r/Steam • u/Haunter777x • 11h ago

Discussion They got us guys.

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How out of touch can you be as a company, this is embarrassing

22.8k Upvotes

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2.5k

u/Powerate 11h ago

Those are NOT the reasons why we use Steam

710

u/gigatension 11h ago

I don’t think they’re actually trying to get people away from Steam I think they’re trying to get people who have never been on Steam to think that epic is better. There’s no way they think they can actually get customers to switch with their garbage platform.

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u/AbyssWankerArtorias 11h ago

And let's be honest, if they didn't have fortnite, epic wouldn't have its own store, unlike steam who even if you don't include counter strike, there's a boat load of reasons to use steam

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u/Puzzled_Connection 10h ago

I mean in all fairness, Steam started as basically nuisance ware that only exists because it was tied to Half Life 2, it’s just they now have a multi decade head start on building out their platform and developing network effects

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u/Arterra 10h ago

Yea. Nobody wanted steam as a mandatory platform. So valve made it better and people grew to accept it. Somehow, epic is blind to that lesson.

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u/EquipLordBritish 8h ago

I imagine that even if steam's competitors did actually compete with steam instead of complaining, customers would not want to re-buy their games or have more than a couple of library apps on their devices. It's an uphill battle in several ways, but they also aren't trying to compete.

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u/Trump_Russia 6h ago

Everyone else is dogshit anyway.

Make a good product I'll give you my money.

I hated steamed when it came out with a passion and they did a great job of winning everyone over and making a wonderful platform I actually want to spend money on.

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u/SS0NI 1h ago

I'd be willing to try if they rebought all the games in my library. Would be a massive boost for the developers, and I wouldn't have to bet my dollars on if the platform will exist 5 years later. But I don't think even Fortnite is that lucrative.

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u/shadowbanthiskekw 33m ago

Of course people wouldnt and shouldnt need to rebuy their games on the same platform. The platform is PC, not steam or epic or ubischrott or whatever. Epic had and has enough time to build up their launcher and make it something people want to use, but they chose not to. They chose to make it a console war on PC and for all intents and purposes they can suck a fat old dick for their exclusivity-on-the-same-fucking-platform-bullshit.

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u/b0w3n 8h ago

I remember hating that gunmetal green color on launch too.

I just wanted my CS 1.5 back.

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u/Trump_Russia 6h ago

I got banned from the steam forums for complaining and trying to start a revolt to get the old launcher back.. lol

1

u/Fizzwidgy 2h ago

first time I ever saw that pea soup colored launcher I thought it would give me a virus lmao, I wish they would do an official retro themed launcher to match the vibe, there was a community made one but the maker has stopped upkeeping it

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u/Portiolli_fez_11set 5h ago

Its not blind. Its just fucking expensive. Steam have revenue to back up their extra expenses.

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u/Arterra 1h ago

Epic owns fortnite. The disgusting amount of profit it generates is as the company's discretion to assign for reinvestment, development, fat bonuses, etc... the fact is that they can invest in the launcher but they don't want to. As a platform to get people to buy third party games, it sucks. As a way to launch their moneymaker, it can be anything. And yet they keep complaining about falling behind steam as a market, so yeah they fail to see why. Willful or not.

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u/Alternative_Fix_1643 43m ago

I remember when I hated the picture of needing steam on Game cases when I wanted to buy a new Game. Good old days when the biggest concern was the Need of Internet Connection.

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u/Alex_2528 10h ago

And they have an actual good support team.

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u/Snipufin 10h ago

Which dramatically improved over the course of two decades. People used to think Steam Support was absurdly bad.

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u/mxzf 9h ago

People used to think Steam Support was absurdly bad.

In fairness, at that point in time the counterargument was "but you almost never need Steam support anyways, because it works". Not strictly 100% true, but broadly accurate.

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u/bs000 9h ago

I remember the counterargument was usually "Well, Steam has so many users, it'd be impractical to hire more support agents," and the rest of the replies were just people nodding in agreement.

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u/KingdomsSword 9h ago

My brother in Gaben, the EGS has had 8 years of following in Steams footsteps to get their shit together. Sure at the beginning steam was not a good product, but they blazed the trail and got better and better as time went on, but are not seeing the EGS do the same.

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u/FlyingBaconPigs 6h ago

8 years plus the hindsight of all the pain that Valve went through. Epic squandered it all by going in with the same mentality that most of tech in the US has, I know better than the customer and this is the end result. The only difference with most tech and Epic is ... Epic has competition unlike Amazon, msft, google

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u/Alex_2528 10h ago

Fair enough, I didn’t get into pc gaming until after steam support had a good reputation so I never knew how bad it was.

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u/SickBurnerBroski 10h ago

Epic has had plenty of time to not be shit.

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u/nikongmer https://steam.pm/t7czt 9h ago

in all fairness, that's always been a line of copium. all epic had to do was follow the blueprint. it didn't even have to be Steam's blueprint. they could have followed their own from their ue store or any store that had a shopping cart in the 90s. they're not some small indie games company hiring talent from highschool who can't code for shit. they make billions a year. same can be said for all the other game stores that failed due to their intentional lack of trying and handwave their failures as "dur, Steam wins because head start derp".

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u/SamiraSimp 6h ago

how many people here actually tried the epic launcher. i used it for a while when they were giving away free games. i gave them an honest shot and the platform was simply not good enough.

they could've turned their nuisance ware into an actual platform but they simply didn't have a good product.

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u/Freezman13 10h ago

The epic launcher is 7 years old.

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u/superxpro12 9h ago

exists

they're also privately owned and not public.

Can you IMAGINE the shit that would be going down if they sold to a vulture private equity firm?

Epic very clearly has the pieces in place to monopolize gaming, they have a launcher, and they have a game engine. They made a play to try to capture market share so they can then monopolize the whole ecosystem...

Steam has all of the above as well, but they choose not to... GabeN is about as benevolent as a benevolent dictator can get in this realm.

You want to make a game? well you ahve to use our unreal engine, which oh btw has a fee. and you also have to publish on epic games launcher, which btw has another fee.

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u/Kougeru-Sama 9h ago

have a multi decade head start on building out their platform and developing network effects

No. They had one decade. Steam launched in 2003. Epic's store launched in 2018. That's only 15 years, not 20.

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u/Putrid-Resolution502 9h ago

1.5 Do be more than 1 though

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u/Then_Musician_8673 5h ago

I'm not sure about you, but I wouldn't call someone that had 1.5 million dollars a multimillionaire.

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u/Putrid-Resolution502 5h ago

I would indeed

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u/cgaWolf 8h ago

All true, but EGS has had 8 years to get good.

Steam 8 years in was established, for example it's where everyone got Skyrim when it first came out. We had Steam Cloud, Community & Workshop by then, and even the MacOS client.

10 years in we got family libraries.

Very different from the "STEAMing pile of shit" reputation in 2003.

2

u/Affectionate_Tax3468 8h ago

What does a headstart give if all the features are out in the open and any contender can just see them?

If anything at all, steam spent a lot of money to weed out things that dont work or now work better.

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u/PleiadesMechworks 8h ago

they now have a multi decade head start on building out their platform

Or, to put it another way, Epic didn't have to do multiple decades of risky R&D to learn what customers want.

And they still screwed it up.

1

u/Dreadgoat 7h ago

They had a head start but more importantly they've made great use of that head start and never got complacent.

Tons of companies and products had a head start and drove themselves straight into the dirt because that's the only thing they ever had going for them, e.g. Facebook

1

u/crustyrobots 6h ago edited 6h ago

I remember the original Green Steam, and how it was a buggy piece of shit that either itself crashed, or the servers crashed so you couldn't play anything until the guy watching it woke up to restart it.

It was just a common update engine for HL and mod games like Counter Strike and Garrysmod, but then they started selling their own games on it as a real first player in this emerging industry and the rest is history. My Steam account is old enough to legally drink :D

1

u/Lord_Emperor 6h ago

nuisance ware

This is downplaying it A LOT. I remember launching HL2 or any of its multiplayer mods and waiting, literally hours, for the Steam login queue and/or updates to finish.

1

u/Josh6889 6h ago

"They're only good at this market because they're the ones that designed and created it"

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u/tha_dank 5h ago

Omg I fucking hated the switch from just regular CS 1.5 fire the game and go days, to steam. I was one of those.

My computer was also horrendous so any kinda stick in my spoke that wasn’t already there kinda boned me.

1

u/TheKingsdread 5h ago

I mean all that might be true, but its not like Epic launched yesterday, they have been around for about a decade. And yet their launcher is one of the worst I ever used, I think it might worse than the Battle.net launcher and that launcher sucks.

1

u/farva_06 2h ago

Also, Epic is jointly owned by multiple billion dollar companies (Disney, Sony, Tencent, etc.) who must be appeased at all times. Whereas Steam just has to appease to his Royal Gabeness.

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u/JBOSS_64 10h ago

I have never even played counter strike and I would never use anything over steam

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u/ensoniq2k 9h ago

Funny thing is, back when you were forced to use Steam for the new Counterstrike release everybody hated it. Not everybody had an internet connection at home and it was painfully slow at first. That doesn't mean that people will one day live Epic though.

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u/Nanomachines100 9h ago

I hope everyone lives epic, but not loves Epic.

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u/Brasolis 8h ago

Steam was absolute dumpster tier garbage on it's first release. I got HL2 for my birthday or something and we couldn't get it to play because steam would just not work no matter what we tried.

Multiple decades of dev definite helped

1

u/ensoniq2k 8h ago

Yeah, it's always hard to be a pioneer. It's not like they could've just leased some AWS compute power back then.

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u/nomedable 4h ago

Fortnite being a fat money maker is funding all the free games on Epic. You know that the moment it doesn't pull in money or the moment Epic decides that the user base is "larger than steam" or whatever that they'll turn off the taps for that.

0

u/Ill_Technician3936 3h ago

Nah, they actually had a decent amount of games that could be making money before fortnite was a thing. My sister spent thousands on Sims which I got for free and it's been free since apparently. I think it was Sims 4.

Them giving away games is the reason Epic has my largest catalog. That said, I really haven't played most and the account is sorta lost since she passed away.

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u/nomedable 2h ago edited 2h ago

The Sims is owned by EA not Epic.

Epic isn't the reason for that being given away for free or being a massive money generator for Epic.

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u/Ill_Technician3936 2h ago

Ah. I've literally never even looked into it or anything just grabbed a copy and she needed help with Epic's launcher from time to time.

That's my mistake

1

u/ABSNegativeOne 9h ago

hell yeah baby go Counter Strike, the best tactical game you will ever play with some of the dumbest mfkers

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u/BorKon 8h ago

They pushed steam with half life 2. Same what epic is doing.

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u/tzomby1 10h ago

who have never been on Steam

So why would they compare it to steam?

What are people supposed to think? "wow this thing launches faster than the time it takes for water to boil 😱"

2

u/BLT_Trade_r 10h ago

Their previous strategy of giving away free games and just having games people wanted to play was honestly the best. They should have just kept going with that and tried to nail exclusives. Exclusives of highly desired games are pretty much the only really effective strategy for all platforms. Its the only reason anyone uses Battlenet, Origin, and others, and its a mainstay of the success or failure of consoles.

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u/Dotura 10h ago edited 9h ago

I do like that your examples are of stores that now uses steam because exclusive didn't work out for them.

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u/BLT_Trade_r 9h ago

No one says it will absolutely work, but I can confidently say the only reason I have any of those accounts is because of their exclusives. I can also say that's the entire reason I started with Steam: Half-Life. People may not like the answer, but it's true. Steam literally sucked when it was getting going and sucked for a long time. They were just lucky in that they were early in the market and had the hottest games on earth at the time. If you wanted to play Counter-Strike or Half-Life, you had to use Steam. People complained about Steam back then as much as they do now about Origin or Epic.

But that is kinda the key: you need that killer game to get you kick-started; then you have to keep going with it. It's way harder to break in once someone pretty much has a monopoly.

Let's not sugarcoat Steam either; Gabe has had many scenarios where he doesn't kick things into gear until there is a legitimate threat.

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u/Dotura 9h ago

Epic, battle.net and origin all are between 8-20 years old and could look to steam and the complaints people had on it of things to do and not to do. They still haven't gotten to a place where they are good just generally usable. With BF6 i couldn't even play the game though EAs own app. I had to refund and buy it on steam so i could play with my friends with the limited time we have as adults now.

I'd say Fortnight and Wow both were killer games. WoW more aging for sure but Overwatch was good though not killer like you probably mean. Fortnight alone is a giant on several platforms and probably had more new players because it was free, CS had a price up until 2018. I even bought Fortnight because i really enjoyed the pre BR thing and yet they can't get off the ground? Free games and they still run in the red as people don't use the service and don't buy games there.

I'm not here to suck steam off im mostly confused as to how badly the others manage to run their own company. I try to give them the benefit of the doubt and get a middle finger as a thanks.

Just an odd fun fact; i have never had a single problem with ubisoft, and that launcher is known to be terrible. Maybe im reverse cursed or something.

1

u/pigeon-check 9h ago

They don't know what they're doing, we already established that a long time ago

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u/passinglurker 8h ago

Sounds like they are trying to appeal to the "being anti-ai is bigotry" crowd, someone should check the epic store bots I mean "users" for money laundering.

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u/booze_clues 7h ago

The only way to compete with Steam is through pricing. Steam own a large majority of the market and has rules that will delist any product sold for less on another storefront, so that is impossible to do. This is why consumers have no price variation, Steams anti-consumer policies prevent it.

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u/Wrexolotl 10h ago

The whole 5 people who built their PCs this year

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u/gigatension 9h ago

I built my PC right before all this mess started happening. Literally within a month of the price’s rising. I both feel blessed and anxious that something will go wrong because there’s no way I can afford to replace it now.

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u/Wrexolotl 8h ago

I feel you. I had to rebuild my PC after it got fried from a bad power power surge/outage last September. I made sure to grab a power backup unit after that as well.

-1

u/mrtomjones 9h ago

I never for the life of me will understand why you guys care in the slightest which platform you play on. I've played on pretty much all of them and I click my game and it opens and I play. Epic does what I want. Steam does what I want. GOG does what I want.

1

u/gigatension 9h ago

I mostly used Steam because epic had a few issues getting hacked and not keeping the customers info safe. It’s not about the platform per se, it’s about the companies security.