Epic Games has been clear about seeing Steam as a direct competitor, and has done everything from giving away free games to paying for timed exclusives to entice players.
Yup, that’s everything. Those are their only options. Yup. Nothing else to be done. It’s an unsolvable problem if those things don’t work.
This is supposed to be how competition in the marketplace works
In case the above sarcasm wasn’t clear, no, this is not how competition in the marketplace is supposed to work.
If you want a preview of an uncaring and anti-consumer Valve, look no further than the company’s efforts on Mac.
This is an example of Apple making life difficult for its customers, not Valve.
There’s no excuse for Steam on Mac to be a far worse experience than on other platforms, though.
There is, because Apple wanted to control their entire hardware pipeline, which meant breaking compatibility with the entire history of PC gaming when they did so. If this is your smoking gun, author, try harder.
Eventually, the bomb will go off, and the full ‘enshittification’ of Steam will commence.
I hate this enshittification term so much, because all it means is that they got complacent, and competitors can pick up the slack. You just spend your money elsewhere, whether it’s Xbox vs. PlayStation or Steam vs. GOG. It is a problem that Steam has so much control of the marketplace, but they got there because their competitors aren’t truly competing. I finally found a reason to shop on GOG again, despite the fact that they don’t support their Linux customers as well as their Windows customers, and definitely not as well as Valve treats them, but DRM-free is a compelling argument for me. Epic does not make a compelling argument for the consumer, which is why that meme, pasted in the middle of the article, exists.
There’s a difference between Valve deciding to not make Mac games anymore and Valve leaving the Mac Steam client a slow and laggy mess on newer Macs. The former only affects people who want to play Valve games, the latter affects a lot more people.
Is it perhaps a slow, laggy mess because Apple decided to break from the same convention that everyone else uses and has used for decades and now has to emulate a different processor architecture? Apple is the one who made gaming shittier on Macs, and they’re going to point to Death Stranding and Resident Evil 4, expecting the flood gates to be open, and now everyone’s going to port their games to Mac. Except they’re not. Apple won’t understand why not, but once again, as they’ve always done, breaking from convention and establishing your own standard that doesn’t play nice with what everyone else is building around is bad for developers. Before this, they were still making developers’ lives harder by not supporting certain graphics APIs. Valve made a Vulkan translation layer to Apple’s Metal, since Apple wouldn’t officially allow for Vulkan, and that was shortly before the architecture change.
Every other major application and service on Mac has ARM-native builds now, there’s not really an excuse for Valve. It’s especially silly when much of Steam is running through a Chromium engine, not machine code or anything else that might be difficult to port.
It is an excuse for Valve, because their business is selling thousands of games that do not have ARM-native builds. No action of Valve’s made Steam worse for Mac users. An action of Apple’s did that. At some point, it’s not worth it for Valve to update their application to be better for a platform that’s actively hostile to its business partners.
Valve leaving the Mac Steam client a slow and laggy mess on newer Macs.
What happened to the Apple fanboys who claimed that the Apple M processors were so fast, x86 applications emulated on Apple M would run much faster than natively on x86 because x86 is supposedly so bad and slow…?
Yup, that’s everything. Those are their only options. Yup. Nothing else to be done. It’s an unsolvable problem if those things don’t work.
In case the above sarcasm wasn’t clear, no, this is not how competition in the marketplace is supposed to work.
This is an example of Apple making life difficult for its customers, not Valve.
There is, because Apple wanted to control their entire hardware pipeline, which meant breaking compatibility with the entire history of PC gaming when they did so. If this is your smoking gun, author, try harder.
I hate this enshittification term so much, because all it means is that they got complacent, and competitors can pick up the slack. You just spend your money elsewhere, whether it’s Xbox vs. PlayStation or Steam vs. GOG. It is a problem that Steam has so much control of the marketplace, but they got there because their competitors aren’t truly competing. I finally found a reason to shop on GOG again, despite the fact that they don’t support their Linux customers as well as their Windows customers, and definitely not as well as Valve treats them, but DRM-free is a compelling argument for me. Epic does not make a compelling argument for the consumer, which is why that meme, pasted in the middle of the article, exists.
There’s a difference between Valve deciding to not make Mac games anymore and Valve leaving the Mac Steam client a slow and laggy mess on newer Macs. The former only affects people who want to play Valve games, the latter affects a lot more people.
Is it perhaps a slow, laggy mess because Apple decided to break from the same convention that everyone else uses and has used for decades and now has to emulate a different processor architecture? Apple is the one who made gaming shittier on Macs, and they’re going to point to Death Stranding and Resident Evil 4, expecting the flood gates to be open, and now everyone’s going to port their games to Mac. Except they’re not. Apple won’t understand why not, but once again, as they’ve always done, breaking from convention and establishing your own standard that doesn’t play nice with what everyone else is building around is bad for developers. Before this, they were still making developers’ lives harder by not supporting certain graphics APIs. Valve made a Vulkan translation layer to Apple’s Metal, since Apple wouldn’t officially allow for Vulkan, and that was shortly before the architecture change.
Every other major application and service on Mac has ARM-native builds now, there’s not really an excuse for Valve. It’s especially silly when much of Steam is running through a Chromium engine, not machine code or anything else that might be difficult to port.
It is an excuse for Valve, because their business is selling thousands of games that do not have ARM-native builds. No action of Valve’s made Steam worse for Mac users. An action of Apple’s did that. At some point, it’s not worth it for Valve to update their application to be better for a platform that’s actively hostile to its business partners.
What happened to the Apple fanboys who claimed that the Apple M processors were so fast, x86 applications emulated on Apple M would run much faster than natively on x86 because x86 is supposedly so bad and slow…?
Apple decided Macs are for playing iPhone games on bigger screens.