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Comment by cube2222 | Hacker News Reader

For me the main thing lacking in all popular Steam "competitors" (looking mostly at the epic games launcher right now) is lack of reviews.

A store without reviews is mostly useless for exploration, while the Steam review system is excellent. I very often wait for a game to come out on Steam just because I want to see the reviews before buying.

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You read game reviews for that ? I just YouTube gameplay videos or intro or whatever. I'll watch a narrated review, but just reading about the game is kind of irrelevant for me. Maybe in the old days of game magazines, but these days - videos do a way better job of telling me what I'm in for.

I also look at Steam user reviews because people tend to share what they like or hate in relatively short form.

I've been gaming for more than 3 decades. Know very well what I like and what I don't. Sure, gameplay videos are great but as an old FPS guy, looking for gameplay recorded by someone who knows what they are doing takes more time. It really does. That's why I look fir videos after taking the time to read what people think.

That said, I've stayed away from professional reviews for more than 2 decades.

I read the negative comments mostly, to see if game has some glaring issues.

Steam generally does a good job of bringing relevant issues to the top, like latest patch breaking something, less than stellar netcode on fighting games, etc.

I don't know. Steam reviewers seem to sometimes have a deeper view of the game, and describe the long term difficulty/power/interest curve etc. They can have many hours in and are not compelled to push the review out early. And you can roughly look at the number of datapoints reporting any given experience. Maybe depends on the game, but often looking at the graphics won't give you much information.

Problem with videos is I have no idea how long someone has been playing the game. With Steam I can see the user has put in 400 hours or something so I can be fairly certain they have experience most of what the game has to offer.

Also for older games, sometimes you get people playing for 1000+ hours who says that the game turned to shit 3 months ago and you'd never get that just watching a gameplay video that came out a few months after the game was released.

Steam reviews also track over time, again, videos don't. I watch videos for new games and use them with Steam reviews to see if I'd like a game or not, but for old games the reviews are much easier to get a clear picture of what the game is like the day I'm planning on buying it.

What? People other then low attention span children watch video reviews rather then read normal text articles?

News to me.

Honestly how steam balances historical reviews versus recent ones is what helps the most to see a trajectory of where a game has come from and where it is now. See No Man’s Sky (from launch to now)

I think it also started reminding people to change their reviews (or maybe it was just to remind them to review?) if they still play a "negative" after a while which helped I think.

And also forum (GOG has one too at least). Sometimes games require more info than is present in the reviews. For example Detroit PC port was atrocious for a significant minority of users. It was a minority enough to have a positive reviews, but significant to have hundreds of people with very different hardware to be affected.

Also forum plus release notes (available on Steam, but not sure about competitors) provide a great picture if game is really supported or not. Same example Detroit PC port - zero patches over a year, almost no "green" replies on the forum from dev team, zero acknowledgment of critical blocking issues. In the same year Horizon PC port was also released with some bugs. It had two dozens game patches and fixes over a year, and devs immediately acknowledged existing bugs, like in a one week time frame.

You can probably guess that in future I will avoid products from Quantic like wildfire and all such info can be found on Steam, for any corporation. So mister Tim, you can keep your stance against customers, and I will keep buying games on Steam and GOG.

For me the problem is the multiple applications. I HATE having to install yet another store app.

I really like GOG lets me download games direct from their web page.

Are Steam reviews any different than Amazon or Airbnb reviews? I never trust reviews on the same platform that has an incentive to sell me something.

I don't know about that. I don't buy games on other platforms because steam is how I search for games.

GOG has it.

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