Well if you’re already a pirate you don’t need the MIG or benefit in any way from using it. Presumably you’ve got an Erista Switch or a modchip. The MIG is only for pirating stuff on modchipless Lite/Mariko/OLED/Apparently 2 (but watch out) consoles. It can’t pirate updates or DLC or eshop-only games so it’s always worse than CFW or modchips for those that can use CFW or modchips.

If there weren’t enough people put off by Origin and uPlay to not install them or use them to buy games, Origin and uPlay would still exist. Steam didn’t kill them, all it did was exist and be a better platform that people actually wanted to use. There’s a whole graveyard of companies that tried to make “our own Steam”. Fucking Discord tried to do it. What’s that going to do for a marketplace where you’re selling “licenses” to users? What good’s your licensed copy of Fallout New Vegas on Amazon Prime Games Launcher when that launcher no longer exists? Say what you will about Steam, most people are pretty confident it’ll still be around in eight years.

If there weren’t enough people put off by the Epic Games Store, the EGS wouldn’t still be paying developers to put their shit on the store. Steam hasn’t killed it, and isn’t even attempting to kill it. It’s just existing and being a better platform that people actually want to use. If EGS can’t compete with Steam while giving shit away for free, that’s not a “Steam monopoly” it’s an indicator of how dogshit the opinion of Epic as a corporation and storefront is.

Origin failed because nobody wanted it. uPlay failed because nobody wanted it. The perks (being able to buy exclusives) weren’t worth the downsides (literally just making another account and installing another program on your computer). I think that’s beautiful. I hope it happens to Epic next.

Steam’s existence as an IPO/enshittification-proof platform has prevented the PC gaming storefront market from going the way of Netflix. Remember that? We had cable channels, pay-per-views, piracy, and VHS/DVDs/blu-rays as the only way to watch movies at home. Then a Blockbuster-over-mail company started getting licenses to let you pay to watch movies at home with one subscription, which was a massive success. Then every other IP holder went “hey wait, why are we paying Netflix when we could just eat the whole pie ourselves” and now we have Netflix Disney+ Max Peacock AppleTV+ Amazon Prime Video Fandango Paramount+ AMC+ Philo Hulu Tubi Fubo Dippy Weeno Poob all trying to be the new Netflix. And because Netflix itself is a shareholder-value-driven company, it’s putting ads in its paid product and jacking up prices and paying for exclusivity.

Y’know what people do seem to like? Microsoft Gamepass. I’ll never install it myself, same reason I’ll never install the Epic Games Store. But Microsoft is using an even less consumer friendly strategy (timed access to games with a subscription) to propose the same “upsides” as EGS (you don’t have to pay full price for games).

For me, it failed because I wasn’t willing to install some shareholder-driven company’s storefront app on my computer just to play Mass Effect 3, so I pirated Mass Effect 3. Then I got to watch it fail because it turns out I wasn’t the only one willing to skip/pirate games because they came with Origin attached to them.

Epic’s exclusives are the exact same.

I get my PC games from five sources. Steam, GOG’s website, Itch’s website, standalone launchers (I’d probably be okay with a “store” of games as small as the Riot launcher, but I don’t use that because I don’t install rootkit anticheat), and piracy. Launcherless Itch and GOG have convenience parity with piracy with the added benefit of the devs getting paid (and the ease of acquiring updates), and I’ll usually use them over Steam if available. Itch could easily get bought by a corp like Humble did and CDPR is already a shareholder value company, but they sell DRM-free products that I can use even after the stores die / sell out.

A recent launch I paid for and didn’t use Steam for is “The Bazaar” - it has a standalone launcher. The game went pay to win so I uninstalled it, but its lack of presence on Steam didn’t keep me from playing it.

I’ll use stuff other than Steam no problem. But I’ll always cheer when a platform owned and operated by a shareholder backed company dies in favor of one that isn’t. My experience in the hobby space of PC gaming is better when there aren’t exclusives locked on EA Origin or UPlay or Microsoft UWP store or Epic, because I might want to play those games without installing a stock-ticker company’s adware on my computer. Having the space “capitalism free” is unrealistic, unless we’re talking “pirate everything”. I’ll settle for “profit driven” over “YOY growth driven” leaders in the space any day of the week.

Now, if Steam’s position as the best distributor/launcher platform is a de facto “monopoly”, what’s the solution to that? Anecdotally I know plenty of people that play non-Steam games while not playing any Epic games. Epic tries to fight Steam by directly paying developers to not publish on Steam, and also effectively guaranteeing studios a financial success by cutting a deal to put their game up for “free” on the Epic storefront. Plenty of games have been “Free” on Epic while full price on Steam. Valve tries to fight Epic by… Acting like Epic doesn’t exist. They don’t chase exclusives or get into a price war with Epic.

Steam is the most popular platform for PC game releases. A subset of users will not consider ever using other platforms. If we accept this as the definition of “monopoly” the way we’d say Windows has a monopoly on x64 PCs, how would changing the revenue split for devs (which appears to be the issue this company’s suing Valve over) alleviate this “monopoly”? Sounds to me like forcing Steam to explicitly allow “the game is more expensive on Steam” tactics would just make Steam even more of a no-brainer for devs over stuff like Epic or their own platform.

You could say that paying the devs/studios a better cut is the point, and I’d see the validity in the argument. But it’s completely unrelated to whether or not Valve operates as a monopoly.

Ah yes. Massively unsuccessful games like… checks notes League of Legends. World of Warcraft. Fortnite: Battle Royale.

The magic part of the PC is that if your independently distributed game does fail, you can still, after the fact, decide to slap it on someone’s storefront in a desperate attempt for eyeballs - see Overwatch 2. Why not double dip? It only costs you hypothetical money you haven’t made yet. Am I supposed to be sad that E fucking A failed to install their shareholder value store on my computer?

Valve will never IPO, yes! I don’t care why. That automatically makes it better than any other launcher/storefront platform that’ll exist in my lifetime, barring one that commits to staying private, succeeds as a private company, and is content with “staying profitable” for x years. Platforms that IPO universally get worse and worse as they wring every drop of shareholder value from their users to feed the infinite growth machine. Platforms that have shareholders (which includes Epic and CDPR’s GOG) have a primary motive of “being more profitable than last year”. If, let’s say, Epic made ten billion dollars in profit last year but also made ten billion dollars in profit in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023, it’d be a failed company.

I’ll happily take the only company in the PC gaming space that’s content with one money printer over every other option that’s always thinking about how to make a second one, or reduce the ink costs, or blah blah blah. It’s just a happy coincidence that in the PC gaming space (unlike pretty much every other space), the shareholder-free thing is also the most popular, and best thing. I’d use the worse less-popular thing if that thing were the only thing free from growth capitalism.

If a game dev doesn’t value their presence on the Steam store higher than the cost of Steam’s service, they don’t list on Steam. Simple as. It’s just that a lot of dev studios consider “visible on the Steam store” to be very valuable indeed. That’s what they’re paying for, not the stuff about Steam that benefits the user (client features like Input, Workshop, Cloud, Community, etc).

CDPR judges that selling on Steam is enough of a boost that it’s worth the cost. Riot (for example) doesn’t. If you think every game company or indie studio feels mandated to use Steam, that’s a hugely consolebrained take. Nintendo has a monopoly. Want your game on Switch? Follow Nintendo’s terms and list on Nintendo’s store. Apple has a monopoly, challenged recently. Want your app on iPhone? Follow Apple’s terms and list on Apple’s store. Want your game on Windows PC? Upload an EXE somewhere. Sell a disc. Run your own launcher. Or license out to Steam/Epic/whoever.

The only reason you get more sales on Steam is because the PC gaming userbase overwhelmingly prefers Steam. Hell, I play Guild Wars 2, a 12 year old MMO that “launched” on Steam a couple years ago. You can still buy and play that game without any third parties getting involved at all, and always could. It doesn’t have any Steam achievements, doesn’t benefit from any Steam features, and has a decade old community in spaces other than Steam ones. ArenaNet decided that exposure via Steam recommendations was worth losing $x/player to list on Steam.

If Steam had an exclusivity clause, that’d be another matter entirely. As it stands, listing on Steam doesn’t prevent you from also listing your game elsewhere or bypassing the entire storefront middleman scheme.

If tomorrow someone made a better Steam, how many years would you have to wait to be reasonably secure that it’s not fueled by venture capital and serving as a loss leader foot-in-the-door scheme? It’s not impossible that Steam itself would enshittify and open an IPO, but the fact that the option’s been on the table for decades and Valve hasn’t taken it is better evidence than any other platform could muster. Valve has proven that it’s profitable and that it doesn’t need to care about YoY growth. Let’s overestimate their operations costs (CDN, R&D, employee salaries, hardware production, licensing, etc etc) at 5 billion a year. If they made ten billion in revenue last year and only make seven billion this year, Valve is fine. Think about that. Think about what a sixty percent drop in profits would do to literally any shareholder-backed company. It’d be apocalyptic.

That’s the main reason I’ll use Steam happily but never install another storefront on my PC. I’ll buy games on GOG or Itch as DRM-free installers, and store the installers locally, and I’ll buy and play games that distribute without a storefront launcher, but the only “storefront platform” anyone’s gonna get me to install in the next decade is Steam. If “better Steam” happens, it needs to demonstrate immunity to being bought out by Microsoft/Elon Musk for eighty morbillion dollars. And that can’t be demonstrated in a day.

That’s without any mention of actual “features” like reviews or remote play or proton or steam input or anything that actually makes Steam as a program good/bad. It’s all about the company’s refusal to go shareholder-driven. If Gabe sells Valve or his successors do, I’m off the ship and scraping the DRM off of my library. What I won’t do if that happens is go to someone else’s shareholder-value-generating storefront.

Gabe Newell is a man who, for the past decade at least, has had a big red button on his desk. This button, if pressed, will deposit eleven or twelve figures directly into his wallet to distribute however he likes, at the cost of letting some company gain control of how Valve operates. Make all his employees multimillionaires! Race Musk and Bezos for biggest number! Buy a small country! Whatever! Gabe Newell has not pressed this button, and has signaled that after his retirement or death that no successor to the company is going to be allowed to press it either. If Newell’s managed not to press it for this long, I’ll “trust” him as far as it goes. His successor hasn’t earned that trust yet, so is only coasting on “trusting Newell to pick the right guy” which isn’t guaranteed - a lot of guys would sacrifice a lot to press that button.

The PC is an open platform. Even more so with Linux. Steam doesn’t force exclusivity, you’re free to host your game on Steam for discoverability while also self-distributing or using other storefronts. Valve’s 30% is a price that a studio chooses to pay, because they know that a ton of PC gamers like buying games on Steam.

If all you want out of a storefront is a payment processor, CDN, and possibly DRM, you can release on Steam, Epic, Itch, GOG, or all at once. You pick Steam (or Steam+others) instead of others because you know that enough PC gamers are willing to pay for your game on Steam, because they like Steam. Epic can tout its small cuts or exclusivity bonuses or “zero percent cuts on the first $x” deals, but game devs know that 100% of revenue on an Epic launch week is going to be a lower absolute number than 70% of revenue on a Steam one.

Hell, if Steam did lower their cut to undercut Epic (which they absolutely could do, especially since they don’t have any shareholders and thus just need to be profitable instead of demonstrating YoY growth), that would be a more “monopolistic” move in the PC gaming space. Remember, the alleged monopoly is over devs, not users. As a dev, the only reason you’d ever consider Epic instead of Steam for your game is that generous profit-share ratio. Steam could remove that only advantage overnight if it wanted to “compete”, and doesn’t. Valve will settle for winning exclusively on the merit of “being a platform that doesn’t suck, and hasn’t sucked for 20 years, and doesn’t have financial motivation to start sucking now”. Because Valve isn’t beholden to shareholder value, if they lowered their cuts to 10%, that ten billion in revenue would be closer to three billion… Which absolutely covers every employee’s salary, the hosting and bandwidth costs of their CDN, and material costs for their hardware. Instead, they consistently reinvest in not just sitting there doing nothing and also not ever sacrificing user experience for number go up. Steam Machines and the Steam Controller could fail without bringing down Valve. The Index and Deck could be produced at scale and aimed at niche audiences because hey, they could afford a failure.

Yeah, all they need to rake in direct profits from the MS store and especially gamepass lock-in is to make it easier to do that than install software through other means. Don’t forget though, even if it’s possible to buy this WinXbox and completely remove Windows from it for SteamOS or Bazzite (unlikely), MS still gets to sell controllers and accessories for the thing. And also, just like installing Linux on a laptop or ad-ridden Smart TV homepages, most users are going to use it out of the box. Anything that’ll require plugging in a keyboard will immediately gate out any chance of a majority of users not using xbox storefront/gamepass/etc on this thing.

It’s also Microsoft. Their video games division is tiny compared to their business sector and other arms. Taking losses in video games just to push the concept of “windows is good and open!” harder to normies (you and i on fucking lemmy know that “more open than a nintendo switch” is a low bar to clear and Windows is far from “freedom”) might be worth it to the shareholders. After all, they spend how many billions on advertising every year and that’s a direct loss in exchange for more consumer awareness of their products. It could also be a targeted tactic to just obliterate Sony as a competitor in the console space. Sell something cheaper and stronger, with more games including your already-paid-for Steam games on it and compare that to vendor lock-in for the PS6? Where the PS6 only has timed exclusivity on most first-party games and the occasional Astro Bot style exclusive? Can’t even be open to anti-trust if they do nuke Sony, because they can just point at Nintendo selling a donkey kongillion Switch 2s in the same exact market space.

So imagine an Xbox Series X that’s also as open as a Steam Deck. Or, to put it simply, imagine a gaming PC with a comfortable couch layout, sold at a much cheaper price point than it’d be as a laptop/desktop because Microsoft can afford to sell it at (or below) cost of parts to push Gamepass subs and adherence to the Windows ecosystem. Mods, your existing Steam / Epic / GOG / pirated libraries. Assuming it’s not locked down, it’s the first time I’ve considered owning an Xbox product since the 360.

Don’t forget, an Xbox that’s just a PC is an Xbox that gets all of Sony’s cutscene hallways too. And all of Nintendo’s games through emulation. And the entire Steam library, and hell since it’s Windows (and thus plays nice with rootkit DRM) it’s a console that runs League of Legends. A console that runs world of warcraft if you want. A console that gets day zero access to those cool indie games on Itch. A console that’s immune to port beggars every time something like Balatro drops PC-first. That’s a console someone’s gonna buy, unlike the XSX which is a console with no exclusives (vs PC) and also doesn’t have the PC’s multiple storefronts and compatibility with your existing libraries and mods.

“why do you have a playstation instead of just a gaming pc in your living room?” Has very legitimate answers other than “i like sony exclusives”. More technical setup. Worse controller UI. More expensive. Bigger. Bulkier. Needs research to determine best parts. Doesn’t have the seamless ability to boot the system from the couch with a controller. All of these could be handled by an MS-backed PC-in-Xbox-Clothing. Yes, they could also (except price point) be handled by a well-researched custom build, but bringing PC to the living room for the kind of person that doesn’t know what an OS is would be a pretty big deal.

Do you know how easy it would be, if money was not transferred, for the new and old owners to both outright say so? Yes they could also lie but that’s irrelevant. if this wasn’t a capital driven transaction, they’d assuage many fears by telling us it wasn’t. They haven’t done that.

The main problem in your setup is you installed Vortex. It and its prior incarnation Nexus Mod Manager have always been a thorn in actual mod developers’ sides. Mod devs can easily tell you where to extract the zip to, and what dependencies you need. Any load order manager type thing will always be better when designed specifically for the game you’re running. Having an “easy one click GUI!!!” doesn’t actually help anybody because modding different games isn’t a universally systematic process.

Game of the year. Also, if it didn’t have the RNG component, it would be a worse game. A puzzle game that inherently prevents you from stubbornly blundering down one thread is genius design, the fact that the house forces you to look at rooms you aren’t looking for leads to so many natural “aha!” moments and encourages you to be actively tracking multiple story/puzzle threads at once.

So few puzzle games care about also being good games, and I can confidently say that if Blue Prince didn’t have the excellent roguelite-inspired gameplay loop at its core I’d have dropped it without even giving it a chance. Giving you “stuff to do” as you process the lore and puzzle hints is the secret sauce. The game’s themes of inheritance tie in perfectly to the strategic mastery curve of learning how to influence the manor. Having a source of “payoff” emotions other than “solving a puzzle” keeps the moment to moment gameplay fresh, and if you’re playing it for long enough that stuff like allowance tokens and stars stop feeling like rewards, you’ll also have access to so many luck-mitigating tools that I can confidently say it’s a skill issue if you’re still fighting the drafting system.

The natural progression from “the objective is to wrangle the house into giving me what I KNOW i want” to “the house is just like this, and I can search it to find new things to want” to “I know how to make this house sing” is perfectly executed ludonarrative harmony. You learn the rooms so much better when you’re forced to walk through them on consecutive days. Upgrades and rarity tweaks give you so much power. The drafting system isn’t a barrier to you solving puzzles. It’s a strategy game that you can be good or bad at. And a lot of people that are frustrated at that system’s existence are refusing to treat it as something you can get good at. It’s a Dark Souls boss fight - practice with intentionality, explore solutions and ideas, fail frequently, learn from failure, be rewarded with mastery.

People just aren’t receptive to the idea of “challenge” in a game that isn’t precision timing or stat sheet optimizing. The house mechanic of Blue Prince is a relatively challenging strategy game, and part of the challenge is recognizing how to interface with it at all. A lot of people come to the game ready for challenging puzzles but not a strategy game, and for those BP will feel like “RNG getting in the way of my puzzle solving”. That’s fair, but I’d liken that attitude to coming into Elden Ring and complaining that all these boss fights are in the way of the lore. Strategy games might not be your thing, and maybe you didn’t know BP would be one, and that’s okay. But for those that like challenging strategy games and intricate puzzles, there’s nothing quite like Blue Prince.

The GAAS crashouts are the modern equivalent. Shareholders were sold the idea of “our own Fortnite! Infinite money forever!”. What they got was Concord. Anthem. Marathon. There’ll still be cash-grab GAAS out there, but eventually investors are going to put it together that it’s not a safe gamble.

But unlike the ET “moment”, video games as an industry, product, and art medium are here to stay. Making the things is too accessible now for the entire concept to ever be at risk again. The ET moment didn’t just threaten Atari, it threatened the concept of home consoles. Trying to imagine a single steaming pile of shit or even industry trend “threatening video games” now is like imagining a movie so bad that it kills cinema. Even if every single shareholder-backed games studio got rugpulled tomorrow, there are plenty of other studios out there to pick up the slack.

I’d take an Apple loss over an Epic one any day here. Apple’s walled garden philosophy has permanently damaged the tech literacy of an entire generation, and the fact that ~half of all people that want to use a smartphone to do things simply can’t just install a FOSS application downloaded from Github to do the thing is an atrocity. Apple getting away with it also emboldens Google to make their phones/tablets into “gadgets” instead of “computers” with stuff like file permissions policies (that became so restrictive that the devs for Syncthing simply gave up on Android as a platform).

Meanwhile, Epic’s greatest evil that affects me is that I don’t play some video games because they’re exclusive to Epic’s store, and also some video games are worse because it “just makes too much financial sense” for AAA devs to release UE5 slop. Operating systems and programs are more important than video games, and video games as a medium are more restricted by stuff like what Apple’s doing than what the AAA devs do to generate shareholder value.

With a phone, there’s a type of controller that wraps around the phone, turning it into a Switch form factor. That’s probably the middle ground between atrocious touchscreen d-pads (or only playing games that actually work well with touch controls) versus lugging around a Dualsense and some mount contraption or kickstanding your phone on a surface.

Well, you have to buy the game to try launching it without Steam. Or ask someone who did, of course. It’d be nice to know before buying.

Do note that the default shortcuts Steam uses are Steam dependent - they’re “steam://” addresses that tell Steam to load the game, not shortcuts to the game’s raw executable.

Steam notifies for third party DRM, but not for the games that do/don’t use Steamworks DRM. There are games on Steam that are completely DRM free and will launch from the exe file without Steam running at all, but there’s no way to tell if Game X is one of those other than word of mouth.

And the thing is… Because Steam is better for the user, it becomes better from the developer. 70% of your game’s Steam revenue will always be bigger than 100% of your Epic revenue. It’s probably bigger than 300% of your Epic revenue. That’s why Steam doesn’t need to buy exclusives or run loss leaders or try to lock you in with “free!” promos. Epic needs to pay developers up front to get them to not go to Steam, because in every case a dual Steam/whatever-else release is better than a whatever-else release. So Epic needs to pay the indie game studio that made a $10 game a million dollars for timed exclusivity, which allows the studio to not worry about losing their Steam revenue from selling 130,000 copies. Then they release it on Steam later anyway.

If it was as simple as “cutting out middlemen” or using cheaper middlemen, devs would just be selling you exe files. CDN costs wouldn’t come close to 30% of revenue, after all. People like buying games on Steam. People buy games on Steam that are cheaper and DRM-free on GOG or Itch. People buy games on Steam that are free downloads like Dwarf Fortress. People buy games on Steam that are free browser pages like Cookie Clicker. Epic wants people to be invested in their “free!” libraries enough to actually be like “oh I mean I’ve got the Epic account, may as well buy this game here because it’s cheaper or more of my money goes to the devs or because it’s a timed exclusive…” And people simply aren’t doing it.

Server costs? Plex’s serverside only handles auth and verification. Once the client connects to the server, any media is sent peer to peer. There’s no stage where the video goes “to plex” or “from plex”. Saying plex needs to charge a sub fee to make up for bandwidth is like saying qbittorrent should do the same.

Unless you’re talking about the content Plex serves, the ones you have to walk every user of your Plex server through deleting from their apps’ homepage.