If I’m honest, I don’t disagree.
I would love for Steam to have **actual competition. Which is difficult, sure, but you could run a slightly less feature-rich store, take less of a cut, and pass the reduction fully on to consumers and you’d be an easy choice for many gamers.
But that’s not what Epic is after. They tried to go hard after the sellers, figuring that if they can corner enough fo the market with exclusives the buyers will have to come. But they underestimated that even their nigh-infinite coffers struggle to keep up with the raw amount of games releasing, and also the unpredictability of the indie market where you can’t really know what to buy as an exclusive.
Nevermind that buying one is a good way to make it forgotten.
So yeah, fully agreed. Compared to Epic, I vastly prefer Steam’s 30% cut. As the consumer I pay the same anyways, and Steam offers lots of stuff for it like forums, a client that boots before the heat death of the universe, in-house streaming, library sharing, cloud sync that sometimes works.
That’s what I always said, why use Epic store? As a user you get worse treatment. Sure price is the same or they give you some discount but number of services offered is far from being on par with Steam. No family sharing, no refund policy, no cloud saves, no networking system, no streaming, no card collecting, no steam play. I might not use or desire all of those but some people do.
The fact Epic had to resort to extremes like timed exclusives just meant I dropped those developers off of my list of wanted games as it only went to show they are willing to sacrifice your inconvenience and happiness for some extra money. For them it was probably making sure project succeeds but in the end I don’t care about them if they don’t care about me.
I use so many of steams features it’s unfathomable to use any other launcher or even pirate anything because steam is so streamlined. Cloud saves, automatic local file transfers instead of redundant downloads, family share to my friends PC so half the time when I visit she’ll have already downloaded and played my new games. When I get there they’re just ready to go. Remote desktop to make any tweaks on my PC or casual gaming over stream. Big picture mode so I can lay back with a controller and chill, no futzing with m+kb UI. Steam input means I can easily drop in and out with any controllers.
I just got a steam deck and while I could install another app store on it, I’ve entirely stuck with steam just for the UX. I don’t want to fuck with extra launchers and touchscreen bs.
I just played a coop Windows game on a Linux based portable PC on a 4K TV with a $24 USB hub for video out, using an Xbox and ps5 controllers over Bluetooth. This was completely seamless and controller navigated. Steam is insanely good.
If I priate anything I still end up adding it to Steam as a non-steam game just because I am dependant on Proton working. Even then the ootb experience is better since Steam handles actually setting up the Proton environment for me when I actually buy the game.
Last I tried using a Bluetooth controller it didn’t go very well, has the experience gotten better?
I didn’t have any issues. We did notice some input lag but disabling vsync helped a lot. Not sure if that was controller related
I tried to play Halo reach over Bluetooth a long while ago and when the rumble went off it would stop taking my input. Glad to hear your aren’t having any issues.
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Can’t remember when was the last time I shelled out 60€ on a game. Indie titles are usually where the fun is at. Good story, acceptable graphics and awesome gameplay. I don’t need UHD mega giga textures to have fun.
I loved my switch at the beginning in 2017 but it being nintendcucked ruined it for me. Terrible sales/overpriced games, also I refuse to pay just to have multiplayer and their half assed emulators. Steam deck is a godsend, someday ill work up the courage to eat the 600$ on one or wait until steam deck 2/pro/ultra/the deckening
Getting the 60th Wii u port 3 years into the switches lifespan drove me crazy as well. If you think that you would like the Steam Deck and that you would use it a lot then I would say just go for it. I use mine almost every day to play games and it has to be reaching a similar level of hours used to my switch in much less time.
I don’t understand where the rumors of a steam deck 2 came from, (it may have been something they said just so people wouldn’t dismiss it as something they would abandon) but it just doesn’t make sense for them to come out with a new one. This thing is targeting around a ps4 game level spec and if the ps3 level graphics of the switch are anything to go by the next Nintendo console will probably be similar to the ps4 as well. This is going to be a direct competitor to said future Nintendo console, they just released it early for everyone to beta test it for them. Game consoles have about 6 year lifespans as well so I see this thing being relevant for years to come. They spent a lot of money on this and are selling it at a loss so I bet they want to get as many of them out there as possible. I bet we will see the OS get a general release and other handheld device makers start to release devices with the OS before we see another one from valve.
As far as devs not making games that run well on it I honestly hope that as the userbase gets bigger that we may start to see more games made with the decks performance in mind. It would also be good for the low spec PC gamers in general as well. But there is such a massive backlog of great games on the steam store that I really do recommend you try this thing, you won’t regret it.
Thanks for the reply, I was really tempted since it went for sale during the steam summer sale. My life circumstances are such that I can’t really justify the money on another game box. My switch still works, I have a decent laptop that can play many of my lower-hardware requirement games. I am currently doing off-grid living and that 600$ is better spent on survival necessities and quality of life improvements or just in my bank as emergency fund. If I were a teen again it would be a no-brainer but my time for gaming is less and less. Saying no to the deck this summer sale was one of the hardest and most responsible things i’ve ever done.
Waiting just means the games you want will only get cheaper! I bet they will have more ridiculous sales for the deck as time goes on as well. Good luck and I hope you can get the stuff you want soon. : )
Indie games are a breath of fresh air in this day and age
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I’m pretty sure they have the same refund policy as steam. They also do have a networking system (which I think even has interop with steam – the Bigfoot game tried to use it but it was very unpopular since it required steam gamers to link an epic account but it exists).
Also pretty sure there are cloud saves but less confident on that one.
And yeah, steam streaming and card collecting aren’t really all that important to me in particular, but I get that some people really like them.
Similar refund policy, but not the same. Epic refund policy marks all the games with in-game currency and purchases as non-refundable. Am not sure about the rest and whether developer can set a game to be non-refundable. It seems they have worked on adding a lot of features, however they are still lagging a lot behind Steam and there are many more things than just cloud saves and refund although those are big features. Steam Play for example which allows Linux users to play any Windows game and by extension makes SteamDeck a possibility. That one is huge. Family sharing is also a big thing. Chat and voice communication, etc. There are plenty of those not implemented yet.
Not only the same, but better. Epic will automatically just refund you the difference if a game you bought goes on sale within a certain period of time after your purchase (allegedly even beyond the two week refund window, although I haven’t been able to find any definitive statement of how long they watch it for). Just flat out, you get an email one day telling you they’ve credited back X amount of your purchase.
There are. For more than four years now. The problem is that, just like with Steam, they can only put the option out there - it’s up to devs to actually implement it. And there are a lot of devs who haven’t done so, which lots of people interpret as EGS not having cloud saves at all.