Some interesting industry news for you here. Epic Games have announced a change to the revenue model of the Epic Games Store, as they try to pull in more developers and more gamers to actually purchase things.
I see what you’re saying and there’s definitely some merit to it, I’d be foolish to pretend they don’t have a near-monopoly and that it doesn’t afford them a position of power compared to their competitors.
But I think the key thing is that devs aren’t forced to use Steam or Steamworks. There’s nothing stopping someone like Epic from providing the exact same kind of services. The only thing they partly lack is the existing network effect, but Epic also has fortnight which provides the basis of that network for them. GoG is arguably in the worst position of the three in this regard, but many would put them in their personal 1st or 2nd place.
If Steam was truly stiflingly dominant to an anti-competitive degree, no one would have downloaded the Epic store to play fortnight in the first place—instead it’s been one of the most successful games on the platform of that past decade.
Epic wants to hedge their potential dominance by paying to keep games off Steam and removing the choice from the consumer. The fact that given there’s basically no barrier to entry and the average PC gamer still chooses to wait for a steam release is more indicative of inadequate competition rather than anti-competitive behaviour IMO.
(Cheers for the replies btw, this has been an interesting discussion)
Hey, you could say the same thing about Reddit or Twitter, and yet…
Not being forced to use a thing isn’t nearly enough to bypass an anticompetitive environment, as Apple just learned the hard way this month again in a separate fight with Epic as well.
Paying for exclusives is absolutely not anticompetitive, by the way. Just the opposite. The idea of competition is you have different offerings in different places. I think the only reason people get so mad about it these days is Valve stepped so far away from making games as a matter of course that nobody thinks about their first party stuff as exclusive anymore (which, again, is another show of their mastery at PR-by-default).
I keep reminding people how mad the fanboys were when Final Fantasy or Metal Gear went multiplatform. Getting old in games and seeing opinions shift based on brand loyalty is wild.
I do appreciate the civil conversation as well, for the record. People get extremely emotional about this one, especially around here, in ways I find outright childish and very annoying. It’s good to have somebody at least disagree politely and put some thought into it.
Apple is a different case I’d argue because until that lawsuit there was no legitimate way to install applications without using Apple’s storefront—that’s a much less defensible position IMO.
FWIW, my understanding is that many economists side on exclusivity contacts being by definition anti-competitive & anti-consumer in spirit if not strictly by law. The whole point of them is to remove the agency of the consumer and attempt to force their hand, after all. The whole Blizzard Activision acquisition by Microsoft was complicated predominantly by concerns of the exclusivity opportunities (mostly around CoD) following acquisition being anti-competitive.
You’ve got a good point about their first party games, but then no one is really giving epic grief about fortnite being a platform exclusive for them. People get annoyed about it more when they’ve paid third parties such as Square-Enix to not release on any other platform. It’s not just on the PC either, I’m pretty sure Sony got a lot of flak for paid third party exclusives to keep them off Xbox a little while ago.
People were mad that exclusives were going multiplatform at the time. Metal Gear on Xbox sent some PS fans into fits of rage. Final Fantasy going from Nintendo to Sony and then going multiplatform pissed people off on every step of that process.
Inconsistency aside, there is a difference between paying a third party to make an exclusive title and buying the third party. The Xbox deal wasn’t an exclusivity deal, it was an acquisition.
Let me put it this way, nobody in their right mind would claim that Netflix buying a show and putting it exclusively on Netflix is anticompetitive. The entire point of the platform is competing on content. If that still sounds implausible, roll it back a medium and think of TV stations. Again, nobody would get mad that a particular show airs specifically on a channel, even if most shows are made by production companies contracted, not owned, by the distribution channel.
Now, when the nerds were raging about exclusives I was on the camp that platform agnostic content is ideal, and I still agree with that sentiment. But it also seems pretty obvious that the notion that contracting out an exclusive from a third party studio is anticompetitive in a way that a first party release is not seems absurd. Why would it make more sense for The Last of Us or CounterStrike (especially CounterStrike, which was originally an indie mod acquired for a full release) to be exclusive than for Alan Wake II to be exclusive? Was it weirder that Ratchet & Clank Up You Arsenal was exclusive than for A Rift Apart to be exclusive just because Sony didn’t own Insomniac for the first one but they did for the second?
Paying for exclusives is 110% anti-competitive and anti-consumer.
Steam is dominant because of the service it provides, if Epic (or anyone else) actually made a compelling service, it could eat into Steam’s market share. Instead they are throwing money at stopping games being sold on other platforms (which is anti-competitive) and giving the user no choice (which is anti-consumer).
You should tell Max they’re being anticompetitive about The Last of Us and Netflix about Castlevania. Sony about Bloodborne, Jak & Daxter and Ratchet & Clank, Nintendo about Final Fantasy 1-6 and again Sony about 7-12.
I’m confused about whether you think Valve outright buying all the modding properties counts as paying for exclusives or not, but you may have to look into that one, too.
I have to say, the most cognitive dissonance about this argument was to see people flip out about Alan Wake II being an Epic exclusive, seemingly having entirely memory holed that Alan Wake 1 launched as an Xbox 360 exclusive and nobody even thought to complain.
I agree, I should. TV shows and movies should be accessible on multiple platforms, there’s a reason they are the most pirated forms of media. I have huge issue with all console exclusives too. I admit it’s not exactly the same if you own the studio/IP, but in an ideal world, them IPs would still exist elsewhere to give consumers more choice. So it’s just another hurdle I’d like the industries to overcome. I couldn’t give a shit about big corpo, only the consumers getting freedom of choice.
I just don’t buy exclusives at all anymore, even if they are timed. I couldn’t give a shit about triple A games either, which are usually the exclusives anyway. I’m not sure what the Alan Wake ramble is about, but I’m sure people complained about it, they always have.
Just because it exists in some form, doesn’t make it okay to continue it. Bringing up examples of exclusivity in other mediums isn’t a counter-argument.
I am genuinely confused to learn what you think a TV station does.
And we’ve gotten to the part where we learn that you somehow have an extremely hard opinion about a subject you don’t care at all about and have very little awareness of.
Which is fine, but it’d save the rest of us a lot of time if you translated that lack of interest and awareness into something other than aggressively expressing a preference, because this was both time consuming and pointless.
I haven’t “deflected” anything. Pointing out things you like about Valve is entirely irrelevant to whether or not they hold a dominant position on the market. “I really like Halo” is not a counterargument to “Microsoft’s dominance in the desktop OS space needs regulatory intervention”. Those things are unrelated.
But hey, nobody forces you to talk to me. In fact, given what you’ve said in this conversation I’m postively puzzled about why you are talking about this, beyond the fact that you hang out in online spaces where “good guy Valve make Linux good” is a simplistic trope to build a sense of parasocial belonging around.
This is such a weird straw man argument. Yes those are all anticompetitve that they FORCE them not to release the game for other platforms.
Valve buying all the modding properties? What does this refer to? Also valve released their games on consoles too, I remember fondly playing the orange box (which BTW was like 5 games in one a fantastic value).
People did complain about console exclusives back then too, it wasn’t as common because before it was understandable as it was prohibitively expensive or time consuming to port to other consoles, that’s virtually not the case anymore (except Nintendo because their consoles always suck) and now it’s just exclusive for exclusives sake.
Oh, yeah, there was a time when Valve teamed up with EA to make console ports back when Steam was a tenth of the userbase of the PS2 or a half of the 360, because business is business. You’ll note they’ve stopped doing that. I mean, it’s hard to tell because they don’t make many games anymore, but there were no console ports for DOTA, CS2, Deadlock or Artifact, and no Meta or Playstation VR ports for Alyx, either. They sure seem less bothered by exclusives than their fanbase these days.
And no, it’s not because they’re competitive or online games. Their last set of ports was CS: GO.
My question about Valve buying mods is why it’s fine for first party games to be exclusives but not third party games. Insomniac wasn’t owned by Sony for most of their existence, but most of their games were platform exclusives, first for Sony consoles, then, once, for Xbox. Was it better or worse for their output to be exclusive before or after the purchase?
And the same goes to Valve onboarding mod teams as fully owned teams, although just as an extension there. Team Fortress and DOTA do not originate at Valve, or as proprietary or exclusive games. Is that fine?
I mean, I think it’s fine. One could say it’s iffy to use free labor from modders as a recruitment tool, but mods are mods and mods are cool, so hiring mod teams is a smart way to hire game teams. But I also think that hiring a third party dev team to make a game for your platform is a perfectly fine way to fill your platform with content, so who knows where you guys are drawing the line for what you consider acceptable ways to fund a game’s development.
I see what you’re saying and there’s definitely some merit to it, I’d be foolish to pretend they don’t have a near-monopoly and that it doesn’t afford them a position of power compared to their competitors.
But I think the key thing is that devs aren’t forced to use Steam or Steamworks. There’s nothing stopping someone like Epic from providing the exact same kind of services. The only thing they partly lack is the existing network effect, but Epic also has fortnight which provides the basis of that network for them. GoG is arguably in the worst position of the three in this regard, but many would put them in their personal 1st or 2nd place.
If Steam was truly stiflingly dominant to an anti-competitive degree, no one would have downloaded the Epic store to play fortnight in the first place—instead it’s been one of the most successful games on the platform of that past decade.
Epic wants to hedge their potential dominance by paying to keep games off Steam and removing the choice from the consumer. The fact that given there’s basically no barrier to entry and the average PC gamer still chooses to wait for a steam release is more indicative of inadequate competition rather than anti-competitive behaviour IMO.
(Cheers for the replies btw, this has been an interesting discussion)
Hey, you could say the same thing about Reddit or Twitter, and yet…
Not being forced to use a thing isn’t nearly enough to bypass an anticompetitive environment, as Apple just learned the hard way this month again in a separate fight with Epic as well.
Paying for exclusives is absolutely not anticompetitive, by the way. Just the opposite. The idea of competition is you have different offerings in different places. I think the only reason people get so mad about it these days is Valve stepped so far away from making games as a matter of course that nobody thinks about their first party stuff as exclusive anymore (which, again, is another show of their mastery at PR-by-default).
I keep reminding people how mad the fanboys were when Final Fantasy or Metal Gear went multiplatform. Getting old in games and seeing opinions shift based on brand loyalty is wild.
I do appreciate the civil conversation as well, for the record. People get extremely emotional about this one, especially around here, in ways I find outright childish and very annoying. It’s good to have somebody at least disagree politely and put some thought into it.
Apple is a different case I’d argue because until that lawsuit there was no legitimate way to install applications without using Apple’s storefront—that’s a much less defensible position IMO.
FWIW, my understanding is that many economists side on exclusivity contacts being by definition anti-competitive & anti-consumer in spirit if not strictly by law. The whole point of them is to remove the agency of the consumer and attempt to force their hand, after all. The whole Blizzard Activision acquisition by Microsoft was complicated predominantly by concerns of the exclusivity opportunities (mostly around CoD) following acquisition being anti-competitive.
You’ve got a good point about their first party games, but then no one is really giving epic grief about fortnite being a platform exclusive for them. People get annoyed about it more when they’ve paid third parties such as Square-Enix to not release on any other platform. It’s not just on the PC either, I’m pretty sure Sony got a lot of flak for paid third party exclusives to keep them off Xbox a little while ago.
No, that’s what I’m saying.
People were mad that exclusives were going multiplatform at the time. Metal Gear on Xbox sent some PS fans into fits of rage. Final Fantasy going from Nintendo to Sony and then going multiplatform pissed people off on every step of that process.
Inconsistency aside, there is a difference between paying a third party to make an exclusive title and buying the third party. The Xbox deal wasn’t an exclusivity deal, it was an acquisition.
Let me put it this way, nobody in their right mind would claim that Netflix buying a show and putting it exclusively on Netflix is anticompetitive. The entire point of the platform is competing on content. If that still sounds implausible, roll it back a medium and think of TV stations. Again, nobody would get mad that a particular show airs specifically on a channel, even if most shows are made by production companies contracted, not owned, by the distribution channel.
Now, when the nerds were raging about exclusives I was on the camp that platform agnostic content is ideal, and I still agree with that sentiment. But it also seems pretty obvious that the notion that contracting out an exclusive from a third party studio is anticompetitive in a way that a first party release is not seems absurd. Why would it make more sense for The Last of Us or CounterStrike (especially CounterStrike, which was originally an indie mod acquired for a full release) to be exclusive than for Alan Wake II to be exclusive? Was it weirder that Ratchet & Clank Up You Arsenal was exclusive than for A Rift Apart to be exclusive just because Sony didn’t own Insomniac for the first one but they did for the second?
Paying for exclusives is 110% anti-competitive and anti-consumer.
Steam is dominant because of the service it provides, if Epic (or anyone else) actually made a compelling service, it could eat into Steam’s market share. Instead they are throwing money at stopping games being sold on other platforms (which is anti-competitive) and giving the user no choice (which is anti-consumer).
You should tell Max they’re being anticompetitive about The Last of Us and Netflix about Castlevania. Sony about Bloodborne, Jak & Daxter and Ratchet & Clank, Nintendo about Final Fantasy 1-6 and again Sony about 7-12.
I’m confused about whether you think Valve outright buying all the modding properties counts as paying for exclusives or not, but you may have to look into that one, too.
I have to say, the most cognitive dissonance about this argument was to see people flip out about Alan Wake II being an Epic exclusive, seemingly having entirely memory holed that Alan Wake 1 launched as an Xbox 360 exclusive and nobody even thought to complain.
I agree, I should. TV shows and movies should be accessible on multiple platforms, there’s a reason they are the most pirated forms of media. I have huge issue with all console exclusives too. I admit it’s not exactly the same if you own the studio/IP, but in an ideal world, them IPs would still exist elsewhere to give consumers more choice. So it’s just another hurdle I’d like the industries to overcome. I couldn’t give a shit about big corpo, only the consumers getting freedom of choice.
I just don’t buy exclusives at all anymore, even if they are timed. I couldn’t give a shit about triple A games either, which are usually the exclusives anyway. I’m not sure what the Alan Wake ramble is about, but I’m sure people complained about it, they always have.
Just because it exists in some form, doesn’t make it okay to continue it. Bringing up examples of exclusivity in other mediums isn’t a counter-argument.
I am genuinely confused to learn what you think a TV station does.
And we’ve gotten to the part where we learn that you somehow have an extremely hard opinion about a subject you don’t care at all about and have very little awareness of.
Which is fine, but it’d save the rest of us a lot of time if you translated that lack of interest and awareness into something other than aggressively expressing a preference, because this was both time consuming and pointless.
I’m not going to continue a discussion where you just constantly deflect. So have a good day.
I haven’t “deflected” anything. Pointing out things you like about Valve is entirely irrelevant to whether or not they hold a dominant position on the market. “I really like Halo” is not a counterargument to “Microsoft’s dominance in the desktop OS space needs regulatory intervention”. Those things are unrelated.
But hey, nobody forces you to talk to me. In fact, given what you’ve said in this conversation I’m postively puzzled about why you are talking about this, beyond the fact that you hang out in online spaces where “good guy Valve make Linux good” is a simplistic trope to build a sense of parasocial belonging around.
This is such a weird straw man argument. Yes those are all anticompetitve that they FORCE them not to release the game for other platforms.
Valve buying all the modding properties? What does this refer to? Also valve released their games on consoles too, I remember fondly playing the orange box (which BTW was like 5 games in one a fantastic value).
People did complain about console exclusives back then too, it wasn’t as common because before it was understandable as it was prohibitively expensive or time consuming to port to other consoles, that’s virtually not the case anymore (except Nintendo because their consoles always suck) and now it’s just exclusive for exclusives sake.
Oh, yeah, there was a time when Valve teamed up with EA to make console ports back when Steam was a tenth of the userbase of the PS2 or a half of the 360, because business is business. You’ll note they’ve stopped doing that. I mean, it’s hard to tell because they don’t make many games anymore, but there were no console ports for DOTA, CS2, Deadlock or Artifact, and no Meta or Playstation VR ports for Alyx, either. They sure seem less bothered by exclusives than their fanbase these days.
And no, it’s not because they’re competitive or online games. Their last set of ports was CS: GO.
My question about Valve buying mods is why it’s fine for first party games to be exclusives but not third party games. Insomniac wasn’t owned by Sony for most of their existence, but most of their games were platform exclusives, first for Sony consoles, then, once, for Xbox. Was it better or worse for their output to be exclusive before or after the purchase?
And the same goes to Valve onboarding mod teams as fully owned teams, although just as an extension there. Team Fortress and DOTA do not originate at Valve, or as proprietary or exclusive games. Is that fine?
I mean, I think it’s fine. One could say it’s iffy to use free labor from modders as a recruitment tool, but mods are mods and mods are cool, so hiring mod teams is a smart way to hire game teams. But I also think that hiring a third party dev team to make a game for your platform is a perfectly fine way to fill your platform with content, so who knows where you guys are drawing the line for what you consider acceptable ways to fund a game’s development.