Soldato
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- 17 Jun 2012
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- 9,898
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I'm an adult (just about) so I can mange with opening up another client to play a game.
All these games platforms
- Thread starter WantoN
- Start date
I don't mind , curreny playing games from 4 different clients and it doesn't really bother me, they don't take up too much room on your hard drive and it takes 2 seconds to load them up and you can have more then 1 running at the same time so I don't see the issue 
... and as others have said it is good to have competition
... and as others have said it is good to have competitionDo you think that the small studios grudgingly hand over their share of the profits to Valve for being allowed to distribute their developments on Steam? A cost that is probably a small margin of what they're getting through the larger audience that Steam gets them? Many of the small developers are constantly releasing titles on Steam, so it only seems to be a problem according to you.
What you're really getting at here is that the ones that make the most noise about it are those big, endless black hole studios like EA or Ubisoft that have decided that despite the superiority of the Steam platform, they'd rather get 100% of their over-inflated price for their products and thus have attempted to create a platform like Steam, but that have only succeeded in creating something that is inferior in almost every way.
Look at GoG. It's owned by CDProjekt Red, who also distribute their own games via Steam. So in essence they clearly have absolutely no issue with the cut Steam takes, but they clearly see there's a huge benefit to the numbers when marketing through Steam, and to be quite frank, the numbers must be absolutely huge.
Do you have any actual evidence to back up your claim that developers hate having to pay Steam for, what is essentially, a service that they don't have to then provide themselves? Add to that the fact that multiplayer on Steam just works, and all the backup and Support that the developers must surely receive for their product just by using the Steam service.
Where are people getting this 30% figure from? It's the number thrown about in here but from what I can gather, the pricing for developers is covered under an NDA and even the official Steamworks page states that they don't discuss pricing information publicly. So how can anyone know that 30% is what's taken?
Not at all a fan of lots of different platforms - I'm 10x more likely to buy a game if I can get it through steam without any other client. Origin these days is actually pretty good but I struggle to justify giving any money to EA so only really use it for the games I've already purchased.
I pretty much avoid ubi soft like its the plague :S
Personally I keep my phone fairly well organised with only the apps I actually need and use - also most apps on a phone aren't a gateway to other programs so :S
I pretty much avoid ubi soft like its the plague :S
'My smartphone has a million apps but I'll be damned if I install 4 or 5 gaming apps on my state-of-the-art, 100 times more powerful PC!!' . Brilliant.
Other than the misplaced and somewhat bizzare loyalty to a huge corporation whose only goal is to empty your pockets, there's no rational reason to refuse to install the other platforms,. They are all quick, easy to use, take a few seconds to load and drain little/no resources.
Personally I keep my phone fairly well organised with only the apps I actually need and use - also most apps on a phone aren't a gateway to other programs so :S
It doesn't matter whether developers like paying Valve 30% or not. Unless they are an EA with a mega marketing budget to throw around then they don't have any choice. Pay Valve or fail.
There's absolutely zero chance of Valve changing their pricing because they have no competition.
It's the worst kept secret in the industry. Valve take 30% it's the same for everybody.
Why should Valve change their pricing though? They're providing a very important and useful service, one that isn't free to update and maintain, and for the price that the developer pays to Valve, they're getting a huge amount of benefits. I'm sure that all studios are more than welcome to have a go at doing the same thing themselves (CD Projekt Red did), but Valve, who are being touted as having a monopoly, rather than as simply having been the first to do it right to this day, already provide the platform and it works perfectly for the majority of users.
Only if they work. If you can tell me why games don't work when I install them with uPlay I'll be very happy as I have a copy of one of the Anno games on it that I can't play at the moment because the stupid thing won't run the game when I try and play it. Never had a problem like that with Steam or GOG it just seems to be uPlay that I have issues with.
That is not true.
The amount varies depending on the individual agreements.
Although 30% is at the higher end of the scale, it is still within the industry standard for transactions. Same for PSN, Xbox live, GOG. The exception is Humble Store who devs have admitted to making more profit with them.
If I was selling games on my own website selling 5 a day if lucky and Valve said "Give us 30% and we will sell it" - In a heartbeat, I would say YES.
They have a monopoly because they were first, and they provided a good product. No-one begrudges Valve taking a cut. But find me a developer who wouldn't like to pay less!
One of the great things about PC as a platform is that it's open. I just find it a bit strange that people complain about not having the PC as a gaming platform completely own by one corporation.
It's not like this 30% of PC gaming revenues is going into funding better or more games, it's just lining Valve's pockets. The only thing they seem to be developing these days is new digital exchanges to rinse money off underage gamblers.
I'm not saying they should change their pricing. I'm saying that if they had some competition then they would have to.
Why should Ubisoft and EA pay Valve upwards of 30% of their revenue just to please you?
I just want to get in a game within 3-4 clicks. If I can do that then I don't mind having other platforms provided they are lightweight, not a nuisance or bloated.
Steam is without a doubt the best, by far. It is extremely stable (servers and the application), has a good mobile app, has so many features which are mostly all useful and aren't bloat and has hoards of games with great deals.
Origin has come along so far in the last 18 months and personally I find it really well designed now and easy to use. It gets way more flak than it deserves. If it deserves any flak it'd be towards their website itself and game integration with it like with Battlefield which I hate so much. I do like Origin Access though.
uPlay needs work but has still come a long way, but they really need to sort out their servers which have always been poor. This is made worse when games need you to be online (like The Division) or have features which are disabled when you're offline (like Sim City or Anno).
GOG Galaxy is probably the worst for me, but it's still in beta. I don't like the design and it's overly confusing in some areas. Thankfully though there isn't many games I need to use it for right now.
Battle.net is just lightweight, very simple and easy to use so I like it.
Still, nothing will ever be as bad as GFWL.
Steam is without a doubt the best, by far. It is extremely stable (servers and the application), has a good mobile app, has so many features which are mostly all useful and aren't bloat and has hoards of games with great deals.
Origin has come along so far in the last 18 months and personally I find it really well designed now and easy to use. It gets way more flak than it deserves. If it deserves any flak it'd be towards their website itself and game integration with it like with Battlefield which I hate so much. I do like Origin Access though.
uPlay needs work but has still come a long way, but they really need to sort out their servers which have always been poor. This is made worse when games need you to be online (like The Division) or have features which are disabled when you're offline (like Sim City or Anno).
GOG Galaxy is probably the worst for me, but it's still in beta. I don't like the design and it's overly confusing in some areas. Thankfully though there isn't many games I need to use it for right now.
Battle.net is just lightweight, very simple and easy to use so I like it.
Still, nothing will ever be as bad as GFWL.
ability to roll back to beta versions from a list and to sort update priorities and update checking frequencies plus to apply an exact mbps download limit rate. When you have a large library, having 4 programs firing off updates totally uncontrolled is a disaster when I power on for gaming once a week with 1000 games archived. Ability to add command line arguments directly from the interface without opening the folders. The built in community forum for each game page so you can get the best SLI/CF support from other users. The sales of course. The cards are so cool, I just sell them all - got £30 credit for a game just from cards and I bought all the steam games on green man so yes I would pay more for steam but you don't have to.
Where did I say that they should do that? I was saying that for me, I don't like the other platforms and I find them unnecessary. My statement kinda speaks for itself to be honest. It's not about pleasing me; I don't feel like I'm losing out by not buying games on uPlay or Origin. If I've never played the game, how can I be missing out?
My argument is that these platforms are vastly inferior to Steam and aside from lining their own pockets, which is their choice, these other platforms don't make it better for the end user, they just benefit EA and Ubisoft. It's not like they're running those platforms for free, so I'm sure that whatever they'd have to pay to Steam to use their better platform would be of benefit to them in the long run. After all, how often do we see posts about "I don't like uPlay, I won't buy a game on that" or "I'm not buying an Origin game, I dislike it". I feel like not having these games on Steam actually limits our choice, not the other way around.
Also, Origin is totally inflated. I had a look at the prices for new releases on that, and £50 per new release is, quite frankly, rather shocking (that's a totally separate debate though!).
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Soldato
- Joined
- 31 Jul 2010
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- 3,199
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- Stoke-on-Trent
PC gamers never cease to amaze me. They are happy for a company to have a complete monopoly over the market. A company that has such little regard for its customers, a company that makes BT customer service looks good. Their client is generally 80% bloatware. You only have to look at the trash that's on there, it's like Apple Store and Google Store nowadays.
Yet they moan that they need to take about 100mb of disk space to install another client.
I have Steam, Origin, Uplay installed, none of them run on startup and the only time I see them is if I want to play a game. It's simply a case of load client, click game and play.
That said it's still "cool" to hate the other clients so it doesn't surprise me when threads like this pop up.
Yet they moan that they need to take about 100mb of disk space to install another client.
I have Steam, Origin, Uplay installed, none of them run on startup and the only time I see them is if I want to play a game. It's simply a case of load client, click game and play.
That said it's still "cool" to hate the other clients so it doesn't surprise me when threads like this pop up.