For a long time, Steam has reigned supreme when it comes to PC games; they had the best sales, the widest selection, the best support for independent developers and publishers. They seemed to be on the side of the players, finding meaningful ways to incorporate player-made assets and mods into their structure and rewarding their customers who made the biggest investments. Even games not installed through steam were often made easiest to manage through the robust steam client, allowing you to use your existing steam friends list and library to keep everything neatly consolidated.

What a time to be alive, eh?

But as we're all aware, it's not quite the perfect picture that it's made out to be; The marketplace was saturated with rubbish moneygrabbing titles that nobody wanted (diluting the cool stuff and making it harder to find unless Valve featured it on their store), reviews for games were frequently skewed by hordes of malicious players, and the few developers that actually managed to find an audience only received a fraction of their profits as steam took a large slice for themselves. The forums and games were predominantly unmoderated, making them a safe haven for abusive and hateful groups of people to congregate and harass other users. Worst of all, perhaps, was that there was nobody out there to challenge them - if you had a problem with steam then there were few alternatives - even the other stores that sold the games you wanted would usually give you a steam key in order to activate it. It's easy to claim you're the "best" when there's nobody else to compare yourself to, I guess?

But now in 2019 we have alternatives!

We have Origin, BattleNet, Uplay, Epic Store, GoG, and even the Microsoft Store, to name but a few. Many of these services have excluded their own games from Steam for years, but increasingly they seem to be promoting exclusivity and competition for games published by other studios, too - case in point, Epic is making bold moves regarding exclusivity with games like Ashen and Phoenix Point.

So what does this mean for the PC gaming landscape?

Despite the awkwardness of having to manage multiple clients and friends lists, my own thoughts are this is profoundly positive. Origin, Blizzard and Uplay long ago proved that their blockbuster games could convince an audience to move away from steam, and now that these stores are also seeking out exclusivity deals there will be plenty of bidding over the best games being developed; Instead of an independent developer having to put a game on steam, take whatever deal Valve offers and simply hope their game gets noticed, these stores will fight over the rights to publish and sell. Competition is healthy, as we have seen repeatedly from the Sony/Microsoft rivalry every E3 for the past billion years, forcing developers to continually one-up each other as the players reap the rewards. Hypothetically if people stop using steam as their default service then that, in turn, should prompt steam to actually try doing things differently; Better incentives for developers, better community management, better curation of their store. In theory, anyway. With their purchase of Campo Santo there's an indication that they might even start developing some real games again...

Some other potential knock-on effects;

• The re-invigoration of the independent mod communities? I can't speak to all of the available stores, but I know Origin does not currently support mods (I just installed the HD texture pack for Mass Effect 2 and it was a pain in the ass). Instead of having to go through the steam workshop players will now have to scour old websites and forums, downloading shady zip directories from anonymous google drive and dropbox accounts. So that's exciting.
• More support for independent developers? If there's several publishers fighting over each game then they have a better chance of working out a good deal and securing some solid financial backing. Capitalism!
• E3 is going to be a lot more wild? More stores means more showcases and presentations. We've started to see a shift away from the big stages already, it would not surprise me if every store started doing their own treehouse-esque webinar on their upcoming titles and plans.
• New approaches to community management? New ways to entice community contributors and positive community members means a more pleasant experience for everyone.

Ultimately I believe the increase in variety and diversity among game stores is good for the industry and good for the players. Which is refreshing to think about.

Thanks For Reading

Love Sweep

great read- and while you're defo more optimistic on the issue than me, you raise some really salient arguments.

counterpoint:

https://kotaku.com/most-pc-stores-have-terrible-controller-and-tv-support-1833167283

most of the value i derive from a digital marketplace such as steam is not from the storefront itself (it's a glorified search bar for me). rather it's the services they provide- cloud saves, controller and big screen support, screenshot management, forums, etc. god knows steam is far from perfect- and i could really do without the vile hate speech that infiltrates the community- but when you have situations like this happening

https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-games-store-users-have-been-turning-to-steam-for-subnautica-support/

i'm not so sure why a consumer should be stoked to be buying products on the spartan storefront of epic. there's the hope that more cash flows to a developer maybe- but that's kinda up to the publisher, no? a small self-published team can probably expect a bigger slice of the pie...but a mid-tier product published by something like Deep Silver? who knows!

the thing is though- devs/publishers went with steam because it's where all the players were- not because valve enforced exclusivity (plenty of games simultaneously appeared on itch.io, gog, uplay, as well as steam). so while i appreciate it takes strong-handed business moves to dethrone the king- i just can't be excited to help epic win playerbase via locking out my options.

also- i'm not sure how much of a 'fight' there actually will be for indie darlings. i imagine it will come down to a cold calculus- where are the players, and does a better epic split compensate for less eyeballs. i don't see valve suddenly cutting exclusivity checks, because 1) they don't have to yet and 2) they seem to be pretty agnostic to the same title being sold on multiple storefronts for now.

but it's true that valve is more-or-less complacent. they need a fire under their bum, if only to continue to earn their players' dollar (as opposed to presuming it's already theirs).

I think i never move from steam. After buying my 500 game a few days back (there's only one THQ bundle in there) I still think the steam client could improve on a lot off things but i still think it's the best store out there. And then i use Uplay Origin Gog and the epic store. I think Origin is second best followed by Gog then Uplay still think the epic store is uther garbage worse then Origin on release, the only positive thing i can say about the Epic launcher is they got a neat download screen. I like that there's more "rivalry" on the pc store front but it's hard to move once you get hooked into one ecosystem, like moving from apple to android.

final note i think taking 30% to host a game is a fair price hosting (maybe they should get a lower tier for games below 2GB) is expensive and Steam is almost always available all the time with max bandwith speed. This might sound like something that's normal for most folks but it takes a lot off work to get there.

I just don't see myself maintaining multiple accounts with hundreds of games between them. Eventually certain stores will be more important than others & those will get the premium treatment from the devs. You already have cases of gog versions not getting the same updates as the steam versions.

Just like mellotronrules, i don't come to steam for discoveribility. There are other avenues to get your game out there, and it seems like the cream does rise to the crop most of the time. Personally, I've never heard of a game that got overlooked on Steam but then suddenly found an audience thanks to the superior curation of a gog or an origin. But eventhough there's a bunch of nonsense on steam, if you're the type of person that wants to be curated, you will never see straight up trash appear on the frontpage & in the first few queue's. I also think the steam curator option is as good as you want it to be. Like i am always interested to see what the latest building /tycoon games are, so i follow an account that shows me those games.

I also want to give a shoutout to Steam's 'join a friend' multiplayer option. I've had multiple times where i randomly wasn't able to join someone's server by manually inputting Ip adresses (Terraria, Starbound). Never had that problem with steamwork games.

As an indie dev, I welcome Epic being in there and am somewhat distraught at the reactions I’ve seen from players. I’m not gonna say the Epic store is great per se, it’s basically lacking every possible features that it needs, but the competition is welcome.

Steam is a complete mess and they need to watch their shit. I’m not going to reiterate about that sexual assault game that was blocked from released a week ago, I’m just saying they need at least a minimum of moderation and curation that they obviously don’t have. Any excuses they use for cost doesn’t make any sense with the profit they’re making, same thing applies for the 30% margin, they obviously can do better, they just don’t need to and are too self-content to do better themselves.

For people on a website like Giant Bomb I understand discoverability sounds like a non-issue, but as a dev I assure you it is. I managed to get a fair amount of players by getting in the trending on Steam, which would’ve never happened otherwise (my game is free, mind you). I barely got any press, and the articles I got didn’t bump the numbers the way you would think. Most players simply seldom go on gaming website, word of mouths, « influencers » and then discoverability is where you’ll get most of your audience.

Lastly, again this might be because I’m developing a paid game, I don’t understand why people berate devs on choosing Epic first. I’d agree some made the move in a less than ideal manner (metro disappearing from Steam) but I see people talking about boycotting Hades and like, why? Why wouldn’t you want indie developpers to get a better share? To get a better deal? I understand being suspicious of massive corporations like EA or Ubisoft just trying to cut Steam out of the equation, but if I can send more money to the devs instead of the middle man I’ll gladly do it.

Still I use Steam family sharing so I’ll continue to buy games there. I’m not saying players that chose one platform over another because it has features they use are in wrong. That said if I can send more money to the devs while paying the same price, I’ll gladly do it.

I feel like this post is like 5 years behind and we've already reached the next stage where every single publisher having their own marketplace is only a detriment to the end user. GoG is 10 years old this year, Origin opened in 2011, Uplay in 2012 and the Battle.net store opened in 2013. Steam might not have had the major mass-market competitor that Epic is setting itself up to be before, but they've had to fight against big hitters for a good while already.

While competition might be good and all at the end of the day people would much rather just go to the grocery store rather than visit a butcher, a baker, a cheese shop, a farmers market and a fishmonger just to get an overview of what's available. Specialist stores are great when you already know exactly what you want to buy, but they are terrible for any sort of browsing. They're also a haven for consumer exploitation, as it's much harder for the consumer to get a nuanced picture of the market.

Yes, the Steam monopoly was not a good thing, but where we're headed isn't really that much better of an alternative. Having a bunch of small "monopolies" perpetuates many of the same issues while also making the market more cumbersome and confusing for the consumers.

I own 902 games on Steam.
... With that out of the way, while my bias is naturally towards staying on Steam it's not just because of the number of games i own on it, in every single other way Steam is a better platform for me.
It's where my friends are, it's where my screenshot library is kept, i love the community forums, i regularly check and laugh at community artwork, and i feel a debt towards Valve for rescuing PC gaming back when the 7th generation of consoles dominated the market, when PC gamers were treated like scum, we are where we are today because of them.
I respect publishers running their own stores and selling their games exclusively, those games come from their pockets, they can sell it wherever they want, as such i own some exclusives on Origin, but Epic's underhanded pilfering of indie and 3rd party titles is really annoying and offputting.
I'm in no rush to play Metro Exodus, i'll happily wait a year until it comes to Steam, but i recently found out Coffee Stain Studios removed their Steam page for Satisfactory, which my friends and i were eagerly looking forward to as big fans of their previous games, to become Epic exclusive.
They put up a video talking about the move, but didn't explain why other than to say "it's not about the better revenue share", so i assume they received a downpayment they can't disclose because moving from the platform which has hosted the entire life of the studio up to now just seems disrespectful, i don't see why they can't sell on both.
It's an ugly situation and will likely lead me to not playing the game, at least until it comes to Steam, i just can't bring myself to support Epic and their business ethics.

Enjoyable read. In the end, market competition is typically the engine of improvement for the consumer. Things might become more ephemeral (and possibly tribal) with the advent of publisher store platforms, but there's no moral reason why one company should be protected from competition.

This was never supposed to be a suggestion that people should abandon steam or that it's "the end of an era" or anything like that. But in the past year or so we've definitely seen publishers make more of a shift towards making their games available on stores other than steam. My point was less "Fuck steam let's all abandon ship" and more that other stores will hopefully chip away at the indifferent complacency that has been Valve's default for as long as I can remember. And while these new services still have a long way to go in terms of rivaling Valve's service and client, the fact that they're making the effort can only be positive.

I can't speak for all people but I'm pretty sure that there's actually a lot of folks who would much rather shop around to get different products at competitive prices. So that's a hard disagree from me on that point.

I have hundreds of games on Steam as well, and I've spent hundreds of dollars on marketplace items and thousands of hours playing steam exclusive games. The idea that this should demand some kind of loyalty though is bananas. If there's a game I want on the Epic Store that's also on Steam then I'm going to buy it wherever it's cheapest and/or has the best incentives to do so. I've actively had a problem with Steam community management for a long time, so if Epic are offering an alternative then I'm going to leap at that, and I think a lot of people would be happy to do so for other/similar reasons.

But there's a massive difference between shopping around at several generalist stores and surveying specialist stores. If every game storefront offered same goods and they actually had to compete it would be a completely different thing, but the way it's going down they're all carving out their own piece of the market. There's no ultimate monopoly on video games overall, but they're all aiming to create coercive monopolies on their own products.

It's like Apple, you can't shop around on their products because they're the only ones selling them. There are no middlemen in-between the producer and the consumer allowing for a competitive market. Sure, you can go other places and look at similar products, but as long as there's a demand for Apple products they're able to squeeze and exploit their customers to the brink without any fear of competition. In the same way if you're into sports games you just have to suck it up and agree to whatever EA wants from you, since they pretty much have a lockdown on that market.

While being able to download games has been a blessing for many people (myself included), the death of the game store is not a good thing overall for us consumers. Hell, Sony has been consistently overcharging games on their store by 15-20% in my region this entire generation even though the supposed benefit of removing the middle-man is lower prices.

Edit: Realized the Apple example is wrong, but you get the idea.