• stoy@lemmy.zip
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    4 days ago

    Yeah, I saw an article about Epic’s CEO having a gormless rant about Steams AI filtering and how but Steam was for them.

    All I could think was: “well, make a better product then”

    GOG Galaxy is the only launcher / storefront that comes close to competing with Steam, and that is because the one thing they do better:

    DRM-free games.

    The rest is about equal or slightly worse.

    If Epic looked at the customer base and analyzed what people wanted I am sure they could build a better platform than Steam, but with a CEO as unlikable as Epic’s and with his trackrecord it would take many years of hard work and effort to even begin to come close to Steam.

    It would probably take some massive PE/VC enforced changes at Valve where they start to enshittify Steam and the loss of confidence in the platform that will follow to make the other platforms competitive.

    • EtnaAtsume@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      It would probably take some massive PE/VC enforced changes at Valve where they start to enshittify Steam and the loss of confidence in the platform that will follow to make the other platforms competitive.

      Make no mistake, it’s coming eventually. I held off on trusting discord for years buy finally they won me over. Now look where we are.

      Never again.

      • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
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        4 days ago

        Valve has been around since 1996, Steam since 2003

        Discord has been around since 2015 and was funded on VC money.

        Kind of different situations lmao.

          • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
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            3 days ago

            That’s true, but we’re not at that point yet so… What is your point? They’ve managed to thrive as a private corporation up to this point, clearly everyone working there is making bank too and treated well. (From all accounts I’ve read) so I’d hope the incentive is higher to keep with the same philosophy for whoever comes after. Of course hard to say, can’t undercut the greed some people have for making more money then they literally could ever spend.

      • stoy@lemmy.zip
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        4 days ago

        I have decided to bite the sour apple, as we say in Sweden, and overpay for the last two hard drives for my NAS build to complete it, then I will grab every offline installer for my games I can find and keep a local copy.

        32TB of storage that can loose two drives before any data loss, a solid start for backups, media and software.

    • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      and that is because the one thing they do better:

      DRM-free games.

      Which games are DRM free on GOG but not on Steam?

      • stoy@lemmy.zip
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        3 days ago

        When I say DRM free games, I mean those with a standalone installer containing the full game that can be downloaded for offline use.

        If this is available on Steam, ai would be overjoyed

        • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          Installers are just fancy zipped folder. And AFAIK, all games that are DRM free on GoG are also DRM free on Steam. So you can download the game, zip the game data folder, copy it elsewhere, unzip it and play it there. I’ve done that with several games, in fact when I was trying to convince some friends to buy a game I did that so we could play it in lan with a single copy so they would try it and buy it so we could play it online later.

          So, yeah, you can absolutely do that in Steam, which is why I never get the “oh, but GoG has DRM free games” appeal.