Steam - a blessing or a curse?

Mole HD

Mole HD
Steam has been going for a long time and is well established and comfortable to use. Having been on Xbox for a few years it was like a homecoming for me going back to PC and seeing all my old games still there... I always wonder if the folks who harp on about Steam remember the dark days of PC gaming before it was a thing...I do ;)

Like the Essential Sailor mentioned...just try to find a hard copy PC games retailer these days. I only have one hard copy PC game...Silent Hunter 3 from many, many moons ago, everything else is digital.
 
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EUS

EUS
Old Duck said:
Any folks here actually using the Linux version of Steam? I love my Linux :D
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Yes, almost exclusively.
The only reason I boot into MS is to play ED, but the last time I booted into MS was at the beginning of DW2.
Haven't been back to MS, or ED since arriving at the 1st waypoint, thx FSS! Kisses!
However, I know this winter i'll fire up MS to play my modded skyrim.
 

askavir

askavir
EUS said:
Is it expensive for companies?
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I do agree that 70/30 split is a bit too much, but I'd like to add that 70/30 has been the default digital store market split. If you try to publish an app on the apple store, they also have that same split, and so do others. Personally, I thing something around 80/20 would be fair for both parts.

Epic has a better split for developers, although they only do it because they have loads of chinese money to dump to try to create an artificial monopoly and reap future benefits.
I don't really blame devs for going to the Epic store exclusives road, but I certainly will never buy their games in those terms either. I understand devs look out for what's best for them, but as a customer so do I look out for what's best for me.
 

Navigare Necesse Est

Navigare Necesse Est
askavir said:
I do agree that 70/30 split is a bit too much, but I'd like to add that 70/30 has been the default digital store market split. If you try to publish an app on the apple store, they also have that same split, and so do others. Personally, I thing something around 80/20 would be fair for both parts.

Epic has a better split for developers, although they only do it because they have loads of chinese money to dump to try to create an artificial monopoly and reap future benefits.
I don't really blame devs for going to the Epic store exclusives road, but I certainly will never buy their games in those terms either. I understand devs look out for what's best for them, but as a customer so do I look out for what's best for me.
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It's definitely better than old brick&mortar. That was like 50/50. Minus lower margins due to physical media, packaging, distribution.
 

-VR- Max Factor

-VR- Max Factor
Garix said:
So you walked into a shop and bought the physical disc. Did you believe that all the money went to the developer/Publisher?
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Different times. I would prefer to buy direct from the companies website.

Also while easy is nice, it is also bad as it becomes too easy to buy games which I then don't bother playing.
 
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Old Duck

Old Duck
Max Factor said:
Its easy, but you are also locked in to that environment. They skim money off the top that doesn't got to the developer too.
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Considering that I would be moving to PC because Frontier so royally botched the PS4 version of ED (for which I paid full price + tons of cosmetics), I'm not bothered that they won't get the entire cut of yet more of my money... Is stealing from a thief actually stealing?
 

-VR- Max Factor

-VR- Max Factor
Old Duck said:
Considering that I would be moving to PC because Frontier so royally botched the PS4 version of ED (for which I paid full price + tons of cosmetics), I'm not bothered that they won't get the entire cut of yet more of my money... Is stealing from a thief actually stealing?
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Fair enough.
 

marx

marx
It's not just as simple as offering your stuff for download from your own site too. Content Delivery Networks are costly and complex. I wouldn't be surprised if Frontier's were at capacity, and the reason their newer games are Steam exclusive could be because they don't want to do those too.

The 70/30 cut also includes paying for the SteamWorks API, the excellent Steam CDN, discovery, some promotion and so on. Now, I'm not going to say that's too much or just enough, because I honestly don't know enough about various kinds of game developers' finances, but it certainly pays for more than many people seem to think.

Meanwhile, my chief problem with the Epic store is that it's the worst I've tried to date. It's still missing basic features. It obviously caters to developers much more than to users, and their main competitive advantage is showering developers with lots of money for timed exclusives. I mean, a lower price cut is cool, but they are offering less services for that lower price cut too. In the end, you get what you pay for.

Oh, and I've also used Steam on Linux, quite a lot. In its early years, there were some minor problems, but it has been a long while since I've had any now.
 

marx

marx
Also,
Old Duck said:
Can I make purchases on their website during a sale using my Linux-based browser, and then download those purchases at a later date once I own a Windows PC? Can I download those purchases to multiple PCs? I'm assuming the rule would be to only allow playing a game on one PC at a time, which is fine by me.
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Yes, yes and yes. I don't think you can play the same game in two different instances, but I've never actually tried that. However, you can have it running on one computer and stream it to another.
 

Shadowdancer

Shadowdancer
marx said:
It's not just as simple as offering your stuff for download from your own site too. Content Delivery Networks are costly and complex. I wouldn't be surprised if Frontier's were at capacity, and the reason their newer games are Steam exclusive could be because they don't want to do those too.
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Ironically it's the same underlying CDN operator :p
 

Shadowdancer

Shadowdancer
Garix said:
So you walked into a shop and bought the physical disc. Did you believe that all the money went to the developer/Publisher?
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The music publishing business managed to carry the box business over into the digital age to their advantage. I don't know if they changed it, but publishers used to deduct a flat percentage from artist royalties for "breakage", i.e., the artist was ultimately responsible for physically damaged media, no matter how much product broke, and no matter if there even was a physical product. I very much wonder how that went for the games biz.
 

Fishy

Fishy
Old Duck said:
Can I download those purchases to multiple PCs? I'm assuming the rule would be to only allow playing a game on one PC at a time, which is fine by me.
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Yes you can, to as many PCs as you like. Only one of them can be 'online' though, so say PC A is connected to your Steam account, then you launch Steam and connect your accound from PC B, PC A will be automatically switched to offline mode. Offline mode cuts off access to store and other stuff, but unless your game requires Steamworks for its networking, it should be fully playable, effectively allowing multiple PCs to play games at the same time. If you do that though, make sure to avoid cloud saves as that might end up being wonky.

It's not as simple as GOG which lets you install and play anything anywhere anytime in as many copies as you want, but it's workable if, say, you want your wife and kids to be able to play your games at the same time as you. There is a 'family sharing' feature to share games between accounts, but it's a bit awful as you can't play any shared game if the person sharing it is playing anything (not even that game). Say we share our libraries and you play game A from my library while I'm working, it's all fine. The second I stop working and launch game B from my library, you get kicked out.

With regards to other stuff not mentioned already, additional stuff I enjoy from the platform is the screenshot library (F12 by default to screenshot while in-game) and its free cloud storage and direct URLs to the images, not even a need to drag and drop to imgur. It's neat to store those gaming memories and occasionally share them on forums (See here for my ED memories for example, or there for the pre-Steam memories when I still launched the game from Steam just for the screenshot library feature). And then there's the controller support. The controller configuration/remapping feature of the Steam client is absolutely stellar. These two (screenshot library and controller support) are the reason why I deliberately launch a good few third-party games through Steam.

edit: made myself lol looking back at those screenshot and rediscovering my 'Belle of Quince' Beluga, registration plate XPLOIT, fully funded by the local tourism exploit back then. :LOL:
 
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