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Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney was asked by Verge why there is no support for the Steam Deck for Fortnite (lemmy.ml)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I'm sure Gabe has a lot of wonderful traits, but pro-consumer ain't one of them.

[–] prole 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Eh... Valve isn't a publicly traded company. I'm not sure I'm aware of anything Gabe has said or done to imply he's anti-consumer.

And he is the one who said that piracy is a service issue, and if you give people convenient access and fair prices, they'll pay. And he was right.

And Steam is proof of that. Their refund policy is also far more generous than, at the very least, Sony and Nintendo.

Any sources to show I'm wrong?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Killed physical ownership of PC games. (Half Life 2 required Steam to work, locking your key to a single account)

Pioneered lootboxes. (Team Fortress 2)

Has price parity rules. (Prevent keys being sold cheaper elsewhere so gamers can't avoid giving 30% of their money to Valve)

Those aren't particularly pro-consumer.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

Honestly saying that Steam killed physical ownership of games and citing HL2 is a poor example. Just off the top of my head Blizzard beat Valve to this with World of Warcraft. You could buy a physical copy but you couldn't play it without their servers. Keys were locked to a single account as far as I'm aware.

Ultimately physical size constraints lead to the demise of physical purchases. That said, Valve in theory has a set-up to allow us to retain our games even if they disappear one day. How that works or how long it would take to happen is a different story, but they do apparently have something like a kill-switch in place.

TF2 was certainly the first major western game to have loot boxes, but extremely similar gacha systems already existed before this. It would be disingenuous to blame Valve for this, they just hopped on the train.

MFN clause is really only an issue if it can be proven that it is in place for anticompetitive reasons, and Steam's rule is not completely inflexible. Also, if the copy is being sold without Steam integration, fine, I can totally see why you shouldn't need price parity — but if you were to sell a Steam key price parity is entirely fair since the end user is getting access to Valve's servers. Also if a developer sold a game for the same price with no Steam integration on somewhere like GOG, Valve wouldn't be getting any cut, the developer would just be making more money (though ironically with less feature integration, it's not like Steam doesn't add value).

On the flip side instead of acting like we said all of Valve's decisions were pro-consumer and cherry picking a few decisions that aren't, I can cite:

Valve's work on Wine/Proton
the open SteamOS
repairability and part availability and compatibility for SteamDeck
all of the features Valve adds to Steam and the improvements they're making over time (it has gotten better), Steam is arguably easier to use and functionally superior to something like EGS
the community marketplaces and discussion boards that Steam hosts
their work to support users on a variety of platforms with things like Steam Link and even cross-platform support for their utilities and games

It's really not like they do literally nothing that is pro-consumer.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

They also had to get sued by multiple states before they started offering refunds in the US. Valve doesn't do anything that doesn't make them money. They just have a longer term view towards profit than a publicly traded company. That's what lemmy/reddit doesn't understand.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Yup, Valve isn't my friend, but there's a lot of overlap in my and their interests. So I support them, because they support me. They make a product I like, and actively work to make my platform of choice better.

They're as good as a friend, but unlike a friend, I'll drop them as soon as they stop providing value.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

There's a difference between calling Gabe Newell pro-consumer (not what I said), and saying he and his company make pro-consumer choices (moreso recently than in the past).

I can't really come up with anything Epic has done that is actually pro-consumer, and no "trying to create a competitor to Steam" isn't pro-consumer when the way they did it was very anti-consumer (just look at all the Kickstarters they swept up and made exclusives even after they had publicly promised Steam keys — it's not like Epic couldn't have added clauses to exempt Kickstarter backers from the exclusivity restrictions) or very intentionally locking people to one platform by force. Their support of anything non-Windows for anything besides Unreal is terrible.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 1 points 11 months ago

And even Unreal is annoying since, at least when I last tried it, they don't provide binaries. I understand why, but the support is just good enough, not ideal.

And that's Epic's MO, everything is just good enough to make them money. They're not suing Google and Apple to take down a big evil corp, they're suing to not share their profits. That's it.

And EGS doesn't exist to make money from game sales, it exists to funnel people into their live service games. But they need people to come to their platform, so they also offer game sales, free games, etc.