"Screw Steam" MCC gets released on Steam.
Looks like I'm done watching this guy now.
I watched the video, and unless I've missed something, Jim doesn't really sing much praise for the Epic Games Store. He highlights why developers are going with Epic instead of Steam due to their generous cut and lack of bad PR, and why Valve's attutide is pretty terrible. Steam letting shitty scam games through is an anti-consumer practice, which Epic has (yet) to suffer from.
Jim's a pretty divisive creator, especially given his persona of ultra twat, but people shitting on him for this video seems like they didn't give him the fair chance. Perhaps it was disingenuous of him to not talk about the moral problems the Epic Games Store has, I don't know.
I am not giving praise to Epic. The Tencent connection is terrible enough, and buying loyalty is horriblely scummy. It feels like the game I'm excited for the most, Satisfactory, is being held hostage from me and I really, really don't want to validate or promote the existance of the Epic Games Store by caving and buying it. Hopefully an alternative will be available to me, otherwise I might never play the game.
Why do I feel Epic payed him off.
He is indeed very divisive and there's certainly a lot of people (here) who find him annoying and often when his videos are posted here I get the feeling that something is brewing, butusually he makes good points and people agree with him so the lid is kept on but then he makes a video like this and people who are already quite upset with the Epic Games Store disagree with him and find themselves justified in shitting on him and it almost feels like nobody liked him in the first place. Personally I take both Jim Sterling and people criticizing him with a pinch of salt. Because mostly I agree with him - not always - and while I find some of his stuff cringy, I also kinda like that he's so outrageous.
The indies pulling off steam and signing exclusivity deals is bad PR in itself. Pulling off a platform you've been actively advertising yourself on is a fucking stupid PR move.
Steam does not dictate a minimum quality for games, but they do remove outright scams. The issue is there are hundreds of games a day released on steam at times, so finding them all takes time.
No, they just actively participate in anti-consumer practice, rather than being passively associated with it.
I have been watching Jim Sterling's stuff for over 10 years. He is a twat, it's not an act. He just says it is to avoid criticism. Sure, he plays it up on the Jimquisition for laughs, but he's still presenting his actual views and opinions.
It's incredibly disingenuous for him to ignore the moral (and legal) problems the Epic Store has, especially since he's been railing against steam for doing much less offensive shit for years. He complained about EA actively breaking Belgium's lootbox laws but not a peep about Epic completely disregarding GDPR.
The thing is Epic have been going about taking on steam in the worst way possible for consumers. If they offered a better service, or at least a comparable one, and didn't pull the anti-competition shit I wouldn't have much of an issue with them. I don't mind having Origin and Gog Galaxy on my machine and I wouldn't mind having the Epic store if it was even on the same level as those. Right now though it's on about the same level as Bethesda.net, and no one should have to put up with that shit. If the Epic Store (which BTW, give your store a catchy name not "The X Store") was on par with Origin and Epic were like "Yo, you can buy our new game Gear of War 5 on our store or the Microsoft store" I would genuinely consider Epic's store.
I probably would go for Microsoft because I already have an account and I'm not sure on Epic's security, but I wouldn't be writing them off by default like I am now.
Ive often thought this but despite all its flaws and problems, and how dissappointing Valve has been for the past few years as a company and with its product output, i am still glad Steam is run by them because it means its run apathetically instead of with outright malice or abusively greedy intent. Even if theres bugs and qualiy control issues and a miriad of other problems here and there i'd rather the lazy hands off approach then what pretty much any other company of comparable size who could run a platform like this would almost certainly do.
Also it actually works 99% of the time unlike pretty much any other one ive tried/been forced to use, like god damn Uplay.
That's bad PR for the indies, not Epic. And given the issues present on Steam that aren't on Epic, it's more understandable why indies to this.
To this point, I haven't actually seen a PR blowback for anyone going exclusive on Epic except for Deep Silver, and that was just because they had already been selling pre-orders on Steam.
Steam should dictate a minumum quality for games. Hundreds of games being released everyday should be perfectly managable for Valve to take down within minutes, given the ludicrous amount of money they take in. Having no quality control means your 10/10 masterpiece could sit next to Rape Day on the storefront, which is horrific. That's why I don't blame people going with Epic rather than Steam.
My dream would people going with GOG or just releasing themselves DRM free, but that's not viable for everyone.
And that is terrible. But for consumers and especially developers, the bad PR of being an evil company is heavily ecplised by filling your store with garbage. Just look at how Amazon is as popular as ever despite being famous for abusing its workers and destroying businesses.
I don't know everything Jim has done, but if he has never covered the Tencent connection and other shit Epic's pulled, then it is disingenuous of him. I didn't find it disingenuous of him to discuss that aspect in a video focusing on Steam.
The thing is, @edits , steam has implemented systems which prevent RapeDay from appearing next to say My Time at Portia. Aside from not allowing RapeDay on the store you can filter out Adult content (which is enabled by default), the store recommends games based on your preferences and recently played games, and if you do ever have the absolute horror of seeing an anime tiddy you can click "Not interested" and steam will never show it to you again.
The fact of the matter is the only way for you to actually see the shit that ends up on steam is to actively search it out, either by going to the Recently Released Games tab and turing off your preferences, or by looking them up by name. Steam having 80,000 piles of literal shit means nothing because regular users will never see them.
I'll concede the senario of my pixelshit diversity adventure being displayed next to Rape Day, I didn't do my research enough.
However, Steam allowing 80,000 piles of shit still means Steam is filled with shit, invisible or not. And having your product be be sold in a house of shit doesn't always reflect fantastically on the producer.
Steam should not be filled with shit. For no reason should the system be anything goes, beyond Valve being lazy in the worst way.
That's like saying Youtube shouldn't have low quality videos because it harms the reputation of people who try to make a living off of it, or Amazon shouldn't have low quality products because it harms the image of their brand. Just don't buy the shit, it's not hard to tell it's shit. Hell with steam you won't even see it in the first place so functionally it isn't there.
Sure in an ideal world there wouldn't be any bad products at all, but I'd rather have a store which occasionally offers a bad product that one which decides what I have access to. There are plenty of really good games that don't make it onto Gog purely because they have to vet every game and decide if it's good enough, and sometimes they choose to not sell games that their audience actually wants.
Everything is filled with shit though.
Every digital distribution platform of any medium, any console that has ever existed, the output of every industry is, always has, and always will be at least 75% complete and total garbage.
Yeah I bring this up basically every time on the subject but the game Opus Magnum is a critically acclaimed puzzle game that has fantastic reviews and popularity. But when they first tried to sell the game on GOG they were refused for not meeting GOGs standards. It wasn't until after the game had it's critical acclaim and brought up that GOG refused them that they were finally allowed to sell on GOG. There are many, many great games and devs of great games that would not exist if not for Steam's decision to not play gatekeeper. And further people originally wanted Steam to stop playing gatekeeper. This was one of the biggest issues people had of Steam prior to greenlight was how difficult, borderline impossible, it was for most games to get on Steam. So they left the gates open. Then eventually removed the fences entirely.
I remember in early early 2013 Gabe gave an interview where he talked about how he wanted Steam to eventually become sort of just a community run API for releasing anything, not just video games, without any direct Valve inolvement.
I don't really see the point in gatekeeping, especially now that they have a pretty good review system and refund policy. Does the presence of a asset flip game on Steam, that you are probably never going to see unless you search for it, really hurts the experience that much? I want to meet people that were 'scammed' by asset flips, because I don't actually believe they exist.
So just to bring up a new piece of info that has just come up:
Epic Games Launcher appears to collect your steam friends & play.
So yeah, Epic is violating GDPR and functioning as spyware. Ironically as someone pointed out the guy behind SteamSpy is also their director of publishing strategy.
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