Let me offer a perspective from someone who doesn't actually care for any of the often-cited steam features. Going to type this all at once so I don't have to do it again.
I like steam because I can generally trust it from top to bottom. It has been there since the early 2000s, when many/most people didn't give a shit about PC gaming. And over the years, while it stayed kinda ugly and clunky, it has been nothing but a constantly reliable source of games content, ridiculously low prices in sales that are borderline cultural (that other platform and consoles only recently started doing reliably).
When there's a new feature that people often laud about, you either find it useful or can freely ignore it. I personally don't give a shit about achievements or hats or cards or whatever the fuck they have going on. That people like them? Great. If I wanted to try some shit with controllers, any controller, it already works on steam. Streaming to TV? Been on steam. Recently they added remote play together; I don't use it much, but great to know it's there on steam. Nevermind that all the games just update and download in the background at speeds that are noticeably faster than say, my switch games. Listening to people having to wait for installs and shit on consoles is just a joke; when I buy a game on steam, unless the game is hundreds of gigs or more it downloads to my computer in SECONDS.
You need to understand that Steam has been doing this for damn near 20 years. The "difficulties" of PC gaming is largely a joke to many/most steam users. Out of the hundreds of games I've played on Steam, I've had technical problems with...maybe a little over 5? And for pretty much all of them the fix involved googling it and maybe changing an .ini file or launching the game with a parameter. Whereas you have all these console squabbles and whatever other noise, every day I can sit down, turn on my computer, and instantly there's just this waves and waves of games of every genre imaginable, played on basically the highest quality in all of the video game market provided you had sufficient hardware. I buy a game over some web store or subscription program? Guess what, it all loads on steam, just in a single giant library that I can go through at my leisure whenever I want. There's been no price hikes, no strange questionable BS. Just sales and games. People conflate it with PC gaming as a whole because it's as reliable as utility.
In other words:
Spiros (Vondas) Vondopoulos and Marlo Stanfield discuss business at a park, and offers a cell phone as a way to communicate. Spiros offers great advice when ...
youtu.be
Here comes Epic, which is fine. But it brings to the table...some bought exclusives and nothing else? I don't want to switch music apps if I wanted to listen to a different song, why would I want to do the same for my games? They obviously didn't bring any kind of valuable product and the fact that they're trying to content-lock their way to success is plain as day. Other competitors in the PC space are fine; no one ever complained about GoG or Green man gaming, so when someone complains about "attack dogs" for steam or whatever, they just have no point whatsoever or don't really understand how people use steam. For instance:
To any regular steam user, this is a joke. As a switch user, if you don't understand how poor the eshop's shopping experience is, I STRONGLY suggest you read up on user experience design.
"But but but the market" theorycrafting kinda ignores the fact that Steam has BEEN the market, to almost no detriment to the consumer, for nearly longer than Sony and Microsoft gaming has existed. Epic wants to make 12% permanent? Cute shit for a first date, let's see what happens in 10 years. Why would I trust and trade up to some grease ball used car salesman that suddenly shows up one day parading obviously bullshit tactics that you can see right through, from something been nothing less than perfectly reliable AND still evolving for almost two decades? Would YOU do that?
I'm perfectly happy for the devs who takes Epic's money, and a lot of people here, myself included, lauded Epic when they're actively investing into the community. But I can wait and Epic can prove themselves in a way that I should give a damn about. Hope that helps clarify.
www.pcgamer.com
