Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

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> At this point, it would take something pretty unusual for me to spend any money on a non-Steam game. I just don't believe other platforms will be around in 5-10 years.

I agree, but I think it's important to consider that they can succeed even if they don't get you or me. There's hundreds of millions of people that have installed it (approaching 250 million a couple months ago), tens of millions playing each month (almost 80 million as of a few months ago) and over 10 million people playing concurrently.[1]

How many of those are young players that might want to try a new game they see some youtuber play, and see it on sale in the epic store they might use to launch Fortnite? That's a hige captive audience, and this battle won't be won by swaying you or me, but by swaying the huge number of new gamers coming onto the market, which are mostly our kids. I know my son who's 9 probably wouldn't care about Steam if I wasn't sharing my library with him. Then again, his computer can't play much and he plays Fortnite on the Switch.

Steam is entrenched, and does have it's own user base, but given that Fortnite along as of a couple months ago has ~66% of the concurrent users of Steam overall[2], I wouldn't count it out. That's a lot for Epic to make something out of.

1: https://www.pcgamesn.com/fortnite/fortnite-battle-royale-pla...

2: https://store.steampowered.com/stats/

I buy something from Steam only if it's not on GOG. Games from GOG let you play them without the headaches of the launcher.

I don't play very often and when I finally find time for it, it looks like this: - clicking on the game icon - the launcher starts updating - the launcher restarts and asks for my account, because why not? - the game starts updating, often downloading patches above a GB ... and so on. And that applies for Steam, Bethesda Launcher and the rest of the bunch. And don't let me get started on the Bethesda Launcher because that thing alone takes 500MB of memory.

GoG is amazing, my preference is GoG, Steam, and piracy is a distant third to the point where I haven't pirated a game in a decade.

Totally agree. However, one major selling point of Steam for me is the practically seamless Proton compatibility layer (while acknowledging the philosophical disconnect between running Linux and buying DRM'd games...)

Before Fortnite was Minecraft and Pokemon Go and Angry Birds... It's in the nature of video games to come and go like fads.

More telling (to me) is that Epic started making a game very different from Fortnite but was both flexible enough and perceptive enough to change the game.

The difference is that Epic is leveraging their current popularity to turn into a platform. Pokemon Go and Angry Birds were already only really available through platforms, so that wasn't an option for them. Minecraft maybe could have, but it seems somewhat opposed to the idea of the program, which is all about user control and users creating an ecosystem. Now that Microsoft owns it, there's already a platform for it, and it's not game specific (the Windows Store).

Fortnite has as many or more monthly players as Minecraft (which is huge), but much more control over the ecosystem and content. As the controlling party of what's (by this point most likely) the most popular online game in history in it's peak (until next month, most likely), that gives them a somewhat unique and powerful position, which they seem eager to exploit.

Will that be enough? I don't know. I definitely think the situation is different than the examples you cited though.

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