Иιɢʜᴛᴍᴀᴢᴇ

It’s (Almost) Monday ! ~ Summer Sale & Social Psychology

I’m not a specialist of Steam. In fact, 9 months ago, before joining Steamgifts, I had less than 50 games in there and never participated at one of those special sales with special events such as the Summer Sale. But. When I began to be interested in badges and all that stuff, I was told to wait for Summer sale and that there were cards and stuff and, to be honest, I didn’t understand much beside, “wait for Summer Sale, you’ll get more XP out of your badges (?) and good prices for games (!)”.
Come the Summer, some the Sale, some the Salt.. Not from me, but from a lot of people who expected cards (?), better sales (?), better events (!) and overall complained about everything and nothing during the whole stuff.
On my side, I just had a smile seeing how people would still protect Steam against every logical argument against it and its sale.


The Race

My experience with the event was pretty bad, not because of the cards and other stuff, I actually don’t even know how valuable those things were, but because of the countless bugs and abuses that were ruining the whole thing. Among the bugs I personally experienced, there was :

  • Nitro boost limit locked at 100 even though I bought some games during the sale.
  • Over 20k boosts linked to my achievements that were never unlocked, instead it was saying “you used your limit today, come back tomorrow” every day during the whole event.
  • I played Two Points Hospital during the event and it counted only 12 people cured, 1 ghost and 0 upgrade. If anybody played that game or “Theme Hospital”, you know that it’s completely inaccurate.

The Rewards

I was also confused by how “cheap” Steam was regarding rewards, giving away 600 games (was it 600 or even less ?) per day during the short time of the event. After seeing the month long on Epic and the Crazy Weekend on Kinguin, I certainly was expecting more, knowing that the amount of people who would participate to the sale would be enormous compared to the two other shops.
Speaking of the rewards, thanks to all the bugs I experienced I wasn’t even able to earn one Discount. The background held no interest to me, nor did the emoticons, so I ended spending everything in useless badges, since - let’s be honest 3 seconds here - The XP system is completely useless on Steam beside stating that you have the biggest.

Steam, Epic Store & Cognitive Dissonance

Look at that pretty title, it’s classy yeah ? Yeah. If you don’t know what Cognitive Dissonance is, you can check the video I linked which explain what it is and gives a lot of good example completely unrelated to internet, but it happens a lot and constantly because of another social concept stating that the Human hates change and for the sake of keeping the same routine and ideas, a Human can simply ignore, deny, lie, twist the truth or pretend to never have heard of it for keeping the same routine / idea while avoiding dissonance.

A pretty recent example is how people didn’t want to quit Skype despite the ads, the bugs, the scams, the account stealing, etc. and STILL don’t want to quit it for a good part of them because changing and adapting to another platform such as Discord will cost them more energy than pretending that the bad sides of Skype isn’t that bad and it doesn’t worth the chance.
Did you try to convince a member of your family or a friend to switch to Discord or to change their browser to another or.. Really it can apply to many many things, even stuff like trying to convince your grand parent to try to use a mobile, etc. Yet, whichever educated advice, knowledge, proofs you can give to them, that person would persist in their previous behavior, way of thinking and persist to use / say the same “bullshit” on your point of view and you don’t understand why.
Well now you know why, it’s not because of the classic “don’t mind them, they are too old to change” because even a kid can already have built a lot of habit and beliefs, it’s because it’s easier to keep things as they are and to avoid the dissonance by pretending that everything is fine despite what is actually happening.

I won’t speak of Steam vs Epic Store situation here even though named them in the title. What I offer is for you to make your own opinion of the way people react when they compare the two shops and now have the tools to understand why some attempts to compare the sales on both shop and the Crazy Weekend on Kinguin were quickly shut by false arguments (one even told me that Kinguin was only giving away $1 flip asset games. We all know that it’s the perfect definition for games offered such as : Rage 2, Sekiro, Cuphead, Stardew Valley and others, right ,) ?)


If you read up to there, you already know what will be the discussion about this week. First of all, what did you think of this Steam Summer Sale ? Did you like the Race event ? Did you face any bug ? Were you part of the lucky 600 daily winners ? Did you hear about Cognitive Dissonance and of what I described regarding habits and beliefs before ?

What do you think of GOG Galaxy 2.0 ? Do you think you’ll move to that new platform ? What about the brand new GMG Summer Sale ?

FINALLY, do you think that those social psychology concepts apply to the war between Steam and Epic Store ?

Cece09

Oh i didnt care for this sale but then with all the others i never really cared. Ive never won a game and i dont bother saving my badges until the sale to get more. Sure the no cards things wasnt the best thing but i dont sell them because i dont have time to waste the whole event trying to get 1p from it before they will disappear rewarding me nothing!

For the race it sucked. I just didnt get the point. Even if i had my laptop i had no games they wanted me to play so what was i going to do anyway. At least with the saliens it was something to entertain me while figuring out what to do

Now the steam and epic situation i am split. While i dont care much about it i do think its a crappy thing thats happening and i wont be moving from steam. Ever since they created the store all i hear is the bad side. I know theres plenty of bad with steam but i didnt know about that store until i was 15 and i mainly used it for visual novels which isnt a thing epic is trying to buy out from under steams nose. So yeah the only thing i want was walking dead which had steam keys and borderlands is a timed exclusive so i havent hit a point of where i will opening rage about it myself.

That whole cognitive thing I can actually get. Even for myself I would definitely say yeah because im so used to steam and invested so much time and money into it that the idea of being like hello new store is not something i would do. Unless i would end up with everything i paid for and have access to the stories i want be it by store or pirated i wouldn’t even consider it. Id rather just buy the games on xbox since hey its epic exclusive but not pc exclusive

Иιɢʜᴛᴍᴀᴢᴇ

Yes, the explanations of the games was really bad written, I didn’t understand them either, nor I did understand how you can make a game so bad that you add rules every single day to try to make it even and eventually just give up.

About Epic, I personally used the store several times and didn’t have a single problem. The fact you hear the bad sides is not a surprise, that’s what happens online with every single shop.
Take Amazon for example, the majority of the comments are negative even though an item will be considered by Amazon as the most successful in its category. People tends to share bad experiences with an item and to consider that it’s not important to share the positive ones because it’s how it’s expected to be.
As a result, there are some sellers who contact the users and offer them new items to test out for free and so they can speak of their experience, good or bad, because it allows their product to have more reviews and it’s pretty common to see on a shop such as Amazon that the items with the largest amount of reviews are also those who are recommended by Amazon.

I will just say a thing about that “trying to buy under Steam nose”, it’s not exactly the truth, making an offer to a developer or a producer using Unity (which is Epic property) isn’t equal to put a gun under their head telling them they won’t be allowed to use their product to make games if they don’t accept. Eventually, it’s the developer which decide what they want and there are a lot of reason which are positive to the players why they can choose Epic. Beside, there are a lot of licenses that are exclusive to other shops, such as Dragon Age with Origin for example, yet you never see such a fuss about it.
It’s only normal that Visual Novels aren’t too present on Epic as they are usually programmed with Ren’Py and not Unity.

Now, what do you think of GOG Galaxy 2.0 ? Do you think you’ll change platform at that point ?

PS: What means the PC acronym for you, if it’s computer, Epic store still sells games that work on computer, in the end, where you buy it won’t affect the fact it works on a computer.

Cece09

The whole buy from under their noses was just something to put at the time. Its was mainly towards the games that were advertised on steam before becoming epic exclusive. I didny really know how to explain it short enough so i went for that instead since felt like it was the best way to describe it with my very limited vocabulary

Ive heard plenty of bad about steam too but i never paid attention to it but with sg and damn epic showing up on google every other day it gets hard to avoid and ignore it like i do with steam. I did try their launcher when I tried to get fortnite but it didnt work so I gave up even bothering with them

For gog galaxy i dont even know what thay is. Ive never used gog just heard a lot about it and just praise without any complaints.

For myself personally as i claimed im at a point that id go back to xbox if steam wasnt a thing. Ive not gotten in the mindframe that pc gaming is better so unless there was another launcher that would feature visual novels i just dont see the point. You can just look at my wishlist and library to see that my style is just something that isnt anywhere else. I have no interest in xbox, playstation or even pc games that are exclusive to stuff like origin

Иιɢʜᴛᴍᴀᴢᴇ

GOG Galaxy 2.0 is in beta right now, it’s a launcher that will feature every shop including Steam, Uplay, Origin, etc. You will be able to gather all your game on a single platform, same for your friends, etc.

Cece09

Oh okay. Idk how much it would effect people but there should be less people who complain about all the different launchers

I have had a launcher for when i had sims and i was basically forced to have one when i had south park so it would still be useless for me but if i had lots of games in different launchers yeah im sure it would come in handy

Иιɢʜᴛᴍᴀᴢᴇ

Yes, that’s what I thought too, gathering all your friends and games on a single launcher should smooth things over, but who knows what will happen then haha ^^ !

Lucky Thirteen

The Steam Grand Prix event absolutely sucked.
Broken, half-assed, centered around spending money and it didn’t even come with an actual minigame you could actually play. The Pit Stop was handled very poorly and the fact that people got insanely random amounts of points/boosters the first day of the event only added fuel to the fire (I understand it was meant to be tied to how many cash you spent previously, but judging by the feedback, it was pretty much random).

Just in case that alone wasn’t bad enough, the “play these games you own” section had 5 random F2P games that I neither own nor am even remotely interested in (with the exception of PoE, which I used to play). The “participating games” didn’t include anything I own either, so what the fuck was the point. Literally all I could do was click a button once a day and get rewarded with a whopping 100 points (lol). One hell of a minigame :steamfacepalm:

And they probably couln’t time it worse if they tried - these months when the “Steam vs Epic” war is going on, I dare say that Steam was expected to come up with something really cool, like they did the previous years. Instead, we got a failure of Epic proportions (pun very much intended).

And just to be clear, I wouldn’t mind the idea of “better rewards for people who spend more” in itself. It’s just that if you wanna go that way, you absolutely have to implement in such a way that feels fair and has a little something for everyone (for example, varying discount coupons with the token cost depending on the percentage). I’m a big fan of Steam so I’m not just looking for an opportunity to talk shit about Valve, but I’m certainly not a fan of whatever the hell this thing was.

Trent

Yeah pretty much this Re: Grand Prix. I spent about US$2 on games and I could still only use 100 tokens per day. And there was nothing I wanted to play from their tiny list of participating games.

Lucky Thirteen

I believe you forgot a zero in that amount of money you spent ;D I spent €10 on Kingdoms of Amalur collection the last day of the sale, but I was really considering not to buy anything at all this sale (we talked about this elsewhere on this site, right?).

Trent

Oh really, it was $10 to increase your daily limit by 100 tokens? How did I miss that? No way would I do that…there’s really no benefit to being on the “winning” team other than getting a lottery ticket to have a very small chance to win a wishlist game.

Oh well, shows how closely I followed the event.

Иιɢʜᴛᴍᴀᴢᴇ

Actually that part didn’t even work for me, it was supposed to augment the daily limit as well and it never did for me. Actually, I got every single bugs on my side, it made me wonder if they had actual developer working on this or if they gave the hob to a first year intern or something.

Lucky Thirteen

The “best” thing is, there were people who reported that they spent large sums of money and didn’t get any extra points at all, either 👍
Also, the money spent didn’t increase DAILY limit, it increased the limit FOR ONE DAY (and yes, that was fully intended because Valve stopped giving a shit a long time ago, apparently).

Иιɢʜᴛᴍᴀᴢᴇ

For me who doesn’t care much about the shop where I buy my stuff and will care even less once GOG Galaxy 2.0 will be there, I found that by comparison, it was extraordinary shitty.
I bought Journey on Epic for $5 and was super happy, because I was waiting for it to be available on computer for very long, while at the same time reading people being sad that it was still not available on computer because it was on Epic (good lord, double standard + cognitive dissonance together sure make people say really weird stuff).
I got every possible bugs on the Grand Prix and seeing that after the month and a half sale on Epic and the weekly free giveaways on Kinguin, I really thought they were super cheap. They know they have the largest amount of people on their shop and that people won’t leave even if they treat them miserably.
To me the whole debacle is just an extraordinary social psychology case study, I should have a look around if some people wrote papers on that.

Amitte

Steam Grand Prix could have been better, but wow, people had their opinions on it. Even so, reading them made me feel like we all could have been taking part in our own events because of how all over the place it was. I’ve had lots of points to use, but the limit technically forbid me from doing so… so I ended up using all the points I could to get Pit Stop points… and spend them on backgrounds and emotes. Yeah, that might have been a mistake, considering I still want something more to pimp my profile (lol). But yeah, I didn’t win anything; if I did, I’d be running all over the internet talking about it, probably xD

Personally, idk about the huge Steam vs Epic thing. I just take what Epic gives and only have an account there because they give out free games - I don’t even feel like my backlog is growing or anything, since I don’t have anything other than games there - no different friends to chat with, achievements to earn in games, and the whole Epic Store is still just lacking too much stuff anyway imo. I’ll stick with Steam and my huge backlog for now, thanks (lol)

Speaking of annoying habits… my mom does that kind of thing all the time. She never learns, even if I make a point to try and convince her I’m right every time. She just gets angry and tells me she doesn’t “need my advice”. Welp, then I guess the reason for her laptop ultimately giving out on her was ONLY its age, and not how poorly she handled it (never turning it off, overloading its disc space, keeping dozens of website tabs open at all times)…

Иιɢʜᴛᴍᴀᴢᴇ

I should have add that question at the end of my long post : What do you think of GOG Galaxy ? Do you think you’ll switch to it ?

Amitte

My stance on that is similar to what I think about Epic - though I’m pretty sure GOG holds up much better than Epic does, judging by how many people use it as a viable alternative to Steam, while whoever decides to legitimately buy a game on Epic often seems guilty (!) when talking about it online. That being said, I’ve got even less games than I do on Epic and they’re all freebies too, so I don’t see myself switching any day soon.

Иιɢʜᴛᴍᴀᴢᴇ

GOG Galaxy is an alternative launcher which will include not only Steam and Epic games, but also GOG, Uplay, etc.

Amitte

Meh. What’s the difference? Launchers are the least problematic thing that could be.

Иιɢʜᴛᴍᴀᴢᴇ

the point is to have all your games, friendlist, etc. gathered in one single place.

Amitte

Steam is that for me already. I almost couldn’t care less about the few games I have in other places.

IcyGlare

I thought the summer sale event was meh. I didn’t even bother to spend my points on the emoticons and backgrounds because they looked meh.

I’m pretty familiar with the concept of cognitive dissonance because of my experience with religion and subsequent deconversion. As for its application in the Steam vs. Epic thing, I don’t think that most people who complain about Epic do so because of blind fanaticism or plain resistance to change. Sure, maybe some do, but a lot of those who complain acknowledge Steam’s faults but stick with it because the benefits from Steam outweigh its faults, and Epic doesn’t offer anything better. Not to mention some valid concerns about Epic’s exclusivity deals, such as being forced to use an objectively inferior store/launcher, and cases of bait and switch (an issue with some crowdfunded projects).

Иιɢʜᴛᴍᴀᴢᴇ

Cognitive Dissonance sure is an important part of anything related to sects and fanaticism, but it would be negative to limit it to that. The example in the video speaks of smoking while knowing that smoking is bad for health, and I consider that the dissonance cognitive regarding Steam is more of that sort rather than anything even close to fanaticism.
What are the benefits of Steam you’re speaking about ? I mean, actual benefits regarding the primary purpose of a platform such as Steam, aka playing games. Beside the fact you can play offline, for now I don’t see any, but maybe I don’t know all its functions ?
The fact is that Epic store and Steam could co exist without people turning things into a war and accusing Epic of offering to developer better deals from their favorite licence. Blaming Epic for that is considerably biased since it’s the developer which takes the decision and Steam doesn’t offer anything better to counter the deal, while they could easily do so.

What do you think of GOG Galaxy, do you think that you’ll switch for it once it will be up for good ? Do you think that people will still be reluctant to leave Steam ?

IcyGlare

Cognitive Dissonance sure is an important part of anything related to sects and fanaticism, but it would be negative to limit it to that. The example in the video speaks of smoking while knowing that smoking is bad for health, and I consider that the dissonance cognitive regarding Steam is more of that sort rather than anything even close to fanaticism.

Yes, for smoking, it’s not even close to anything like fanaticism, but rather, nicotine dependence. I’ve never smoked, but from what I’ve read, some people who do so are fully aware that it’s bad for the health, yet they continue to smoke because they feel good, and experience withdrawal symptoms if they stop. It’s not exactly the same as switching from one app to another.

What are the benefits of Steam you’re speaking about ? I mean, actual benefits regarding the primary purpose of a platform such as Steam, aka playing games. Beside the fact you can play offline, for now I don’t see any, but maybe I don’t know all its functions ?

Well, Steam has a working “resume download” function, which is a basic feature of a downloader/launcher. Can’t say the same for Epic (when I tried it). :p And then, there are those social media features such as profiles, forums, reviews, etc. Those may be useless to you but other people find those features indispensable, or convenient, at the very least, and therefore, useful.

The fact is that Epic store and Steam could co exist without people turning things into a war and accusing Epic of offering to developer better deals from their favorite licence. Blaming Epic for that is considerably biased since it’s the developer which takes the decision and Steam doesn’t offer anything better to counter the deal, while they could easily do so.

It’s not that simple. People aren’t angry because devs are going to Epic per se. Again, maybe some are, but not all. It’s more due to unmet reasonable expectations. I don’t see a lot of complaints about The Division 2 not being available on Steam because Ubisoft never advertised that it would be available on Steam. On the other hand, there are games which had Steam store pages for a considerable length of time, and were advertised to be released on certain dates, but their release on Steam was delayed due to those exclusivity deals (And no, those are not mere accusations. Epic and the dev/publisher admitted that there were, in fact, exclusivity deals). What I’m saying is, people would not have been angry if those games were made available on Steam as advertised. For games that were never advertised as being available Steam, I guess being angry about those may be due to bias since there could not have been a reasonable expectation of those games being available on Steam.

What do you think of GOG Galaxy, do you think that you’ll switch for it once it will be up for good ? Do you think that people will still be reluctant to leave Steam ?

I’m fine with GOG Galaxy. And EA Origin. And Uplay. I actually use all of those. I also would have been fine with Epic if it had worked. I tried the Epic launcher and found that it did not have a working “resume download” function. At that time, I had a very slow internet connection such that it would take me the whole day, assuming I didn’t use internet for anything else, to download 5GB. If I had wanted one of those Epic exclusive games, I probably would have been pissed off about being forced to use an utterly useless downloader/launcher. As for switching to GOG, I currently have no reason to do so. Most of my games are on Steam. If I had those games on GOG, sure. As for other people, I can’t say. There are many reasons, valid or not, why people prefer some things rather than others.

godprobe

Really interesting to hear the perspective of someone new to Steam regarding the Summer Sale and race event. It definitely highlights just how bad it was, if it’s turning a new customer against the service.

My experience of the race event was basically: what the hell is this? eh, I’ll just wait ‘til later in the day and figure it out then. At which point it became clear that everyone’s impressions of it were still “what the hell is this?” So I decided to mostly ignore it, but I always like to pick up the backgrounds and emoticons, and get a nice-looking badge. I don’t try to pour any levels into my badge. I don’t even idle games for cards. As soon as the whole profile level + cards thing debuted, it was obvious to me that it was just another way for Valve to make money, so I never got invested in it. Anyway… back to the event…

After the first two days, thousands of points that I figured I’d spend gradually over the course of the sale just vanished. I didn’t know how I’d earned them in the first place, so although it was just more evidence of the event’s catastrophic failure, I was mostly unbothered by it, again thinking Valve would fix things up well enough that I’d be able to get the backgrounds and emoticons anyway. And I did. I did buy some things, and needed to in order to get the points necessary for the backgrounds and emoticons, but I made it. One background had an error on purchasing, and so I tried again, and apparently I bought it twice. Then, I refunded a game, and (expectedly, since this was in the event’s FAQ) the last background I’d picked up vanished. Thankfully, Steam support was quick and on-point enough that they granted my request to delete the earlier extra background, and that refunded the 1000 points I needed to re-purchase the last background again.

This event was not at all typical for Steam though – this was a train wreck like I’ve never seen on the service. Still, all the people making you have high expectations for the event are hyping Steam events too much. They used to be pretty cool, but people ruin good things, and they haven’t been as fun as they were in the past for years now. But nothing’s been as stupidly-made and disastrous and confusing as this one was. The art was nice though; about the only good thing I can say about it.

And the sales…
The sales were actually pretty decent. I expected much worse.

Also Steam’s generosity… the free game raffling is about like what it always was, so, again, I think people hyped the sale for you too much. Steam has been “generous” in the past though. Portal for free, etc. Nothing huge, but still cool.

re: cognitive dissonance, I expected a lot more from that section of your write-up! Instead, it was just a definition and examples (making the video link further redundant), and then saying you weren’t going to discuss it! :P All that build-up, and then I got nothin’ outta that whole section! :D

For me personally, I don’t think of it as cognitive dissonance. I’m well aware that Steam is becoming a bit of a brutish behemoth without much direction apart from making more money with as little effort as possible. For me, it’s about investment. I’m over-invested in my Steam library. In an ideal world, game licenses would transfer to whatever service you preferred. Finally started trying the GOG Galaxy 2.0 beta recently, and I could be convinced to switch to that, were that utopia a real thing. However, it’s not, and Galaxy 2.0 isn’t without its own issues. So for now, the convenience of Steam is still its most attractive feature to me, and is keeping me there. As far as Epic goes… they are even more blatant about money being the bottom line than Steam is. I don’t trust them.

In other words…
Cognitive dissonance has nothing to do with it. imho! :)

Lucky Thirteen

This event was not at all typical for Steam though – this was a train wreck like I’ve never seen on the service. Still, all the people making you have high expectations for the event are hyping Steam events too much. They used to be pretty cool, but people ruin good things, and they haven’t been as fun as they were in the past for years now. But nothing’s been as stupidly-made and disastrous and confusing as this one was.

Personally, I always liked Steam’s winter and summer events. I enjoyed all those little minigames, even the Saliens one that a lot of people disliked. It was always a little something, a nice touch, you know? :) But yes, the thing we got this summer? Utter shitshow.

Иιɢʜᴛᴍᴀᴢᴇ

I admit I laughed at your comment regarding cognitive dissonance “OMG ALL THAT TENSION, ALL THAT EXPLANATION AND NOTHING AT THE END !!!!”

Well I apologize, I hesitated to express my point of view directly and to explain a few more key points regarding Steam and its strategy to keep people shopping there that will make any other company hurting themselves to the resistance to change (that’s the second thing at plays which I spoke of a little).
I honestly preferred having your point of view rather than just giving mine, because we learn more when we think of a problem or a situation and are then more open to another point of view than if one smashes their in your face while you may already be reluctant to heard stuff about it.

BUT ! If you’re eager to read more, if other people too because I didn’t have enough time to read everything that has been written as people apparently had a lot to say about the sale (lol), tell me, I’ll make a part 2 and I’ll explain a part of the other mechanisms at play Valve uses to keeps its customers and why, even when they do shit, customers tend to forgive the shop rather than having a look elsewhere, while they don’t hesitate to do so when it comes to store like Epic for example ,) !

godprobe

Oh good, I was worried I was too aggressive with my stance in that post! But I have to admit, leaving your own voice out of it has probably resulted in a much better discussion here, without people simply arguing with a point of view already given. So… great job there! :D shows what I know! :P

Иιɢʜᴛᴍᴀᴢᴇ

That’s exactly the reason why I left out my point of view, because as soon as you explain, even with proper argument, people deconstruct your message to contradict it bit by bit because feeling personally attacked by it if their opinion is different.
A good example of a conversation that will lead to nowhere is when someone cut your text in small bits to answers to those without taking in account how those are linked and answer to examples as though you were saying that it’s exactly similar, while those are only example explaining how the mechanic works. In those case, there is absolutely no other way to discuss a problem because the rejection is already too high for a reason or another, and that’s what happens most of time when you see a topic becoming the war Steam vs Epic.
Bonus : This week, Green Man Gaming released their own summer sale. Even more to compare, right ?

aonrao

to change their browser to another or…

I saw myself right there. I’m a Google Chrome user and I’ve been using Chrome since… forever I guess. My boyfriend kept trying to convince me to switch to Mozilla, but I refused, saying I don’t necessarily need to. He has good arguments though. Seeing this and being aware of why I might not want to switch makes me more eager to listen =) Thanks for this in general.

In Steam situation, I’m very fond of Kinguin’s Crazy Free Weekends but I wouldn’t use them as a store, only because they don’t have regional pricing. In case of Epic, I would still choose Steam over it, because I don’t have having multiple platforms where I have a lot of games. So far, I do have 3 accounts on 3 different platforms, but with GOG and Epic, it’s the free games they gave away–I haven’t bought anything yet. I’m not too opposed to using them–I would just rather not if I can help it.

This was the first year I actually paid attention to the Summer Sale event and yeah, it was bad. I mean, I don’t care much (I guess) but it was a bit of disappointment, after hearing how good it should be. (Shrugs)

Иιɢʜᴛᴍᴀᴢᴇ

Since I’m living in Europe, the fact there is not so many regional pricing on Kinguin is actually helpful for me as the prices on Steam are always higher than almost everywhere else. There ARE some regional pricing on Kinguin though, such as EU / ROW and a few RU, but it’s not the case for every game and for me it’s always a win, thanks to the fact I live in EU and games are high priced here.

What do you think of the GOG Galaxy 2.0 ? Do you think you’ll switch your platform of choice when it will be around ? What do you think of Discord as well ?

aonrao

It’s good that Kinguin’s working out for you! I know that games are priced highly for euro, and I’m glad there are some other options of buying cheaper ones for EU out there =) I’m not sad about not being able to use Kinguin anyways, as Steam (for the most part) works good for me in prices.

I just recently downloaded GOG Galaxy (in fact, just yesterday morning) and I’ve heard of 2.0 (on r/gog actually) but I don’t know enough about it to consider switching. The thing is, I’m actually very comfortable using Steam (probably because of the prices), and I don’t like the idea of using multiple platforms much like I said. I don’t know about Discord as well, but while I use it for voice calling, I don’t think I would consider it as a store? If that’s what you’re asking?

Although, after my comment on “not being oppossed to using Epic”, I’ve read a couple more things on them and I’ve changed my mind. I won’t use Epic ever probably.

If you can link me a place where I can learn more about GOG Galaxy 2.0 I would appreciate it! =) I can also look around when I’m back home, so it’s fine if you can’t.

aonrao

I checked GOG 2.0, and it looks good! I think I might give it a shot =)

Иιɢʜᴛᴍᴀᴢᴇ

Actually Discord is also a gaming store which offers similar deals to developers. In fact, they are the n°1 when it comes to benefit given to dev and Epic is only the n°2.
The current problem with Epic is the fact that people are really vindicative regarding it and don’t see the interest in having a shop that can be a direct concurrent to Valve. but I may speak of that another time :p !

Formidolosus

Every year people complain about the steam sale because it’s done something different. They complain because there are no more ‘flash deals’, they complain because there are no free things and they complain when the event doesn’t meet their expectations. Yes the grand prix event was a mess this time round, but honestly I have found all the previous games and events pretty stupid too. For me the steam summer sale is always great, because it’s my chance to get a few of the big name games I’ve been wanting. Thanks to regional pricing, no other store out there can match the prices, and I always have a bit of money from my birthday to spend, so for me it’s always going to be a good time, because I get to buy some games I really want to play at a better price than normal, which is really the main point of a sale isn’t it?

As far as the Epic store goes, for me personally, it’s not that I am so attached to Steam that I’m unable to make the jump to spend anything, heck I have bought games on uplay, origin and GOG before, my issue is that their business practises are not good, and I honestly don’t trust them at this point. Buying out exclusivity is going to be costing them a lot of money and unless they start turning a profit, I worry that the whole grand experiment will fail and everyone who has spent money with them will lose access to games they’ve bought. It has happened before with other stores, and unlike publisher stores which are essentially just wrappers for the publishers games, Epic needs to turn a profit on the games they sell in their store to keep it viable. So forgive my scepticism but I’ll wait a bit longer before spending money on Epic. (Oh and the regional pricing on steam means that games are still cheaper for me on steam anyway, so there’s that.)

godprobe

Epic needs to turn a profit on the games they sell in their store to keep it viable.

Regarding that point… for some of the games, that might not be quite as important – if they’re running on the Unreal Engine, then Epic may already be making a profit on the game. Early on, they seemed to indicate that Unreal-based games would get some priority on the Epic Store as well, so I’m assuming the store was also a bit of “look what you can do with the Unreal Engine!” in their heads, to get more developers to use that (instead of Unity, for example).

Formidolosus

Fair enough. I was talking more about the profit of the store itself. But maybe they are just merging them together?

Иιɢʜᴛᴍᴀᴢᴇ

Epic offers to developers to get more from their work, on my point of view it can only be positive as it also means that the developers can invest the bonus in new games earlier, work on more DLC, etc. Never forget that the producers as much as the developers can say no to an offer.
Epic store may add an exclusivity for X time on their shop so they can actually turn profit, but so do other shops with other licences without people complaining about it. After all, the SIMS 4 and Dragon Age are Origin exclusives for example and I don’t see anybody complaining about it.

godprobe

After all, the SIMS 4 and Dragon Age are Origin exclusives for example and I don’t see anybody complaining about it.

There was plenty of controversy back when this happened.
https://www.geekweek.com/2011/06/recently-released-ea-games-pulled-from-steam.html

EA’s take…
https://www.techspot.com/news/44602-ea-explains-why-crysis-2-was-pulled-from-steam.html

Valve / GabeN’s take…
https://www.technobuffalo.com/valves-newell-talks-origin-and-ea-pulling-games-from-steam

The first big title EA released entirely off of Steam after this was Mass Effect 3. Plenty of people purchased it on Origin, but I think the success of that departure from the Steam store was tempered by the controversy over ME3’s different-colored endings. But since then, EA’s releases possibly being Origin exclusive has just been expected. We (or at least I) don’t like it, but only because, like Epic’s exclusivity buyouts, it’s just another limitation of consumer choice. For example, I really love that CD Projekt Red releases their titles on their own service (GOG) DRM-free, but also puts them on Steam.

Formidolosus

Hmmm yeah but those games were developed by the owners of the platform, so I don’t really think it’s the same thing. Valve developed games are Steam exclusive as well, but I guess being as Steam originated as a means to distribute their games it’s fine. Same as origin and uplay and battle.net all exist primarily as the means to distribute their publishers games. Epic is actively seeking to remove games that were promised on one platform to have them on their own, games which they don’t own, which is where a lot of people have an issue. I don’t care about that so much as I don’t normally buy games within the first year they are on sale anyway, my issue is more just one of trust at this point.

Иιɢʜᴛᴍᴀᴢᴇ

Epic is actually the one developing Unreal Engine and the games available on their platform are mostly developed with this tool if I’m not wrong. Epic is offering a deal to developers using their tools to produce games, once more, developers are the ones taking the final decision, why not blaming them in the end ?

vigor

About the event, I’m happy enough of getting 5000 xp or so from the badge.
About the money: Only invested 5 paypal euros into steam but end buying nothing
About skype: I stopped using skype years ago, now I use mainly discord and steam.
About Epic: I don’t like Fortnite and all the kids getting sucked into that game tbh, but that % reduced fee for developers is something I cannot ignore, if I was a developer I would probably go to Epic first.

Иιɢʜᴛᴍᴀᴢᴇ

Unrelated question: What do you think of Steam chats and forums and announces for groups ?

vigor

steam chats: Sometimes I feel the need of using group chats with the official app, but noooooo, what valve employee would work on that, right?
I prefer websites instead of steam groups, it’s easier to manage and way less spammy. Sometimes I find the same advert in a whole network of groups and have to quit half of them.

Trent

Any event that tries to get me to play games I don’t want to play atm, even if they’re games I own, probably won’t fly with me. To add insult to injury, spending US$2 on the sale didn’t let me use more than 100 tokens per day, so I guess that was another bug. But it’s not like I’d actually get anything for being able to use more tokens other than…a few emoticons or background? Or upping my badge level…?

As for Epic, I think people always react to exclusives when they’re the ones being excluded. ;) And some devs did legitimately screw users over by switching to Epic after the fact. Personally, I’ve had a “no non-Steam DRM” rule for some time now, so I don’t have interest in other DRM platforms/clients. But who knows, if they offered enough free games, and/or the platform matured sufficiently, then maybe I’d give it a try.

Иιɢʜᴛᴍᴀᴢᴇ

I’m glad to read someone saying that it’s the developers fault for switching to Epic and not Epic fault for offering a better contract.
What do you think of GOG Galaxy 2.0 ? Do you think that you will switch to it ?

Trent

To the degree that I will play my GOG games, I will use the Galaxy client. I don’t intend to use any of the social / Steam-like features that are planned. Of the ~150 games I have on GOG (mostly freebies and GOG Connect games), I have partially played five of them on GOG, and never finished one. Sad but true.

MouseWithBeer

I started writing a comment on this way too man times already. All I will say is that for the Steam vs Epic thing you have to look beyond just sales and actually see the big picture of things. If you do that you will see a whole different picture that even considering with all the awful shit Valve did in the past probably still makes the show in the best light out of all 3 of them.

Иιɢʜᴛᴍᴀᴢᴇ

I would be glad to hear more about all the shit Valve did and all the argument you have against any of the shops you have in mind. It seems like the topic is interesting a bunch of people so I may write a part 2 and the more material I have the best it is. Plus I’m rather new to Steam so there are a lot of things I don’t know and am curious about :) !

MouseWithBeer

The topic has been done to death, I just despise Epic enough that I will take every chance I get to shit on them.

I am on my phone so some years might be wrong as I can’t be arsed to look them up.

Bad things about Valve:

  • they didn’t have proper support till the beginning of 2018
  • didn’t have refunds till 2016
  • refused to give Australia their currency in the shop till last year
  • got rid of EU2 pricing which was a 2nd pricing region for poorer European countries making everyone pay EU1 ones.
  • they should fire every single one of their UI designers because they are all bad
  • the new chat is still a mess a year later, so it is Panorama UI in CSGO 2 years later
  • accidentally leaked customer info on Christmas a few years ago
  • greenlight
  • refusing to curate a damn thing, I don’t care about the flood of shitty games. I care about games that outright don’t work/lie
  • their API is a piece of fucking shit
  • probably more, but that is all that comes to mind right now

Good:

  • made a very convient way to buy games cheap
  • they did so much to help gaming on Linux. The days of LiNuX dOeSnT HaVe GaMeS are long gone. 60% of Steam games now work on Linux mostly issue free and a lot more with some bigger issues. It was 50% just a couple of months ago. Before they introduced Proton/SteamPlay less than a year ago it was a lot less.
  • their new recommendation system is quite cool
  • gave away plenty of free games
  • allow the devs to sell Steam keys for their games at a 100% profit
  • from what I have heard their support is actually great now
  • probably some more that I can’t think of right now.

Epic:
Bad:

  • took me 3 weeks and talking to 3 useless people to manage to get my account deleted.
  • you know how I said that Steam was working on trying to improve Linux gaming? They were working with Easy Anti Cheat trying to get support for Linux. You know what Epic did? Bought EAC and stopped all the progress :) Their CEO compared using Linux to moving to Canada, because that makes so much sense lol
  • buying exclusivity, even from games that were promised to get released on Steam in the first place
  • their client was looking at files on people’s PCs that has 0 businesses looking at.
  • The /r/fuckepic subreddit has a nice shitlist of all the crap they did over time

Good:

  • they give away some games sometimes I guess?

Kingvin:
While not as bad as G2A from what I have seen/heard they still allow for stolen keys to be sold on their marketplace which directly hurts game devs, do I need to add anything more here?

Edit: added Epic and Kingvin that I promised to add last night

86maylin

Well, I was kinda disappointed by the sale since there’s no cards. Yes I’m the type that wait for sales to craft badges, but now I need to wait for god damn autumn or winter sale. Pretty annoying. And the event itself is kinda boring. The only bug I encountered is that when I tried playing Stardew to get the points it’s not registering. That was before I even knew there’s a fucking point limit tho so now that I think about it it’s probably cuz I already reached the limit by getting achievement points. It’s still super bad that it’s all too confusing and the fact that there’s a limit isn’t really clear. Spent all my points on badges and emotes cuz I’m a hoarder and I don’t think I could’ve gotten a discount anyways? Also I did not win, which is not a surprise since I chose Corgi. lol

As for Cognitive Dissonance, I have heard of it and honestly, I would think I also sometimes am like that. lol I don’t like changes. I would rather stay in my comfort zone if I don’t have to change. It’s just something that most people will have.

I’m actually really looking forward to GOG Galaxy 2.0. I think if it really accomplish what they say they will do it would be fantastic. Personally I don’t have a problem using other platforms, however I’ll still primarily use steam mainly because of its trading card, items and market place. I’ve managed to earn most of my games from either selling cards I got from free games or items that drop from certain games. AFAIK there’s no other platforms that does that, which is the main reason why I’ll stick to steam. I did have Epic installed tho just for their free games. Those are some damn nice games they’re giving away. Several are even on my steam wishlist. About the war, I don’t really mind Epic. In fact I support it to rise up. Even if the store and launcher is bad and there’s some exclusivity deals problems and such, it’s still great if there’s actually a store that can compete with steam, or even just make Valve have to actually work on making steam better. And also bigger cut for devs is pretty nice. Though I probably wouldn’t buy on Epic tho, maybe. There is Hades that I’m keeping my eyes on. Might eventually get it, who knows?