TF2 General Chat & Speculation Station V17 - Ms. Pauling Won't Stop Calling Me - Games

Well if any of VNN's shit is accurate the rest of Valve is trying to kill the TF team by discouraging people joining it because Eric and co are toxic assholes.

Failing in some areas? They've failed in all areas, even Steam.

If it wasnt for steam, valve would have gone under years ago.

If it wasn't for Steam, Valve wouldn't have ended like this. A company that needs money, doesn't become complacent. Lets hope that old staff retiring and the Steam Store gaining competitors, changes Valve again but this time for the better.

Steam as a platform still has a massive amount of features other platforms can't even grasp on. Saying they collectively failed with steam because their non-existant quality-control system is beyond stupid. Steam Workshop, Controller Support for basically any game (!!!) , Steam Community Market, list goes on. Saying Valve has failed in all areas and then naming blanket naming an area they fail in, acting like it's the norm is outright wrong.

Oh boy, they have features other platforms don't have! Could it be because of Steam's age, having accumulated all those features over time? No, of course not; certainly it's because Valve is and continues to be great (but remember, only in certain areas)! Merely because they established a respectable service in the past does not mean that service is still respectable. Valve has lost a lot of real estate in the digital distribution market over the past few years, with fewer and fewer major titles being offered on the platform. Meanwhile, the platform continues to burst at the seams with a glut of asset flips, shovelware, and hackish knockoff titles, all the while failing to impress with sales and frustrating with an increasingly buggy UI.

I mean you're completely right but steam is still the only launcher worth using (for now) and yeah that is just due to the age of it, but it still makes it a success success isn't really measured by whether it has bad press or not in my opinion

It's stupid to say that they did anything but succeed with Steam. They have a monopoly on the PC gaming market because Gabe came up with an original idea, and even though it was bad at first, it gained the clout (via the legendary Half-Life and Counter-Strike games and their modding capabilities) to eventually take over. However, it's also just as stupid to say that they're anything but complacent at this point. It's clear that they're just banking on steam and have no interest in notable advancements of the platform or game development. They (needlessly) updated the friends list system, and now not only is it much harder to actually navigate, it also requires its own updates for some god-forsaken reason. Artifact released in 2018. Steam community events are literally nothing but "buy games and get profile stuff", even though years ago events gave you free in-game stuff just from playing games you already owned. Also, the whole "steam always has a shitton of sales which shows that they care about the consumer" is a bit off the mark. They have those sales because a purely digital platform means you lose a lot of potential resale value for your games. If you lose your steam account, all your games are just as likely to be gone. The sales also existed way before the (still admittedly super shitty) refund system was even in place, meaning the money you spent on a game on steam was essentially gone forever. Steam is by no means a bad pc gaming client, or it wouldn't be the juggernaut it is today, but it's not like Valve and steam are the gods of PC gaming people always portrayed them as in the 2000's. Far from it. They've proven time and time again that, between their absolutely ridiculous corporate structure and how pathetically slow development of anything that isn't VR or the failed Steam Link and Steam Machines is, they're pretty bad as a company, and the monopoly they have on PC gaming is the only thing keeping them from seeing huge backlash.

In four or five years I predict Steam will be entirely eclipsed by alternatives. That is, of course, granted they stay the course and persist in operating the way they do.

One thing I want to know about valve is how the attitude in the office is now especially after artifact flopped as hard as it did.

I'm not convinced steam's going to die. At the moment nothing else has the features that steam does, and it's going to take a while for other services to get up to snuff. And even when we do see one of these new platforms like Epic reaching steam's level of quality, even if they become a big competitor to steam, that doesn't mean steam actually dies. This industry's big enough for more than one storefront. To actually kill steam, you'd need an alternative that's drastically better, or for valve to fuck steam up immensely. As far as steam itself goes, valve hasn't fucked up with it much at all. Most people don't really care if valve is making card games nobody wants, it doesn't affect the steam platform at all. Epic games COULD provide a drastically better service, valve could fuck up steam immensely, but there's really no way of knowing whether that will happen. How steam will be affected by new stores popping up is an open question, and there's nothing really to indicate anything as drastic as steam being altogether overtaken.

Maybe this new growing in popularity exploit will force Valve to kick out another update to Team Fortress 2. Maybe it'll help turn Casual from Leave Fortress 2 back to Team Fortress 2.

https://i.redd.it/iivwvbxh2rd21.jpg The Epic store literally just added a search today. It's going to be a long time before they have anywhere near the current feature set of Steam, much less features Steam will add in the next few years. Obviously Epic can't keep buying exclusives (and honestly it's not exactly a popular tactic among PC players), they're paying some revenue share for streamers who sell stuff on the Epic store but only for the next 24 months, and Tim Sweeney himself has said it's not possible to operate with a 12% revenue share in some countries and they push payment processing fees onto customers. They aren't going to keep giving away free games forever either. It feels like to me that they're just making a mad grab at what market share they can before the way they operate becomes unsustainable for them honestly and they make changes like increasing their share of the revenue and not pay streamers out of their cut anymore. Even having Fortnight probably isn't going to be a huge help for the Epic store, even the Steamspy guy who now works at Epic has said people who spend a bunch of time playing a F2P multiplayer game rarely buy other games on a platform.

Manipulating a platform into giving you free advertising and publicity, knowing all the while that you're going to pull a bait-and-switch and relocate to a different platform to actually sell the game, makes you a terrible businessperson and a bad person in general.

There's a decent bunch of platforms which are only a few years younger than Steam and still only have done 20% of it what Steam has done. Age of course plays a role but that doesn't exactly change anything about the argument of Steam having positives for the customer...? Once again. It fails at some areas, but is great at a lot of others. Being overly snarky because "but shovelware!" doesn't make any of the positives any less positive.

Who gives a shit? No, seriously, who gives a shit. You're asking me, as a consumer, to completely ignore the pros of one platform because the other platform hasn't had time to make those features. Too bad! They should've worked longer before releasing their platform then. Why the fuck would I blatantly disregard countless features that push Steam in front of all the rest of competition? Why should I hop away from a platform that does what I want in the hopes that the new platform might one day do exactly what I already like about Steam? Why would I not, as a consumer, just use the better fucking service? If they didn't want to be compared on those features, they shouldn't be competing in the same market.

Don't you know it's only fair to compare a brand new platform to Steam in 2003? It didn't have many features then and people didn't like it very much.

By that logic, you should also ignore all of Epic Game Store's pros. -Lower revenue share? Well they haven't had enough time to realize they need to increase it yet! -Less bloatware? They just haven't had enough time to fuck up their game submission process yet. It took Valve a decade. Give them time! (Those are the only 2 possibly better things about the EGS btw, and #2's real fucking iffy, and #1 is meaningless to consumers)

At the end of the day, a storefront is only as useful as the products it purveys. When the quality of those products continues to decline, then it doesn't matter how many ancillary features it offers.

Except the EGS is just a storefront, so that's true. Steam isn't just a storefront. They managed to build something people actually want to use. That's a pro btw.

Steam is just a storefront. It's a storefront with many bells and whistles to enhance the experience, but do you really think Steam as a program would see any usage entirely independent of its original purpose? Remove gaming and what are you left with? Features that revolve around and support... gaming. And yes, that includes its social components, marketplace, etc. These features are meant to increase customer dependency, and it performs well at ensuring additional investment. Of course Steam is more feature rich than EGS, no one is denying that, and I'm not dismissing the fact that Epic Games should have launched their service with similar capabilities. However, Steam is faltering, and yes, I do think time freezes at Valve, especially in comparison to companies without Valve's unique difficulties.

Amount of features isn't really an issue. It would be nice to have them, but I'd be fine without them. There are 2 major issues for me: 1) Anti-consumer practices. They claim that they try to fight with Steam's monopoly, but they do that by introducing monopoly over certain products. 2) ToS. "We own any content you create and you have to pay us if we got fined by it" is nonsense.

A computer is just a big calculator. It's a calculator with many bells and whistles to enhance the experience, but do you really think a Computer as a calculator would see any usage entirely independent of it's original purpose?

I guess this is somewhat relevant now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUHl9ZThXU0

If Epic Games store doesn't implement custom profile and badges. There's no way I'm moving over lol. I feel too attached to Steam to find any reason to move over something else, and unlike every other game store I wanna browse through steam UI I'm not sure why and how though, but at least nothing is obscure when using it.

I wish Valve would finish Cactus Canyon and Asteroid

The only thing that I find Steam truly useful for, is the Workshop. The Community Market is ok too.

That's not even remotely similar, but nice try. You're comparing a broad open-source concept to a proprietary platform for selling games.

it's a stupid argument but it fits the bill if you ask me. Steam developed past just being a store-front the moment they added a dedicated modding library with tools for moderation and updating, entirely game-independent chat, group, voice chat, broadcasting system alongside of once again entirely game-universal controller support - then there is whatever they are doing with linux right now which arguably enough is pretty groundbreaking. Calling those things "bells and whistles to a store front" is an incredible understatement.

Has anywhere heard anything from the team lately? I've been trying for months to find out.