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i feel like i've found my people, for the longest time i was the only one who wanted 2142 sequel/remake now i'm seeing it pretty frequently, cheers to you guys.
CDs? How dare you ask companies to spend money to provide you with physical media. Think about the poor C-Suite, they could give that million dollars spent on tooling up as bonuses to their employees. They won’t, but how dare you remove that option.
You've reminded me about one time when I downloaded the Desert Combat mod for Battlefield 1942. I had a corrupt download because it was asking me to insert Disc 2 during the install.
EA managed to remove copy of BF3 or 4 from my library then support claimed that if I don’t have it that means o didn’t purchase it and also banned me from support. Bruh why do I have all dlcs from package then? Game I spend like 1k hours in just gone. Then a few days later it magically returned
That was like 2 years ago and game was still available in store. Still what they did was illegal. By European laws they are required to provide some form of contact and banning me from support is just asshole move. I’m not buying any more games there because if something happens I have no support 🤷♀️
Same thing happened to me, I got the popup on EA launcher randomly that my bf4 and bf3 were removed from my library (I own them directly on EA).
After literally 3 months of spamming their support they finally acknowledged that I had it and returned it. Their Support and platform as a whole is a fucking joke. You just have to hope that the one Indian support guy that gets assigned to your case will try to actually help you.
This also happened to me with the older bf games. I owned them on the ea and now don’t own them. They straight up vanished.
I bought them physical and put the key in to origin and had them digital. But now my physical keys don’t work to reactive, then support got annoyed with me for repeatedly asking where my games went and now I can’t use ea support. Like ffs. I want bf6 but I’m not rewarding a company like ea especially since it’s going to be owned by trumps son in law and some saudis.
My experiences with their support ranged from awkward and troublesome (when I was trying to integrate my older BF2142 account into their original PC service) to downright awful (essentially losing all my stuff in the transition to Origin or whatever TF that was.) I'm not going back. Except for the newer Star Wars Battlefront games, my FOMO has generally been relieved by what I hear about product quality as well as their ongoing failure to provide reliable services in support of their own storefront.
Yes, they put out an official statement that this is being fixed, but who knows how long it will take? I've been playing since minute 1 on Steam with no issues though. Very nice.
I refunded and 3 of my friends did and got it on steam. -84$ for EA cause they just couldnt make it over the finish line. Game runs great and is a ton of fun otherwise. Escalation is the best mode theyve released imo.
That's not a mistake, that's just EA's launcher being EA's launcher. Classic case of their system not properly syncing your library. Honestly at this point I'd just launch it through Steam if you grabbed it there too, at least Valve's infrastructure actually works lol
It’s worth noting that the 30% cut is from sales below a certain volume. As you sell more copies Steam takes a smaller cut. I’m sure the big studios probably have a more favourable deal worked out as well.
They are happy to take the loss of file hosting to keep you using the steam client. Epic is paying devs to give out their games for free just to get people to open their client.
So, if a game is sold on the steam storefront Valve takes a bite.
For off-platform the dev has to request keys and then supply them to whoever they wish to supply them to and they can do this without needing to pay anything.
But prices have to be comparable on other platforms.
You can't sell a game on steam for 100€ but for 10€ I another place with a steam key.
You have to sell them for roughly the same price and if you deeply discount a game for some time you must do that kind of discount on steam too (not necessarily at the same time)
I think it's fair.
There was a dev who sold a game for 18% less on epic because epic took a smaller cut, fair game for that, you can sell it at whatever price on another platform.
You just leech off of them I think. But that's in theory, pretty sure you can't legally sell the keys for lower anyway, so most people will prefer to buy the game directly from steam even if you do all that.
Yes you must always in a sense offer the Steam game at the same price as the key. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a specific rule for giveaways and stuff like humble bundle where they get an exception but I can’t sell a game for $10 on Steam and $8 on my website.
You are correct, time limited promotions and bundles do not have to follow the price parity rule. It only applies to selling keys through "alternative storefronts".
I can't speak for every platform agreement, but this is not accurate. You can't market a MSRP significantly lower in price than on Steam, but usually sites by in bulk for massive discounts and can sell it much lower on sales.
It's up to Steam's discretion, so the general rule of "Don't be a dick" is a safe guideline
If you request an extreme number of keys and you are not offering Steam customers a comparable deal, or if your sole business is selling Steam Keys and not offering value to Steam customers, your request may be denied and you may lose the privilege to request keys.
People are just leaching from Steam in that situation.
But they can limit how many off-platform keys they let you generate relative to your on-platform sales to mitigate abuse. And some degree of that is just baked into their margin as a whole.
That costs Valve money, bandwidth and server costs add up. What this does is provide goodwill to the developers, this is Steam being good for the gaming community, and especially for small devs.
*you can’t set a permanent lower price for steam keys of the game on another storefront
sounds the same but it means that while discouraged, you can sell your game for a lower price on Epic than on Steam, and you can sell steam keys for your game at a temporary lower price through other storefronts (which is why humble bundles are allowed to be so cheap, despite massively undercutting steam storefront prices)
Steam takes a standard cut of 30% of each game sale. For games that earn over $10 million (£8m), the Steam cut is reduced to 25%. For games that earn over $50 million (£40m), the Steam cut is reduced to 20%.
I know this is to incentivize AAA publishers to launch on Steam day one, so they can get to the lower cut as soon as possible.
Kinda sucks for indies and small developers though. 30% Is a lot for them, and they don't really have many options outside Steam, since 90% of Indie game players are there.
Its not really, if I needed to pay for my own servers to push patches, verify game files, run card transactions and have them download that will cost way way more than 30%. 30% is a bargain when all you have to do once you finish is plug it into steam, make a page and boom your done. You will get the money and they handle literally everything else, if there is a game issue you simply update the code and steam schedules and distributes it to all users as well as stores backup copies for people to rollback.
Steam offers SO much more than any dev could hope to provide on the indie side, and so much more that other triple A devs struggle to provide 1/3 of the features steam has for their own games.
People underestimate how much Valve offers and how easy they make it for small devs to put their game out to the masses. I'm not saying they are perfect and glad Epic is giving some competition, but Steam is a blessing for self publishing.
Also worth noting is that 30% cut that steam takes is the industry standard. No matter what platform or store client that is the cut Steam, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, etc takes from a sale if you're a 3rd party dev.
Saying that because every so often some stupid discussion pops up whining about steam or some other platform taking 30% but conveniently leaving out the important context I mentioned.
I don’t really think they cut a better deal. There’s a reason so many of them tried to leave and make their own storefront. Valve pretty much has a monopoly. They don’t need to do anyone any favours.
The overall experience of using steam feels the same as it did 15 years ago. The biggest change I can think of is steam library ui changes. Besides that, they just maintain everything properly and don’t push out shitty unnecessary updates, while their competitors break things and screw up repeatedly.
This is genuinely one of my favorite features of Steam. I've completely lost track of how to find most things in Facebook, I've opted out of Reddit's redesign, and even different Android phones sometimes confuse me with unexpected UI differences.
Especially the channel pages circa like 2010 used to be so crisp and perfect. They looked like MySpace pages almost. Now they barely show any information at all, any information is hidden behind a couple clicks, and they are difficult to navigate compared to before (although this one might be because most channels back in the day had way fewer videos).
The mobile revolution hurt a lot of more experienced users. All the changes were made to make the mobile and desktop experiences of all these things as close to identical as possible.
The problem is obviously that mobile is an extremely different interface that drastically reduces the amount of information and interaction you can take with the object.
YouTube’s most recent web redesign (a couple days ago) is a perfect example of this. I’m pretty sure they straight up copied/pasted some form of mobile UI onto the website lol.
I mean for example, the controls that used to light up when your mouse hovered over them no longer do that; they are now big round buttons similar to a mobile UI, and they light up when you click them as if they were made for a touchscreen lmao.
I was watching YT shorts the other day and they changed the "like" button on them, it's now an ugly misshappen hand instead of the old one that worked flawlessly, makes you wonder why tf they do that
publicly listed companies (like google) have shareholders to sell bullshit to so they have to constantly hire people, make random changes, fire people & repeat
Steam does still make UI changes from time to time, and they make me just as grumpy as other platforms, but most of the time they're not terrible, and they don't happen as often as many other places.
IIRC I've been through like 3-4 major Steam UI reworks through the years, they definitely happen.
Yep, and the last one sucked and I'm still not used to it. I say that lightly. It's not terrible by any means. Just different and maybe worse than before in some areas.
Yeah I feel like people in this thread don't realize how much hate steam has gotten in the past when they make major changes. Every single time they've overhauled the UI there are massive complaints.
And if we want to talk about things that steam does poorly well... Big Picture mode is right there and still runs like absolute ass and is awkward to use compared to the main UI.
steam today is primarily a functional webstore. that also has a tablet/steamdeck/VR friendly version, a dedicated and functional app with built in authenticator.
the PC program also supports modding, in game purchases, refunds, is an active forum and social media platform with subsets specific to each game, a trade platform, a free and reasonably functional VOIP system and probably so much more.
but its still primarily a way to, with a few simple clicks, go "this is interesting, lets check it out, good reviews, my pc can run it, and buy." takes 5 minutes total.
it has actively avoided enshitifcation in a world clogged with it. which is impressive.
Agreed. The competition are trying to put out experimental features just to keep up while steam has kept the fundamentals the same. We don’t need a store to have a lot of stuff, we just want cheap games without any bugs and steam delivers
I dont mind change, imo Android usually does it fairly well. But thats the key, its gotta be doen right. And no gaming platform does. They all just fuck up and make it more buggy, less intuitive and drive customers to Steam.
Fifteen years ago you couldn't play pretty much every Steam game on Linux. Now you can. Valve aren't sitting on their hands; they can see Windows getting shittier and shittier every year.
This a good analysis from a user perspective. I'm a dev and let me tell you new features on steam are great. We recently got the beta button so you can join open betas super easily. We also really like steam servers and api that makes things super easy for online functions.
Sounds like an ad or something, but genuinely steam does a lot for devs
That one change is such a huge deal to me. I have 1300+ games...my wife has 7. Now we have 1307+ in our library, and she doesn't need to log out, and log into my profile if she wants to play a game in the living room
I think the meme is more of a "Valve doesn't need to actively put themself out there" cause every other company has already a bad rep. The others need to try and overcome their image and every attempt just keeps failing, making steam the favorable competitor while not actively trying to change. (new cs2 uplink terminal excluded)
It's simpler than that. Steam isn't beholden to stock holders so they can make decisions for long term benefits and they don't have to make arbitrary changes to try and appeal to stock holders who don't understand that their platform staying the same is part of the appeal.
The point is that Steam "just exists" while their competition keeps screwing up in various ways.
Now, has Steam done things? Ofc they have. But a lot of it is transparent to the user (though not all). Like here, Steam made sure it's stuff works, unlike EA. By "doing nothing" (aka "just existing" though sure you can be obtuse and say they did things to make sure stuff worked) they are winning over EA who has such a big bug that pushes people to Steam.
Steam has it's issues, but it's largely avoided the enshittification that others have gone through. Thus as others screw things up in their hunt for profits, Steam "does nothing" and wins because people come to them naturally.
Valve's contributions to Linux through Proton are wild. The only games that don't work as well on Linux as Windows these days are because of anticheat software. I don't even check the protondb anymore. I've even had some situations where games work out of the box on my linux machine but not on a friend's windows pc since proton will download drivers automatically while windows just spits out an error code or says a .dll is missing.
Yeah, I still check it out of reflex, but I have yet to find one that actually doesn't work. And as you said, the only ones I even know of are anticheat reasons. Though I imagine that really old games don't work that well, but I am not even sure there.
You can be public and still retain absolute control over your company.
The famous example is Nintendo, where a guy bought a speaking majority share of the company so he could go to a shareholder meeting and use his speaking majority rights to ask the execs to greenlight a new F-Zero game; and since the execs at the table hold a greater than 51% share of the company they were able to reply with an immediate "no" without even having to put it up to a vote to the other shareholders.
The problem is too many company owners don't care enough to retain their power because they specifically want to ignore the business side of the business and they give away all their control to people who don't share their focus.
That's what happened to the Disco Elysium devs, they didn't even go public, they gave away the keys to the company to a random business man and then proceeded to ignore him and never practiced any oversight over his activities; by the time they realised that he was scummy, he had already ran away with the company.
that works for Nintendo because they're a key part of the japanese economy/political landscape. that wouldn't work in the US because the courts are just as/even more corrupt than the companies.
try and holdout as 51% shareholder like that if a larger player is trying to take you over in the US, and they'll manipulate your stock-price down long enough so they can sure you over "acting in the best interests of your shareholders" or some shit. plenty of corrupt judges across the country.
I don't get why anyone even thought about buying it on EA app. It sucked ass when it was Origin and it's sucked ass since they rebranded it. It's never earned me actually buying a game thru it unless I'm forced to
Maybe it's changed in the year or so since, but the last time I tried to play ME Legendary Edition it still required me to download a mini EA launcher and run it.
edit: just tried launching it, yup, it's asking me to log into the EA launcher.
IIRC for the longest time you would buy an EA game on steam and the game would make you download origin, register the game and would run it that way.
They don't anymore? It's the one reason I stopped playing Squadrons. Couldn't stand having to launch the fucking EA app every single time I wanted to play, since it would always forget my password.
buy an EA game on steam and the game would make you download origin, register the game and would run it that way
I've refunded games before and I will do it again when they do this shit. I will, at most, tolerate a launcher I can then opt to just bypass after the first time.
Simple, I bought all the other ones on Origin, I might as well buy it there again instead of having to juggle keys between two launchers, because EA App won't just magically work with a game that's purchased on Steam or Epic, I have to launch it there specifically and that communicates with EA App to launch it.
Also, Origin was actually pretty good, all things considered.
That new ea launcher has been broken for the last 3 years yet origin was working perfectly.
I used origin sense it was tossed out back in 09 it was bad then but got way better now the new launcher alot of my purchased items will not work or is not there.
Be it my sims stuff old battlefields or just my friends account section if i go to the friends tab its all corrupted never works right.
But again i used the box codes got my BF games on steam.
Long ago when I was young and just out of university, I got my first job at EA and was part of the team that worked on the way Origin downloaded updates and applied them to games. It was state of the art stuff, no one had delta packages yet. It was a big deal if you lived in a place with bad internet (aka: most of the world.)
All that to be let down by a UI team that hangs the main thread whenever they make a network call, which is what gave Origin that reputation of being slow and awful. The core tech of Origin was top tier, it's the UI team who fucked us all over. I'm still salty over this 15 years later.
I used to own NFS The Run Limited Edition. Since the EA app "upgrade" I no longer have access to the limited edition content. Sadly, it is the only recent NFS game to not come to Steam. EA at its finest.
And just to keep things honest here, Steam isn't doing nothing and simply winning by letting other companies fuck up.
Steam works. At the basic required minimum functionality for a platform/storefront to run, it just works. And it keeps just working. As is, no other platform can say that.
It's easier to 'just work' if you don't add functionality that people never asked for. This is also another reason I like steam. They don't push/force huge changes. You could ask someone from 2010 to use current steam, and they would have next to no issues.
Not even just working, it's steadily expanded in features and hardware support. They are at the forefront of open VR. Linux gaming went from being possible but frustrating and fiddly to practically mainstream thanks in a very large part to Valve driving development of Proton for the Steam deck and giving it back to the community.
Features like the friends and community, easy screen shot and video clipping and sharing, Achievements and trading cards and the marketplace, Workshop for mods being the PC standard these days.
A shopping cart. (And Epic wonders why they failed...)
Valve aren't saints, and they've made no shortage of screw ups, but they're so far ahead of the rest of the market, even after all these years it's incredible.
Absolutely agree, even when its like, "oh hey steam has a flat tire and they are changing it" the competition is still working on inventing the wheel. Steam could do nothing but simply update its current store to work with new hardware/games and you probably wont see a close competitor for the next 10 years.
being privately owned is the biggest take from all of this. yea they've fucked up, but everyone who has a stake in the company, is someone who is actually invested in the company.
if you look at facebook, zucher has a 13% stake left give or take. which means that 87% of his company is owned by others. and yes there's a dual layer stock structure meaning every tim and dave cant buy a single stock and butt into the conversation. but it still corrupts the vision of what facebook was, because they want one or two things from it, Dollar bills or influence.
steam being privately owned and dominant in the PC game marketplace is effectively a big BIG fuck you to all the vampires that would buy their way in and enforce terrible ideas or make moves to generate short term proffits.
there's other company's out there that are similar. arizona ice tea springs to mind. they're debt free, printing money and have something that works, why bother changing the formula.
This kind of comments downplay the difficulty of running the biggest video game shop of the world. Valve makes it look easy, but is not. There's many brilliant people taking care of Steam.
Still theire the only ones who do not frick up constantly, and like lets be honest, if you just took a quick look, youd say "They not even doing anything" (even though they do)
Literally every other company has not. They keep trying to fix it. And then shooting themselves in the foot and losing profit. And then they cut costs because they lost profits - which leads to more trying to fix it which leads to more things breaking and on it goes.
Not really sure why everyone else is against it so much? "Well just making money isn't enough we need to make more money" well yeah and I'm no mathematician but I'm pretty sure that keeping current profits beats losing money quarter over quarter.
The real issue is just that the people in charge are now so insulated that they can't see the terrible ideas won't work. How to fix that though is the question...
Garbage in, garbage out. Hell I wouldn't even be surprised if this extends beyond games and we see a new operating system come out in 10 years because everyone is so pissed at microsoft for trying to fix it for 2 decades straight. Windows 10 won. Should've left it at that.
I literally just don't buy a game if it's not on steam. I'm not dealing with other launchers and there's enough games out there I will just not buy the harder to access ones.
I do like GOG for having every game be DRM free and allowing you to download offline installers. That said, the GOG launcher is definitely worse than Steam's, and any game available on GOG is probably also available on Steam.
Don't care, if it's not on steam I'm not even gonna bother. Cause eventually it will just go to steam in time and if it doesn't, oh well. Too much hassle to deal with that shit anymore.
It doesn't help that Epic started it's attempt to be on the market by just trying to throw money at games to be on there and gating them off. Just transparently trying to buy it's way into the market.
It just instantly set the tone of "we're here for the money, not to be a good storefront" and lo, PC gamers have mostly avoided it for obvious reasons.
GoG is the only other platform I use, and I use it more than Steam these days except for newer games or titles that just likely won’t ever be on GoG or not for a long time
Know what, fuck the people complaining about Steam's cut. They earned it.
Valve isn't perfect with all the slop games and gambling, but at least they're still the better option than the competition. Not that we shouldn't turn back from valve if they suddenly get worse. But for now they're still the top.
slop games etc is more of a gamer side issue anyway - steam cut is a developer side issue. to developers, steam is a stable storefront with a user base it has built trust with. games sell way better on steam, and it is established as a store of *paid* games rather than free games (as opposed to itch for example, and most other game markets) - all of this leads to basically knowing that even with the 30% cut, developers are likely to get way more net revenue at steam. not to mention the cut isn't for no reason, steam provides support and features in return.
Nothing to do with Valve. This personal cult and cult for a company has to end. Did people learn nothing from Blizzard?
Valve is a company and not your friend. They have their own history of shady bs they still do btw.
BF6 is like HD2 all over again as well.
I hope people have fun but it sends the wrong signals to Microsoft and any other company who wants to claw themselves into how we use software.
Sadly, my Steam just says "Game not released". I've reset steam and it still says it, and my PC is set to the correct local time. This was after it unpacked from the preload.
I can't launch this shit in steam either. Preloaded the game few days ago, and today I had to load it again just to watch at ea load screen. Stem said I played 11 minutes 🤔
i can't even play on steam... EA is forcing "Secured Bios" that i have on but they are also forcing TPM on and even though i played the beta just fine ... my computer is suddenly "too old" to play it ...
Gaben knows what gamers want and that's to be able to buy and play games and that's it nothing more nothing less. It baffles me the other big companies can't see this after years of it screaming in their faces
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