Hacker News Reader

Comment by m_eiman | Hacker News Reader

Those who were there at the beginning of the Valve Linux Offensive (circa 2012) will remember Gabe Newell stating that the main driver for investing in Linux is their dependency on Windows as a platform.

I see a problem that is just as big, or probably bigger, here for the (PC) game industry: the near-monopoly of Steam.

I try to buy non-Steam versions of the games I buy, because I dislike Steam's online DRM and their client, but it seems that Steam is the new Windows when it comes to gaming. "Everything" is released on Steam first, and it seems a lot of times only on Steam. Which means that we're one focus shift or stolen password away from not being able to run the games we've bought and paid for.

gog.com has a better offer, IMHO, by being DRM free. Are there any other similar competing services? Humble Bundle seem to be selling Steam keys these days, so they're a subset of Steam.

View on HN

I think people maybe don't realize that, like Windows, Steam got to where it is for a reason. Valve knuckled under and built a digital distribution platform for PC games during a severe decline in the PC gaming market when very few people thought it would work.

And it wasn't exclusive, they sold other people's games on there too. Then they helped kickstart the indie gaming explosion with the Potato Sack. Then they started trying to make Linux a better gaming platform to provide an alternative to being locked in to MS. Then they released a non-exclusive VR platform against a competitor that was exclusive.

Say what you want about Valve having a monopoly and that being bad for the market, because that's generally true, but my opinion is that Valve has demonstrated a sincere interest in doing good things for PC gaming, not just what's good for Valve.

Mentioning the Potato Sack gets into one of my biggest complaints with Steam and why I worry about its monopoly position: we can't talk about the Loot Box problem and dumb addiction hacking and not point to the elephant in the room.

Valve has invested a lot of time and effort into its various loot box schemes (hats, trading cards, stamps, badges, etc), and Steam is currently the only retail platform deeply complicit in the worst slot machine tendencies of the industry at large, and has been for a long time.

They have stopped improving their client, doing anything novel in their store, releasing titles in popular franchises and improving graphics or game engine technology.

It's been 6 years since their last franchise title, CS:GO, was released and it's profitability was based on micro-transactions. I think this experience (along with DOTA 2) would forever change the way the company perceives its value to customers.

In hindsight, I regret hats on TF2. I regret that as customers we steered Valve into this lackluster state where microtransacted eSports is in and beautiful game engines for storytelling are forgotten.

Ya, all they did in that time was design and release the world’s first mainstream VR headset, tracking system, controllers, and API.

What a waste of time.

As a Linux-only user, there are almost no Linux-compatible games I'm interested in playing on Steam. So, if I have that rare desire to load up a game, I always find myself going back to TF2, which I didn't even pay money for, and at this point am about as entertained by as Solitaire.

None of the big name releases ever seem to be available. I understand this is due to the game studio's decision of not spending the money on porting to a market that they calculate would make up a rounding error in revenue.

I'm sure there are Linux-compatible indie games out there that would be nice to try, but I'm a casual gamer and I don't have time to research and trial and error what might be a good fit for me.

How is this Valve's fault? Valve lets pretty much anyone who's willing to pay a (small) up-front fee list their game on their store. If there aren't any good games for Linux, that's because nobody is developing them.

There are plenty of AAA games released with Linux support each year - a small fraction of those released with MacOS support, and a much smaller fraction again of those with Windows support but still: they're there.

A large amount of AA and Indie games are also released on Linux (largely, I suspect, because they use middle-ware like Unity which makes multi-platform releases much more straight-forward).

My point being that there are lots of options if you have a hankering to play a quality game on your Linux machine. The problem in this instance, I suspect, is more to do with this line from imjustsaying's post: 'if I have that rare desire to load up a game'.

Give Darkest Dungeon a go. It's the one game I just keep coming back to.

Civilization 6 is definitely an AAA game and it supports Linux if strategy is your thing. Tested it myself with both AMD and Nvidia cards on Ubuntu and apart from few minor glitches it works just fine.

Steam gives developers unlimited free keys for their own games. That's why so many services also give Steam keys. Valve gets $0 if you buy from Humble Bundle even if you redeem the Steam key.

> Are there any other similar competing services?

itch.io is one such competitor, with lots of interesting games (you need bit of digging for sure). http://itch.io/

http://playism-games.com/

They mostly have games by Japanese developers; I suspect their Japanese version of the site has quite a few more games, however they do have some games with English translations that do not appear on gog. I haven't actually purchased from them yet, mostly due to their cloudflare settings being fairly strict and often blocking my vpn/proxy (that only I use, but is in an IP address range that others use for vpn) so I am reluctant to use them even when it works. However, it is not so good if gog is the only DRM-free option either (I strictly avoid steam). I don't know of any others.

Humble occasionally has bundles that have "DRM-free" options for most or all of the games (like the current indie bundle), although I am a little suspicious that their "DRM-free" might sometimes have call home DRM. However, I haven't investigated closely and most of the games I got from them have worked fine without an internet connection.

There are some who claim that gog is better than steam but for me there are two big advantages to steam that gog and perhaps other stores are yet to catch up with: One being region specific pricing, in Steam third world gamers pay affordable third world prices, and this has been I think a majored factor in steam adoption in these countries. The second thing being that Steam offers no-questions-asked refunds for upto two hours playtime, GOG as I understand is not going to have no-questions-asked refund facility.

I'd say Steam gets points because they seemingly care about gamers around the world, where as GOG apparently as yet is focused on selling to gamers from the developed countries.

One of the reasons for current Steam refund policy is that Valve lost lawsuit in Australia: https://www.pcgamer.com/valve-loses-australian-legal-battle-...

Many games on Steam are DRM free already. Just because it's served on Steam doesn't mean it automatically has DRM.

Only if you have a version that exists outside Steam. If a game has been installed through Steam, it must have the Steam client running to play.

Only if the Game requires it; that's an API call.

Many games you get from Steam can be run without the client.

That‘s really up to the game developer, who can (and often do) use Steam DRM, but it‘s certainly not mandatory.

Not true. I know I've been able to run many games by directly running the binary on the filesystem w/o the Steam client running.

I'd say GOG is the biggest competitor now. Then there is itch.io, but they have quite different approach.

For Ubisoft, there's Uplay. But I don't think you'll like their client either. Also, Origin, EA's shop, carries non-EA games.

Uplay is the worst of them. UPlay has modal ads for other games in the store when you close a game, or if your game crashes!

The worst is when you're forced to use Uplay in addition to Steam.

GOG is probably the sanest competitor to steam, especially since they launched Galaxy so that you can manage your local installations without having to download and run individual installers. Next up is probably itch.io.

UPlay, Origin and whatever the hell Blizzard's client is called these days are just lock-ins from their respective publishers.

Yes, I agree that GOG is the best, especially with Galaxy. I was just trying to find alternatives to both GOG and Steam.

There might be others sellers, but I don't know if they deals with the distribution themselves or just sells Steam keys, like HumbleBundle.

To some extent, https://itch.io - also DRM-free AFAIK

(No affiliation)

The problem I find with itch.io (haven't checked this year) is that it provided roughly the equivalent game quality of Steam Green-light.

And they have almost none of the AAA games.

Itch.io is the open bazaar of digital distribution platforms, so yeah there's going to be a lot of crap in there, but it is that open model that gives it value. Also I hear they have exceptional tooling for developers.

If you make a habit of checking GoG first (sometimes you have to be patient for maybe a month), you'll find that there isn't as much of a monopoly as you'd think. Have a look at itch.io, but keep in mind that it's more about indie than DRM-free.

I do, and actually ask developers if/when they’ll release on gog. One example: Bomber Crew, they refer to their distributor who doesn’t seem interested :/

> Are there any other similar competing services?

Itch.io

Reply on news.ycombinator.com