Ubisoft comes crawlin' back to Steam
Ubisoft comes crawlin' back to Steam
After years of running exclusively with Epic, Ubisoft has had enough.
Now we can not buy their games on Steam, too! 😃
I was hoping to see this comment!
It's funny because if Bethesda, EA, Ubisoft and Epic joined forces to make one platform they could put a dent in the steam monopoly.
But since they're bunch of shittiy toxic managers with mentality of screwing everyone around for their own benefit, it's never going to happen. They will always fail and crawl back to Gabe
For a short period, yes probably. But Bethesda is a failing studio and so is Ubisoft. EA has popular sports games but I’d guess that’s a very small portion of PC sales considering those games do poorly on the platform compared to consoles. Epic does have loads of money but not enough to float the other companies.
In my view, Microsoft and their GamePass stuff is the only real competitor that will ever take a small dent out of steams sales, mostly because of the Call of Duty titles being on there now. But in order to take 0.05% or whatever of their sales they had to: own the OS for almost every computer running steam, buy dozens of game studios, compete (and lose) in the physical console market over decades, and they had to buy not one but two of the largest studios out there. To the point where they own a significant portion of the iOS App Store that is orders of magnitude more money than PC games and still they cannot compete with steam on their own operating system.
If that doesn’t spell out how unstoppable Steam is, I don’t know what will. The thing that might actually hurt Steam is if those publishers were all GamePass exclusives. Even then, Steam would be just fine I think. Crazy.
Its literally the prisoners dilemma but they're too greedy to look at it factually 😭
Explanation for those that don't know https://youtu.be/TJCGTNIwmv8?si=lRAX3BPpKO2j_SOX
BethesdaMicrosoft, EA, Ubisoft and Epic
Epic enshittified early. The whole system was terrible and they force it onto you. Here is valve actively making it easier to play your games while epic was like "It's PC gaming, you get the good with the bad, suck it!". You can't simply buy your competition when your competition has more money than God.
Epic is failing because Tim Sweeney refused to innovate the platform.
Fuck Tim Sweeney with a linux powered dildo.
He is the reason linux gaming is being held back.
Pornhub video title would be: "Getting all my weak spots penetrated at once by software using 'unsafe custom kernels' "
average Lemmy conversion lol
That picture of Gaben badly needs the addition of someone feeding him grapes
Ubisoft could put their games for free right into my PC's games folder and I still wouldn't play them. They're shit.
Once you’ve played one Ubisoft game you’ve played them all. They did that thing where they took the best gameplay loops from each of their games and implemented them in their other games. So you always feel like you’ve done it before.
Their stories dance around the idea of saying something meaningful without actually taking a stance on anything. They feel like they’ve been approved by a board of directors and not the vision of an artist.
Absolutely soulless.
Spot on, I feel exactly the same about their games.
I used my money to put one of their games in my library and when I noticed (after the refund window) that it was an Ubisoft game, I decided to play something else.
I don't subscribe to the sunk cost fallacy.
Man, I don't like the Steam monopoly on principle, but I have to admit I do struggle to pay attention to Epic exclusives. It's simply the launcher I open the least after GOG and Steam. I've though "hey, wasn't that Ubi Star Wars thing out" like two or three times and forgot about it between remembering that's an Epic thing and deciding whether I wanted to buy it.
But hey, since we're going multiplat again, I could use some newer Ubi games on GOG, too.
Valve is just one shite CEO away from going from PC's blessing to its curse.
If you think about the fact that he's taking enough profit from every sales to pay his employees more than the industry average and to be a multi billionaire while his clients can barely afford a house or can't afford one at all then the current CEO is already shit...
Fuck all billionaires.
It’s a good monopoly, for now and hopefully for a long time.
The fact that Valve went out of their way to make gaming better in Linux, says a lot imho.
I hope you've read the news that two Volvo devs are speeding up the Wayland development. :)
I like Valve, but I will point out what's been said before - Valve has a stake in making Linux gaming better, since it enables the Steam Deck to exist and prosper. They could've chosen other options that don't help the community, but they didn't choose this entirely selflessly, since they reap the benefits from not just their own work, but also that of the open source developers.
It says (pretty explicitly, if you go back and read interviews), that Gabe Newell really doesn't like Microsoft in general, that the feeling is mutual and that the fact that his multibillion dollar empire is stuck as a Windows application MS may try to muscle out at any point has motivated him to bring PC gaming out of Windows from very early on.
Granted, MS has been sucking at attempting exactly that for a long time, but that's the ultimate motivation here. That's not a particularly disputed fact.
There is no such thing as a good monopoly. He leverages a 30% tax on a huge chunk of the gaming industry. Steam, Microsoft, Epic, Sony and Nintendo all essentially participate in collusion and anti competitive behavior.
Think of all the indie studios that closed and sequels that got canceled and ask yourself if they could have made it if steam only took 5%.
They leveraged linux to save on development and maintenance costs. Capturing the handheld market at a tenth of the price while making the same profit isn't altruisme.
It's tough for any public companies to compete because they keep setting off their own footguns, ensuring they don't succeed in the space. As long as Gabe is around I'm okay with this one (1) monopoly, as a treat.
The weirdest thing is that steam doesn't have a natural or self reinforcing monopoly. It wouldn't take much for another company to copy their business model, and provide a competitor. In practice, however, they all fall flat on their faces.
Steam's model is to give up short term gain for a smaller long term gain. Over time, this has snowballed into what we see now. Gabe is happy to get ever richer from his golden goose laying away. The competitors get started, then try and gut the goose for a quick buck.
It kind of does.
You get user lock-in as users buy more games, making it so Steam is always a store to buy from. You can't deplatform from Steam. At that point, you can't replace Steam with another DRM platform to pay existing games. That creates a large customer base which becomes a must add for vending new games.
It isn't a hard monopoly, but it helps create a soft monopoly.
I don't think this tracks. Steam's model is developing software to automate or crowdsource expensive effort. Now, anyways. It originally was to fix PC piracy, but they achieved that ages ago.
And hell yeah they have a natural self-reinforcing monopoly. Even ignoring the mass of captive users with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars committed to the platform, Valve has been doing feature work on that storefront for decades. When others try to compete people immediately bring up the expansive value added features. They make their own controller drivers. They make their own compatibility layers. They make their own OS, FFS. In what world bringing a PC storefront to that level would "not take much"? It's an Apple-style ecosystem model, and much as it terrifies me that it's an ever growing monopoly, it's still impresive that they managed to build it within Microsoft's own.
That would be true only if a company recreating the same product and improving on it would actually have a chance to compete, which isn't the case. People refuse to have multiple launchers out of principle, having all your games in one place makes it so you don't want to split your library so you keep buying from the same store (sometimes people even brag about paying more just to have a game on Steam instead of an alternative).
The only way to break that monopoly would be for a competitor to come and offer to recognize purchases made on Steam for games they offer on their own platform and to start with, at the minimum, everything that Steam offers and I'm sure I don't have to tell you that's completely unrealistic.
I'm on the same page as you, it's tough. I have no idea how any other platform can really achieve competitor status with steam, and this is a big problem for us consumers and for developers.
All Epic had to do was build a good store front with similar features as Steam provides. They didn’t. Their store sucked from the beginning and it also blows now. Relying purely on exclusives and freebies was a losing game - they needed to back it up by making the service worthwhile beyond that, and they utterly failed to do so.
Yeah, if it isn't it will be. If you extrapolate their current moves to a world where PC gaming is entirely controlled by them, maybe even from the OS level downwards, and there is also a set of console-like standalone platforms on handheld, set-top and VR segments.... well, that's a level of control over a massive media industry that I don't think anybody has had before. Especially not a private company whose ownership is two cheeseburgers and/or an unfortunate knife sharpening accident away from changing overnight.
That's half the reason I don't buy Ubisoft games. The other half is their launcher and DRM system.
Why is it always this one photo of Gabe? It's like a meme format that journalists use unironically any time Steam comes up.
Especially because IIRC he lost a bunch of weight since and looks better
I think because (health aside), it projects huge IDGAF energy.. which goes well with the stories.
Maybe these corporate parasites that ruin the industry could learn the lesson that it is a lot more profitable to not be a piece of shit. And treat people with respect.
That's a good point-- I'm on board with that.
Oh man, that picture of Gabe just keeps getting better.
for the love of god and gaming, please don't buy ubisoft games
Don't buy any game forced onto epic gamestore.
Ubisoft left steam? Didn't even know it, their games have gotten terrible reviews for so long, and their uplay platform is so shitty, I have skipped them until they fixed their game dev or cancelled uplay, haha.
If you're into Metroidvanias "Prince of Persia: Lost Crown" was actually a real surprise hit. I think it's the first Ubisoft game I've played in years.
Didnt even know they left. Not bothered with any of their games in so long.
I wish Ubisoft goes back to the era of calling all PC players pirates and then not realising their games on PC because it’s too much effort. This way we won’t have to suffer their presence on our beloved platform.
I'm not sure if it's not already too late for me. I think they might have lost me for good. And I loved their games.
Sweet now they need to fix their file sizes. When I saw how much bigger newest Far Cry was compared to last one I did a hard pass. Learning that companies are doing this so you can't install competitor's games made me never want to play another Far Cry again.
Learning that companies are doing this so you can’t install competitor’s games
Wait, wat? I hadn't heard this explanation. I cynically thought it before, but I've never seen it suggested by anyone other than me.
Few weeks back saw there is a lawsuit about this issue. I think more related to console though. As companies are on purpose using uncompressed and unoptimized files more and more just to take up more space to deny other games. *EDIT Just for reference Far Cry 5 required 40gb in 2018. Far Cry 6 required 170gb in 2021. Three years and grew more then 4 times the size...
You really don't think AAA games are getting bigger because the companies want you to play only their games?
It's been like that for years, especially on console. Why do you think Warzone takes up so much goddamn space?
Yay!
Have fun ubisoft, I will never notice. I ignored every game made by them by searching for them in the steam store.
On the right hand side there is a gear. Click ignore to take out the trash.
You can also ignore them on their developers page to blanket-ignore their games