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Comment by john-shaffer | Hacker News Reader

We've had decades of exclusivity deals for one console or another. Those actually prevented people from playing the games without shelling out for an extra console.

Total War: Troy is exclusive to Epic Games Store for one year before it comes to Steam. If you got the game on its release date, Epic gave it to you for free. To play it, you need one more launcher to go along with Steam, Battle.net, GOG, and various custom launchers. What is the harm being done here?

I like Steam, but I doubt that it will be good in the long term for it to be completely dominant. It needs a solid competitor.

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I dont care about free games, I have more money than free time. All I want is that games work on my platform, which is linux. They killed rocket league, because its not worth it to support platform that is used by 0.3% of the playerbase. Somehow they managed to do it before epic monies, but now its just too expensive or something. So fuck em.

TotalWar franchise works great in native Linux/Steam. I think I even got better performance than when I played the same (Shogun 2) in Windows on the same laptop. Kudos to CreativeAssembly for backporting all the old releases to the platform. One day all my old purchases just showed up under Linux and was installable without any fuss using the steam interface. Oh yeah, Civilization 5/6 showed up as well. You may want to take a look at what's been added recently. You might find something you like!

Epic launcher isn't even available on Linux unlike Steam..

Well not everyone wants to have to have ten game stores with ten custom launchers if they only have ten games installed

Also Epic may control the release in some ways. For example, Civ 6 on Epic is PC only but on Steam it’s PC & Mac. So I bought it on Epic and then realized I can’t play with my friends who are on Macs.

Why would I want an entire new game store, an app that they’ve chosen to make incompatible with one of the two major computing platforms, and yet another thing to keep updated, minimized, and logged into.

I’m all for competition but exclusivity deals are overall negative for the consumer. It’s worth $10 million to get a new game exclusively for Epic to force everyone to use a store they don’t want to install or use because they’ll end up spending $100 million on other games. It’s an effective business tactic but it’s not exactly in my interest.

Are any of the exclusives permanent? Because consumers can wait of they really can't stand a second launcher.

I'd say the choice of launchers and stores is fine. Especially with tools like GOG Galaxy which can aggregate them too.

Would consumers prefer paying 30% more for games to stay on the most dominate launcher/store?

Epic exclusivity deals are typically for one year.

Steam exclusivity for games like Portal 2 is forever. Of course, Portal 2 was a sequel to a game created by a studio that Valve simply bought outright.

No one expects Steam to put their own titles in a rival store. You don’t buy Halo on Mac

Why should that not be more of an expectation? Sony has started putting out formerly PlayStation-exclusive first-party games on PC. Even Bloodborne may show up on Steam soon if rumors are to be believed.

It would be a good thing if Half-Life Alyx came out on other PC game stores, in exactly the same way that it would be a good thing if a game like Control came out on other PC game stores. Our expectations are socially constructed and we should question them more.

Look I think they’d sell more copies and it’d be good for everyone to have the content more widely available but it’s not always feasible to require it. A PlayStation game doesn’t just automatically work on PC and it probably takes numerous hours to get a PC game ready to submit to the Steam store. I’ve certainly wasted many hours localizing text for iOS app submissions and the like.

With so many different stores to download apps, it gets increasingly unlikely anyone is going to take the time to cross list on all of them.

If we wanted to change how this worked, I feel like we’d need to consolidate on fewer marketplaces. For example, apt-get has access to a huge variety of packages so I don’t find myself using the Ubuntu App Store or random third party marketplaces as much as I do with games.

Are you sure we'll be paying 30% less, or will they be pocketing 30% more?

Considering the fact that you can easily find iTunes gift cars for 10% off face value (and 15 to 20% around the holidays), I remain skeptical that anyone will be paying 30% less.

Fun fact: Brick and mortar retailers spam the checkout lane with gift cards because they do not pay face value for them.

You’re exactly right. Epic charges the same for games as Steam usually even if their cut is a bit smaller. Plus they still take a cut so the difference would be about 20% instead of 30%. For larger developers Steam only takes 20% so the difference would be around 10%

Epic charges a fee too so I’m not sure why you think the price of the game is going to change drastically to the end user. Epic doesn’t charge less for Civilization 6 than Steam does, the developer just gets a bit more of the sale.

What is your opinion on the fact that game devs aren't allowed to have a cheaper price on Epic due to Epic's much lower cut because Steam doesn't allow the devs to?

Isn't that also a net negative for the consumer? The fact that a game dev cant charge $8.20 on Epic vs $10 on Steam or else Valve will ban their game?

I wasn’t aware of a Minimum Advertised Price rule for Steam but such rules are extremely common across industries even if I agree they generally don’t help the consumer.

This is why when you go to buy an Apple laptop or a GoPro or whatever on Amazon that they can’t initially show you a price below the price allowed by the manufacturer. You’ll sometimes need to add the item to your cart to see the “discounted” price which is still allowed under Minimum Advertised Price rules. Cars and many, many other products work this way too.

Once again, not saying I’m necessarily in favor of it but it’s hardly a unique Steam policy. Brands seem to believe protecting their advertised prices helps maintain the value of their brand. For Steam, I guess they wouldn’t want to have a store full of games that cost more. Just like no one wants to pay 30% more to buy a game on iOS instead of PC.

That’s a false equivalency. A more apt comparison would be if you could only buy a game at GameStop for one year, while all the Best But shoppers weren’t able to buy the game from their preferred retail store.

This is fairly common in retail. I've never heard a complaint about it before in that regard.

You never heard complaints about physical store exclusive DLC? It was a big topic for a year or two before Gamestop decided they weren't getting their ROI and it became less common again.

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