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Comment by 411111111111111 | Hacker News Reader

In what way, if I may ask? I am not aware of any controversy surrounding the steam store with that regard.

Now that the store had that facelift the only issue I am aware of is the honestly pretty lacklustre curation... Which is an extremely hard issue so pretty forgiveable

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Some people are deeply upset that a gigantic storefront and distribution network [0] would dare take a 30% cut, despite that being well below brick and mortar rate and also pretty standard for a digital storefront.

But hey, you can instead distribute with Epic, a storefront so advanced it doesn't even have a shopping cart.

[0] not to mention community forum, reviews, and art gallery.

I don't even know how to actually check what I have on my Epic account without going to past purchases. It's baffling how a company that's trying to take more marketshare from a platform as polished as Steam without focusing more on UX.

They're just annoyed and lashing out by spending their unexpected Fortnight fortunes. There was no strategy.

Any chance they had of getting me as a customer died when they started doing Epic store exclusives. I won't give them money to build another walled garden. There's more than a few games I haven't purchased because of those deals and by the time they finally come to steam I don't care enough about them anymore to spend the money.

Even though Borderlands 3 is now on Steam, I still refuse to buy it because of their exclusive deal... I own every other Borderlands game, but I will never buy that one

If you buy it from steam, they might have an incentive to actually move more games over there.

I understand the sentiment though.

> But hey, you can instead distribute with Epic, a storefront so advanced it doesn't even have a shopping cart.

Which is kind of odd, since the Unreal Marketplace in the same launcher does have a shopping cart.

What’s the problem here? Check out reviews on steam and participate in the discussion forums, and make your purchase in Epic, to support the developers.

My personal number one issue with Steam (aside from the obvious fact that it's still DRM at the end of the day) is that I think their family sharing feature is kind of bullshit. You cannot let somebody play a game in your library and be able to play yourself another game in that same library at the same time.

There is no good justification for this restriction and it makes that whole feature sound more like a PR move than something that was really released to help the consumer.

If it's of any help, you can play games at the same time if you go into offline mode in your main account. That way you can atleast play one multiplayer and one single player game at the same time

I'm aware of that workaround but there shouldn't be any need for a workaround in the first place. Valve shouldn't get to freeze my entire library when I want to share a single game with a family member or friend.

This "feature" bothers me a lot. When my girlfriend tries to play Planet Coaster from my account via the family sharing feature, sometimes she kicked off even though I'm not even playing a game at all! I think this is a big reason cloud based services like Steam are a step down from physical games with no reliance on internet connectivity. Truth be told my friends and I were doing fine before Steam existed, even if it meant sometimes needing to get friend's IP addresses and troubleshoot firewall issues to play multiplayer games.

They take a bigger cut then most other digital store fronts and they have a history of using the loyalty of fans to do unpaid work such as translations and perform the majority of moderation on Steam.

... So basically they're exactly like every other content network that currently exists?

Pretty much, yes. They're just more consumer-friendly in some ways, and they do some cool stuff. Also, trading cards.

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