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.
“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.
Remember when epic invented proton and fex and epic input and made cloud save standard and kept in game advertising to a minimum and …
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).
Don’t be shitbags and at least try customer service.
These fuckers have tried everything except shipping a decent product.
Capitalism breeds innovation crowd seems awfully silent
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”
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.
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.
They “broke it”?
I mean sure nobody likes capitalism here but have they actually tried making a better product?
To be fair, he’s kinda right about it. You can’t JUST make a better product and hope gamers will move to your platform. Everyone’s got dozens if not hundreds of games on Steam and nobody wants to sit in two gardens.
To get people to move over, Steam would actively have to turn shit too. There’s nothing you can do to make a platform so much better than Steam currently is that it would entice people to move over. Perhaps if it sucked your dick while you’re playing?
That’s a separate point from Epic itself being shit.
That should be easy for them because they’re really good at sucking
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.
You can do the greater than symbol for quotes at the start to do quotes.
“>” Like this
Like this
It’s just as much that epic shit the bed when they first introduced their launcher/store by very clearly taking the “shitty capitalism” path that tries to compete by killing off competition with exclusivity deals and later throwing money at players with free games. Not to mention not even trying to compete on some of the things that gives steam more value to many users.
It was clear they were trying to do to video games what uber and abnb tried to do to taxis and hotels and use venture capital money to undercut the existing market with the intent of being able to set whatever price later when their competition died off but were even less successful than the other two corps, who still managed to become big players in their market even if they didn’t kill off the competition.
For me personally, not only am I uninterested in epic’s store, but I don’t wasn’t to see them succeed. Even if they started doing the good things, I wouldn’t trust that they’d keep it up if they managed to get to steam’s market position. They showed their cards too soon with trying to open up with exclusives.
BS. Steam offers games simply without the bull. They didn’t break capitalism, they just didn’t enshitten their platform.
Or maybe they broke capitalism in the sense that they are showing that the shit they teach MBAs isn’t the only or even the best path to profit and if enough people adopt (or return to) that way of doing business, they can dominate their markets and compete directly with the venture capital class that tries to compete with its financial weight more than whatever products or services it is currently peddling.
I mean, this part is so obvious to me right now. With all the complete shit products out there that have so many anti-features that I often just stop looking for things rather than get enticed by the good features, I think that competitors that come in with the intent of making good quality shit people want (where “good” can even just mean “doesn’t try to spy on you”) could similarly dominate their markets. And if people don’t chase empires to become billionaires, I think there’s a lot of room in all markets even when certain players come to dominate their local area (considering physical markets more than digital ones, since they scale very differently, though I do think that some thought could be put in to how to do this for digital markets, too… Maybe some drastic changes to IP laws).
Even on Lemmy people talking about stock value fluctuations as if that’s the whole of the game for businesses.
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
They can break it real easy…
- Go public
- Priotitize investors over customers
- Slowly degrade customer sentiment until the customers are willing to switch.
You know… the same thing that is driving enshitification across all markets.
