The OP says global preloading and gifting are going live soon. Bundles are also on the roadmap. At the end of the day though, what’s the main benefit of a bundle? It’s the discount, right? I’m not sure the discounts offered via bundles on Steam are an overall better deal compared to Epic offering cashback of 5% on everything, sometimes increased to 20% (like now). For some countries, Epic also offers significantly better base prices compared to Steam. It still supports the Turkish and Argentinian currencies and presumably has specific price guidelines for those as well, compared to Steam having removed those options. I also remember Epic talking about supporting more regional currencies compared to Steam. From looking at the documentation now, it’s 37 on Steam and 43 on Epic.

Regarding the app, I disagree. It was very convenient to have everything in one place (which Steam fans should understand, given their reluctance to use a different launcher) and I used the chat feature all the time, but after Valve separated them, I just got tired of switching and ended up not installing the chat app after resetting my phone OS. Sometimes I need to message a friend, but I feel like the effort of installing it and logging in is not worth it for those occasions.

People love to bash Epic and list all the (often redundant) things Steam is ahead in, but nobody mentions the ways in which Epic is ahead. Something as simple as being able to chat with your friends is no longer a feature of the mobile Steam client, but if Epic sticks to the roadmap, their app will allow that. It also makes me think of how despite so many years of existence, Steam still doesn’t allow to add game editions to your wishlist, while Epic has allowed that from the start. It was also the first to introduce a custom value field for downloads throttling, before Steam followed suit.

Valve enabling Nazis on Steam is about as good as being a Nazi. If this is the first time you’re hearing about the problem, search for “steam nazi” via your favorite search engine and you’ll get some pretty good results among the first.

I’m not even sure if it’s love. When something is all you’ve known, you just view everything else as strange and inferior. When you have so many games and have had so many experiences on Steam, the cognitive dissonance of accepting that Valve is quite problematic could be hard to bear. Knowing that everybody around you praises Steam, with many turning to rage or even harassment when they see competitors like Epic, the fear of being ostracized and ending up in the same position as those competitors is also a strong factor at play.

I even got to downvote that back then!

cultivates chill working culture

Seriously?

“Influencing” is putting it mildly. Funding organizations with political power is a lot more than that.

Let Doechii do it for you 😛

If it does “flop”, they undoubtedly would chalk it up to it being inclusive and diverse though. Otherwise they just quickly move on to the next target.

Very true. I have its history tracking disabled, but it still suggests those videos or creators even when I’m watching something that has no relation to outrage, like a movie trailer or a GDC talk like one on Unreal Engine.

just agitators who don’t even play these games.

Duh, however, they get millions of views across YouTube and X and hundreds of thousands of followers on Steam.

Searching for Dustborn on YouTube is the best way to get introduced to those channels.

If we dig just a bit deeper, it seems your issue is with the whole concept of not owning games, which is the very nature of Steam and its main policy, aptly called the subscriber agreement. Taking that out on game developers, let alone a competitor with more lax DRM practices, is also missing the forest for the trees.

I’m not aware of any evidence of Valve’s cut ever adapting to a dev’s circumstances. It’s 30% until they’ve made $10M, which drops it to 25%, and to 20% after $50M. I’d call that scalability available only to the most successful few, not flexibility.

From what I’ve been hearing, their fee is flexible. 30% is uncommon on PC.

Implying review bombing is always warranted is as misguided as it gets. Games regularly get review bombed for something as trivial as having a non-white person for a protagonist.

You do realize the market share of GOG is about 0.5%, right? That’s despite Projekt Red being a beloved developer, the great launcher features, the fairest DRM practices, many years in the business, and so on. It only proves the point that Steam is a monopoly that cannot be disrupted whether you do it nicely like GOG or aggressively like Epic.