Jim has never actually cared about consumers. He's an asshole who fucks up his research regularly, but just brushes it off with his "persona" because it lets him be an ignorant dick and look like an in-joke.
A year or two ago I actually did a big ass post breaking down the likelihood of finding that trash on Steam, which involved scouring various ways of finding games on Steam. And basically the only two places you will see it is if you look in "All new releases" or if you are looking in the recommendation queue and like me and have literally thousands of games viewed on in the queue:
https://i.imgur.com/aOmZSxn.png
Otherwise you will never see the trash. You basically have to have seen a massive chunk of Steam's catalog or else be actively looking for the trash to find it. And thats literally what Jim does, he actively seeks out trash to complain about then pretends its the only thing you'll see.
I've only watched maybe two videos by this guy. One was some review or whatever for some Steam trash and another video of him talking shit about the dev of said game when he was understandably upset when tens of thousands of Sterling's fans started bashing his game.
He spent the entire video acting like a smarmy asshole towards the dev saying that his game is shit and the likes. Think my only take away from it was that Jim is a fucking loser who picks on people whose games obviously aren't good because he knows no one is going to defend it and in turn bruise his fragile ego.
Maybe I just watched the two outliers and the rest of his content is great, but from what I watched I don't understand why people give this guy the time of day.
No that describes Jim pretty well. He swings at low-hanging fruit so he can get easy clicks on his videos and try to send people to his patreon.
If youre talking just about quality of games and the benefits for developers Epic has then yeah, screw Steam but accounting everything else as a storefront and a service then screw Epic more than Steam. Go buy games on GOG
I have like 9k games viewed on queue and i never really ran into the absolute garbage tier games like Jim did, but i did saw alot of “minimalistic games” which are just achivement farmer and hentai puzzle games, and using the not interested doesnt seem to get rid of them or show me something thatd make me interested
One big thing I think about thought is that Epic has pitched their store as the best place for Unreal Engine games, as the 12% they take from the store also covers your 5% engine fee.
If Epic manages to push it into mainstream status, people would be more inclined to put their garbage games on epic instead, due to the market reach and increase in profit
Could you link me that big ol' post with the data? Trying to win an internet debate.
I like the way the Epic Launcher's downloads tab looks.
At the moment, that's the best compliment I can give it.
I was trying to find it earlier actually. This was back when the old videos subforum still existed and unfortunately tracking down threads from there is a pain. I think I found it but the link was dead, despite a different thread working. Gonna see about maybe an archive link if one might exist.
Yeah this hypocrite is at it again, wonder what bullshit he'll say next time to get views.
Steam can be really bad at times, but imaging endorsing a store that don't even have a search function until a few weeks ago over it.
Reminder Jim never explicitly complained about all the issues on Epic Game Store the same way he did with all the other companies, even during the Metro Exodus situation he just explained the situation without calling Epic out unlike the way he did with Steam/EA/Nintendo/etc.
Mentioning Epic and not GOG/itch.io is big Hmm
Really makes me think
I saw another channel in the last week or so that was talking about Epic and Fortnite battlepasses and such and was really just trying to excuse Epic and Tim Sweeney by saying "Well, Tim Sweeney donates money to forestry stuff!" and white-knighting the hell out of them.
Maybe Epic is throwing a bit of Fortnite money at getting friendly voices on their side.
Did you mean the Extra Credits video? The thumbnail alone was enough to know that they are "suspiciously nice" with him.
I mean, if this is the same thing I think it is, jim reviewed a terribly shit game whose developer then decided to do a copyright strike on his review. To which jim rebutted, eventually this developer decides to do a libel lawsuit against jim and had been harassing him for years.
Jim Sterling won that lawsuit, and afaik the developer has a restraining order now.
On the main topic itself, Jim usually has good points and good intents, but in this case he's dropped the ball hard.
I think so. I don't watch extra credits but the boyfriend does and it was over on his screen I saw it.
Disregarding Epic for a moment, I do think too many people are complacent with Steam's near-monopoly over the PC market. GOG, itch.io, Origin, and uPlay combined still don't hold a candle to Steam and no matter how good they get, nobody's going to want to switch to another storefront, especially so long as Steam is where their existing libraries and friends lists already are. We see this with the console wars every generation: "Well, all my friends and all the games are already on this system, so I'm going to reinforce its position as the de-facto standard by buying into it, thereby making the case for other systems even more difficult when the next person who comes along."
It's an unstable equilibrium, and it still happens on PC even though digital stores don't have the same ~$300 entry fee that consoles do to almost mandate the vast majority of players only be able to afford one system per generation.
But honestly, I don't know how you break Steam's utter dominance of the PC market. Just offering the same games as Steam and having a good client/service has been proven multiple times to not be enough. Otherwise all those other storefronts would be way bigger and more of a threat to Steam than they currently are; it can't simply be that "Steam is just the best".
Well the idea is that if you can't offer anything better than steam, then perhaps they are entitled to that monopoly. It's unrealistic to think some random company can come in and topple 15 years of dominance in a short time, it takes time to build up that brand loyalty. Steam as a market leader isn't exploiting their position to the point that they hold all strategic assets, deny all entry attempts from any competitor, and have complete control on how much to scam their consumers. As such, they are tolerated.
Same as other monopolies to be honest. People want better products and services, not mere alternatives.
Jim usually has good points because he is just repeating what everybody else have been saying for years without adding any of his own research or new ideas to the discussion. I don't think he really had "good intents" for what he's saying aside from getting views with clickbait titles.
Better products and services won't come if no one even bothers giving the alternatives a look-in. Again, unstable equilibrium: once you get so far ahead, your advantage is so much that it will only ever increase.
I would argue that once your product becomes big enough to become a de-facto standard, you ought to relinquish control of it. If Steam is just that good, then either the Steam division of Valve should be broken off and split apart into competing entities, or Steam itself should become an open standard somehow. Because we're not going to progress otherwise. No other entity has the momentum or clout to make something that's that much better so as to take market control from Steam from a cold start.
Tying into that, I also take issue with the brand loyalty thing, because Origin and uPlay came into being when Steam was only half as old as it is now and EA and Ubisoft are far from "random companies". It just proves the stubbornness of the Steam userbase; they don't want other storefronts, they just want one single platform for everything. This kind of loyalty is how we got to the mass hysteria that has commanded Gen8. (Yes, hello, Max.)
The thing is people do go to them for their services when necessary. But usually they simply aren't.
How? To who? In what way? What about existing infrastructure and systems? This is a massive logistical nightmare without a decent guarantee it will render a positive result.
What exactly is the progress to make next that isn't being made? Why does Steam even need to explicitly lose market control? That is having a solution and seeking a problem to fit it to.
They're random in that they just up and do it and there is no specific factor making it happen. Further, the issue with those is they are by and large, aside from spare exceptions, are first-party exclusive stores. Same with Battle.net. They're not stores really trying to sell other games, they want to just sell their own.
Most users just want the most convenient experience and thus far Steam has provided exactly that. Epic's game plan at this moment is to not offer a better experience, but to instead force the Steam experience to become worse.
Console loyalty has been a thing for a long time. "Genesis does what Nintendon't." and so on. This isn't a Gen 8 this and has little to do with PC storefronts.
Exactly my point. No one's gonna look at options outside of Steam unless forced to.
No, that isn't your point.
he's owned by china anything he say is irrelevant
Okay, then, that isn't my point.
Should Steam die, then watch Jim come back crying about the Epic store like a little bitch like he was against it in the first place.
I really wish Valve hadn't fucked up as much as it did in the last 10 years, else we would not be at risk of having the biggest marketplace of a major industry be under direct control of the Chinese government.
Elaborate?
This is why they are pushing hard with the revenue split. They are targeting developers, who seem to be disgruntled with Steam. People go where the game are.... r-right? (so they thought)
Without this whole drama I would argue that Discord is doing a much better job than Epic.
This tends to be heavily exaggerated. The bulk of developers who are having a problem with Steam are the one or two person teams who release tiny games that sell maybe a few hundred copies. I did a very deep dive on a part of that matter more recently than the other one I linked earlier in the thread. The devs complaining were people whose games sold copies in the double digits by and large (and in one case appeared to have a game that never actually sold a single copy.) And they were complaining because the algorithim for showing games in the "related products" section was changed slightly in relation to a bug fix and it meant those tiny games that almost never got seen got seen slightly less. Indie developers see massive reduction in Steam traffic I also make a mention of the revenue split which people have accused of being an attempt to hurt indie devs, despite the fact its just basic economics of scale. There are of course large indie dev teams that are complaining, but most of that seems to be about just the fact there is so much competition now. And a few show a remarkable lack of self-awareness by complaining about Steam being too-open while at the same time they owe their own existence on the platform to that openness.
I hope so.
I am not surprised, but I wonder if Jim has been made aware of Epic's control of user generated content is very similar to Nintendo's old YouTube policy, which Jim filleted and said it was okay to pirate Nintendo games because of that policy.
I don't think these people are paying attention to what the Epic Store is doing, they just fell for the hype that it's going to be the one to take Steam down a peg. This hype seems to exist as a result of
publicity from the exclusivity deals, posturing, and Epic having a powerful brand that isn't as toxic as EA's, regardless of whether or not it should be. Other storefronts didn't have the means to create hype for something like that, and most if not all didn't even want to.
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