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In 2018 a group of Valve staff tried to figure out just how efficient they were being—and found they were making more money per head than Apple, Facebook, and nearly every tech giant out there (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 2 years ago by [M] to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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[–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

IDK, retail can be a tough business, just ask GOG and Epic.

It's a lot of work becoming the de facto standard, but once you've made it, the money just rolls in.

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    At least gog has something unique in that they offer drm free games. Epic just buys fucking exclusives to try to force people over.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    However, neither have learned the lesson from Valve: make it a really good experience.

    GOG still doesn't have as good of support as Valve, and I don't think Epic is even trying with EGS. I'm happy to use a Valve competitor, but they need to make a good product first. GOG is close, and now that they seem to be sharing sales revenue with Heroic, I might buy more from them on my Steam Deck. But Valve just makes everything work so nicely that I'm hard pressed to find a reason to use another.

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  • [–] 24 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    The thing with Valve is that they didn't just build a store for PC games and that's it.

    Steam Input practically solved the issue of games not supporting your particular gamepad. There's Steam Remote Play, Proton for Linux compatibility, workshop for mods, well built systems for player to player trades, cloud saves that actually work...

    Steam is what makes the PC a gaming platform, rather than a box capable of technically running games.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago

    And yet Valve's competitors can't even make a halfway decent store. They can cry about monopolies and whatnot, but at the end of the day, they just don't have a compelling product.

    I'm not expecting GOG or EGS to provide all those extra services, but they need to at least be a decent store, and that means better customer service and decent discoverability, yet they fail at actually being a store.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    idk man, gog already has it pretty fucking good. Maybe it's not as nice as steam, but DRM free games that just fucking work is about as good as you're going to get really.

    That fact that i can just stuff terabytes of games i own onto a disk and then fuck off is awesome. BTW, if you want a good gog interface, i've been using heroic games launcher for a bit with epic, it's pretty good, do recommend it.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Yeah, I'm trying it out on my Steam Deck. This might just be what gets me to start buying from GOG instead of Steam:

    We also started a partnership with GOG and now every game you buy from the GOG store inside Heroic will give us a commission, so it is another way of supporting the project. :)

    Before then, GOG just didn't support my platform of choice (Linux desktop and Steam Deck), so I always felt like a second class customer (though they did make installers, which was nice). Steam supported Linux since 2012 (I made my Steam account in 2013-ish because of that), and continue to support Linux through Proton enhancements.

    However, now that Heroic makes something from GOG sales, maybe I'll actually buy a few. That's close enough to supporting me that I'll give them a shot.

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