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.
Plenty of other platforms spend more money on the platform than Steam. Definitely. Easy.
I mean, for one thing the console manufacturers are shipping a TON more hardware, often with very low margins. And they are all bigger than Steam and have as much of a software upkeep. They are spending more money on game development than Steam, too.
Steam Deck, Steam OS, the Index and Proton are at most on par with what Sony does just for the PS5 platform.
Oh, and to your first question, Steam does very much tell developers what they want them to do. They are a first party, and have their own preferences an policies. They are currently in court for banning developers from offering games cheaper on any other competing service, for instance.
I mean, it’s only relevant because you incorrectly gave them credit. The rest of it is just word salad, but that one was stating a fact and the fact was a lie, so I wouldn’t want somebody to read it and get the wrong impression.
Also for the record, Steam’s current refund policy is more strict than GoG, in that GoG’s has no playtime limit, just a time-from-purchase limit, which is a fairly decent parallel to return policies in retail. Given the fact that there’s no DRM on GoG games either is pretty meaningless, and it’s anybody’s guess whether GoG could sustain it with the kind of volumes and exploiting Steam faces, but now we’re getting to levels of nuance well beyond writing misinformation-laden rants with no caps.
I’ll give you that my brain is getting quite sore from this conversation. I don’t know if it’s gymnastics, but man, it is quite draining.
And, for the record, you didn’t give them credit for having a good refund policy, you first heavily implied they had “ensured” one for gamers, which they didn’t and actively resisted doing, and then that theirs was more generous than GoG’s, which is also not true. It’s still written up there.
The only reason I don’t think you were lying is I’m pretty sure you had no idea about any of that in the first place and you didn’t bother to look it up. “Lying” implies knowing something is false, so I guess you’re off the hook on that front.
Oh, hey, you acknowledged they’re not perfect and most of their positioning is them understanding PR better than competitors. I’m gonna count that as an agree to disagree and stop talking to you because holy crap.
Plenty of other platforms spend more money on the platform than Steam. Definitely. Easy.
I mean, for one thing the console manufacturers are shipping a TON more hardware, often with very low margins. And they are all bigger than Steam and have as much of a software upkeep. They are spending more money on game development than Steam, too.
Steam Deck, Steam OS, the Index and Proton are at most on par with what Sony does just for the PS5 platform.
Oh, and to your first question, Steam does very much tell developers what they want them to do. They are a first party, and have their own preferences an policies. They are currently in court for banning developers from offering games cheaper on any other competing service, for instance.
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People get mad at me for caling Dunning-Kruger in these things, and it inevitably gets to that point, but…
…come on, what am I supposed to do with this?
For the record, Valve specifically avoided having a return policy until regulators threatened to impose one.
The first platform that implemented no-questions-asked return policy?
EA’s Origin, believe it or not.
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I mean, it’s only relevant because you incorrectly gave them credit. The rest of it is just word salad, but that one was stating a fact and the fact was a lie, so I wouldn’t want somebody to read it and get the wrong impression.
Also for the record, Steam’s current refund policy is more strict than GoG, in that GoG’s has no playtime limit, just a time-from-purchase limit, which is a fairly decent parallel to return policies in retail. Given the fact that there’s no DRM on GoG games either is pretty meaningless, and it’s anybody’s guess whether GoG could sustain it with the kind of volumes and exploiting Steam faces, but now we’re getting to levels of nuance well beyond writing misinformation-laden rants with no caps.
deleted by creator
I’ll give you that my brain is getting quite sore from this conversation. I don’t know if it’s gymnastics, but man, it is quite draining.
And, for the record, you didn’t give them credit for having a good refund policy, you first heavily implied they had “ensured” one for gamers, which they didn’t and actively resisted doing, and then that theirs was more generous than GoG’s, which is also not true. It’s still written up there.
The only reason I don’t think you were lying is I’m pretty sure you had no idea about any of that in the first place and you didn’t bother to look it up. “Lying” implies knowing something is false, so I guess you’re off the hook on that front.
deleted by creator
Oh, hey, you acknowledged they’re not perfect and most of their positioning is them understanding PR better than competitors. I’m gonna count that as an agree to disagree and stop talking to you because holy crap.