It was Epic Games, yes. They're heavily incentivizing in order to up their numbers. The issue, for me, is that their platform simply sucks. I gave in due to the incentives eventually, but I think they're doomed to fail unless they put serious work into improving the platform.
If people want to decry Steam, that's fine, but these would-be competitors are dooming themselves if they can't muster an equivalent quality to the baddie.
There are a couple of problems with this, in my opinion.
Firstly, "simply sucks" is entirely subjective, which makes building a competitive platform a fool's errand (unless it somehow mirrors Steam in every way, and they've had an X year headstart). This isn't me saying "aha subjective YOU LOSE". This is me saying it's impossible to draw on a hundred thousand variants of why it apparently sucks and build an effective roadmap out of it.
A lot of a (general, hypothetical) player's investment in Steam is straight-up psychological. It's why they added account levels, it's why they added Trading Cards (well, that and the money factor). I'm not saying it doesn't work, or people are bad for liking shiny aesthetic bells and whistles, but it creates an image that is harder to compete with.
There were people spamming "Epic sucks because it doesn't allow user reviews" as though that was a glaring omission and not intentional choice (see: all the issues Steam's had with review bombing).
Secondly, we have evidence of competing clients that do have comparable features and they somehow weren't good enough. Origin launched out of beta with a working offline mode, all the trophy aesthetic stuff, and the overriding manta was "EA sucks". It had little to do with the client, just like a lot of positive impressions of Steam come from its association with Valve. People will justify
anything on spurious (and most recently, somewhat racist) theories. Take Tencent, for example. A huge investor in a ton of companies, but because they have shares in Epic people came out with "it sells information to China". Folks can
dislike Tencent all they want (I trust them as far as I can trust any company above a certain size, office building included. So not at all
), but all this scaremongering does is preserve the status quo of Steam's dominance in the market - with Steam not having done anything (and certainly not being at all innocent in terms of data collection. No more than any company does, but that goes for, well, all companies. I criticise them equally on this kind of thing - I have a lot of experience with data privacy since GDPR came into effect over here).
I use Steam, Origin, Epic, whatever. Except the Stardock one, because Stardock sucks (in my personal and humble opinion). That's my choice. But I also recognise the problems people have with the concept of DRM full stop (which to me is far more understandable than selective dislikes of whatever platform - because it's
consistent). My problem (and it's nothing to do with anyone in this thread) is I've had to deal with
so many people bending over backwards to defend whatever Steam has done and is doing because said folks are emotionally (and financially) invested in it, but just don't recognise that.
I'm invested in Steam! I have several hundred games on it, which I would struggle to source elsewhere and especially given the cost involved. I'm unlikely to be getting rid of it anytime soon. But I've had a lot of arguments about feature parity over the past decade, and in my lengthy but still anecdotal experience, people just can't seem to separate that investment from their analysis.
