After years of running exclusively with Epic, Ubisoft has had enough.
  • DreamButt@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 天前

    I’m really starting to worry about steam. There aren’t any good alternatives that seem to be hitting mainstream. Not to mention every now and then the shop gets ever so slightly worse and more spammy looking. Steam was a god send when it first launched and I’d hate to see it become what it replaced

    • smeg@feddit.ukEnglish
      0·
      2 天前

      Not to mention every now and then the shop gets ever so slightly worse and more spammy looking. Steam was a god send when it first launched and I’d hate to see it become what it replaced

      Was it a godsend? I thought everybody hated it initially. And I feel like it’s only got better over the years as they’ve added more features.

    • thermal_shock@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 天前

      there are alternatives, but when you take shitty games (at least crippled games) and pack them into another client that also requires you to sign up, again, is it worth the effort? the games aren’t worth at that point in my opinion.

    • Kecessa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      2 天前

      You could create the best launcher in the world and people would ignore it because they don’t want multiple launchers and their library is already centralized on Steam.

      • Scott@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        2 天前

        I’m starting to build up my GOG library quite a bit, and that launcher in its current state is still better than Ubisoft Connect.

      • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        2 天前

        Maybe.

        But until there’s an alternative that isn’t outright disrespectful with how complete and utter dogshit it is it’s hard to say that for sure.

        Inertia matters. But so does the fact that no one has bothered putting the work in to not be a trainwreck.

  • Funwayguy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 天前

    As much as I agree the 30% cut can be a bit steep, I do appreciate that part of it is going into ongoing R&D like Steam Deck and Proton benefiting the whole gaming industry. I’d like to think of it like Valve are investing into PC innovation similarly to the way Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo do for their new consoles.

    • Kecessa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      2 天前

      A big part is going to buying yachts as well so Valve and Newell could 100% afford to charge a lot less than 30% and still do just as much r&d

      • PieMePlenty@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 天前

        AFAIK it falls to a lower percentage if you sell more copies. As to why I dont mind the fee as a consumer; valve invests its earnings into linux gaming and does cool shit like that. I can’t remember the last time i aplauded ea or ubisoft or epic for doing something like that. Oh yeah… it was never. Id sooner applaud Microsoft for investing into a non lucrative venture like accessible gaming accessories. But they aren’t on the same playing field… so from them, I’d expect it.

        If i were a developer, I’d let valve eat the 30%. The amount of customers they bring to the table, deal with chargebacks, host the files. That shit isn’t free. Epic has to take such a low amount because they don’t have as many users and can’t produce such sales numbers and don’t have to deal with as many chargebcks and don’t have to waste as much bandwidth hosting the files.

        • Kecessa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          2 天前

          Again, they can afford their R&D while paying their employees more than the industry average and while making the owner a multibillionaire, they 100% could afford to lower their cut without any negative impact on everyone but Gabe Newell.

          The lower % starts if a game sells enough copies to make 10m$, Valve has made 3m$ at that point.

          Stop defending the people that make you poorer, they’re not your friends, all billionaires exist at the expense of our wealth. All. Of. Them. Are. Evil.

          • PieMePlenty@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            2 天前

            Well I guess I’ll just stop buying things then because all Im doing is contributing to some billionaire’s cocaine fund. This is capitalism. I learned to live with it. When the time comes to sieze the means of production and give power back to the proletariat, I’ll be there to help. Until then, I’d rather give Gabe my money so he can shove more ships up his ass than give it to Sweeney because at least Gabe will throw a penny back into linux gaming. Ill take the crumbs if I can get them because Im not a 21 year old student with a burning desire to change the system anymore.

            • Kecessa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              0·
              2 天前

              There’s a difference between dealing with it and defending it, you’re doing the latter by saying 30% is ok because reasons.

              • PieMePlenty@lemmy.worldEnglish
                0·
                2 天前

                And those “reasons” were plentiful. Most importantly is their market share. From a purely business perspective, if a distributor has 200% more users and charges 100% more while offering the same features, they will be the better choice - purely from en economical perspective. 30% is ok because you will reach a larger audience and if so many publishers disagreed with Steam’s cut, they wouldnt all come crawlin’ back would they? In other words, the market dictates the price and the market has decided that price is 30%. It doesnt matter who does or doesnt defend it. Thats what it is.

                • Kecessa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                  0·
                  2 天前

                  As to why I dont mind the fee as a consumer; valve invests its earnings into linux gaming and does cool shit like that.

                  You’re also talking like they wouldn’t have as many customers if they reduced their cut which is completely ridiculous. More profit would go to the people actually doing the work or prices would go down.

                  Stop defending the billionaire, you’re making a fool of yourself.

      • Kellamity@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        2 天前

        I don’t know why you’re being down voted, he is literally a billionaire

        ‘No ethical billionaires’ apart from this guy apparently

        • Kecessa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          2 天前

          I’ve had this conversation so many times and some people just can’t imagine that they might be paying more than they need to just so Gabe can collect yachts… People feel they’re getting their money’s worth because everything they’ve ever bought is priced based on the fact that there’s multimillionaires and billionaires higher up the chain…

      • Chozo@fedia.io
        0·
        2 天前

        Lemmy loves to shit on billionaires, until it’s one they think they like.

    • stupidcasey@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 天前

      If you have to choose an evil monopoly hell bent on world domination and bloodshed you might as well choose steam at least they are owned by a private individual instead of a hive mind distilled from the pure greed of capitalism.

    • CEbbinghaus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 天前

      But unlike valve the console R&D is limited to the consoles themselves. Valve is working to improve gaming for Linux in general and foster a more open and consumer friendly console system.

  • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 天前

    Despite the best efforts of major publishers including Activision, Electronic Arts, Rockstar, Bethesda, and others, not to mention the far better deal offered to developers by Epic, Steam is more dominant than ever—and in the end, they all came crawlin’ back.

    They’re all crawling back because they did not give it their best effort. They just wanted the full 100% of the sale revenue without doing the hard parts. To be fair to EA, for the first few years, it looked like they were actually going to try.

    • exu@feditown.com
      English
      0·
      2 天前

      As a user there simply was/is no incentive to use other stores when the game is the same price. There has to be a reason for me to buy somewhere else.

    • ryathal@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      2 天前

      Yep same thing with all the streaming services, just taking the Netflix money was probably a better move for a lot of these services.

      • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 天前

        Eh, it’s so easy to hop between streaming services that I don’t have the same hangup there. You subscribe for a month, watch what you want to watch, cancel, and then go to the next one. You can always resubscribe later. When you buy a game on a given storefront, you’re stuck with their feature set forever.

    • Dudewitbow@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      3 天前

      its more or less that yes. they saw the money but not the time and effort to get users to use your platform.

      and its not like impossible, as long as you can create games people will play and stay at itll work (e.g Riot), but they legit put such little effort in the launchers that it was creating a negative user experience, and never put in the money to make it better.

  • EndOfLine@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 天前

    Until I hear that they have dumped the requirement to log into Ubisoft Connect or Uplay or whatever they are calling it noe, then Ubisoft will remain dead to me.

    Makes me sad. I really enjoyed the Assassin’s Creed series and have waited for Shadows for what feels like a decade now.