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Valve Adds New Clause to Steam Distribution Agreement, Could Block Epic Store Exclusivity

FranXico

Member
This new clause won't prevent Epic exclusives, far from it. What it might do is make some devs think twice before screwing over their supporters.
 

mcz117chief

Member
my only problem with steam is all the garbage games they recommend me. they are something I would see on newgrounds 15 years ago, or someone who did a highschool project that decided to just put it on steam. There are chinese games some look ok, but it says not in english so thats a ignore from me.
I sometimes try those $2-5 Chinese/high school project games and rarely do I get burned. I don't buy them blindly of course, I do my research (reviews, videos, forum).
 

Shifty

Member
Still waiting on that substantiated argument from King Sycophant JohnnyFootball JohnnyFootball

Surely he couldn't possibly have bailed in lieu of actually being able to explain himself? :unsure:

That clause would forbid developers to release patches first on other platforms. Considering how much GoG already suffers with postponed patches (or no patches at all), it would be a massive "fuck you" from Valve to GoG, and non-Steam stores in general.
That logic doesn't add up. If some developers are already being lax with updates for non-Steam platforms, how does this make the situation worse?

There's nothing in the 'new' clause saying that they can't ship updates simultaneously, which they should be doing already. The blame for that lies with the devs, not Steam.
 
I bet you $100 you're wrong.

And you know you are, Mr Drivebypost.
Hey, That's my rap name!

But in all fairness, the clause is reasonable. But to me, this means most Publishers will just announce it for the Epic store and leave Steam out of it especially for the first year of sales. As everyone knows, that first year is crucial.
 
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CuNi

Member
Hey, That's my rap name!

But in all fairness, the clause is reasonable. But to me, this means most Publishers will just announce it for the Epic store and leave Steam out of it especially for the first year of sales. As everyone knows, that first year is crucial.

I would beg to pardon. Many medium sized studios without huge financial powerhouse to fund them or even indie devs, heck even triple A devs that use Kickstarter to fund the games rely to some degree on Steam exposure. Have you seen the media and backer outcry when certain games pulled from steam while promising keys to backers? Many use steam as a big billboard to advertise to a huge crowd for free and then do a 180 and get extra money from epic. All this new clause does is locking out shady af advertise and exposure practices. If you advertise on Steam, you have to release on Steam. Developers now are free to chose If they rather have a chance to sell to a huge audience with a lot of exposure on Steam or go with the money and forfeit the exposure. If the dev is about selling his game on as many plat8as possible to give everyone the ability to buy it where they want, then nothing will change. If developers want free advertising and then pull out, then sadly steam is not a welcome place for them anymore and honestly, fuck devs that do this and try to play the moral game with the better cut for devs. Other people don't want trash games on Steam, I don't want shady devs on Steam and I can gladly miss out any game that puts profit first instead of giving as many players a chance to play where they want.
 
I would beg to pardon. Many medium sized studios without huge financial powerhouse to fund them or even indie devs, heck even triple A devs that use Kickstarter to fund the games rely to some degree on Steam exposure. Have you seen the media and backer outcry when certain games pulled from steam while promising keys to backers? Many use steam as a big billboard to advertise to a huge crowd for free and then do a 180 and get extra money from epic. All this new clause does is locking out shady af advertise and exposure practices. If you advertise on Steam, you have to release on Steam. Developers now are free to chose If they rather have a chance to sell to a huge audience with a lot of exposure on Steam or go with the money and forfeit the exposure. If the dev is about selling his game on as many plat8as possible to give everyone the ability to buy it where they want, then nothing will change. If developers want free advertising and then pull out, then sadly steam is not a welcome place for them anymore and honestly, fuck devs that do this and try to play the moral game with the better cut for devs. Other people don't want trash games on Steam, I don't want shady devs on Steam and I can gladly miss out any game that puts profit first instead of giving as many players a chance to play where they want.
You would be right for everything except AAA PUBLISHERS will beg to differ with you. They want the bang for their buck, they want to make the most money they can and the only way to do that for them is one of two ways.
  1. Epic Game Store - where they make 10% more profit than Steam
  2. Publisher Store - where they make 100% profit
Let's face it, there are a lot of good games out there, but the games that matter are AAA. Developers are not always in control. The amount of trash on EGS compared to Steam is extremely minimal. Steam is chock full of garbage.

EDIT: I don't say this because I hate steam, I love it. But the EGS library gets better and better everyday with a strong library of good games front and center. It may lack features, but games matter most to me.

Literally look at the front pages

www.steampowered.com

www.epicgames.com

Epic has a whole front page of heavy hitters.
 
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Hope this actually means something.

EGS is trash. Steam should really start to do something about them.

When Epic cares about games and developers Epic will start funding games.

Epic is just the rich, spoiled brat that instead of putting the work or the risk pays for it and even then uses every shortcut in the book.
 
You would be right for everything except AAA PUBLISHERS will beg to differ with you. They want the bang for their buck, they want to make the most money they can and the only way to do that for them is one of two ways.
  1. Epic Game Store - where they make 10% more profit than Steam
  2. Publisher Store - where they make 100% profit
Let's face it, there are a lot of good games out there, but the games that matter are AAA. Developers are not always in control. The amount of trash on EGS compared to Steam is extremely minimal. Steam is chock full of garbage.

EDIT: I don't say this because I hate steam, I love it. But the EGS library gets better and better everyday with a strong library of good games front and center. It may lack features, but games matter most to me.

Literally look at the front pages

www.steampowered.com

www.epicgames.com

Epic has a whole front page of heavy hitters.
Does it make sense to call it a front page when that is all the games they have?
 

ethomaz

Banned
Epic is literally forcing indie developers to release it as an exclusive or not at all on their platform.
If I put money on something then I really want that thing to be exclusive to me.

The dev can choose if them accept or not.
 
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Kadayi

Banned
You would be right for everything except AAA PUBLISHERS will beg to differ with you. They want the bang for their buck, they want to make the most money they can and the only way to do that for them is one of two ways.

Any AAA worth a damn is p[aying Valve 20% -25% beyond the first 166k sales. Given none of the AAA Publishers despite plenty of time and opportunity have bothered to try and match Stream on the feature set front, says all you need to know about them as far as strategies go. The one thing that Valve has concentrated on with Steam and the reason in large part for its success was this idea of added value to the customer.

I get it for the anti-social shut-ins that turn up whenever one of these threads kick-off the concept of features is largely lost on them but for others of us, they've become part and parcel of the play experience, and the great thing about it. is you don't need to jump through hoops.

For instance with No Mans sky often I might find a good location I want to return at some point. I'll take a screenshot with the location coordinates, then go off and do other things, then just pull the Screenshot up again in the overlay to find out where to go. It's all contained in the Steam UI, I'm not having to run FRAPs of something and I'm not having to run to pen and paper either. Small stuff, that makes my experience a lot easier as a player ( I use screenshots as an in-game information capture system more than for anything else for loads of games).

No amount of 'Devs get more money' matters one Iota to me if a developer/publishers choice of a platform makes my experience more complicated in that regard.
 
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Does it make sense to call it a front page when that is all the games they have?
It has more games I want to play on the front page than what I see on steams front page. What do you think a regular consumer would do? Do you think a regular consumer cares if they are EGS or Steam? Probably not. It also shouldn't matter to us either.

Any AAA worth a damn is p[aying Valve 20% -25% beyond the first 166k sales. Given none of the AAA Publishers despite plenty of time and opportunity have bothered to try and match Stream on the feature set front, says all you need to know about them as far as strategies go. The one thing that Valve has concentrated on with Steam and the reason in large part for its success was this idea of added value to the customer.

I get it for the anti-social shut-ins that turn up whenever one of these threads kick-off the concept of features is largely lost on them but for others of us, they've become part and parcel of the play experience, and the great thing about it. is you don't need to jump through hoops.

For instance with No Mans sky often I might find a good location I want to return at some point. I'll take a screenshot with the location coordinates, then go off and do other things, then just pull the Screenshot up again in the overlay to find out where to go. It's all contained in the Steam UI, I'm not having to run FRAPs of something and I'm not having to run to pen and paper either. Small stuff, that makes my experience a lot easier as a player ( I use screenshots as an in-game information capture system more than for anything else for loads of games).

No amount of 'Devs get more money' matters one Iota to me if a developer/publishers choice of a platform makes my experience more complicated in that regard.
Thinking I'm an Anti-Social shut-in is a very presumptuous. Considering Discord exists and is extremely popular. None of the games that matter use Steam servers and typically force you to download another launcher for social activities within the games you purchase.

There's a huge Steam bias here at Neogaf and it's kind of sad.

Lastly, why would I care who looked at my screenshot?
 
It has more games I want to play on the front page than what I see on steams front page. What do you think a regular consumer would do? Do you think a regular consumer cares if they are EGS or Steam? Probably not. It also shouldn't matter to us either.
I have more games on my steam backlog than EGS has on their whole store. I even own more games on GOG than in the EGS. I would consider myself a regular consumer so again I ask the question. Is it really accurate to call that a front page when it isnt a curated list but instead the whole sum of the store. You're basically comparing two sidewalk sales but one of the stores doesnt have anything else behind the doors. For example when i click on your steam link above it shows me sales and new releases as well as lists of games played by my friends.
 

MMaRsu

Banned
It has more games I want to play on the front page than what I see on steams front page. What do you think a regular consumer would do? Do you think a regular consumer cares if they are EGS or Steam? Probably not. It also shouldn't matter to us either.


Thinking I'm an Anti-Social shut-in is a very presumptuous. Considering Discord exists and is extremely popular. None of the games that matter use Steam servers and typically force you to download another launcher for social activities within the games you purchase.

There's a huge Steam bias here at Neogaf and it's kind of sad.

Lastly, why would I care who looked at my screenshot?

A steam..bias? Bias against what exactly? Or bias for? None of us here give a shit about Valve or about Gaben. I care about having my games in a place I'm sure will still be standing in 10 years, having a nice library in one place, convenience, nice features that interest me such as cloud saving, preloading, a friends list, a shopping cart. A store that has good security and that doesn't take up a lot of RAM on my pc.

I ( and millions of others on PC ) have pretty much decided that Steam offers all these things, over the years they have improved their service a ton to the point I'll happily buy a game on the service.

Epic offers pretty much none of these things, and is holding games from popular series ' hostage ' as to garner interest for their platform. Which is terrible.

There is no bias for Steam on GAF. Steam is the best store on the PC side aside from GOG.
 

Kadayi

Banned
Thinking I'm an Anti-Social shut-in is very presumptuous.

Who said I'm talking to you specifically? I'm merely highlighting a common theme of 'but why.gifs' that come up in these particular threads when it comes to people going on about not using features, so seeing no value in them. Nine times out of ten they're some low-end sperg billy-no-mates with two free games on steam who hasn't logged in in 6 years.

None of the games that matter to me.

Corrected for accuracy.

There's a huge Steam bias here at Neogaf and it's kind of sad.

LOL. I think the reality is, there's a lot of fairly dedicated PC gamers who like Steam because they make use of its feature-sets, and then there's a small contingent of driveby casuals who simply don't get it. If EGS had come out of the gate with a comparable client to Steam I think you would find that people would be prepared to give it more of a chance, but the truth is, it was hot garbage at launch and not much has changed since. Sure for some the lure of 'Free games' is all that's required to get them moist in the panty zone, and sing EGS praises as if it was the second coming, but for those of us with substantive backlogs already, it's less of a draw ( If there was ever a chance I was going to play it, I probably already own it tbh).

Lastly, why would I care who looked at my screenshot?

Well, I don't know why they'd look at your screenshots, but I know why I look at mine.
 
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johntown

Banned
If EGS had come out of the gate with a comparable client to Steam I think you would find that people would be prepared to give it more of a chance, but the truth is, it was hot garbage at launch and not much has changed since.
This exactly! Epic has plenty of money from Unreal and Fortnite and they are devs! Why they don't have a fully featured store is really hard to say but I can say it is not due to a lack of technical ability or cash resources. So what could it be?
 

theclaw135

Banned
This new clause won't prevent Epic exclusives, far from it. What it might do is make some devs think twice before screwing over their supporters.

I don't have a problem with Epic exclusives per se. That's the dev's choice.

But absolutely Valve should crack down on bait and switch schemes. Consumers expect games advertised on Steam, to be released on Steam within a reasonable time frame.
 
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Kenpachii

Member
This won't help anything.

Devs will simple not announce for steam anymore and just call it, coming in 2020 to populaire PC shop(s).

And what happens if metro tommorow made another game and janks it off steam again to do the same trick? They going to ban all the metro games and remove it from people's library? or prevent people form buying them now?

Sounds like smart business to me, u now lost there entire game division and it will never come over. And will piss people off on your own platform.

People go to where the games are on pc and this has always been the case. The more heavy hitters epic store gets the more game time there store see's and the bigger they grow.

Loyalty doesn't exist on PC platform.

Any AAA worth a damn is p[aying Valve 20% -25% beyond the first 166k sales. Given none of the AAA Publishers despite plenty of time and opportunity have bothered to try and match Stream on the feature set front, says all you need to know about them as far as strategies go. The one thing that Valve has concentrated on with Steam and the reason in large part for its success was this idea of added value to the customer.

I get it for the anti-social shut-ins that turn up whenever one of these threads kick-off the concept of features is largely lost on them but for others of us, they've become part and parcel of the play experience, and the great thing about it. is you don't need to jump through hoops.

For instance with No Mans sky often I might find a good location I want to return at some point. I'll take a screenshot with the location coordinates, then go off and do other things, then just pull the Screenshot up again in the overlay to find out where to go. It's all contained in the Steam UI, I'm not having to run FRAPs of something and I'm not having to run to pen and paper either. Small stuff, that makes my experience a lot easier as a player ( I use screenshots as an in-game information capture system more than for anything else for loads of games).

No amount of 'Devs get more money' matters one Iota to me if a developer/publishers choice of a platform makes my experience more complicated in that regard.

Then u are a casual PC gamer.

Everybody uses discord/reddit and gyazo for there gaming use. Nobody cares about the steam forums or any of there features. Even modders don't. They all sit on nexus.

Also most PC gamers are not even sitting most likely on steam to start with. Dunno where you get that delusion.

Steam need to get with the times and start offering better deals or go out to publishers to pay them and get games going. The same what sony/microsoft and anybody does in this industry.

Because atm everybody uses stream just as promotion tool and nothing else already for a while now. The trash on there store is in such insane amounts it feels absolutely useless to even scroll through there game library. I can't wait to see 30 shower with my dad knockoffs before i maybe see on page 300 a game i could be interested in.

It's like deciding on a new car and decide u want a blue one, then the dealer has 300 blue types of colors in that model standing there. Yea have fun figuring it out.

U guys are really trying your best to make steam sound like something its not lol.
 
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MMaRsu

Banned
This won't help anything.

Devs will simple not announce for steam anymore and just call it, coming in 2020 to populaire PC shop(s).

And what happens if metro tommorow made another game and janks it off steam again to do the same trick? They going to ban all the metro games and remove it from people's library? or prevent people form buying them now?

Sounds like smart business to me, u now lost there entire game division and it will never come over. And will piss people off on your own platform.

People go to where the games are on pc and this has always been the case. The more heavy hitters epic store gets the more game time there store see's and the bigger they grow.

Loyalty doesn't exist on PC platform.



Then u are a casual PC gamer.

Everybody uses discord/reddit and gyazo for there gaming use. Nobody cares about the steam forums or any of there features. Even modders don't. They all sit on nexus.

Also most PC gamers are not even sitting most likely on steam to start with. Dunno where you get that delusion.

Steam need to get with the times and start offering better deals or go out to publishers to pay them and get games going. The same what sony/microsoft and anybody does in this industry.

Because atm everybody uses stream just as promotion tool and nothing else already for a while now. The trash on there store is in such insane amounts it feels absolutely useless to even scroll through there game library. I can't wait to see 30 shower with my dad knockoffs before i maybe see on page 300 a game i could be interested in.

It's like deciding on a new car and decide u want a blue one, then the dealer has 300 blue types of colors in that model standing there. Yea have fun figuring it out.

U guys are really trying your best to make steam sound like something its not lol.

roflmao
 
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