RE: Life as a Gamer | Epic Store rivals Steam's refund policy - Store competition might be bad
I think the big thing with storefronts is that the direction they're going is different.
We're seeing more of the big publishers who have a bunch of games at least advocate for their own storefront, if not requiring it outright (see uPlay, Origin, Microsoft).
The way I see it is that when a player becomes accustomed to having more than one central hub for games, it sort of breaks down the barriers to having multiple storefronts as places to make purchases.
I think Steam in particular has a crisis because it's ceased offering superior experiences. Games are almost always cheaper through an authorized reseller like GMG (to say nothing of bundles or sketchy-but-legal means of getting games), and those often achieve low prices by going direct to the publisher.
It's also got such a bloated market that it's hard for developers to make in-roads at Steam like they used to: they've stopped curating games at all and it's just a buy-in process, which I think is fine (except for the buy-in), but it also means that anyone uploading competes with everyone.
Large market players tend to dislike competition on storefronts, because they want their name to be the biggest. It's not surprising that they want to move away from a platform that might block their signal.
I have to disagree with some points. I think Steam's services are as good as always. They're also the best option for the indie dev because they hold the biggest playerbase. My game would not have sold a single copy anywhere else.
It's not hard to make a breakthrough either. Out of 6 new games on a daily basis, 5 are asset flips or just shit, so anything good actually stands out a lot. There are a lot of curators actively searching for good games. Steam's system in itself makes it easy because of the "related games" tab which brings hundreds of visitors every day to pretty much every game.
I think publishers opening their own storefronts don't want to give Steam a 30% cut. Maybe they also want a bigger bite out the market.
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