this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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There’s a lot of money to be made as a middleman.
If there’s a gold rush, you want to be the guy selling shovels.
For a real comparison steam is the distributor, storefront, advertiser, and support. A bit more than just 'a middleman'.
A vertically integrated middleman is even more profitable.
Who wants to stand up all day though
That's why it pays so well
If there's a gold rush, you want to run the railroads, build the houses, sell the shovels and open the general store I guess
Fortunately, that's illegal now. If only those laws would be applied to modern things
You're missing the actual biggest key component. It's also a built in community forum with tons of user-requested settings. They mostly know how to cater and rarely backtrack a quality of life feature.
They're multiple middle men at once
I would make the comparison to the monopolized railroad instead of selling shovels. There is Vanderbilt level moneys in setting up a transport network that only you control and rent seek from.
IDK, retail can be a tough business, just ask GOG and Epic.
It's a lot of work becoming the de facto standard, but once you've made it, the money just rolls in.
At least gog has something unique in that they offer drm free games. Epic just buys fucking exclusives to try to force people over.
However, neither have learned the lesson from Valve: make it a really good experience.
GOG still doesn't have as good of support as Valve, and I don't think Epic is even trying with EGS. I'm happy to use a Valve competitor, but they need to make a good product first. GOG is close, and now that they seem to be sharing sales revenue with Heroic, I might buy more from them on my Steam Deck. But Valve just makes everything work so nicely that I'm hard pressed to find a reason to use another.
The thing with Valve is that they didn't just build a store for PC games and that's it.
Steam Input practically solved the issue of games not supporting your particular gamepad. There's Steam Remote Play, Proton for Linux compatibility, workshop for mods, well built systems for player to player trades, cloud saves that actually work...
Steam is what makes the PC a gaming platform, rather than a box capable of technically running games.
And yet Valve's competitors can't even make a halfway decent store. They can cry about monopolies and whatnot, but at the end of the day, they just don't have a compelling product.
I'm not expecting GOG or EGS to provide all those extra services, but they need to at least be a decent store, and that means better customer service and decent discoverability, yet they fail at actually being a store.
idk man, gog already has it pretty fucking good. Maybe it's not as nice as steam, but DRM free games that just fucking work is about as good as you're going to get really.
That fact that i can just stuff terabytes of games i own onto a disk and then fuck off is awesome. BTW, if you want a good gog interface, i've been using heroic games launcher for a bit with epic, it's pretty good, do recommend it.
Yeah, I'm trying it out on my Steam Deck. This might just be what gets me to start buying from GOG instead of Steam:
Before then, GOG just didn't support my platform of choice (Linux desktop and Steam Deck), so I always felt like a second class customer (though they did make installers, which was nice). Steam supported Linux since 2012 (I made my Steam account in 2013-ish because of that), and continue to support Linux through Proton enhancements.
However, now that Heroic makes something from GOG sales, maybe I'll actually buy a few. That's close enough to supporting me that I'll give them a shot.
i wasnt even aware they had a partnership prior to this, that's really cool actually. Hopefully that goes somewhere.
I updated Heroic and saw it in the changelog. I doubt it's very much, but it's still cool.
Your comment about guys selling shovels is in violation of my patent about commenting about shovels.
You'll need to pay me a license of $300 USD for every day this comment is left online.
And there's a lot of other guys selling shovels, too. It's not that anticompetitive when someone is selling better shovels than anyone else and also charging a premium for them. Anticompetitive would be having the best and undercutting everyone else on pricing in order to make sure no other sellers had a chance.