I would argue UE5 enables and encourages bad development practices that lead to the unoptimized mess that "modern graphics" games are right now. Their work is cool, but so many games rely on temporal aliasing for in-game effects now, and UE5 is the common denominator. Steam and GOG have a strong history and userbase. 0% commission is nice, but Steam in particular offers a world of more value than Epic Games Store, including but not limited to a usable fucking user interface (I use [Rare](https://github.com/RareDevs/Rare) to play my EGS library because it's so bad). Steam games are DRM free unless you consider Steam itself a form of DRM. DRM is implemented by the developers of the game, not by the marketplace it's sold on. And I find it strange that you think GOG has a better business model than Steam and will be more competitive long-term. Why do you think so?

Cool Epic Games store and Tim Sweeney are both still peices of shit.

> I find it strange that you think GOG has a better business model than Steam and will be more competitive long-term. Why do you think so? Steam is it's own DRM system. Control (2020) is a perfect example. You can't run that from your steamapps folder due to Steams DRM to verify a purchase license. GoG on the other hand has the same game, usually cheaper, an runs entirely independent of any platform. Not every Steam game is like this, but most major releases are.

You do realize the market share of GOG is about 0.5%, right? That's despite Projekt Red being a beloved developer, the great launcher features, the fairest DRM practices, many years in the business, and so on. It only proves the point that Steam is a monopoly that cannot be disrupted whether you do it nicely like GOG or aggressively like Epic.

Implying review bombing is always warranted is as misguided as it gets. Games regularly get review bombed for something as trivial as having a non-white person for a protagonist.

Source 2 is closed source, however it's absolutely available to third parties. There are a couple non-Valve Source 2 games in development right now.

Steam wins again by doing nothing

Could you point to these games or any documentation on how a developer may reach out to Valve regarding developing in the Source 2 Engine? I was able to find sources for the Source engine, but not Source 2 which Valve has been primarily making games on in the last 10 years. In any case, neither are as widely supported or available as UE5.

Tim, what are you doing here?

I don't think the GoG numbers matter, and I do think Steam's days are numbered if they continue on their current course. GoGs DRM free and game archive mantra is going to give them longevity. The World continues to digitize, and eventually, society is going to have to grapple with Internet privacy and digital ownership. Steam on the otherhand is catering to the same crowd EGS is at a 30% tax. No doubt Steam has the numbers, no doubt they will for awhile, but I do think they will eventually run out of Steam if they don't invest in a more sustainable business model. To be clear, I don't hate Steam or am in any way rooting against Steam, this is just my PoV in comparing their business model to EGS who has primarily invested in their UE5 engine. Valve on the otherthand does well with hardware, Steamdeck and SteamVR I think are both solid. I also don't believe that EGS is as bad as a company as people make them out to be.

Neat facts, but they don't justify the awful game store they have created. They can't even handle a downloads queue that you can change around, which is embarrassing. They have 1% of the features that Steam provides, so rightly they can't charge the same. Would be nice if Source 2 was available to anyone, but it isn't a product they want to sell/support. It's mostly meant to power their own games (like most game studios, they can have their own inhouse engines). Maybe as it gets more mature they could explore this possibility idk. > Steam has been quietly collecting cheques while their Source Engine has collected dust. Very innacurate. Valve create so much great software around gaming. Steam gets updated very frequently with bug fixes and new features (just recently we got game recording). Source 2 is likely constantly being worked on (featured in 2 of the most popular pc games: CS2 and Dota2). Maybe randoms like us could never use it, but they still work on it unlike your statement would suggest. Not to mention Proton, which helps every linux gamer run Windows games. 30% may sound steep, but it's not really when you consider what Steam provides: Game distribution (downloads, forever), community features, steam workshop/marketplace (if implemented), inventory system, game networking, in-game purchasing, achievements, etc, etc. I'm not a game developer, but theres probably a million more things they do. I'm not even mentioning the features they provide just for us, the gamers (mainly family share, thats simply amazing). > I've been getting through GoG. Very awesome, GOG and their goal of preserving video games is great. My p.s. wrapup is that Epic is barely a launcher when compared with Steam. Yes Epic can launch a game, but it does nothing else (well) at all. Even with all the years they have had for development, they'd rather try to shove money into game devs faces (or customers with free games) than fix their app. I hope they realise this is a mistake, because you can get game devs to move over with lots of money, but customers who are spending money won't if they arent treated well. This isn't a long term strategy they have been using and this 0% fee seems like desparation to me (not to say they are poor, cuz fortnite pays the bills, but they likely aren't seeing much growth). I hate defending corporations, but Valve is the one that I hope every other company looks at and tries to mimic because they have only done good for their customers.

Competition is usually always a good thing, but sadly no launcher has ever brought anything new to the table that Steam hasn't already been doing (they usually just bring headaches). Epic doesn't want to compete fairly (by providing a great user experience, etc). They want to compete by paying for exclusives & bribing users with free games. Obviously this hasn't worked because they are loweri g fees, likely to try to get the growth they just aren't seeing.

Like Steam is doing? I don't think their cut is them being greedy. Your plan might not be economically feasibile, because companies need money for growth (new products, R&D, etc), so only charging enough to run is not possible. Steam is probably doing a kindness by not charging an infrastructure fee every year to developers, that shiz would probably really expensive. The cost of the cloud features they provide is likely, usually, understated. Just the bandwidth costs alone of allowing your game to be downloaded whenever the user wants and however many times they want is expensive enough. Add on cloud saves and all the other niceties.. All that is just to say that Epic is likely losing a lot of money here just to try enticing more developers to move over, and maybe bring some customers too, but it's not gonna work. They are lucky the fortnite piggybank lets them do this, but it's not smart by any means.

I think it still counts, due to all the work they did on the software side.

And it was just a big coincidence that Epic removed Linux support exactly when the Steam Deck got announced...

None of these are why people hate epic games or like gog/steam. EG is toxicily anticonsumer. Their platform is assbackwards with no good functional community features. They bombard users with ads for games they already own. They spyware they call a store front has repeatedly been caught snooping through user files without consent and sending unknown amounts of data back to their server without permission to gather that data in the first place. And the cherry on top is their close relationship with tencent, aka one facet of the propaganda arm of the CCP.

> And the cherry on top is their close relationship with tencent, aka one facet of the propaganda arm of the CCP. I see this a lot and... do they though? From what I can tell, Steam also operates in China. Sure, Tencent invested in EGS, but not in any kind of controlling stake. Tencent does invest in tech and EGS is probably a solid investment.

Operating in China and having 10% of your company publicly owned by an entity of the Chinese government are two different things, and EGS has reportedly been all to happy to give over any and all information they have on identified users to the CCP. One article in 2019 suggesting that Hong Kong activists were being targeted by data in part provided through such means.

> Operating in China and having 10% of your company publicly owned by an entity of the Chinese government are two different things I don't think it is. Steam operates in China and even allows China to censor the Steam store page and games as needed. Valve doesn't take much issue bending over for China either in that regard. EGS and Steam are both Corporations and China is a large market.

Steam is good, but competitors can only make it even better. Worst case it doesn't change.