I did not realize they were trying to compete in the first place.
Amazon tried getting into game production as well and seems to have middling results at best. Having the financial backing is significant, but it doesn’t guarantee success.
That’s not how Capitalism works!
/s
The larger company simply needs to create/invent problems that the smaller company cannot solve, and then sell a solution.
And buy them out at some point too. Very important step.
The larger company needs to hinder the smaller company with pointless slapp lawsuits. That way the smaller company will be too busy to innovate anything new.
Valve can make some good calls, but do you guys -really- think enshittification is not coming for it ever? It’s just a matter of time.
I admit that I still make Steam purchases, but this has started to be in the back of my mind when doing so. It is still another company that sells stuff that the customer ends up not owning. With all that they’ve done for gaming on Linux and doing right by their customers so far, it’s just so hard to doubt them.
So after investing millions in this, this is incredible insight that the VP has gained:
- Talk to Real Customers Before Writing Code
I really recommend reading his LinkedIn post, just to understand how these people think, and how fucking incompetent people at the top raking in millions are. It’s surprisingly honest for a LI post (although that bar is very low), probably because the guy is now retired and doesn’t give a shit anymore.
I honestly never even processed that Prime Gaming was a thing and that it was trying to compete with Steam. I just knew they purchased Twitch and thought they’d probably abandon it into a shitty, old and slow site like they did with IMDB and Goodreads.
Could you link a screenshot of the LinkedIn post? I don’t want to make a LinkedIn account.
Feels like every 5 years some major Internet company looks at how many billions video games draws in, established markets with PC and consoles, and how much hype and marketing gets thrown around the space and decides they can do it better.
With zero understanding of what consumers want, expecting to be able to charge extra for content that no one asked for or services like steam offer for free, and usually with such an awful UI and interactions with the consumer you wonder if they see potential customers as anything but cattle to be figuratively slaughtered and try to milk as much currency as they can with overpriced subscription(s) and not-so-micro microtransactions.
Edit: For those that want examples, most recent one comes to mind is Stadia
Every prime gaming offer I took was for games on steam. I really thought they were just promoting twitch with drops and stuff, not actually trying to compete. Haha, the balls.
Lrrr: Why does the larger company not simply eat the smaller one?
It’s not as if gamers could smell the stench of corporate greed
I love your optimism, but looking at the current trends of preorders, microtransactions, gacha games, … Most gamers don’t care about corporate greed and dive into it head first…
There’s also this thing that happens where, as a whole, we’ll just act capriciously.
I don’t know if it’s true of younger gamers but my generation seems to really choose at random whether we like your product or want you to die in a fire. Any fishy behavior can tip that scale pretty quickly, and if we already recognize a brand, and it’s not one of our arbitrarily Chosen Few, then we might not even give you a chance. Just because we know the name, and that’s already a strike against you.
Granted I’m not a gamer, but I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of prime gaming. I’ve heard of steam though.
I’m a vivid gamer. I’ve never heard of prime gaming.
My partner streams on twitch, only reason I go on that site (also found out T pain streams a lot of things there and he’s genuinely amazing to watch, I will shill him every time I can). I only found out about prime gaming because I’d get notifications from twitch that I can claim free games from epic and GOG. So I got several big titles that way.
thanks for reminding me to get my free games.
Prime Gaming gives away free games every week or so. It’s one of the perks available to those subscribed to Amazon Prime.
Those games can be on EGS, Amazon’s own launcher (that nobody uses), GOG, or Legacy Games Launcher.
Easy: Amazon just gotta invent new problems for gamers! And then sell the solution.
This’ll only work if they also buy everyone else who sells the solution, and shut them down.
Huh, did they make an alternative I don’t know about?
The only reason anyone even knew about Prime Gaming was they pushed it with Twitch.
The only launcher I use the same amount if not more is gog.com. Give me those good old games.
I use gog, but fuck the launcher. Fuck all launchers. An icon on desktop is all I want.
Thankfully it’s easy to get no matter the storefront.
GoG is just the best. They don’t have all the nice things Steam has, like workshop for example, but they compensate for it by actually selling you a game, not just renting it out with drm.
GOG providing installers is absolutely amazing.
Maybe it’s nice on windows, but on other systems, got still relies on steam.
GOG + Lutris
Lutris is just a pain compared to proton. I’m not going to say that its terrible anymore but 90% of the games that I play regularly on steam just work straight out of the box.
Then there’s me on Gog buying DRM free games that I can download and keep at my leisure.
You’re not the only one.
Whilst I do have a small collection of games in Steam, my collection of games in GoG is about 30x larger, because I prefer buying from GoG when I have the chance.
As the old saying goes “Possession is 9/10 of the Law” - when the installer of a game is in your hands (kept in storage media under your control) such as with games in physical media or offline installers downloaded from GoG, even if they wanted to take it away from you, they would have to take you to Court for it, whilst if the installer of a game is in somebody else’s hands (in Steam’s servers or in GoG’s servers if you only ever use their launcher and don’t download offline installers) they can take it way from you (even what happenned was that they just mistakenly locked you out of your account) and now it’s your problem and you have to throw yourself at their mercy to get what’s supposedly your stuff back and if that fails take them to Court (which for most people costs more than the games are worth).
It’s hilarious that people think “Steam is great” because they don’t often lock people out of their game collections or remove games from people’s collections and when they do and people throw themselves at their mercy to get it reversed they’re generally understanding, when Steam themselves were the ones who created a system where they have all the power and you have none, it’s just that so far they’ve not purposefully abused it and are generally nice when their own mistakes cause problems which one wouldn’t have in a different system - they’re comparativelly better than most other stores because those other stores are so shit (except GoG, IMHO), but they’re still worse than good old physical media when it comes to consumer rights.
Absolutelly, use Steam when it’s worth it for you, just do it with your eyes wide open, aware that you’re chosing to be at their mercy because the system they designed for digital game sales makes sure all customers are at their mercy, so they’re definitelly not your buddies, just (so far) nowhere as abusive as most faceless companies out there.
PS: Back to the post of the OP, amongst all the digital stores with “it’s not really yours” systems, with all the power over gamers than entails, Steam are by far the ones that least abuse it (I think they never did on purpose, though some people have been locked out of their accounts and couldn’t recover access to them) so comparativelly are way above the rest, especially Amazon as demonstrated by their practices when it comes to digital books.
I don’t use the Amazon launcher, but I’m pretty sure the Amazon games are DRM free as well. Not sure if it’s all of them but I know a lot are
Amazon launcher requires an internet connection for games, at least the free ones.
They were competing?
I once playtested their MMO, I believe it was called “New World”. It sucked balls. Didn’t realize they were also trying to get going with game distribution.
It had a somewhat interesting combat system for an MMO, but there were a TON of glaring gameplay and balance issues that essentially guaranteed the game would be dead after a month or two.
People kept finding exploits to fuck the economy so they kept turning off trading which made it difficult to progress. I think my issue was lack of storage and you needed money to get more if I remember right. I got bogged down with inventory management and never touched it again.
It has improved but it feels like someone made LOTR The Two Towers game from the 2000s into a mmo.
To be honest I really do prefer buying games on GOG. One day steam will go shit and we will be stuck with huge game libraries locked there. The day GOG goes dark I’ll still have all the offline installers of everything I bought.
Piracy is our friend. If Steam ever goes to shit, gamers would go back to piracy.
Steam also never took it’s eye off the piracy ball. Offer up a service better than free piracy.
Just pulling from my memory:
- Family Share
- Easy controller support
- Game Casting
- Gameplay recording
- “Invisible Login” for social network
- Torrent from a local area network friend who has the game on their computer
- (list goes on)
Steam Workshop is pretty nice to.
deleted by creator
Because you’re smart and you are archiving everything. Most people don’t even know they can download the installers, they just install Gog Galaxy.
GOG Galaxy has the ability to download offline installers. They’re listed under Extras on the game’s page. It’s arguably even better there than on the website because you can download those .bin files all in a single click.
There’s always someone in the world archiving stuff, and with GOG the installers can be shared freely if they ever close shop, since they don’t have DRM. With Steam that can be a lot harder, depending on the DRM they have
Pretty ballsy to put up a long LinkedIn post that boils down to “I am incompetent and should not be hired under any circumstances.”
Not when you’re retired
