News Discord to open its distribution platform to all

I didn't even know Discord HAD a platform, aside from being a chat client. To me though this is just 1 more, or with Epic, 2 more annoying things that I might need on my PC at some point. I'm gonna avoid them both if possible. I already got Steam, Origin, GOG, BattleNet and Uplay. Like I need another bloody app.

Oh and Tencent are coming to the party aswell..make that 3 bloody things I don't want.

 

Isn't Steam's approach to ripping developers/publishers off staggered? As in, 70/30 as standard, 85/25 if you make 10m+, 80/20 if you make 50m+?

 

From a developer or publisher's perspective that's staggered from a terrible deal to a very bad deal to merely a bad deal. $3million from tthe first 10, then $10million from the next fourty has paid for setting up a digital distribution platform from scratch, which is obviously the maths EA did with Battlefield 3 eight years ago and Epic/Tencent a couple of years back.

On that note it's quite staggering how Valve have gone from the consumer friendly face of PC gaming to cartoon villains in the last five years. If you had told me in 2012 that by 2018 I would consider Valve and EA interchangeable for their level of honesty I would call you crazy. Granted Valve has achieved infamy by a different route to EA, but still they have managed it.

 

The thing that makes Discord's store really interesting is that a crapton of people already have Discord installed. It makes it way more likely to be used widely instead of just being another weird not-Steam.

 

Except they are still by far the best game store that exists:

No one has better OS X and Linux support than Steam.
No one has better mod support than Steam does with Workshop.
Some of the other shops either have no refunds or expect you to contact support rather than making it as easy as Steam does.
Most other stores lack user reviews to steer you away from broken crap like Street Fighter V and the likes.
Not even to mention stuff like the ever improving support for non Xbox controllers, Big Picture mode, Family sharing etc.

(And yes, that says more about the abject failure of the other stores rather than the "glory" of Steam)

 

Prior to 'Workshop' the way mods worked was:
- You installed a game
- You download a mod (from anywhere)
- You install the mod

Steam Workshop just added a middleman to that process, then made a go at charging you for the privilege.

 

And it was a complete pita since you had to know where to look for info to find out that said "anywhere" even existed, you had to read a manual to install the mod correctly, you risked having to pointlessly reinstall games if a mod didn't work as opposed to simply unticking a checkbox.
I'll take the easy to use method over the needlessly complicated old garbage any day of the week.

As for paid mods, yes the implementation Steam tried to cram down our throats was horrible, but they also got rid of it quickly.

 

I take proper modding over Steam's streamlined experience any day of the week. And by proper modding I mean games that support mods from the word go (level editors, logic editors, world creation and story line tools, ...). Think Doom, Quake, Oblivion, Half-Life. If I have to put effort into finding stuff that makes my game better/more fun/fresh I'll gladly do it. Sadly, most games today don't even support modding anymore. Even mapping tools are extremely hard to find.

 

I agree that Steam is the best piece of software, the trouble is Valve's 'let anyone publish and take 30%' approach eaves it functionally useless to actually publish games on unless your either:

A Triple AA publisher with the financial clout to buy space on the front page.
Mass releasing asset flips and so called fake games for the purpose of money laundering.

Actual releases by medium sized or small studios basically disappear into the aether the moment they are launched. Whilst big releases spending onto the front page is fine, Valve have shown no interest in solving the latter problem. I don't think they ever will either, unless they are implicated in something really nasty that was funded via Steam purchases, at which point excrement will hit the rotary ventilation device. It will happen sooner or later.

 

Steam as a piece of software is a fairly tottering heap. The store itself is just a wrapped-up web browser (it's just the Steam webpage in a skinned window), there's a pile of garbage you need to turn off after installing steam to avoid being peppered with in-game social nonsense, and half that 'community' guff is also just web pages in skinned browser windows. Then you haver trading cards, pins, badges, or whatever other F2P microtransaction garbage Valve have thought up that you get bombarded with for successfully starting a game up that clogs up any sort of notification feed that might be buried in the whole mess.
I'd rather just dike out the file updating portion of it and trash the rest.

 

On Steam itself? Sure, but you also don't have to rely on sales from Steam alone. Valve doesn't care if you sell 20 copies on Steam and the rest of your sales comes from sites like Fanatical / Gamesplanet / Greenmangaming / Humble etc who will bother to do some mild promo for your game, while also bypassing the 30% problem.