And I canāt stress enough how exclusivity deals are signed with both first and third parties all the time. Iām old enough to remember when gamers were rioting at the concept that Metal Gear or Final Fantasy would show up on Xbox. Insomniac only got purchased by Sony in 2020, they had made Playstation exclusives for twenty years by that point. From the end user perspective there isnāt, and has never been, any difference between a game being made by a first party or being signed as an exclusive from a third party.
Do you not see how youāre talking about something completely different here? Youāre talking about āMario is only available on Nintendo systemsā not āIf you have a Nintendo you can only buy Mario at Walmartā.
The first is not a monopoly: āYou can purchase this product anywhere you want, it is only compatible on this systemā.
The second is a monopoly: āyou can only purchase this product from US!ā
For someone so much against monopolies and arguing for the need for competition and consumer choice, you are spending a lot of effort arguing FOR a behaviour that restricts competition and consumer choice.
And as for your last pointā¦ so donāt frickin use Epic, who gives a crap. You have so many ways around this entire non-issue. Go play Fortnite on the Switch, or Alan Wake on a PlayStation. Or donāt play them. Or play them on Epic and quit the launcher after. I canāt describe the subatomic size of the violin Iām playing on behalf of your ordeal, my friend. Nobody should care about this.
So we both agree that your argument that āSteam might be bad one dayā is pointless and a non-issue. Good. You can stop bringing it up then.
Thatās not even a little bit what a monopoly is.
Which is obvious. Nobody is out there arguing that signing an exclusivity deal between a first party and a developer is somehow a monopolistic situation. Nobody has argued that in forty years of gaming exclusives and nobody has argued it in a century of television or music recording labels.
So the question becomes why argue it now, right? Why werenāt you mad when Ratchet & Clank could only be purchased an played on a PlayStation or Final Fantasy was only on a SNES? What overzealous, cult-like situation leads to a whole host of people going to bat for this ass-backwards concept on behalf of Steam? Who, I should add, have not argued this themselves or asked for this at all, although thanks to the power of lawsuits we do have a decent indication that they do approve of it.
One has to assume the cart is being put before the horse, given the timeline. People were bashing Ubisoft and EAās previous competitors for less defined, more ambiguous reasons, and often no reason at all beyond brand loyalty. The whole āexclusives are bad nowā argument happens to be the narrative that stuck with Epic specifically because itās the one thing theyāre doing that the previous ones werenāt.
So all of this has been a ton of typing to come back to the only statement this conversation ever needed:
Seeing the console wars play out on the basis of which DRM platform you want to put in your PC is wild.
Why werenāt you mad when Ratchet & Clank could only be purchased an played on a PlayStation or Final Fantasy was only on a SNES?
Why arenāt people angry that you canāt put diesel in a gasoline engine? Why arenāt you mad that a DVD canāt be played in a VHS? Why arenāt you mad that you canāt plug a computer hard drive into a switch and play Civilization?
Do you understand that there is a difference between āThis is only compatible with certain hardwareā and āYou can only purchase this at one specific businessā? Because you are once again arguing as if they are the same thing and Iāve already pointed this out to you, which means you are either completely disingenuous or an idiot. Either way this is a waste of time.
If thereās a third option Iām missing please let me know.
They are the same thing on the business side, absolutely. I mean, games are developed on PC anyway, so those are the same thing today for sure. I promise you there is a PC version of Bloodborne in a FromSoft computer somewhere, even though itās stuck as a PS4 exclusive. Not because there is some mystery technical reason, but because somebody signed a deal to make it that way.
There has never been a technical reason a port of Ratchet & Clank or Uncharted couldnāt work on a PC (or a GameCube, previously), even when there was more porting work to be done, the game would have sold more than enough to make it worth the porting costs. Those games were stuck on their platforms because Insomniac and Naughty Dog had a business relationship with Sony. And then Sony said it was fine for them to be on Epic, Steam and GoG. And then they decided they wanted to have online authentication DRM, so they were only on Epic and Steam after that point.
Hell, if you go backwards, there was an uproar among Nintendo fanboys when Resident Evil 4 stopped being a Gamecube exclusive and showed up on PS2 (and then on everything else). And that, again, was not a technical issue, but a deal that was in place until it wasnāt. Because this conversation has been dumb both ways for a very long time.
The third option is you donāt understand how games are made or exclusivity deals signed and youāre only latching onto them as a backwards justification for your foregone conclusion because you want to root for Steam as a platform.
The third option is you donāt understand how games are made
Right, the devs just need to change the code from āIf_On_PC_Do_Not_Runā from TRUE to FALSE and it will work just fine. And Iām the one that doesnāt understand how games are made.
Dude, no, you really donāt. Youāre Dunning-Krugering the crap out of this one.
Look, you donāt need to take my word for it, but I also donāt need to give you my bona fides or give you a TED talk about how platform targets are chosen in most modern games. You can go look it up.
Itāsā¦ really not how youāre picturing it. And youāre picturing it that way to justify your chosen platform as a home team. You should really stop doing that and just enjoy the games you want to enjoy wherever you want to enjoy them.
How do you think I am picturing it? Iām responding to your absurd claims that not being able to use gasoline in a diesel engine is the same thing as Esso being the only business allowed to sell gasoline.
No, youāre imagining that games are like fuel. Games are not, in fact, like fuel. Itās not like youāre picturing it.
Iām tempted to give you a different simile, but itās clearly pointless. Games are like games. You put them on platforms if it makes more money to sell them there than it costs to port them, and modern hardware is very similar across the board, so thatās most of the time, unless you have something more profitable for your programmers to be doing OR somebody pays you to change that math.
There I am, giving you the TED talk. And you know what? You donāt deserve it. Youāre confidently wrong on the Internet, itās kind of on you at this point. You can figure it out or not, but under no circumstanes will exclusivity deals, co-marketing or co-development deals be anticompetitive just because you want to shill for a random company online. It just doesnāt track at all and itās weird that people keep parroting it.
No, youāre imagining that games are like fuel. Games are not, in fact, like fuel. Itās not like youāre picturing it.
You are saying that a product (games) not being compatible with every hardware (system) is the exact same thing as the product only allowed to be sold from 1 business.
I substituted a different product (fuel) and hardware (engine) to highlight how absurd that is because you still seem to think they are the same thing.
It doesnāt matter how theoretically profitable a port to another system might be, it still takes time and resources to produce. Time and resources that a company might believe can be more profitable spent elsewhere.
It does not take time or resources to make a PC game that is on the EGS compatible with the PC on Steam. I donāt know how to explain this to you more simply.
Do you not see how youāre talking about something completely different here? Youāre talking about āMario is only available on Nintendo systemsā not āIf you have a Nintendo you can only buy Mario at Walmartā.
The first is not a monopoly: āYou can purchase this product anywhere you want, it is only compatible on this systemā.
The second is a monopoly: āyou can only purchase this product from US!ā
For someone so much against monopolies and arguing for the need for competition and consumer choice, you are spending a lot of effort arguing FOR a behaviour that restricts competition and consumer choice.
So we both agree that your argument that āSteam might be bad one dayā is pointless and a non-issue. Good. You can stop bringing it up then.
Thatās not even a little bit what a monopoly is.
Which is obvious. Nobody is out there arguing that signing an exclusivity deal between a first party and a developer is somehow a monopolistic situation. Nobody has argued that in forty years of gaming exclusives and nobody has argued it in a century of television or music recording labels.
So the question becomes why argue it now, right? Why werenāt you mad when Ratchet & Clank could only be purchased an played on a PlayStation or Final Fantasy was only on a SNES? What overzealous, cult-like situation leads to a whole host of people going to bat for this ass-backwards concept on behalf of Steam? Who, I should add, have not argued this themselves or asked for this at all, although thanks to the power of lawsuits we do have a decent indication that they do approve of it.
One has to assume the cart is being put before the horse, given the timeline. People were bashing Ubisoft and EAās previous competitors for less defined, more ambiguous reasons, and often no reason at all beyond brand loyalty. The whole āexclusives are bad nowā argument happens to be the narrative that stuck with Epic specifically because itās the one thing theyāre doing that the previous ones werenāt.
So all of this has been a ton of typing to come back to the only statement this conversation ever needed:
Seeing the console wars play out on the basis of which DRM platform you want to put in your PC is wild.
Why arenāt people angry that you canāt put diesel in a gasoline engine? Why arenāt you mad that a DVD canāt be played in a VHS? Why arenāt you mad that you canāt plug a computer hard drive into a switch and play Civilization?
Do you understand that there is a difference between āThis is only compatible with certain hardwareā and āYou can only purchase this at one specific businessā? Because you are once again arguing as if they are the same thing and Iāve already pointed this out to you, which means you are either completely disingenuous or an idiot. Either way this is a waste of time.
If thereās a third option Iām missing please let me know.
They are the same thing on the business side, absolutely. I mean, games are developed on PC anyway, so those are the same thing today for sure. I promise you there is a PC version of Bloodborne in a FromSoft computer somewhere, even though itās stuck as a PS4 exclusive. Not because there is some mystery technical reason, but because somebody signed a deal to make it that way.
There has never been a technical reason a port of Ratchet & Clank or Uncharted couldnāt work on a PC (or a GameCube, previously), even when there was more porting work to be done, the game would have sold more than enough to make it worth the porting costs. Those games were stuck on their platforms because Insomniac and Naughty Dog had a business relationship with Sony. And then Sony said it was fine for them to be on Epic, Steam and GoG. And then they decided they wanted to have online authentication DRM, so they were only on Epic and Steam after that point.
Hell, if you go backwards, there was an uproar among Nintendo fanboys when Resident Evil 4 stopped being a Gamecube exclusive and showed up on PS2 (and then on everything else). And that, again, was not a technical issue, but a deal that was in place until it wasnāt. Because this conversation has been dumb both ways for a very long time.
The third option is you donāt understand how games are made or exclusivity deals signed and youāre only latching onto them as a backwards justification for your foregone conclusion because you want to root for Steam as a platform.
Which is the wild part.
Right, the devs just need to change the code from āIf_On_PC_Do_Not_Runā from TRUE to FALSE and it will work just fine. And Iām the one that doesnāt understand how games are made.
Looks like option #2 was the correct one.
Dude, no, you really donāt. Youāre Dunning-Krugering the crap out of this one.
Look, you donāt need to take my word for it, but I also donāt need to give you my bona fides or give you a TED talk about how platform targets are chosen in most modern games. You can go look it up.
Itāsā¦ really not how youāre picturing it. And youāre picturing it that way to justify your chosen platform as a home team. You should really stop doing that and just enjoy the games you want to enjoy wherever you want to enjoy them.
How do you think I am picturing it? Iām responding to your absurd claims that not being able to use gasoline in a diesel engine is the same thing as Esso being the only business allowed to sell gasoline.
No, youāre imagining that games are like fuel. Games are not, in fact, like fuel. Itās not like youāre picturing it.
Iām tempted to give you a different simile, but itās clearly pointless. Games are like games. You put them on platforms if it makes more money to sell them there than it costs to port them, and modern hardware is very similar across the board, so thatās most of the time, unless you have something more profitable for your programmers to be doing OR somebody pays you to change that math.
There I am, giving you the TED talk. And you know what? You donāt deserve it. Youāre confidently wrong on the Internet, itās kind of on you at this point. You can figure it out or not, but under no circumstanes will exclusivity deals, co-marketing or co-development deals be anticompetitive just because you want to shill for a random company online. It just doesnāt track at all and itās weird that people keep parroting it.
You are saying that a product (games) not being compatible with every hardware (system) is the exact same thing as the product only allowed to be sold from 1 business.
I substituted a different product (fuel) and hardware (engine) to highlight how absurd that is because you still seem to think they are the same thing.
It doesnāt matter how theoretically profitable a port to another system might be, it still takes time and resources to produce. Time and resources that a company might believe can be more profitable spent elsewhere.
It does not take time or resources to make a PC game that is on the EGS compatible with the PC on Steam. I donāt know how to explain this to you more simply.