Games

Not one of those data points justifies their shitty client, which, as a consumer, is all I really care about.

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.

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.

Tim, what are you doing here?

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.

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 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?

Yet Steam has a history that proves they will not fuck customers over, and if they try new features people hate they'll not pushing it through no matter what for the purpose of maximizing profits (also not through dark patterns). This is something phenomenally rare and which you can't buy with any amount of money.

So yeah, not sure what will happen in the future. But competing with Steam always will be just painful unless you got your own niche (like GOG) by the mere fact that Valve isn't "just another company that will screw you over" <-- the default expectation these days.