Both GOG and Epic stores are quite full of games. Give developers the chance to sell things, and they’ll take it.
GOG doesn’t have everything since they require DRM-free, but I do most of my indie-game purchases on there. GOG have said in the past that their most-requested feature from developers is “can you make your achievements / social integration just basically exactly the same as Steam, so that it’s easier for us to integrate?”. Means game updates sometimes take longer to arrive, but hey.
Heroic launcher starts faster than Steam, so I’ll grab whatever’s free on Epic that week while waiting for it to load; but fuck giving Tim Sweeney any money obviously. Seems to have quite a variety of stuff, tho.
The problem with displacing a company with established network effects is that simply “just as good” isn’t enough - you need to be much better to start moving people over. And I’m not really clear what “much better than Steam” looks like. They have great Linux support, great workshop integration, regular sales, the forums are well-regulated, and so on.
You can’t compare alternative stores like GOG and Epic directly to Steam though, because of all the additional stuff Steam offers that GOG, Epic, and all those other indie stores can’t replicate.
That’s also why I don’t see those as competition to Steam, and more like enhancements. You can buy you DRM-free game on GOG and enjoy some of the benefits on Steam at the same time.
Thinking about it Epic might have the closest shot what with their whole Fortnite and UE stuff offering a lot of the backbone that Steam offers, but even they bungled it so hard they had to bribe devs for temporary exclusivity.
Both GOG and Epic stores are quite full of games. Give developers the chance to sell things, and they’ll take it.
GOG doesn’t have everything since they require DRM-free, but I do most of my indie-game purchases on there. GOG have said in the past that their most-requested feature from developers is “can you make your achievements / social integration just basically exactly the same as Steam, so that it’s easier for us to integrate?”. Means game updates sometimes take longer to arrive, but hey.
Heroic launcher starts faster than Steam, so I’ll grab whatever’s free on Epic that week while waiting for it to load; but fuck giving Tim Sweeney any money obviously. Seems to have quite a variety of stuff, tho.
The problem with displacing a company with established network effects is that simply “just as good” isn’t enough - you need to be much better to start moving people over. And I’m not really clear what “much better than Steam” looks like. They have great Linux support, great workshop integration, regular sales, the forums are well-regulated, and so on.
You can’t compare alternative stores like GOG and Epic directly to Steam though, because of all the additional stuff Steam offers that GOG, Epic, and all those other indie stores can’t replicate.
That’s also why I don’t see those as competition to Steam, and more like enhancements. You can buy you DRM-free game on GOG and enjoy some of the benefits on Steam at the same time.
Thinking about it Epic might have the closest shot what with their whole Fortnite and UE stuff offering a lot of the backbone that Steam offers, but even they bungled it so hard they had to bribe devs for temporary exclusivity.