Would you buy a game on EGS instead of Steam? And why?

They’ve been doing way more than employing 3 Linux devs.

He’s definitely not a communist, but there are other ways to choose a successor for a company.

Linux is where it is because companies that care about making money contribute money to make it better. The same goes for projects like Blender. Linux became immensely more usable for the average user because Valve wanted to ensure that they’ll be able to continue making absurd amounts of money in the future regardless of what Microsoft decides to do. The licensing of open source software ensures us that we don’t even have to trust them to not pivot to BBQ sauce tomorrow, because the work they’ve already done will continue to serve us.

I personally have no problem with a profit motive on its face, and the above is why. If you want an easy underhand toss for something to criticize Valve for, it’s that their motive for profit encourages them to continue to exploit a loophole in our gambling laws to create a generation of underage addicts. They can simultaneously be the company responsible for breaking down walled gardens and creating a better personal computing tomorrow; and also the company profiting off of child gambling addiction that governments are too slow or too unwilling to do anything about.

I don’t see it, especially since Steam got to where it is now by stealing customers who rejected that same price hike on consoles. Everyone learned that Steam sales offer deeper discounts than digital purchases on consoles’ walled gardens and that online is free. If customers are savvy enough to do that, they’re savvy enough to find other storefronts in a world where Steam sucks. As I see it, anyway. I think I’d have to see the world change in a substantial way to believe otherwise.

But I think that being forced to abandon Steam, which is for sure an option they all have in a world with GOG and Epic, is exactly why Valve doesn’t really have that power. As soon as that guy sees the $5 lemonade, he’s going to hear the other guy yelling that there’s a dark alley selling it for $1 around the corner.

Do you believe Steam has the power to raise prices when those prices are set by vendors on their platform and there are at least two other major players? I suppose they have the power to try to exclude competitors, but those competitors would be buoyed very quickly by Valve attempting to do so. And even still, plenty of the biggest games in the world (Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, League of Legends) aren’t on their platform already.

A monopoly is defined as being the only seller, so I don’t think you can be one without being the only seller. But our laws (are supposed to) target companies that use anti competitive practices to drive the market closer toward that being true. There’s at least one suit that alleged it, but they had a difficult case to prove it. Valve doesn’t deal in things like locking up exclusive titles that make it harder for others to compete.

The advantage to Epic’s is that they offer cross play for free. I’m honestly not sure what the problem is.

I don’t think the presence of the library on Steam is doing that much work here. Epic’s been giving games away for free for five years to alleviate that issue, but it doesn’t work. And ultimately, you have to ask: what’s in it for me to buy a game from Epic when I get better features on Steam? On GOG, I have an answer to that question, but on Epic, I don’t.

They were declared monopolies because they were determined to have used anti-competitive practices to cement their market position. Valve does not.

The one that stuck out to me was Metaphor: ReFantazio. It has Denuvo, but the message didn’t identify it as such and read like Steam DRM. Dragon Ball FighterZ has no listed additional DRM on the Steam store page, but if I booted up the device offline then tried to run the game, it would refuse to boot until I went online. I ran into it a few other times other than that, but don’t recall which games they were. Sometimes it’s just an unlucky roll of the dice with when Steam decides it’s time to authenticate the game again.

Then there are other DRM schemes, like Ubisoft’s and EA’s, that are even worse. At best, they require you to explicitly set your Deck to offline mode before traveling; just not having an internet connection isn’t good enough.

They’ve got some of those things. They recently added a workshop equivalent, and they’ve had a multiplayer SDK for a long time. The multiplayer SDK is actually a problem, because it means multiplayer often only works on Galaxy, which is just DRM by another name.

And Steam’s DRM was pretty invisible to me until, ironically, I got a Steam Deck. Then I started running into games that needed to be authenticated while I was on a train with no internet.

By cap, I mean lower bound. I see random encounters. If random encounters go down as CPUs get faster, my CPU is so much faster than one from the 90s that my random encounters should approach zero, but I had plenty. I just didn’t have what that person experienced where it felt like too many. In fact, it felt so right to me that I didn’t question that anything might be wrong, but I would if I saw dozens. You’re right: there’s no way they could foresee how fast my CPU would be in 2024 or 2013/2014, so how would their logic still output what feels like an acceptable encounter rate that matches other games in the genre by accident?

Look, I believe you, but I’ll admit I’m having trouble reconciling a few things about it. If it’s a CPU-bound problem, I’d expect it to get worse as the CPU gets faster, and my PC now is much faster than the one I played Fallout 1 on about a decade earlier, yet my encounter rates were remarkably similar. Not only were they remarkably similar, but they were remarkably similar to every other RPG I’ve played like it, such as Baldur’s Gate and Wasteland 2. Looking at heat maps of encounter rates on a wiki, I definitely had more in the red zones, but it was maybe two encounters per square rather than a dozen, and a dozen sounds miserable; I, too, would come to the conclusion that something was wrong if I saw significantly more encounters than I did. I ran Fallout 1 on Windows back in the day and Fallout 2 via Proton, so we can eliminate that as a variable that may have caused the game to behave differently. A streamer I watch played Fallout 1 for the first time via Fallout CE and had extremely similar encounter rates, and not only are we running very different machines, but surely that project unbound the encounter rates from the CPU. If we’re hitting some kind of cap on encounter rates, why do they all appear to be at about the rate I experienced? And why would we not assume that that cap was the intended design?

If we ignore the part where that person had so many encounters that they came to the conclusion that something was wrong, and if we ignore the distinct possibility that people remembering a higher encounter rate could have been experiencing that due to their CPU spec not being what the developer intended even in the 90s as CPUs increased in speed wildly in the course of just a few years back then, it would only make the random encounters in the overworld more of a deterrent against traveling too often.

The good: WB development studios have been limited to making games off of only WB properties for so long. Developers would come up with a pitch or a prototype, but it wasn’t allowed to be an original IP, which was bad for them and Warner Bros., since it made it harder to sell off the video game division by itself. Maybe this will give those devs more freedom.

The bad: We’re rapidly approaching that Bojack Horseman joke where there are only four companies with extremely long hyphenated names, and Netflix doesn’t seem to know what they want to do in the video game space or how to do it. They have an incentive to lock games exclusively behind subscriptions, which is what everyone was afraid Game Pass would do but Nintendo and Netflix are doing this already right now.

Show me a video of a normal encounter rate from the 90s, and I’ll tell you how my experience compared.

Eh, I doubt it, because it didn’t seem like I was seeing too few. They came at an appropriate clip, and the second game even gives you a car to see fewer of them after the halfway point.

Fallout 1 about 10 years ago. Fallout 2 about a year ago.