Thread by @RowanKaiser

so for a while I've been making the argument that "gamers" are a vanguard of the internet, their cultural wars are the ones that the rest of us will be seeing in a few years.

The current battle over Steam/Epic is both exemplary and ominous.

For those who don't know games, Steam is the dominant digital distribution mechanism for computer games. I'd say it's the Netflix of games, but Netflix only wishes it had Steam's dominance. Steam has crushed every other competitor, Netflix has Hulu and Amazon.

Epic is an old and successful game company, primarily of Fortnite recently., which you might have heard is making a bit of money. That cash has given them a pretty large war chest, which they've used to launch the Epic Games Store, as a competitor to Steam.

Epic has done a couple things which give it a lot of momentum. It's attached the Store to the Fortnite launcher, instant userbase. It's offering developers an 88/12 revenue split--Steam takes 30%. And every two weeks it offers a free game. A good game usually!

Gamers, of course, being pro-capitalism and free stuff and game devs making money, have embraced this new competition.

HAHA j/k there's a HUGE fan?base out there that has decided that Epic is some kind of grand existential threat to Steam

The arguments include things like Epic using its money to "cheat" and get exclusive games/offer free games, that it's somehow anti-competitive to offer competition, and conspiracy theories about how the Epic Games Store is malware.

As an example of the levels of rage, Borderlands 3 was recently announced as a one-year Epic exclusive, and Steam gamers decided to review-bomb old Borderlands games on THAT platform for....some reason.

Now Rowan, you may be asking, this sounds a lot like bizarre corporate loyalty, like people preferring DC to Marvel, or PS4 to Xbox. That's annoying, but what's new about it?

The thing is, there's....no difference, in practical terms as a player, between Epic and Steam. They're icons on your desktop that, hell, you're probably auto-loading on your computer anyway. A PS4 vs Xbox is hundreds of dollars of choice. A movie, or franchise, is time and $$$

The most inconvenience between Epic and Steam is that you have to sign up for something new. Nothing more than you'd do signing up for a rewards card at your local grocery store.

Here's the part that I find ominous. There's no functional difference , as a user, between Steam and Epic. But there's a culture war nevertheless! People are drawing up battle lines, releasing increasingly deranged videos about the imminent death of Steam, etc etc.

These are *platforms*. And they're picking up loyalists willing to go to battle for them, using sky-is-falling rhetoric of the sort that has triggered mass ~gamer~ movements of idiocy before.

It's like people attaching *moral* worth to having Netflix and not Hulu, or using Uber over Lyft

The aspect of the internet that likes to find political justification for "I like this one thing a bit more" is merging with the late capitalist urge to treat corporations as religious objects of loyalty.

Basically, we're gonna be talking Netflixgate in two years. It's gonna be so dumb and so inescapable.

Hell, maybe sooner, if the CW agreement doesn't continue thanks to CBS All Access.

Addendum to this thread: a few people have noted that Steam does have certain user perks that are relevant, like Big Picture Mode or Cloud Saves, or irrelevant, like Achievements, that Epic lacks.

while I can definitely see being annoyed at those things, the vast majority of the pushback against Epic that I see is not based on "it could be more functional" but instead what I described earlier, "it's unfair that this even exists"

also, some people made the argument that we already see that with Lyft over Uber, which is why I framed it the other way. But if you prefer Grubhub over Caviar, go for it.

I am getting people trying to tell me that Epic has a worse user experience than Steam and, like, have you USED Steam? has it added anything to make a better user experience since 2011? God that thing's a mess.

I mean, just...what?

final thought for a bit: I probably shouldn't have to say this, but y'all know that Steam, by being a de facto monopoly for major PC games, basically purchased exclusivity for like a decade, right?

only EA has managed to fight that, barely, with its games on Origin

random parallel I just remembered: sportswriters have been noticing how weird it is that fans are defending owners from not wanting to pay the luxury tax, a thing that would make the team better but cost the owner more money.