randomly on fire, spawning space ships and so on.
I begged in voice for them to just leave us be, to no avail.
We are all older, we rarely have time to play together. I was crushed.
I was an hour over the return time on Steam, one of the other friends took a bit longer exploring and was even more than that.
I contacted steam anyway and tried to get a refund, and they granted it for all of us.
Later I learned this was a thing in RDR2 and there was now the ability to create private lobbies, but I just can’t make myself try it and give Rockstar any money.
Steam however, won a lifelong fan. They didn’t have to honour the refund, and they don’t have to provide personal support that offers more than just the canned responses, but they do.
I hope Gabe lives forever, or finds another like him to carry the torch after he’s gone.
Yeah my loyalty to them comes from the fact that they treat me like they value my business. Every company says they do, but they help when help is needed and get out of the way when it isn’t. The only other businesses I feel that way towards are small restaurants and bars. It’s not an unconditional loyalty but so long as they treat me right they’ll keep my business.
They are reinvesting money back into r&d, and linux. They keep updating everything. Wish they kept making steam controllers. I have seen steam change a lot over the last +10 years.
i think ive heard rumblings about a steam controller 2? not entirely sure though
Lrrr: Why does the larger company not simply eat the smaller one?
Oh they do, frequently
The only reason anyone even knew about Prime Gaming was they pushed it with Twitch.
Huh, did they make an alternative I don’t know about?
