{"id":332,"date":"2021-03-23T01:23:17","date_gmt":"2021-03-23T01:23:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/?p=332"},"modified":"2021-03-23T01:23:17","modified_gmt":"2021-03-23T01:23:17","slug":"the-end-is-nigh-because-of-the-war-of-the-storefronts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/index.php\/2021\/03\/23\/the-end-is-nigh-because-of-the-war-of-the-storefronts\/","title":{"rendered":"The End is Nigh … because of the War of the Storefronts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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This article originally ran under a different banner\/website in January of 2019 and is now being here re-uploaded for purposes of convenience and consolidation. Please enjoy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!!! LEND ME YOUR EARS!!! FOR, I, THE DOOMSAYER, WANT TO TALK ABOUT WAR!!!\u00a0 War.\u00a0 War never changes.\u00a0 Since the dawn of PC gaming, when our fathers first discovered Doom <\/em>and Quake<\/em>, numerous companies tried to create a marketplace on PC: from Electronic Arts to Ubisoft to Microsoft.\u00a0 It\u2019s the year 2003, after years of free reign, Valve developed the digital distribution platform known as Steam.\u00a0 The PC marketplace was consumed by Valve\u2019s child, but it was not, as some had predicted, in harmony.\u00a0 Instead, numerous contenders jumped into the ring to take a piece of Valve\u2019s pie.\u00a0 Over the years, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Microsoft, and even Bethesda would develop their own digital distribution platforms; not to provide a better service than Steam, but to have full control over their content.\u00a0 As a result, none of these platforms were able to overthrow Steam.\u00a0 The only one to come close is the GOG store, offering older titles not on Steam, and promising they would be DRM free, but war… war never changes.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A new contender is emerging to wage war against Steam.\u00a0 Backed by Fortnite <\/em>money, Epic Game has decided to challenge Steam for the title of best digital distribution platform on PC with their own storefront: Epic Store.\u00a0 Along with being less flooded than Steam, Epic vowed they would do more to help developers by promising developers a larger profit cut.\u00a0 This also results in games being cheaper on the Epic Store.\u00a0 They also promised they would do more to prevent customers harassing developers, unfortunately, that meant removing user reviews and forums.\u00a0 While I do agree some developers are unfairly harassed, I don\u2019t believe taking away customer service tools is the right answer.\u00a0 Nonetheless, I was still willing to give the Epic Store a shot, mainly due to the free copies of Jackbox Party Pack<\/em>, Subnautica, Super Meat Boy, <\/em>and What Remains of Edith Finch<\/em>.\u00a0 I personally, welcomed this competition to Steam.\u00a0 I still think Steam is in desperate need of some quality control and a rival with a cleaner store could inspire Valve to change.\u00a0 Unfortunately, they were nothing compared to the bigger moves that Epic had planned.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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On January 9, Epic announced they would be partnering with Ubisoft to bring The Division 2 <\/em>to the Epic Store.  With this announcement, they also announced The Division 2<\/em> would not be coming to Steam.  Cries of outrage echoed throughout the internet.  I will admit, I dismissed many of the concerns, because buying Ubisoft games on Steam resulted in Steam opening Ubisoft\u2019s client Uplay to play the game.  Would have almost better off just buying The Division 2<\/em> on the Uplay store.  On January 28, Epic announced they landed an exclusive deal on the new survival horror shooter, Metro Exodus; <\/em>the title will be only available on PC through the Epic Store.  Fans of the Metro <\/em>series were not pleased.  While initially, unaffected by this news, I decided to take a moment off my soapbox and see why the people were outraged by this news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I soon learned how woefully unprepared Epic is in taking on the task of rivaling Steam.\u00a0 For starters, Epic is incredibly irresponsible with consumer data.\u00a0 Not only does Epic have terrible security with over 80 million accounts hacked over the past weeks.\u00a0 Epic is also owned by the Chinese company, Tencent, known for selling customer data.\u00a0 Epic\u2019s store also does not comply with Europe\u2019s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).\u00a0 I, for one, remember that year that Steam had the data leak on Christmas of all days.\u00a0 The swarming hate for that fiasco is nothing compared to what Epic would receive if people who purchased Metro Exodus<\/em> had their data leaked.\u00a0 On top of that, it appears Epic is embarrassingly unfit to handle any data leak they might have.\u00a0 With a simple Google search, I was able to find numerous stories of Epic customer service unable to do anything about a customer\u2019s data being leaked.\u00a0 Epic\u2019s client is also in no better shape.\u00a0 As I mentioned earlier, taking away user reviews and forums to protect developers seems like a misstep, especially when Epic users had to go to Steam forums to solve problems with Subnautica<\/em>.\u00a0 Throw in no offline play, no screenshots, no controller support, no achievement, and no cloud saves and start to feel that Epic has no right to have the exclusive rights to Metro Exodus<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I can\u2019t help but recall a quote from Valve co-founder Gabe Newell.\u00a0 He was asked about piracy and he simply stated that to beat piracy, you just have to offer a better service than the pirates.\u00a0 With the way Epic is handling Metro Exodus<\/em>, I can\u2019t help but feel that Epic is not offering superior service, but a disservice.\u00a0 Instead of highlighting the reduced costs and the higher percentage of the sale going to the developer, they are essentially saying you either play with us or don\u2019t play at all. \u00a0 They might have been better off not landing the exclusive deal, but still, offer the product on their store at a reduced price.\u00a0 I would have given it serious consideration knowing my wallet and the developers would benefit from me buying Metro Exodus <\/em>through the Epic Store.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Frankly, I think the competition between Epic and Steam can be good for consumers.\u00a0 I, myself, have been trying to purchase more games through Humble Bundle and GOG to help encourage competition.\u00a0 That still doesn\u2019t take away from the fact that both Steam and the Epic Store need some massive improvements.\u00a0 Valve seriously needs to clean up their storefront of all the games unable to launch or are asset flips.\u00a0 Epic should consider using the money they acquired from Fortnite<\/em> to improve their store before considering snatching up PC exclusive deals.\u00a0 We, as consumers, need to start demanding more from our storefronts.\u00a0 We should demand quality be released onto the store and not broken products.\u00a0 We need to demand ours protects be free of DRM.\u00a0 We need to demand better data protection.\u00a0 Our storefronts need to be better or else the end will be nigh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This article originally ran under a different banner\/website in January of 2019 and is now being here re-uploaded for purposes of convenience and consolidation. Please enjoy. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!!! LEND ME YOUR EARS!!! FOR, I, THE DOOMSAYER, WANT TO TALK ABOUT WAR!!!\u00a0 War.\u00a0 War never changes.\u00a0 Since the dawn of PC gaming, when our fathers… Continue reading The End is Nigh … because of the War of the Storefronts<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":333,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-opinion","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":339,"href":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332\/revisions\/339"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gatecitygaming.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}