this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
388 points (98.0% liked)

Games

16757 readers
938 users here now

Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)

Posts.

  1. News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
  2. Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
  3. No humor/memes etc..
  4. No affiliate links
  5. No advertising.
  6. No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
  7. No self promotion.
  8. No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
  9. No politics.

Comments.

  1. No personal attacks.
  2. Obey instance rules.
  3. No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
  4. 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:

Beehaw.org gaming

Lemmy.ml gaming

lemmy.ca pcgaming

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 126 points 8 months ago (5 children)

There’s a lot of money to be made as a middleman.

If there’s a gold rush, you want to be the guy selling shovels.

[–] [email protected] 71 points 8 months ago (4 children)

For a real comparison steam is the distributor, storefront, advertiser, and support. A bit more than just 'a middleman'.

[–] [email protected] 73 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

A vertically integrated middleman is even more profitable.

[–] squid_slime 17 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Who wants to stand up all day though

[–] Gumbyyy 2 points 8 months ago

That's why it pays so well

[–] [email protected] 38 points 8 months ago (1 children)

If there's a gold rush, you want to run the railroads, build the houses, sell the shovels and open the general store I guess

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago

Fortunately, that's illegal now. If only those laws would be applied to modern things

[–] UsernameIsTooLon 21 points 8 months ago

You're missing the actual biggest key component. It's also a built in community forum with tons of user-requested settings. They mostly know how to cater and rarely backtrack a quality of life feature.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago

They're multiple middle men at once

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago

I would make the comparison to the monopolized railroad instead of selling shovels. There is Vanderbilt level moneys in setting up a transport network that only you control and rent seek from.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] SkyezOpen 21 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months 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.

[–] kadu 24 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

i wasnt even aware they had a partnership prior to this, that's really cool actually. Hopefully that goes somewhere.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I updated Heroic and saw it in the changelog. I doubt it's very much, but it's still cool.

[–] kadu 9 points 8 months ago

Your comment about guys selling shovels is in violation of my patent about commenting about shovels.

You'll need to pay me a license of $300 USD for every day this comment is left online.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

And there's a lot of other guys selling shovels, too. It's not that anticompetitive when someone is selling better shovels than anyone else and also charging a premium for them. Anticompetitive would be having the best and undercutting everyone else on pricing in order to make sure no other sellers had a chance.