I’ve tried to love Itch, EGS and GOG, but the thing that keeps me coming back to Steam is the ability to say “No, I’m not going to play that, stop showing it”. The other stores shove unwanted ads in my face every time I visit, and it’s always for the same old games I have no interest in. Steam helps me on my quest to find the diamonds in the rough, and every time I check the front page I usually see 5+ games that I’d consider playing.
Anyone else feel game shops should do more to help us find the right games? What’s your strategy for finding good games with so much trash out there?
There is some anti-competitive abuse: Steam will delist games if it finds them being sold with a lower price on another platform. This prevents other platforms from competing for customers by taking lower fees. They can only compete for developers and hope developers will drive customers, which hasn’t happened so far.
That doesn’t affect me much though. I mostly just want better competition so that more money goes to the gamedevs. Steam makes an insane profit. Steam’s profit from me alone is more than the undiscounted launch price of
3022 AAA games… Have they employed hundreds of people for thousands of hours to make something to entertain me? No, they just operate the store. Hardly seems worth being almost 1/3rd of every pricetag.EDIT: Ok, curiousity got the better of me, I checked my purchase history and did the math, Steam has earned roughly US$1367 from me. Hard to be exact as it’s split over 3 currencies, but that’s roughly 22 * $60. I’ve updated the number above.
Steam delisting games due to them being sold at lower prices elsewhere isn’t something that’s entirely unprecedented, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it done on the retail side. A lot of wholesale distributors and manufacturers don’t like it if you try to sell their products below a certain percentage of MSRP, since it results in one seller taking business away from the distributors’/manufacturers’ other retail clients and drives everyone’s overall income down. But when used that way it encourages competition, rather than discouraging it.