“The Steam Killer”
The following article was originally planned to be published to TechRaptor as part of the SteamWatch article column that I run over there, however in the while I was busy with some other things, TechRaptor had already ended up publishing a similar article talking about a similar topic that I would have been covering, and as a result, I figured it would not be fitting to post it there. Originally I was planning on canning the post, but I got a few people still interested in my take of the whole thing which is what we’ll be talking about here.
Prior to the launch of the controversial Epic Games Store, the term “Steam Killer” was thrown around significantly whenever a new competitor arose promoting its self as a game client that sold games to you. This was all that was really required for a platform to be dubbed a “Steam killer” as the term was used by hopefuls that were sick of using Steam and wanted another client to come around and top Steam. The problem was people were too hopeful and optimistic and realized a platform would not topple Steam in one night. There has been a great variety of clients and gaming stores cropping up over the last few years such as itch.io, GOG, Origin, UPlay, GameJolt, Battle.net/Blizzard App, Bethesda.net and Discord just to name a few. As you can tell from the list, a few of the competitors that have arisen, namely Origin, UPlay, Battle.net, and Bethesda.net brewed from the simple premise of developers wanting more money from the sales of the game and so they chose to host their own stores where they get 100% of the profits without needing to give Steam their 30% cut while giving the convenience for the customers to have all their games under one client. However, with the growing market and expansion and the evergrowing catalog of clients continually cropping up into existence, this “convenience” has been diminishing over time where players have 5 different clients installed just to play their games.
I recall whenever I saw another dubbed “Steam killer” rise up, I was constantly shown it by optimistic hopefuls saying this would top Steam and I would be the asshole that I am and quash that optimism by telling them it wouldn’t, and 9/10 I was right. But then even I have to admit, the Epic Game Store has been putting my emphasis on Steam being the continuous lead of PC gaming to the test.
Before I get into possibly what a lot of you want to know with regards to Steam and Epic, I feel it is important to go over each of the previous competing clients first to understand them more and where they may have fallen flat, at least in my opinion.
I do want to point out though, all the clients I’m talking about are far from being dubbed as “failures” but I’m just simply saying that they didn’t top Steam despite what some hopefuls may have said once upon a time and it’s with this I want to talk about why they didn’t top Steam.
Itch.io and GameJolt
Starting off on the smaller end, we have both itch.io and GameJolt, two of the leading distributors when it comes to indie gaming. Both sites have vast catalogs of games on offer, more than Steam. All the games on offer are DRM free which gave both sites brownie points amongst consumers.
Where both of these sites fail at gaining more mainstream appeal though is their lack of AAA titles. 95% of the games both these sites have to offer are indie games and they don’t have the large big budget games on offer which deters the mainstream audience away from both of those sites since if you aren’t big into indie gaming, you won’t be big into itch.io or GameJolt. I feel it’s sort of mismatched to really call either of these sites Steam competitors though, as it was never really either platform’s aim to topple Steam, but rather to co-exist. While Steam has an especially sizable indie developer scene, itch.io and GameJolt have even less quality assurance practices in place than Steam does with its approval process. There are no fees tied to posting games to either platform, it’s fully free of charge to post the games and the games aren’t tested by an employee to see if the files are functional either, meaning there’s a chance you could buy a game on either site and find it unfunctional and unplayable. And of course, with the lacking first hurdle, or well, ANY hurdles to speak of when it comes to posting games, the quality of them all is very varying. Some games are sequels to indie games that have found great success, others are first-person shooters with little style or identity. Some are remastered classics of old-style 90s point and click adventure games while others are asset riddled messes with poor concepts and worse execution. Some are genuinely under-rated gems whereas some are developed by Ata Berdyev.
GOG
Let’s move on to what I believe to be the closest that Steam had as a competitor until Epic Games came onto the scene, GOG. An abbreviation for Good Old Games, GOG was established by CD Projekt Red, developers of the popular Witcher video game series. Unlike clients we’ll talk about later that have virtually libraries exclusive to that of their creator, GOG doesn’t and includes masses of games. One up that GOG has over Steam is that you can access incredibly older PC games on here that are made to work on newer computers through the use of programs like DOSBox and SCUMMVM. Once upon a time, when you were buying a game on Steam that was released prior to the year 2000, you weren’t guaranteed it would work on your machine as compatibility issues would most likely arise though, not with GOG. GOG assured its users that each and every retro game on their platform would be functioning and they garnered a good reputation through this. GOG of course does stock newer games and keeps it’s self up with the new releases in the games industry relatively well. GOG did and still does however have a couple of downsides which played against it.
GOG is basically a far more curated Steam store, however from what I’ve gathered, if Steam was on an extremist side of being “pro-everything coming onto our store” GOG would be the other side where they were “pro-AAA games coming onto our store and maybe the odd indie.” GOG has been criticized by some indie developer circles of having high standards for what is posted to their store, however, it’s become so high it is incredibly difficult for some indies to reach out to GOG’s audience. GOG haven’t really been overly successful in tapping into the niches that the indie gaming scene fulfill. On top of this, with the exception of having a vaster library of older PC games on offer, GOG doesn’t do much to set it’s self aside from Steam. The one interchangeable factor between the two stores was GOG had some old ass games on it. This may have been a huge appeal to the crowd of gamers for the 80s but to the newer generation, they were given little to no reason to choose GOG over Steam as Steam just had so much more to offer to them on top of what GOG already did.
Discord
One of the newest competitors to enter the battlefield of PC gaming would be Discord. The popular voice, video and text chat software that had once competed with Skype and TeamSpeak before it destroyed them decided to branch out more with what it offered to users and opened its own gaming store. And poor old Discord just isn’t really cut out to be a gaming store. Besides its timed exclusivity deal of Last Year: The Nightmare, Discord doesn’t really have anything to attract gamers away from Steam and the store is really underdeveloped, which while I could understand with it being newly set up, it is missing key features right now, such as a method of actually even accessing the store. Yes, they don’t even have a way for you to access it. The only way for you to get to games on the store is to go through your activity feed, find a game Discord is promoting and then click to go there. It’s telling that Discord isn’t prioritized with being a gaming store and wants to stick to what it does best: video, voice and text chat.
The Publisher Launchers
One of the main things that larger scale businesses will focus on Steam would be how much money they’re making and how if in any way possible they can maximize the profit they make. Obviously, Steam’s 30% cut of money generated from each game sale may be a deterrence to some companies and as such, in order for these publishers to keep as much of their money generated from each game sale as possible, some have responded by making their own stores and clients. There are a great number of examples of these types of clients varying from EA’s Origin, Ubisoft’s UPlay, Activision’s Battle.net/Blizzard App, Bethesda’s launcher, and that’s just a few examples.
These types of clients tend to be the most scrutinized, namely because due to the large expansion and popularity of this scheme, it’s lead to customers having to repeatedly install extra stuff onto their computers if they want to play the newest hotness from one of the many AAA publishers. UPlay, in particular, has come under heavy scrutiny due to the fact it doubles as an extra layer of DRM. Ubisoft despite having their own store still do continue to put their newest games on Steam, but with a catch. If you buy it on Steam, you’re then forced to create a UPlay account and Ubisoft’s UPlay has leaded to some noteworthy disasters.
The majority of these clients also have high chances of never dreaming of being the top store distributor due to them almost exclusively distributing their own games and don’t open themselves up to other companies unless their publisher handle is attached to it.
So What Does Steam Have?
Followers of mine from either my articles on TechRaptor or my Steam group Sentinels of the Store will know that I am very critical of Steam and tend to criticize Steam a lot, but the fact of the matter is I do it because I love the platform and I still personally think it is the best game client out there. My harshness and critical nature of the platform stems from a desire to see it improve immensely from where it continues to stand. So let me explain what Steam does right over its competition. What puts Steam on a completely different level to its competitors is what it has to offer towards its customers and community.
A viral image on Imgur that was posted after many people started calling Epic the new Steam killer showcased exactly the grander scope and what a lot of people don't often consider when calling something a new Steam killer or a new competitor: Steam is much more than just a store.
Disclaimer: the Chi-com spying element has currently been proven as a falsehood but was under investigation when the list was made.
Steam has community discussions, Steam has forums, Steam has community hubs for the games on its platform, Steam has a workshop where the community can post their mods for games like Garry’s Mod, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Speedrunners and many more. Steam also has a community market where emotes, cards and such can be sold where the users can make money from playing their games, and while this has had numerous faults and has been a practice ripe for bad actors coming onto the platform, the plan is neat in concept and does what it sets out to. Steam has embedded live streaming features in the form of broadcasts where you can stream while you play. There’s also Steam groups where collections of people can come in and play together or chat or come to together with a similar goal in mind. Steam also has badges that you can obtain to show your support for games that you like and what also acts as a nice decal for your Steam profile.
Epic has none of this. What Epic does have is paid exclusives which in and of its self is an anti-consumer practice of trying to give its self a boost ahead of Steam. While it is working for them, not many people are happy about it including me. Epic have outright refused to add forums and it’s lead to troubles for when Subnautica was added to the Epic store with there being no forums, people had to go back to Steam if they needed any help with the game, and Epic still was under the impression having no forums was a good thing. In addition to this, their idea of an opt-in review system that is to be set up by the developers is also exemplary of how Epic does not think the customer's voice is a priority
I’m now going to focus on some common argument points I’ve seen people leverage when either attacking the Steam storefront or defending some of the practices Epic has done.
“Epic is only buying out games to attract people to its platform, what’s wrong with that?”
Epic in its current state is an incomplete store, with a development roadmap that, while acknowledging work needs to be done, that should be the priority. While buying out these exclusives may lead to customers wandering to the Epic Store to get the game, when they enter the store they find an incomplete, featureless mess that makes it so very few people are happy to stay around. Epic with their exclusivity deals has made it so that customers NEED to go to their store and not because the customers WANT to. Let’s face it, while the store is good for developers with an improved and fairer revenue share of sales (at least in the developer’s case) I want to pose a question; what is there on the store that would make a customer want to go there excluding the exclusivity deals that Epic are buying out? With Epic’s actions, it’s clear that they have shown where the priorities lie, they want to force customers over and then make it a place they want to spend time on later. Including bold statements saying that gamers don’t realize that the Epic Store is improving the industry is a laughable and deluded statement when talking about marketing mix and simply just makes customers despise you even more as it’s effectively a statement saying that they don’t need to appease the consumer.
“What’s wrong with Epic buying Exclusives? Steam has technically ran a monopoly of the market for over a decade!”
I really dislike this argument because games in the last 8 years didn’t go to Steam because they were paid out by Valve to put their game on there, the developers chose to put the game on Steam because they either liked working on Steam or because the customers were all on Steam and they wanted a large target audience. Steam themselves never forced people to come over, people chose to do so. And it’s for that reason people use the “technically” part because they themselves know that there is a difference between developers and customers choosing to go over to Steam to put their games up and play their games and then Epic paying out developers to put their games on their incomplete store hoping the customers will follow through with their forceful nature of pulling them away from Steam.
“What’s wrong with the Epic Store not having features? It’s a newly launched store!”
I would be much more lenient towards Epic for having a low amount of features on their store if it wasn’t that they were forcefully shoving something they knew wasn’t complete onto customers. Their program of offering free games on their service? I’m all for that as it’s beneficial towards building up healthy developer partnerships and also being a pro-consumer move and it pushes people towards your store to maybe at least check it out and pick up a game. Stripping away the newest fad on Steam and making it exclusive to your store not only highlights in my eyes insecurity that Epic have about their own store knowing that their store can’t speak for its self because….well, just look at the store in its current state, but also creates customer resentment towards both the developer for agreeing to do the deal, even more so when it’s a crowdfunded game which was promised to launch on both Steam and GOG with keys for backers.
In short, it not having features isn’t necessarily a problem….well it is but it has reasons to be on the lesser side of features. The problem is is that while accepting the store not being complete, they are forcing this incomplete store onto customers by locking some of their favorite upcoming titles behind it.
I’m all for competition but frankly solely because I don’t want companies getting too set in their ways and I think competition is a good way for companies to strive to do better. Epic is not the competition that Steam really needs and is a store that is incredibly non-beneficial towards the customers and are overly forceful with how they’ve introduced themselves to the scene and are trying to make it so that the developers dictate where the industry goes where on the opposing side, consumers also have a say in this and typically have a much louder voice for better or worse.
