How would you make an actual competitor to Steam?

I’d try to appeal to developers more. Try and cultivate original/appealing games that are exclusively available on my platform only. Also would be consumer friendly like steam. While people won’t be leaving steam in droves, I think I’d be able to at least have a sizeable/profitable user base.

An actually fully uncensored western gaming store competitor would be nice
But I guess the payment processors wouldn't play nice so you'd probably have to do payments through cripto
GoG seems to get away with having some very lewd games like rance but it doesn't really have most things nor is it it's focus

expand to the mobile market or create your own 'team 'eck

Okay. I guess it's over for humblebundle, fanatical, gmg, etc. big legit key stores. Valve must have been gathering evidence against them the past decade or two

See? This is why nobody takes Valvegans seriously anymore when you bend over to gross consumer practices.

exclusives

consumer friendly....

You can't because people already own hundreds of games on Steam. Would you support other stores and abandon Steam and all the games you own there? No you wouldn't Nobody would and that's why nobody will ever be able to compete with Steam. Epic literally gave you free games and still failed, so the next logical step would be to give you money to play games. That's is the only way anybody could compete or maybe MS eventually with their GoyPass. At some point GoyPass will become too tempting to ignore. Too many games, including new releases, for the same price of a single AAA game on Steam. In fact, GoyPass is already crazy unmatched value.

nothing will ever be like Steam because modders don't want to upload and manage their mods across multiple services. these are the types of things that make it so no one will ever be able to leave Steam.
Epic has done a bunch of stuff to combat this somewhat with things like EOS working on all stores/platforms as an alternative to Steamworks, and while that works for developers they'll never reach a similar level of adoption from user content

Have the platform be the game. There are so many people that like trading and designing their profiles. Gamify it more than Valve has done. Steal some Gaia Online and make people do puzzles and mini games for a Steam Point equivalent that will let them dress up their profile.
Go even further and have special cosmetics for people that do mods and submit profiles that can be bought. UGC as a store and a game.

You can't because people already own hundreds of games on Steam. Would you support other stores and abandon Steam and all the games you own there?

you probably can't get the ones who have already been using steam for a long time
but it's not necessarily about that
it's about the newcommers

If you can easily transfer your Steam library like on Gog launcher and even EGS then this is a fake problem that you simply sensationalizing. Steam is primarily a store, not some glorified streaming service.

Be Microsoft, buy Nintendo then put all Nintendo games on pc.

Wait, people actually use the Steam workshop?

literally just copy steam one for one and disable drm. there the perfect steam killer that jews are afraid to do

I only ever seen it used for Garry’s mod.

Steam does not hold exclusive dominion over games you get there, unless it's something Valve made directly like Half Life Alyx. They don't do third party exclusives like EGS, any game that n won't launch is a publisher decision that as nothing to do with Steam.

The only possible way to do that would be through one of two paths.

Option #1

Be Nintendo and open an exclusive storefront that also sells third party games. That's it. That's all they would have to do.

Option #2

Be Sony or Microsoft and sign a LOT of deals and lose a LOT of money pushing through an 'integrated platform experience'.
You sign into your PS account on PC and all your games are there. Every single digital title associated with your account, including third parties, is there. You clear the investment hurdle instantly and get somewhat even footing with steam.
But that will never happen.

Realistically you basically can't, but if you had infinite fantasy budget you'd basically just have to directly copy what they already do with a few more bells and whistles like no DRM, no censorship on the store, full offline copy downloads, etc. Otherwise just wait for Gabe to die and see if they go full retard or not.

it's big with paraslop
but also other games

sometimes it's usefull for just minor things like UI fixes
but it's nice to have, especially from a dev POV

So should Steam be considered a monopoly due to this?

King. Never let them forget.

When devs actually work to make it compatible it's fucking magical (terraria, TTS, etc.) Only pain in the dick is valve are still prudes and most devs don't bother to have proper modding support because they're gay.

Yes. I use it for most games. Rimworld, Kenshi, Paradox games, and many more games I can't think of right now. I prefer it way mroe over nexusshit and modio

Except Nintendo would have to agree to the purchase. Microsoft tried to buy Nintendo before in the late 90s, even back then when Nintendo's market share was started to erode they laughed Microsoft right out of the meeting.

It's not a monopoly, but even if it was being a monopoly is not by itself a bad thing, it's anti-competitive practices which can be done without being a monopoly. Someone would need to prove that Steam is actually engaging in anti-competitive practices and isn't simply giving a superior service compared to its competitors. This is why Steam's strategy of ">do nothing >win" is airtight from a legal standpoint.

This is retardedly naive, its basically what EGS attempted and a big contingent of internet people have never forgiven them for daring to try and compete with steam.

but what about [minor missing feature]!

this will always be the case with every attempted competitor, it takes time to build out features, and even when those features are added you’ll still get people shitting on you forever for having once not had them

Do exactly what they do, but cheaper.

Yes? All you have to do is just download my game store and to get access to the game.

It should, but too many people have cognitive dissonance that doesn’t allow them to reconcile a thing they like being a monopoly, so they’ll make excuses for it

Not sure about other games, but I fucking hate using it for Paradox games. It's such a pain to have to use the subscription shit. Just let me download the god damn mod. I don't want to wade through that god awful UI every time I want to disable a mod from being auto-downloaded.

Giving devs a bigger slice of the pie was never the issue, inherently. It was bringing retarded consolefag exclusivity shit to PC that riled everyone up to an insane degree, but that was the only reason why you would ever give devs more in the first place so I guess it was just a retarded idea from the start since there's pretty much 0 benefit to the customer outside of you might feel a little better if you give a shit how much a multi million dollar corporation is getting from another multi million dollar corporation.

its basically what EGS attempted

EGS was an objectively shitty product though? Not to mention they’re beholden to shareholders who want line to go up no matter the cost.

need to prove that Steam is actually engaging in anti-competitive practices

Valve refuses to allow games on their services if the product is sold elsewhere cheaper.
They can't. Sticker prices have to be the same for the devs as they are on Steam.

Valve refuses to allow games on their services if the product is sold elsewhere cheaper.

Wait, really? How come I can ALWAYS find a game for cheaper outside of Steam.

Prove that this is anti-competitive under the laws of any western countries. Keep in mind tons of businesses do "we will match the competitors' prices!" deals and they're not anti-competitive.

I’ve seen this as an explanation for what Epic is doing, by giving kids who are just there to play Fortnite free games, by the time they start buying them they’ll have this huge EGS library already to anchor them to the platform

No clue if it’ll actually play out like that, but kudos to Tim if it actually does, it’s kind of a brilliant plan

It was bringing retarded consolefag exclusivity shit to PC

You don’t have to buy an entire PC just to play an EGS exclusive though? You just create an account on EGS and play the game using that account? Why did PcFags throw such a hissy fit about it?

GOG's preservation angle is the best anybody's got, though that's more for old-school players and people who appreciate gaming history and not the general public.

offer at least the same level of service to both customers and devs and then improve on something steam does bad (impossible challenge)

It's a pity that they stopped selling shows/movies on Steam, i'd much rather just have everything in one place. I might actually be tempted to buy manga/comics if i could just view them in steam without needing some third party thing.

Epic is not a publicly traded company, they’re no more beholden to shareholders than Valve is.

ummm but Tencent

Tim Sweeney owns >50% of Epic, he has complete control over it

why the fuck would they not?
just because you haven't doesn't mean everyone else is you

The problem with EGS is that they didn't really tackle the feature issue that Valve bolstered Steam with throughout the 2010s. That's not to say Steam isn't perfect per say (the chat app is still buggy, the group chat revamp in 2018 still is a poor mans discord, the streaming options are trivial compared to software apps like OBS), but there's a lot more commitment built up with peoples Steam pages over the course of the past 15 years. The leveling system and profile editing introduced in 2013 was Valve's way of preemptively cementing peoples commitment to Steam and Steam only.

more importantly why do consolejeets get mad when people don't want their exclusivity bullshit on PC?

you need to stop using Steam to use another platform

yes? all the time?
bizarre as fuck post steam workshop is amazing

Can't be bothered. I know the consolefags ate it up like hogs at the trough, but we're a little more oldschool here. You either put it on the store I can be fucked to use or I steal it. Your choice.

They’ll pretend it’s for some other reason, but it’s because PCfags are bigger console warriors than snoys are, they don’t like seeing things compete with steam

valve only has private shareholders who are employees, epic has tencent controlling half of the company, you're delusional and wrong if you think tencent has no control over epic

Yeah but you forget the part where I don't like Tim Sweeney either
He should go back to disavowing PC gaming sucking Sony's dick

t. snoyjeet

consolefags are literally incapable of understanding that I simply don't want more than one launcher on my computer and think it's some retarded consolewar shit like this moron.

I’ll say this again, Tim Sweeney owns >50% of the shares, he has complete control over the company, that’s how it works. Tencent takes a 40% cut of the profits, they have no ability to force Tim to do something he doesn’t want to.

GOG should theoretically be the one real competitor for steam (EGSfags need not reply), but retards can't into anything if it isn't some fucking drm frontend ecosystem with big buttons, apparently

but we're a little more oldschool here.

Anon, back in the 2000's, you usually had an email tethered to several programs meant to launch games whether it be Steam for gldsrc/source, battle.net for Blizzard games or w/e MMO you had. Did you not use Gamespy, Xfire ect back then?

I don't think he understands how shareholding works or has any desire of understanding it. Tencent could have 1% of shares and he'd still be repeating the line like an NPC

I would probably do a GoG thing but amp it up to 11. I think they had the right idea but the execution wasn't great. I.E, rather than just repackage DOS games, make proper NightDive style ports of beloved games. Not just PC games but console games as well. Maybe even full on remakes. Then once you have that niche and all the developer, store and community tools start branching out to more regular game releases.

anon I dont know how to communicate this to you but not very many people use GOG because their game catalog is microscopic compared to any other PC storefront. And the vast majority of games they sell are fixed up old games

Literally proving my point

just because timmycel can pass a vote at the board of directors, it doesn't mean tencent has no control over the company. Why do you think they invested in the first place? For trickle down revenue? You're delusional

Shit, i don't even know.
EGS literally bribes shitskins to keep them on the platform, and even that doesn't make a nudge.
Only move is literally wait it out

fixed up old games

Not him, but in other words back when PC gaming was good and not justt consoleslop ported over with a higher res texture pack.

I LAN'd like a real white man.

you had no point other being mad at PC, snoyjeet

you having friends

[x] doubt

Was that the first time you’ve ever seen a game die in development or something?

why the fuck would they not?

Because it's awful to use and is so restricted it makes even fucking Nexus censorship look laissez-faire.

How would you make an actual competitor to Steam?

Don't

Steam sucks but it was first and I had to download it to play HL2. All the other game launchers are so much worse.

If your game is not on steam it doesn't exist to me.

why yes I wasnt around back then and I am larping how did you know?

The only thing steam is missing is it's own easy to streaming service to compete with Twitch. They could make vtubing way more accessible for those inclined to use it etc. Gaben gib me money and I'll explain more.

there are STILL browns defending fucking EGS of all things

Did tim suck your dick so well you saw stars or what? It's not even a competition at this point even the man himself threw in the towel and gave up. It's just fucking bizarre.

One thing notable about steam is its “played on another platform” thing is completely ignored by recommendation algorithms. Which is smart on their part.

Its just consolefags trying to start shit on PC as if PCfags have some kind of store fanboyism on par with consolefaggotry.

in development

Artifact wasn't dead in development, it was officially released. Valve promised a million dollars in a tournament if you invested in purchases of cards to compete but then immediately dropped support for the game because it wasn't selling millions of copies. This is the type of behavior Anon Babble would be livid at for other major publishers but because it's Valve you have a lot of Gabensimps who let it slide.

There's no point, Steam has a 2 decade headstart of a digital library. That's the biggest reason why it's at the top
Games I bought in 2010 are still in my steam library and playable 15 years later. All I have to do is download them

they're mad snoyjeets and nintenjeets who basically want to ruin PC gaming with EGS

I know in the current gay retard world the concept of a club is a mysterious, strange thing, but we really did just have hang out events back in the day. Didn't even matter if you knew anyone. You rolled up with your shit and got some vidya in. Maybe you mesh with some other retards there. it was great.

well you could try the walmart strategy of undercutting your competition by offering the lowest prices. doubt it'd be profitable but given enough time steam would at least comply with pricing to stay competitive or die.

It’s the question of why would you use another platform at all

There’s also the fact steam, same as Netflix, considered piracy their main competition and engineered itself to compete with that, while all the other platforms try to compete directly with steam/netflix.

all games are free
coomslop gets accepted easily
donation button to keep the site going
gg ez

lesser cut on games. similar to epic

great storefront that's easy to use on multiple platforms

focus on the games themselves. steam can't be competed with outside of that

customer support staffed by actual people and allowing appeals to actually go through if something goes wrong

no crypto/nft/web3 games. (AI is allowed in certain contexts, mainly if the game wouldn't function without it (i.e. Suck Up!) )

linux and mac support (games themselves don't need to support them, but the software will)

DRM free (unless the games are online only. if a multiplayer game has a singleplayer component you MUST provide a drm free singleplayer only version of the game.)

anyone else have any ideas?

It's antithetical to PC gaming. Was back in early 2010's when it was introduced.
The greatest thing about PC gaming is that it use to be decentralized. Wanted to make a map and publish it? You had a lot of options of free providers or you could host your own primitive site with links to it without a censorship fear of it getting taken down.

Dont the game devs set the store price? Idk how you would be able to undercut the market unless you pay devs to lower their game's cost

directly copy what they already do with a few more bells and whistles like no DRM, no censorship on the store, full offline copy downloads, etc.

You’ve described gog.com

Some games' mod scene is bigger on Workshop than it is on Nexus. For example TW Warhammer

that's right, it wouldn't be profitable, but technically elon moneybags musk could probably spend his fortune on that and make a viable competitor for the sake of undercutting valve.

PCfags better learn to diversify because once Gabriel kicks the bucket, their precious steam is doomed.

modding is bad... BECAUSE

keep telling yourself this and maybe it'll be true in your head, snoyjeet

I highly doubt you never played online games in the 2000's. If you truly relied entirely on LAN, I'm going to assume you are a turdie where dialup was still uncommon.

And surprise, surprise it's one of the few storefronts that actually competes.

The only area you can do better than steam is curation of your store. Steam is filled with garbage games and the tags are abused to hell and back by devs and publishers tagging their games with fucking everything possible. It's super hard to search for games in a specific genre without relying on autistic curators who list games for that genre and it's fucking impossible to just look through new games and find treasure withing the trash because there's so much garbage. Curating your store and tags or other search functions is all you can do that's better than what steam already does.

does EGS even have a shopping cart yet?

EGS immediately resorted to scummy tactics right out of the gate. Buy an ad.

Borderline impossible for anyone who isn't already a big company like Tencent or similar. Sony could make their own client and rely on leveraging their console user base and exclusives, but they would also need to ensure the maximum quality of the app and features. Then add features that Steam doesn't have, like allowing you to play the same game on console and PC at the same time so two people can play with the same copy. More importantly, they would need to make sure that anyone who owns the game on Steam can transfer it to PSN so that people don't have to buy games again.

Crysis was the last big PC exclusive game that demonstrated the prowess of visuals of the latest tech and the Great Recession caused publishers to back away from making PC games exclusively and to focus on developing games for consoles to then be placed on the PC.

EGS is rapidly gaining market share on Steam. All the Fortnite zoomers are buying games on EGS en masse and only balding millennials care about Steam. Give it a few years and EGS will take over.

Make it an all in one storefront and library

games

music

TV

anime

movies

social media

Out-convenience Steam by offering anything you could want on your PC in one place.

I'll just go back to pirating everything. The only reason I use Steam is due to convenience.
Same reason I never cared about the whole "you don't own your games!!!!!!!" shit either. I already have access to more or less every game that has ever been made for free. It just takes a bit more effort to download them.

reading comprehension

Never once said modding is bad. Must be a spambot I'm replying to.

Sell physical CDs, DVDs or USB drives with games with no censorship.

yeah that's some grade A wishful thinking you've got there, fren. round these parts we call that cope.

Funny enough Valve tried to add media like tv shows and movies to Steam in early 2010's. Didn't go so well and they dropped it quietly.

idk if bait or delusion but even fortnite is losing money

the entire "you dont own your own games" gotcha consolefags use is tremedously retarded. Assuming every corpo goes bizarro and decides to just revoke everyone's ability to play the games they purchased then people will just turn to piracy. Gaben said it best when he told everyone that stores need to compete with the convienence of piracy vs each other. Trying to ass fuck your consumers on PC wont work with how easy it is to pirate everything

Monopolies aren’t automatically bad. It’s when they start being anti-consumer is when they’re bad.

The gold standard of a bad monopoly was standard oil.

be the only supplier of gasoline in a huge region

charge exorbitant prices

competitors attempt to sell drill for oil, refine, and sell gasoline at a reasonable price

undercut them at a loss that is recouped by gouging elsewhere

competitor goes bankrupt

buy their holdings at auction for nothing

if someone else tries to outbid you for their holdings, let them, then go back to undercutting them until they go out of business

At the end of its lifetime standard oil wasn’t even building its own derricks anymore. Just raping anyone who’d try to compete, while still expanding their holdings.

proving my point

You just played a server off some dude's shitbox PC he had in the corner, man. It wasn't hard to dodge having to use some other gay shit and there were plenty of ways to establish an online VPN even back then.

I know. I think that was the fault of a lack of advertisement and people regarding steam as a game store above everything else. If you market a storefront as having all of those things I think it would do better.

it's not a monopoly, objectively speaking, snyojeet no matter how much you hate valve or gaben

anon literally every console tried this and failed. The PS3 tried to do that and nearly killed them, Xbox one tried this and failed. The all in one service so you can become the ultimate middleman just doesnt work

conviniently ommits the PS2 which sold so well because people used it as a DVD player

Hey wouldn't it really suck if we sold all our shares and your stock price plummeted 40% overnight? It would, wouldn't it? So how about you do that thing we want you to do? Would really be a shame if we had to sell.

You don't need a majority to have power in a company. Even 10% is massive and as long as you keep your demands relatively reasonable, most of the time it'll be enough to get your way by threat of selling.

game console + dvd player vs game console + TV + streaming + dvd player + social media + etc

yeah man, very comparable

ps2 didn't have a digital only media storefront you goofy goober.

You're upset that too many people have a decent understanding of what a monopoly is and don't listen to your monopoly cries?

Those are tied to specific hardware and not software-based storefronts.

What point? The point I'm making is that mod publishing should be decentralized and not rely on Steam workshop.

Given the state of gaming now, if they wildly expanded up the decades from the 80s and 90s through the 2000s they could do really well but that'd be a huge investment with doubt that it'll pay off. They really do need to go further than what they have been doing though.

Fix the government so it's a real government and not a tool for rich to push laws favoring them. Then the gov will disband retarded monopolies like steam and other useless rent seekers like jewish bankers, tech giants etc. saving the future of children so they won't be cucked like zoomers.
I'm not sorry for this antisemitic post. Cry about it.

Me? Id serve crab legs

steam isnt a monopoly doe?

A combination of good marketing, charging less of a % than Steam to developers and being more successful at integrating social aspects that are very underused by steam users who mostly instead use discord and so on, rather than steam's own chat/community features.
So to beat Steam you not only have to be a good storefront that offers the same services at a better price but also have something other to offer that is in direct competition with some other service in order to offset the fact that Steam already has a bigger captive audience. It aint easy

The bigger problem is Nexus and its faggotry.

EOS

keeeeeek they couldn't come up with a better name

What could you do and offer that hasn't already been done on other platforms like EGS?

EGS done something besides giveaways? GOG at least puts up effort in bringing up and patching old games. And Timmy did nothing but boasted how Steam is bad for developers or something.

Nothing is stopping a person from hosting their own simplistic sites with a few links.

This color isn't blue!

This is how you sound steamdrone

tranime

retard dogshit post

It is allowed, what is not allowed is you, as a developer, take the Steam keys and sell them somewhere else for a lower price than you set on the Steam Store.

Steam has to really fuck up first
Not "Makes terminally online posters on Anon Babble mad" level of fuck up
But actually piss off the normies enough that they are willing to deal with the inconvenience of switching.
Before that nothing will happen.

710663684

Seething drone can't argue with truth
Go lay with the rest of the bodies, I won't even give a (You) for this low tier post

let me import every single minute detail of my account, including profile/cheevos/library, or else i won't move even if you suck me off.

to be a monopoly steam would have to choke out competitors. Yet EGS, GOG, itch.io, and so on continue to exist and steam doesnt do shit to fuck with them

First you need feature parity, then you can think of something else. Every other launcher/store failed because they didn't have 1/10 of Steam features, yet they expected people to use their shit, just because they gave some bonuses like some new user discount or some decade old+ games for free.

steam cannot control the PC market so it's not a monopoly you turdworld shitskin, compare this to apple and apps on iphones

It's funny how Epic's entire strategy was grooming Fortnite zoomers with some free games, so they could build a library and not consider Steam, and it failed spectacularly.
btw, did they even finish building their HQ? lmao

Every game needs to have a place to leave comments give a rating, for all to see. Exactly like steam. That's it. I just want to know whether people think a game is shitty or not, or whether the devs are treating players like shit, or whatever, etc.

Wouldn't that mean lost sales? Why would anyone do that?

Epic's entire strategy was grooming Fortnite zoomers with some free games, so they could build a library and not consider Steam

Which would help if 90% of them weren't on consoles and mobile.
Also doesn't help that the streamer bait games they want to play are on Steam not EGS.

did they even finish building their HQ?

Nope

Enjoy playing to an audience of six people then

Don't woory. They have NFT games now. Surely this will turn the tides in their favor. WEB3 is the future!

btw, did they even finish building their HQ? lmao

They gave up. Money tree dried up
newsobserver.com/news/business/real-estate-news/article299369874.html

Steam

30% cut, 100$ buy-in

500k impressions advertising for no extra cost even though my game kinda sucked and got like 10 reviews

Get me a lower cut and the same ratio of impressions and I will use your platform.
If it's not exclusive I can accept a much lower impressions count, but you still need to do a good job with the recommendation engine for the users, and make it as pain free to upload on your platform as possible.

For consumers get them a good store page and recommendation algorithm, including game tags by developer/users, multiple pages for each tag highlighting good games in those genres,
a good review system and refund system,
a workable social chat (better yet, just do an advanced discord integration, since that's where people will go anyway and it would save you a lot of development effort),
And they will expect that it is completely lag-free and bug-free, and can easily handle multiple game libraries across disks, downloads well and fixes dependencies, and downloads patches in the background.
Don't let low-skilled (cheap) programmers write it, because the mildest frustration is enough to push people away when the competition is that good.

Additionally add some spice that steam doesn't have, for example letting web-based game demos run directly in the store page. Imagine going on a game's store page and being able to play the demo right there in the launcher by utilizing it as a web browser like itch.io does.
Or whatever other ideas you have.

That's for them to worry about. Not me. Either take the deal or I stay with steam.

offer made-to-order physical version of pc games without drm, with the old video game manuals and collectors edition boxes (with cool shit and goodies) with the collaboration of the respective devs themselves. like limited run games but without the fomo and all the control over your media.
either bundle custom blu-ray disk players with cool game designs or subtle/professional ones that suit customer setups with first time orders, or for relatively cheap seperately. not too sure on how this will fully work or if its even reasonable cost wise but hopefully its novel enough to stand out.
Profile system where you can use any receipt for games you've bought to display thm and/or their collectors editions on your profile alongisde other cosmetic features. Like a shelf on your profile that anyone can view and they can interact with 3d models of the games being displayed - won't cost any money aside from buying the games themselves.
allow you to build up store credit at a reasonable rate via logging in, participating in developer blogs and interacting with game community pages where you can get cool memorabilia like club nintendo for free minus shipping costs. no mtx for any of the customisation features either.

The network effect has made them all but impossible to compete with. They're a de facto monopoly, and the barrier to entry they've set up is the very fact that they control most of the PC userbase. The best you could probably do is make an all-in-one store for games that get banned from Steam, instead of them getting scattered across numerous comparatively tiny storefronts, but again, you run into the issue of user adoption and inertia from them not wanting to move off of Steam. The only real solution is to trust-bust Steam or subject them to regulation to force them to behave in a neutral manner to stamp out their rampant anti-Japanese bias in approving games.
If a major portion of users didn't unironically believe this, it wouldn't be such a major blow to publishers and devs when their game gets banned from Steam.

offer a significantly better product

This might work, too. Seconding this. Physical PC games need to come back in some form. It tickles the collector instinct and could sidestep the issue of being beholden to digital storefront approval at the same time.

What do you want that Steam isn't giving you?
This is the approach that needs to be taken.

The main product Steam offers to developers and publishers is its very userbase. How do you compete with that? You people need to read about the network effect. It's the same reason why platforms like Youtube and Xitter are still dominant in their spheres despite going down the shitter.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

Uncensored Japanese games.

This

It's pretty hilarious that so many generic as fuck console games are just too far for steam while all sorts of degenerate shota shit is advertised on steam fests.

At this point the only thing that would attract people is an open-source, decentralized platform that runs as well as Steam.
That's to say that the distribution service is purely open source, with the game files held in repos similar to how linux does it.
Instead of the profits privately held, they're directly used to host the repos.

wrong. youtube has by far the best backend of any video website, and x is the only social media website thats worth using

network effects are real which is why you cant just offer a product thats equally good (or worse, as is the case for epic games), it must be much better. then you will succeed. just like skype and facebook failed while tiktok succeeded

how do you break up a monopoly in tech

an exact copy of steam but i know how to code unlike h1bs and AI so my client runs on 5mb of ram rather than 50GB

By catering to the consumer rather than the dev. Gog survives because it has its own niche with DRM-free games. Every other platform or launcher has been a disfunctional piece of shit, especially microsoft store.

Apparently all you have to do to outcompete steam is do exactly everything they do but take a smaller cut

By catering to the consumer rather than the dev.

based gabe corporate cock sucker being honest

I did not like Steam at first, and think having everything go fully digital was retarded and benefits no one except some bloated corporations.

But the reason I stuck to Steam instead of every other service is every other service was more bloatware than Steam was and were not designed to be user-friendly. I suspect that's the reason everyone else picked Steam over ubisoft's shit, over Origin, over even gog's launcher.

If you want a competitor, it has to do the same thing Steam does, except be less obtrusive. It has to launch and organize games quickly, it can't get in a user's way in any manner. If the user wants to completely ignore the storefront for months on end they have to be allowed to do that, no sales reminders or popups or anything like that and that user-first philosophy has to be present in every design decision.

I'll make my own steam.
With blackjack and hookers.

clone everything and then take a 0% cut under the for 100k sales and then 20% over that.
egs failed because for years (and even now) it didnt have any of the features of steam and somehow was a laggy piece of shit.
its like making a pub that gives 1 pint of free beer per week but the pub is just a tent put up between a sewage treatment plant and a landfill.
that 1 free pint just isnt worth the experience.

Any attempt to call something a monopoly when it’s sitting next to a limitless free source of everything it can provide, and some stuff it can’t, will always smack of dishonesty. Since the internet renders distance irrelevant, steam is essentially selling bottled water next to a waterfall (piracy) then newcomers look at this, ignore the waterfall, and try to compete directly with steam. Which is self-defeating as needing multiple accounts and several different bloatwares to juggle is automatically reducing the convenience factor, making the piracy waterfall a better option

It is a monopoly in practice. Not that monopoly is bad. They didn't use any anti-competitive practices tactics to establish it. Nor do they use any to keep competitors out of the business.

clone everything and then take a 0% cut under the for 100k sales

anon lives under a rock episode

Epic takes 0% under 1 million. yeah that's how strong the steam monopoly is.

It is somehow the only monopoly to ever exist that isn’t actively fucking people over

Note that I say “actively”

Make physical PC games a thing again

and where do you put them

What does steam do that epic doesn’t? And vice versa?

It's not really possible, your only chance is to wait for the new generations of consumers and try to catch those who don't yet have a reason to use Steam because they don't have game libraries there, or a habit of using the store.
Any store that targets the same niche as Steam only makes sense as a very long-term investment, I'm saying 30-40 years in normal situations, or ~15 years if new technologies emerge that considerably change how people play video games, and you can take advantage of them before Steam.

you honestly cant. Whenever you google a game steam is usually the first link.

stfu bitch

What does steam do that epic doesn’t?

Well it isn't shit for starters.

Best thing would start with Steam itself as a baseline for what my store should be(maybe taking away a few things I find superfluous), then research what the biggest complaints people have with Steam and try to improve on those.
Also never go public, being a private company is basically the only reason Steam's stayed as good as it is.

Epic takes 0% under 1 million

AND STILL NO ONE USES IT BECAUSE ITS SHIT
clearly its not about the money
but it would help because once you make a clone you then need to convince people to hop over
like if i clone the beer you are currently drinking why would you drink my beer instead of the one you always buy? well if make mine 10% cheaper my beer is alot more attractive.

Epic also releases a lot of free games, but apparently that’s also not enough

Epic takes 0% under 1 million.

Which continues the problem of "how do we get people to actually buy games on our store"
Like they tried their first run program which didn't really help them either.

bro its not hard, just do the same features steam has but do them better. Uplay failed to do this, origin failed, they all streamline it to shit or lack features, no community reviews or forums, nothing, they want to compete but they dont actually want to implement what people like about steam.

They release free games years after everyone has already played them.

Because that would mean relinquishing control

based grudge holder against gross consumer-unfriendly practices.

That has nothing to do with some made-up "monopoly." The savings from Epic's cut is not passed onto the consumer. Why should I give a fuck if a publisher is paid 30% more if they're still asking the exact same price for an ecosystem that ultimately offers less than buying the same thing on Steam?

well theyre just pants on head retarded, pc players can tell when something is lacking, they want everyone to just magically migrate over and faux ignorance about what we like on steam. I even didnt migrate to epic because of their free games, the client itself is useless to me and I didnt like most any of those games, even if I did I would instantly notice its lacking and has no community features.

They are pants on head retarded because they’re used to console players just rolling over and taking it up the ass

Because it can’t. If steam starts trying to fuck people over said people just go to piracy. People trying to claim it’s a monopoly because no other business can compete are also ignoring the fact piracy exists and is, by default, more convenient than any paid service.

Yes?
Do you live in a cavern or something?
It's pretty great when devs actually bother making their games compatible with it.
So much more convenient than using Fagxus or downloading a bunch of zip files and some specific executable and all that just to get some mods going.

Good Old Games already exists and is my ideal competitor.

And how does that reflect on the final prices? Oh yeah, it doesn't. I don't care. The consumer doesn't give a fuck.
And Epic is doing the bare minimum, no shit you need to beat the big guy by taking less if you want to compete. But that isn't enough.

monopoly defenders seethe (uncontrollably).

Sorry Tim, maybe next time you’ll create a service that doesn’t brick your account and credit card if you make more than 3 purchases in an hour