I wish Valve had pushed harder to compete with Origin, but this looks like the end of its complete dominance. Once EA demonstrated that anybody could hack together a launcher, it's become a free for all. As a consumer it's been a worse and worse experience since increasingly small companies felt the need to replace steam with technically inferior solutions. But this is different-now we get a competitor which is willing to sell more than just its own titles, and this will be a major blow to steam (because indies will go for this-fortnight will be the killer app for this new store just as Half Life 2 was for Steam.) I was really rooting for Valve because they where making a linux gaming future look possible.
we'll see. i'm in no hurry to rush out and buy anything that isn't on Steam. all these articles talk about the cut Epic will take, but as a customer, I couldn't care less. what i do care about is e.g. Steam's excellent return policy. maybe i'm just getting old and am not that interested in games, but i'm happy to pass up games if they aren't on Steam.
i'd venture a guess that Steam and Epic Games Store may not be competing for quite the same market; Steam is likely to remain dominant for PC gaming (maybe rightly so, they have worked hard to get there), and Epic Games Store might focus more on mobile gaming instead. so it's a bigger threat to the App Store/Google Play than Steam IMO.
> maybe i'm just getting old and am not that interested in games
I'm in the same boat, but don't underestimate the number of eyeballs of moldable children fortnite is getting right now. Would steam be the client it is today without the masses from Counterstrike?
I think this will take a big piece of the growing pie that is game sale.
The popularity of Fortnite means that there's already a huge install base on PC. As a customer I don't like to see total vertical integration of platform and engine tech-I don't want to see Unreal go the way of Source, and I don't want to see Unity squeezed out.
I don't think it will be a major blow. Ubisoft followed suit and just sells games on Steam but tacks on their awful DRM on top of steam. Origin is a joke in terms of functionality and ease of use. The only advantage it has is the library of games if you so happen to like EA games, which has been very mixed in the last few years to say the least. I only own two games from there and would rather just buy a used PS4 copy than have to deal with that bad store.
GoG is the only good alternative but they don't even aim to compete with steam since they offer a service of maintaining old games to be played on modern OS's. I was shocked that Steam sells games that quite literally do not work on anything more modern than XP!
This annoys me because I had Skyrim[1] in Wine on Linux for the occasional run but after the update I'm faced with working out what broke as I can't back out.
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[1] Purchased as a real physical DVD. Except the installer requires the use of the Steam client even for the base game.
Origin and Steam both have problems but frustratingly they're different problems, so the fact that I've learned to get to the tiny text that represents the Steam game I want to play does not help me find the incantation for getting the latest version of Origin to just list the games I have installed. Battle.net does a pretty good job-big game names, a big "PLAY" button, etc.
It wasn't just EA - Blizzard, uPlay, GOG, etc. All with different strengths and weaknesses.
> compete with Origin
Origin is garbage and a reason I won't own games that are connected to it (I really wanted to play ME3 and the newer FarCry's) - as is u(dont)Play (couple games ruined by uPlay that were purchased via Steam... boo)
bNet is decent in that it's contained to only Blizzard so it's very contained.
Valve still has the best platform, hands down.
Now, their gaming division on the other hand... Half Life Episodic content? HL3?
I've found as a consumer that its gotten much better. Steam's customer support is absolutely atrocious and hugely anti-consumer whereas both Origin and Battle.net have great customer support. I hope this competition drives Steam to be better.
I like Steam, but I have no problem using other game stores such as Origin as well. If others stores want to co-exist with Steam, why not? Many people have Netflix, HBO Go, Amazon Prime, Hulu..
On my Roku I can fairly seemlessly switch between Netflix, HBO, Hulu, etc. I hate that they don't just expose shows to a common list I can browse through, but whatever. The UX is generally uniform and I can find the things I want no problem. On PC, despite the fact that I'm running a much more powerful machine, they all have a laggy start up because they need to make sure they're up to date, they all have radically different UX, etc. I need to maintain friends lists separately on all of them. My friends need to learn how to invite people to a group and such on all of them.
That is a good point about friend lists. But really I don't switch game like I switch channels. If I am sitting down to play a game, it is one game. And my clan in World of Warships is generally different people than who I would play League of Legends with.
You can also see that Discord is trying to create a communications service that runs alongside of other DRMs like WoW / LoL / Steam etc. That is fine with me.
I'm totally the opposite-I have friends that I play all of my MP with and we tend to have a stable of games (current lineup includes Pubg, WoWS, StarCraft, Far Cry 5) split across launchers.
