The Division 2 is skipping Steam

[Chazore]

Raven722 said:

Zkuq said:
Eh. I'm glad I'm not too interested in The Division, because this most likely means I'm going to skip it as long as it doesn't feel like a must-have game (which, like I said, it doesn't). I don't feel like exclusivities like this are a good thing, I don't like Tencent being behind Epic Games, and the Epic Store client's offline mode didn't sound too functional (although that's just based on some forum discussions I've seen). It sounds like Epic Store is great for publishers and not so much for gamers. Currently the only incentive I have to start using Epic Store are exclusives, and I generally strongly dislike the practice of exclusives.

We'll see how well Epic Games does with this. If the Epic Games Store fails to provide meaningful sales overall then this will probably be a very short lived run of exclusive titles. I can understand publishers wanting to make their own games exclusive to their own stores but this is something different. If games like The Division 2 end up with poor PC sales and it gets determined they would have been much better off letting the game be sold on Steam as well then this practice might not last. It may also just be something that Epic Games is paying a good deal of money for upfront to help get their own store off the ground and they stop doing it later. I'm not even sure these store exclusivity deals are something permanent. On the flip side, if the Epic Games Store does well, then Valve will be forced to respond somehow. I'd say a good start would be cleaning up their mess of a store. Way too much garbage on it with few methods of effectively filtering it out.

Well seeing as how it's been seen and talked about, that buying up exclusivity on PC isn't a good practice, it really isn't to be counted as a good one.

 

In the console space, you need to sell those plastic boxes, but on PC you don't need to sell hw, you don't even need to sell a storefront as signing up for one costs literally nothing. ALl this does is force people back and forth in a game of musical chairs, only they get yanked around with less and less benefits each time, while publishers and studios reap more and more. That's not a good thing, it's never a good thing for the consumer to lose out,m even in the slightest. Why should the consumer ever have to lose out in any sort of deal?.

What exactly would Valve do to gain back the likes of Ubisoft?, a company that still thinks PC gamers as pirates (their 4 layer DRM and Uplay requirement state this boldy) and wants more and more money. You can't pull the "develop more games" tactic, because they are already making games and have released one recently. They already have tools on Steam for you to use in order to filter out games you don't like as well.

 

Also another thing, since when has your idea (or anyone else's for that matter) of "curation" been objectively better for me?. I ask this, because every time someone mentions that X store needs "curation", they seemingly forget that said "curation" requires subjective input and subjective action to be taken. You're effectively using a small group, or single person's bias, in determining what I should play, vs what we all could play.

I've seen Jim sterling argue about curation and how it mucks things up. We've also seen how this rolled over on GoG, when a moderator disallowed a game onto their storefront, simply because they thought it was a mobile game, when in reality it was a puzzle game from a known puzzle game dev. Curation is subjective, it is also very flawed on it's own. It's never objective and it always serves for one particular groups tastes. 

If Steam was to heavily or even "lightly" curate itself, we wouldn't get one hit wonders like Undertale or Stardew Valley, simply because they look like a typical RPG maker game. 

 

I do not agree with Epic doing this, and I absolutely hate Tencent with a passion. I strongly feel that Tencent just wants to own everything and control what they can get a hold of. Has Chinese gaming ever truly cared about what th West wants?. Have they been totally legit fair on their side of the games industry, with zero MT's in their games, and plenty of fully fledged, well written SP games, ones that aren't complete and utter copyrighted ripoffs?.