Ubisoft comes crawlin' back to Steam
Ubisoft comes crawlin' back to Steam
After years of running exclusively with Epic, Ubisoft has had enough.
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Man, I don't like the Steam monopoly on principle, but I have to admit I do struggle to pay attention to Epic exclusives. It's simply the launcher I open the least after GOG and Steam. I've though "hey, wasn't that Ubi Star Wars thing out" like two or three times and forgot about it between remembering that's an Epic thing and deciding whether I wanted to buy it.
But hey, since we're going multiplat again, I could use some newer Ubi games on GOG, too.
Valve is just one shite CEO away from going from PC's blessing to its curse.
I choose to believe that Gabe's will bequeaths Steam to a cohort of independent non-profits and co-ops which will each be charged with attempting to continue to elevate gamers and gaming according to Gabe's 1,200 page manifesto.
GabeN will name twelve disciples who will spread His word and continue His work.
sixteen (0-F), but yes.
They'll strap him to a chair and sacrifice 1000 2fort snipers a day to keep him alive.
At twelve disciples, that means he can give each pair one of his mega yatchs. I'm sure with a third of all gaming profit coming their way, the twelve of them will be able to afford the 100 million per year it costs to maintain the fleet worth around 1 billion.
He's not Jesus, he is just a piece of shit billionaire like the rest.
It is genuinely pretty obscene. You can't "offset" this kind of behaviour.
Whoa, you should preface your posts with a warning, lest anyone cut themselves on all that edge.
If you think about the fact that he's taking enough profit from every sales to pay his employees more than the industry average and to be a multi billionaire while his clients can barely afford a house or can't afford one at all then the current CEO is already shit...
Fuck all billionaires.
It’s a good monopoly, for now and hopefully for a long time.
The fact that Valve went out of their way to make gaming better in Linux, says a lot imho.
I like Valve, but I will point out what's been said before - Valve has a stake in making Linux gaming better, since it enables the Steam Deck to exist and prosper. They could've chosen other options that don't help the community, but they didn't choose this entirely selflessly, since they reap the benefits from not just their own work, but also that of the open source developers.
I don’t doubt that, but Steam was available for Linux, a long time before the Steam Deck and even SteamOS, as far as I remember.
The steam deck wasn't even a sketch on paper when Valve started pushing Linux. It's been their route forward into all forms of hardware. I'm sure it's not long before we get a stand alone VR headset that runs Linux, which seems to me to be the real goal. The Deck was just a step along the way.
The only good monopoly is one where the profits goes back to the population or the customers.
It’s a private company, so you could argue that the profits go towards the employees and the customers in the form of improvements. Not shareholders.
One employee is a multi billionaire, so no, it's not a cooperative where the profit is split fairly between employees or redistributed to the customers/members.
You mean the owner?
Now, now. What would Marx say about that?
Well, that and the several billion dollars in Gaben's bank account.
Private companies are still corporations, guys.
There is no such thing as a good monopoly. He leverages a 30% tax on a huge chunk of the gaming industry. Steam, Microsoft, Epic, Sony and Nintendo all essentially participate in collusion and anti competitive behavior.
Think of all the indie studios that closed and sequels that got canceled and ask yourself if they could have made it if steam only took 5%.
They leveraged linux to save on development and maintenance costs. Capturing the handheld market at a tenth of the price while making the same profit isn't altruisme.
It's not like the value added for that 30% tax isn't there. Steam has made so many things so easy that it's easy to forget what things were like decades ago.
If you were an independent game publisher, you had to figure out how to set up a web storefront, a content delivery network hosted in perpetuity, take payments, do multiplayer, add in-game chat, map every weird joystick and gamepad in the universe to your control scheme, achievements, friend lists.... And every game developer had to do that independently because there was no public solution, really. The friction to enter the indie dev space was so much higher.
Also, steam does not force you to use their store- you can generate steam keys and sell your game away from the steam platform. The only thing that they enforce is if you sell it for a lower price elsewhere, they'll de-list your game. Which I think is reasonable.
You can use the same argument about Musk or Benzos as well. Clearly, they are over charging for the value or they wouldn't be billionaires.
Steam could give the same value on 2% taken and Gaben would probably still be able to afford at least one of his 6 mega yatchs. But there's indie companies that are struggling where just an extra 10% would go a long way.
In the end, Gaben and his friends greed is killing indie companies, affecting the quality and amount of games we get and is having a detrimental effect on the industry.
Yet because Gaben has a really good pr team and managed to convince everyone he's "not your average billionaire", we now have comments comparing him to Jesus and applauding his monopoly as being the only good one. Fucking hell.
Only if the game is purchased directly on Steam. A developer can sell Steam keys on their own website and not have Valve take a cut of the price. I think the only rule is that you can't sell the key cheaper than the price the developer has set on the Steam store.
It's just a way to bring in and trap people in their ecosystem. It's free like Gmail is free, not out of altruism. The bad seriously outweigh the good when it comes to steam, we shouldn't praise them.
It says (pretty explicitly, if you go back and read interviews), that Gabe Newell really doesn't like Microsoft in general, that the feeling is mutual and that the fact that his multibillion dollar empire is stuck as a Windows application MS may try to muscle out at any point has motivated him to bring PC gaming out of Windows from very early on.
Granted, MS has been sucking at attempting exactly that for a long time, but that's the ultimate motivation here. That's not a particularly disputed fact.
It's tough for any public companies to compete because they keep setting off their own footguns, ensuring they don't succeed in the space. As long as Gabe is around I'm okay with this one (1) monopoly, as a treat.
The weirdest thing is that steam doesn't have a natural or self reinforcing monopoly. It wouldn't take much for another company to copy their business model, and provide a competitor. In practice, however, they all fall flat on their faces.
Steam's model is to give up short term gain for a smaller long term gain. Over time, this has snowballed into what we see now. Gabe is happy to get ever richer from his golden goose laying away. The competitors get started, then try and gut the goose for a quick buck.
It kind of does.
You get user lock-in as users buy more games, making it so Steam is always a store to buy from. You can't deplatform from Steam. At that point, you can't replace Steam with another DRM platform to pay existing games. That creates a large customer base which becomes a must add for vending new games.
It isn't a hard monopoly, but it helps create a soft monopoly.
Compounding interest is the most powerful force in the universe
Much like the nuclear forces, it only works within a certain range. Not enough principle and the economy collapses before you can snowball. Too much and the economy collapses because you snowball.
That would be true only if a company recreating the same product and improving on it would actually have a chance to compete, which isn't the case. People refuse to have multiple launchers out of principle, having all your games in one place makes it so you don't want to split your library so you keep buying from the same store (sometimes people even brag about paying more just to have a game on Steam instead of an alternative).
The only way to break that monopoly would be for a competitor to come and offer to recognize purchases made on Steam for games they offer on their own platform and to start with, at the minimum, everything that Steam offers and I'm sure I don't have to tell you that's completely unrealistic.
I don't think this tracks. Steam's model is developing software to automate or crowdsource expensive effort. Now, anyways. It originally was to fix PC piracy, but they achieved that ages ago.
And hell yeah they have a natural self-reinforcing monopoly. Even ignoring the mass of captive users with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars committed to the platform, Valve has been doing feature work on that storefront for decades. When others try to compete people immediately bring up the expansive value added features. They make their own controller drivers. They make their own compatibility layers. They make their own OS, FFS. In what world bringing a PC storefront to that level would "not take much"? It's an Apple-style ecosystem model, and much as it terrifies me that it's an ever growing monopoly, it's still impresive that they managed to build it within Microsoft's own.
I'm on the same page as you, it's tough. I have no idea how any other platform can really achieve competitor status with steam, and this is a big problem for us consumers and for developers.
All Epic had to do was build a good store front with similar features as Steam provides. They didn’t. Their store sucked from the beginning and it also blows now. Relying purely on exclusives and freebies was a losing game - they needed to back it up by making the service worthwhile beyond that, and they utterly failed to do so.
Assuming that a company could hope to achieve a store front with similar features in a few years instead of the 21 that steam had, why would anyone migrate there?
A. The technological landscape is very different today than it was 21 years ago. Many other companies have launched a better copy of Steam - including Ubisoft themselves. People didn't like when Ubisoft and EA did it because they tried forced exclusivity, like Epic, and couldn't offer anything beyond their own games. And you couldn't even sync friends between the 3, needlessly splitting your friends between different platforms. GoG has been doing fine for years now.
B. Maybe if Epic had provided basic stuff like a shopping cart - you know, a basic feature that you can find on any webhost service's website maker - instead of paying companies for forced exclusivity, maybe people would've been more willing to give it a chance.
Forced exclusivity put them on a bad start. The lack of basic features that were standardized for online storefronts 25 years ago killed any chance they had to gain any kind of traction. And the series of bad decisions following guaranteed that they never would have a good reputation. Remember when they had a sale on unreleased games without asking the devs of those games?
I agree that forced exclusivity is bad. I absolutely disagree with your statement that ubisoft store was better than steam, I don't even understand how you can say something like that. But yes, without the games any store is worthless.
You didn't respond to my question though, so I'll repeat it: even if someone was able to launch a product with feature parity to steam, why would anyone migrate?
I didn't mean that Ubisoft's was better than Steam - just better than Epic's store when comparing both against Steam. I hated the uPlay store as much as everyone else.
As for your question, once you have feature parity, it becomes about finding a niche. GoG has its list of old games and lack DRM going for it, for example. Nobody is going to pull large groups of people from Steam immediately without some major draw, obviously, but if you offer a similar service that doesn't exclude people on other platforms like Steam from playing games with people on your own platform, then people will be drawn to whichever they like better.
The big reason I think we don't see any real competition for Steam is that the companies with the funding to do so all wanted to force a piece of the pie rather than actually compete with Steam on quality of service. If EA, Ubisoft, and Epic had tried that, we would probably have a much more diverse ecosystem of storefronts - especially with crossplay becoming common. As it stands, Steam's biggest competitors are the consoles, and that's largely down to hardware preference rather than storefront/launcher preference.
Steam has so much impetus now that competing with them is very difficult, but as I saw somebody else in here say, if Epic had done something like offer their lower take from devs on sales at the agreement of a 5% lower price on their platform instead of spending all that money on forced exclusivity, people would have a real reason to go there instead of Steam (if the quality of service were comparable).
"Forced exclusivity is bad" is an angle that has always baffled me a little, because some of its proponents seem to also be going "what exclusives does the Xbox have" like two posts down the road.
Or maybe it's because I'm old enough to remember where the "I will never buy anything on Epic because they pay for exclusives" was instead "Square has betrayed its customers by moving to the PlayStation" (or, you know, Konami for having Xbox ports).
Gaming opinions are weird, and get weirder if you track them over time.
That wasn't the question, the question was "Given they're provided the same set of features, why would anyone migrate?"
I suppose those exclusives and freebies were the reason. I think they needed to do all the things and blew the opportunity. If it was a company with shit for funding I might have more pity but Epic definitely had the budget to do more.
I have no idea how any other platform can really achieve competitor status with steam
Aside from all the (other) obvious options replicating Steam, theres always the tried and true option of offering lower prices. To my knowledge, no one has been willing to try that yet.
Lower prices was a promise by Epic. We take a smaller cut from the devs so the savings can be passed down to the customers.
Didnt happen, buying on Epic is just getting a worse experience and giving the devs more money for it.
Lower distribution costs (in exchange for less marketing and a worse product) are not lower prices though. If Epic had spent half the time and money they spent negotiating for exclusives on negotiating for lower prices, Im sure they easily could have. For example, Epic advertises a 12% fee on sales, but if they instead took 10% (maybe spent less on exclusives to account for this) and then required prices be 5% lower than MSRP on other stores, then suddenly its a lot more appealing to customers - the ones actually providing the money - while still offering a much better deal than Steam. Similarly, Epic could have just passed on the saving more directly, like I said, with a rewards program or similar. Epic had plenty of ways to actually lower prices for their customer rather than just their buisiness partners. They just chose not to.
Frankly, Epic is pretty irrelevant to this point considering how significantly they chose to burn the bridges with their customers right from the get-go anyway. Unless you're studying how to lose consumer trust or goodwill, they're not really a good reference.
and then required prices be 5% lower than MSRP on other stores
That's something that Steam doesn't allow, which means the only way to have lower prices is for Epic to pay for an exclusivity deal. Because who's going to move to Epic if the only way is to lose out on Steam?
From my understanding, thats only for selling Steam Keys. As long as you're not using Steam's infrastructure, you're fine. You often can find better prices off Steam as it is, on platforns like Epic, GOG or esspecially Itch.io.
That's on publishers though, if Epic gets a smaller cut and the price is the same, the money is going somewhere.
I think part of the Steam contract for publishers is that they can't sell their games cheaper elsewhere. So anyone wanting to compete with Steam on price needs to sell games that are in demand but not already on Steam. And Epic is really the only company with the pull to get that to happen, but the only way for them to do it is to get exclusivity, which gamers hate.
From my understanding, thats only for selling Steam Keys. As long as you're not using Steam's infrastructure, you're fine. You often can find better prices off Steam as it is, on platforns like Epic, GOG or esspecially Itch.io.
I thought it was the opposite, that they can't sell lower on other marketplaces, but they can do what they want with their keys.
Information is limitted as the contracts used for developers aren't shared, but the general understanding is that this only applies to Steam keys.
The one exception is the wolfire games lawsuit, which includes one alleged instance of Valve asking a developer not to distribute the game for free on their Discord when it is a paid product on Steam. Given the lack of detail, the single anecdote for evidence, the existence of other games where they are priced lower or free off Steam (I.E. Dwarf Fortress), its certainly not a widespread problem, almost certainly not in contract, if it did happen exactly as the anecdote suggests, may have been a misstep on the part of one employee, and may not have happened at all.
Of course, if Valve does do this, nonetheless mandated it, its an issue, but given that no one else has challenged them on what would be such a blatent anti-trust case, esspecially given how everyone else in the industry has been trying to take Valve's place for years, I think its unlikely.
I was gonna comment about epic giving games away for free, but I think I got your point. You mean like the same releases, but subsidizing, say, 10% of the price?
Yep, although there are a ton of other ways to do it as well such as a good rewards points system, or a raffle system with bonus games won when purchasing, or similar. As long as you don't spend years antagonising your customers first, I don't expect game stores would struggle to compete offering better prices than Steam, even at the cost of features.
Yeah, if it isn't it will be. If you extrapolate their current moves to a world where PC gaming is entirely controlled by them, maybe even from the OS level downwards, and there is also a set of console-like standalone platforms on handheld, set-top and VR segments.... well, that's a level of control over a massive media industry that I don't think anybody has had before. Especially not a private company whose ownership is two cheeseburgers and/or an unfortunate knife sharpening accident away from changing overnight.
As long as they stick with Linux as their target platform for the future, then I think the hardware side of this is safe. The problem is if their storefront goes to shit. People have pretty much their entire hobby reliant on one company on a platform that's supposedly meant to have open competition as a benefit.