re: this article.
The title is a joke. "Free, but you have to make an EGS account" is a bit too rich for me.
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2025
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Why aren't people angry that you can't put diesel in a gasoline engine? Why aren't you mad that a DVD can't be played in a VHS? Why aren't you mad that you can't plug a computer hard drive into a switch and play Civilization?
Do you understand that there is a difference between "This is only compatible with certain hardware" and "You can only purchase this at one specific business"? Because you are once again arguing as if they are the same thing and I've already pointed this out to you, which means you are either completely disingenuous or an idiot. Either way this is a waste of time.
If there's a third option I'm missing please let me know.
They are the same thing on the business side, absolutely. I mean, games are developed on PC anyway, so those are the same thing today for sure. I promise you there is a PC version of Bloodborne in a FromSoft computer somewhere, even though it's stuck as a PS4 exclusive. Not because there is some mystery technical reason, but because somebody signed a deal to make it that way.
There has never been a technical reason a port of Ratchet & Clank or Uncharted couldn't work on a PC (or a GameCube, previously), even when there was more porting work to be done, the game would have sold more than enough to make it worth the porting costs. Those games were stuck on their platforms because Insomniac and Naughty Dog had a business relationship with Sony. And then Sony said it was fine for them to be on Epic, Steam and GoG. And then they decided they wanted to have online authentication DRM, so they were only on Epic and Steam after that point.
Hell, if you go backwards, there was an uproar among Nintendo fanboys when Resident Evil 4 stopped being a Gamecube exclusive and showed up on PS2 (and then on everything else). And that, again, was not a technical issue, but a deal that was in place until it wasn't. Because this conversation has been dumb both ways for a very long time.
The third option is you don't understand how games are made or exclusivity deals signed and you're only latching onto them as a backwards justification for your foregone conclusion because you want to root for Steam as a platform.
Which is the wild part.
Right, the devs just need to change the code from "If_On_PC_Do_Not_Run" from TRUE to FALSE and it will work just fine. And I'm the one that doesn't understand how games are made.
Looks like option #2 was the correct one.
Dude, no, you really don't. You're Dunning-Krugering the crap out of this one.
Look, you don't need to take my word for it, but I also don't need to give you my bona fides or give you a TED talk about how platform targets are chosen in most modern games. You can go look it up.
It's... really not how you're picturing it. And you're picturing it that way to justify your chosen platform as a home team. You should really stop doing that and just enjoy the games you want to enjoy wherever you want to enjoy them.
How do you think I am picturing it? I'm responding to your absurd claims that not being able to use gasoline in a diesel engine is the same thing as Esso being the only business allowed to sell gasoline.
No, you're imagining that games are like fuel. Games are not, in fact, like fuel. It's not like you're picturing it.
I'm tempted to give you a different simile, but it's clearly pointless. Games are like games. You put them on platforms if it makes more money to sell them there than it costs to port them, and modern hardware is very similar across the board, so that's most of the time, unless you have something more profitable for your programmers to be doing OR somebody pays you to change that math.
There I am, giving you the TED talk. And you know what? You don't deserve it. You're confidently wrong on the Internet, it's kind of on you at this point. You can figure it out or not, but under no circumstanes will exclusivity deals, co-marketing or co-development deals be anticompetitive just because you want to shill for a random company online. It just doesn't track at all and it's weird that people keep parroting it.
You are saying that a product (games) not being compatible with every hardware (system) is the exact same thing as the product only allowed to be sold from 1 business.
I substituted a different product (fuel) and hardware (engine) to highlight how absurd that is because you still seem to think they are the same thing.
It doesn't matter how theoretically profitable a port to another system might be, it still takes time and resources to produce. Time and resources that a company might believe can be more profitable spent elsewhere.
It does not take time or resources to make a PC game that is on the EGS compatible with the PC on Steam. I don't know how to explain this to you more simply.
That is irrelevant, and I realize that attempting to explain this to you is now reflecting poorly on me, but here we are.
Any first party submission is a first party submission. It has some cost and generates some profit. Believe or not, game publishers have these things called speadsheets. They can sum like nobody's business.
They can count how much money they can make by porting something and how much money they can make from, say, putting those same engineers to work on something else. And they will typically do the thing that yields the most money.
Not that it matters because these days most games are on middleware engines targeting effectively a few iterations of the same rebadged mid-spec PC, so a bunch of ports ARE in fact mostly pushing a button to make the game go. Hell, most of the work across the current-gen consoles comes down to sorting out all the APIs and metadata nonsense from all the first party services.
Of course it's cheaper to put a PC game in more than one storefront, but it's also irrelevant because, and I can't stress this enough, all storefronts are running on the same computers, so you're typically not blocked from any of your userbase. Next to zero cost, next to zero reward.
You aren't even arguing about exclusivity to a platform, you are arguing about the layer of download management software that installs the same files to the same computer. It's the stupidest fanboyism I have encountered in all my years of paying attention to videogames for fun and profit. It's baffling.
You can even boot your Epic games from inside the Steam interface and use all the Steam features on them. This is such a nonsense debate it doesn't even begin to justify all this back and forth you and I are having here, let alone however long it took to put together this meme. I swear, man, gamers are exhausting sometimes. I am done here.
Exactly. You are arguing about "exclusivity to a platform is bad because monopolies" but somehow exclusivity to the download management software, something that there is no good reason for, is good?
"I don't like this specific company because of these things that they do" is the opposite of fanboyism. The only fanboyism is you ranting for post after post trying to argue that EGS's anti-consumer practices are "good actually because everyone chooses to use Steam so that makes Steam bad."