There’s a war brewing in the video game industry, and it’s getting uglier by the day. Steam, the longtime leading digital distributor for the PC platform, is facing a significant challenge from an equally large and powerful player: Fortnite creator Epic Games, which launched its own PC games store last year. The ensuing competition has morphed into a console war-like debate for a modern generation of players who grew up under the unhindered dominance of Steam, a platform now facing its first real form of competition since it arrived on the scene nearly 15 years ago.
I’m glad we’re seeing more and more competition in this space. Steam is a hot mess, both the store and the application itself, and the more competition Valve has to deal with, the better. I’m tired of Valve approving every single garbage reskin “indie” title, leading to an endless stream of terrible “games” that makes it incredibly hard to find the few gems among the pile of feces, and I’m tired of the Steam client being a huge, slow behemoth of an application that regularly crumbles under its own sheer bloat (on Windows – let’s not even get started on the Linux and Mac versions).
Valve has had this market all to itself for far too long, and they’ve grown complacent. I welcome the competition from GOG, Epic, Humble, and all the others.
Except there is no real competition. Epic isn’t releasing their store on Linux, and GOG still hasn’t released a client for it. That leaves basically itch.io which has a bunch of indie games and mostly just the same stuff as Steam.
Maybe Epic will compete once they have more games in there, but for now I think of them as like uplay and Origin. They’re there, but I try to avoid them. Steam has had competition for a long time, but they are clearly doing just fine. (Not sure what the gripe is about the app, I haven’t ever had steam crash on me, or if it has, it has been so long ago, or was the fault of Windows, where there were other bad things going on.
I particularly don’t want a client, so GOG is way better than Steam is for me even on Linux. Not everyone does want a client, and some see the lack of a Linux variant as a good thing because it’s at least one major hurdle if GOG ever wanted to make it mandatory.
Epic releasing their store on Linux would make 1-2% of a difference… it’s most likely not worth it to them (is it really worth it to Valve?)
I think Valve mainly did all that (and made all the contributions to Linux graphics, in particular the NVidia drivers) to make those Steam boxes a thing, and now it’s just not that much effort to keep going for some good will.
Steam as a client program is stagnant and frequently awful From November until March/April (and still pending in the stable version), fullscreen videos were broken on displays with something other than 100% Windows scaling (aka most 1440p or 4k displays, or my laptop’s 1080p screen). https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/discussions/0/2798319091582753808/
This was a regression, not some mysterious unsolvable problem. But Valve let it sit for a third of a year.
Anything that lights a fire under their ass is fine by me.
TBH, there really isn’t any practical competition:
* Epic: Has a horrible UI, does only a fraction of what Steam does, and has near zero practical selection. They at least get credit for making it easy to migrate, offering to parse your list of friends on Steam and point you at them on their system.
* Itch.io: Isn’t even targeting the same market as Steam, UI is mediocre at best, and has a tiny selection compared to most other options (though that fits in with their different target market).
* GOG: Is decent, but still has a very limited selection, lacks some functionality Steam has, and has no native client for Linux despite technically supporting it.
* UPlay: Is absolute crap, plain and simple. It’s only redeeming factor is that it actually integrates sanely with Steam (that is, you can register games that need UPlay with Steam (or just buy them through Steam), and everything just works).
* Origin: Similar situation to UPlay, just for EA and without the good Steam integration.
* Humble: Actually decent, but they still have a limited selection compared to Steam, and still lack many of the features present in Steam.
* Discord: Only offers things as part of a subscription service, as well as lacking in features compared to Steam and having an at best mediocre UI.
Note that my comments above about Steam having a larger selection are ignoring all the crapware on Steam, there are quite a few good games on there that you just can’t find anywhere else. That, plus the level of horizontal integration Steam as a platform provides (for any given game, you have forums, guides, news, and user content all in one place alongside the game itself) and the sheer momentum that’s present from how long they’ve been the only practical option means that Steam is not really even threatened by any of this ‘competition’, so it’s not likely much, if anything, is going to change.
?… ( I have some games on Uplay, from magazine; would be good to transfer them to Steam, not sure if that’s what you mean…)
I agree about the comments on the crap that is in steam. I think that equally applies to the mobile stores. I personally would pay a small yearly fee for a more curated version of those stores. It should work like most football ( US Soccer) leagues, There are 10 spots for an application, but year over year only the top 8 stay in the upper league, two get dropped, and two from the lower tier get promoted.
@Thom
What is so good about it to have to install several of these programs? If I could choose where I want to buy the game, it would be ok, but with all these exclusive titles you end installing several of these programs with all the updating etc. sometimes just for 1 game.
Really, really bad for the customer