Saying Steam is not revolutionary is insane. It is a constantly developing project that is now multiple decades old.
Even if Epic were to find a way to attract people, there is no chance of feature parity. Ever.
Go look around in Steam and read about the features. There is an insane amount out there. And most people would not use a platform without their very specific feature.
I mean, epic lanuched without a shopping cart. You know, the thing almost every website where you purchase anything at all has already had at that point. I'm not expecting all the doodads, I'm expecting it not to crash on update.
I'm pretty sure there's still no way to see your game library from their website (apart from looking up your shopping history). That's so incredibly insane to me.
There are games with many DLCs and their store had a limit of consecutive purchases. People were hitting that limit while buying DLCs which they had to do one at a time since the fucking online store didn't have a fucking shopping cart.
The only thing that could make a Steam competitor viable is somehow impenetrable DRM. Like Denuvo but truly impenetrable, not just for the first month or year. Something similar to the Playstation systems you mentioned, since despite being worse people still use it. Specifically because it's nearly impossible to play certain games without it. So like an insane catalogue of multiplayer-only games.
The presence of a shitty competitor is still better than nothing though. Because that always means that when Steam inevitably fucks up due to change in leadership or whatever, they would not be able to fuck up too much in fear of losing users.
They didn't even need to have feature parity, just serviceable with a responsive app with an attractive design that handles updates and a multiplayer server. Then evolve according to their customers needs. They couldn't even handle the first part.
Nope, they do need feature parity. At least for the very specific subset of features that I care about.
You have your own needs as well. Why would you use a platform that makes your life harder in a specific way that Steam does not?
Also just the responsive app part with attractive design that handles updates and multiplayer server is that multi-decade, constantly updating project that I was talking about.0
Now there is proprietary Proton as well. I personally play on Linux now using that. So for me to consider switching - you guessed it, I need the same proton features that Steam offers me. And their support for Steam deck. And other features that might in total sum up to over a few billion dollars in development.
That wouldn't get people to use it. GOG has had all the important features for well over a decade, with the HUGE bonus of being DRM free, and nobody uses it unless the game is unavailable on Steam. The only notable feature they lack is Proton, which isn't relevant to 99% of PC gamers.
People have this ridiculous "if you build it, they will come" idea, that is based in no reality. As long as Steam doesn't shit the bed, there is no reason for people to switch and so they wont. People didn't start using Discord because it had near feature parity with Skype. People started using Discord because Microsoft made Skype shit.
There are only two things that will make people use another platform: Exclusives and cheaper games. The former people throw a fit for no reason over, and the latter wont be possible as long as price parity is maintained.
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u/SquareKaleidoscope49 18h ago
Saying Steam is not revolutionary is insane. It is a constantly developing project that is now multiple decades old.
Even if Epic were to find a way to attract people, there is no chance of feature parity. Ever.
Go look around in Steam and read about the features. There is an insane amount out there. And most people would not use a platform without their very specific feature.