53
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
53 points (92.1% liked)
Games
16155 readers
317 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
If you're talking about "I want to buy a PC game on the internet", there are tons of competitors (ignoring stores that only service one platform or only first party IPs); Microsoft, Humble, GoG, Amazon, Itch, and (technically, yes) Epic.
If you're talking about a service that offers the social aspects, storage (saves, etc), support, DRM, and hardware/software development (VR, handheld, OS, controller), there isn't any competition, but it's not because they bought everyone. They just develop a ton of things in house, and make an effort to continue to improvel and offer the best experience.
All Epic does is buy developers, hold games hostage, and offer constant freebies in hopes that they'll get enough of a marketshare to take the same cut that valve (and everyone else) does. They're losing boatloads of cash, and it's pretty much just Fortnight proping everything up. Their not mattering is entirely because they just aren't as good. If they really want to have a chance of competing, they need to stop slinging shit at valve in the news, hilariously complaining that Steam is somehow anti-competitive while they themselves do anti-consumer shit like buy dev studios and block access to games.
'Competitors exist' is not a counterargument for 'their competitors do not matter.' In fact, if you look carefully, you'll find acknowledgement of their competitors' existence, in the sentence: 'their competitors do not matter.'
Feature parity don't matter if customers basically just use one store. It does not matter what their competitors are doing - it plainly is not working. Those competitors can develop a ton of games, and exclusively offer some big-name third-party titles, and give away all kinds of freebies, and those competitors still do not matter.
If you think any of this is a defense of Epic then you are mistaken.
People would use more than one store if the other stores had the same or better features.
The only thing their competitors have done is exist and provide the worst fucking service possible while using anti-competitive tactics to try and get customers. The stupid fucks can't even attract customers using anti-competitive practices because they just outright refuse to do what customers actually fucking want and then complain it.
Neat.
Meanwhile:
Whatever the underlying reasons,
customers basically just use one store.
Which is what a monopoly is.
Customers choosing one option over the others isn't a monopoly, it's capitalism at work. There are other players, they're just not as good. Not Valve's fault they can't get their shit together.
Customers having one worthwhile option is in fact a monopoly.
That is not what a monopoly is. A monopoly is characterized by a lack of choice. People have choice. There is only one good choice, though, and people have chosen it over other stupid garbage that doesn't even try. Maybe you'd see that if you took Tim Sweeny's dick out yo mouth for 5 seconds.
This topic invites the weirdest goddamn replies.
It is a failure of moderation that any appropriate response to this baseless insult are equally forbidden.
Suffice it to say: I already told you, none of this is a defense of Epic.