Coming back to Steam.

 Look who came crawling back!

It takes quite the gall to step away from the biggest video game marketplace in the industry in order to sell your games literally anywhere else in the world. Helped, often, by the kind influx of angel money from the platform to which you're heading, or at the very least a much better general cut of the sales you'll be making, ideally resulting in better dividends. Provided, of course, that people will be encouraged enough to seek you out on that comparatively niche and small-pond alternative in order to actually go and buy your game. Because invariably, if you aren't on Steam you're not where the visibility is. But what if you have the absolute supreme confidence to go out there and take that one step further? To actually mount your own marketplace to sell your very own video games? Why, at that point you've got to be at the top of your game, right?

I mean, having the gall to launch your own storefront is basically saying that as a company your singular brand is powerful enough to attract anyone who would want to seek out your games directly to you. You have that staying power which few other publishing houses can match, and that ability to market directly into the feeds of your user base without the help of Steam and discount sales. And- crucially, that you have the consumer trust to hang onto their bank details for long enough for the transaction to go through. That last one is a big one, because let me tell you there are plenty of times I've backed out from even considering the purchase just because I think the website looks like the kind to suffer a password breach without alerting their users for the first three months. If you can claim all of that, then why shouldn't you strike out on your own and start your own storefront?

Well, we've actually touched on this topic before and a big point of contention is the user experience on PC. Any PC player will tell you that the single most frustrating moment of buying a PC game is realising that the damn thing won't play until you download a crappy publisher-only launcher ontop of the game you just brought. Thank you so much Paradox Interactive; but I only own Stellaris, why in god's name do I need your first party software booting up everytime I play that one game of yours? Well, triple that sense of exasperation when it comes to whole actual storefronts! Now your library is in five separate applications. Just the other week I had to go on a wild goose chase to figure out which library held my PC version of Watch_Dogs 1 in it. It was the Ubisoft one. I totally forgot that Ubisoft hosted their own games through their very own service until that exact point.

The more companies who start to split off their games from Steam, the more inherently segmented their playerbase becomes. How many people out there buy their games dependent on which games get a discount? That's pretty much my entire philosophy unless it's a title I adore so much I have to support the developer with a full priced purchase. Well Steam and Epic have systems in place so you know when a discount is implemented to a game you're looking for; but games on EA Origin? On Ubisoft's store? I don't even if they do get discounted, because no body is checking out their storefronts on a daily basis. Maybe you could subscribe to the websites for that info; but do you really want the corporate shill marketing account cluttering up your inbox? Is that what anybody wants?

So what do you do when you're own hubris leads you out of turn? What happens when you've believed yourself to be strong enough to start your very own marketplace, only for that to come and bite you in the profits? Well, just ask literally anyone other than Epic who has done this over the years. GOG is it's own thing with it's own draw, but I genuinely think Epic games are the only devs who tried to copy what Steam did and bragged it off based on the sheer power of their Fortnite money, and even then there are significant market reach limitations constraining their growth. EA Origin ended up folding into Steam, and now it seems like Ubisoft is starting the arduous process of bringing all of it's modern titles to Steam to match up with their old titles, so that maybe now people can start finishing off that Assassin's Creed collection they started ten years ago.

News on this came out whilst Valhalla was getting it's very last update, because apparently some truly lost individuals still play Assassin's Creed Valhalla expecting the grind to suddenly evaporate or become worth it in the end. (There's no worthwhile endgame content; save yourself the trouble.) Assassin's Creed is coming to Steam as Ubisoft are no only happy supporting their games with only Epic and their own storefront. I myself can attest to how this effected my own buying decisions when it came to buying one of their games. Because when it came to buying Watch_Dogs Legion with Ubisoft or with Epic, I defaulted to Epic simply because I didn't trust Ubisoft to stick around and remember by purchase five years from now. And I never pick Epic if I can help it!

I suppose this prove that despite the increased value for developers to launch their games on Epic, there really is no true replacement for Steam. Because even positioned as the artesian game marketplace, free of freemium trash games which clutter Steam's ecosystem, Epic cannot hope to match the reach of their bluer competitor. It's a shame really, lack of serious competition always lends to stagnancy, and though it's looked rough here and there, I don't think Steam are taking Epic seriously anymore. Heck, Square Enix even did a same day release for Final Fantasy Crisis Core Reunion! Can you believe that? I'm still having trouble wrapping it around my head! I had to wait an entire year for the FF7R bad PC port to come to Steam; what the hell, Square?

Ubisoft, EA, Bethesda; how many more preppy so-and-so's need to be crushed under the cold heel of reality to realise that launching a market place isn't just a 'set in and make money' solution? Do you think that Valve stopped making games simply because their Steam platform made more money? Well... yes, they did; but there was a little bit more ontop of that besides! Decades of work went into making Steam the powerhouse it is today, and it's going to take more than a half-assed barely functional launcher to replace it. Yes, I called Uplay barely functional- it can't even get the Ico file right for the games it downloads! At the end of the day, as a player I just want to press play and not have to worry about all the elements in the background; and if a publisher can create a platform that manages to perform that as good as, or better than, Steam; then you'll have yourselves a competitor!