Steam is a case of "first out of the gate wins" business. It was easy being the first store out there. There was no alternative and Steam gobbled up all PC gamers. Now, you'd have to convince people to fix what's (for them) clearly not broken and make them come to your new store. When Steam has every conceivable feature already (except proper 2FA authentication, which is a headscratcher, but I digress). And people clearly having no wish to spread there games across several stores.

On top of that, the motivation for EPIC, EA and Ubisoft's stores wasn't even offering users a better experience. It was purely meant for developers to evade Steam's high fees. Thing is that users don't care how much fees the developers pay. That had and still have zero incentive to switch.

People have tried to replace Facebook, too. Same result. There is no room for another social network for the same reasons there is no room for another online game store.

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If all it takes to be against hate to get targeted by these people, it seems it doesn't take much these days. It also says more about them than their targets.

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Anyone know what these "unfavorable market dynamics" even are? From what I have seen, industry revenue in the PC/console segments seem to be more or less stable and mobile is still growing a bit. In other words, people aren't spending less money on games. I suppose it's more unfavorable shareholders complaining about their yachts being too small?

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Unity are focusing on adverts a lot with tighter advert tech integrations

The same adverts that prohibit your game from being published on World's largest games retailer? :D

*slow clap*

And yes, who needs Unity when there is Godot?

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Too bad it's unfinished from what I've heard.

That and they removed the soul from the game, which was guiding a civilization from the bronze age all the way to the space race. Some dev apparently felt the need to change things that weren't broken for the sake of changing things. Unless they make the "pick a new civilization for every new age" feature optional, there is no way I am going to buy this game.

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Again, most of these magnet games aren't on Steam anyway. PUBG is, but it's F2P and thus creates next to no income for Steam. And if it's the main game for some people, why would Steam care about them leaving? People so focused on one game aren't very likely to buy dozens of others...

For all I care, they can grandfather existing games, which would remedy your concern. Making it next to impossible for developers to use kernel level anti cheat in future projects will do the trick just fine.

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If Valve banned kernel-level anti-cheat, some of the most popular and most-lucrative games on Steam would go to the Epic Store, terrible business move that will never happen.

EA tried leaving Steam and crawled back
Ubisoft tried leaving Steam and crawled back

Leaving Steam is terrible for business if not even some of the largest publishers can pull it off. There are only a handful of high profile games that can do that and most of these have never been on Steam anyway (Fortnite, Valorant etc). The move would hit all the smaller games that would simply die without Steam and thus make it impossible for developers to use kernel level anti-cheat unless they are 100% certain that their game will become a mega-hit even without Steam, turning using it into a gamble.

I am not sure why Valve would need to be afraid of the EPIC store. It's a laughable failure that keeps existing only because EPIC constantly shoveling money into the financial abyss that it is.

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They should ban kernel level anti-cheat while they're at it. I hate ads as much as the next person, but I hate malware more.

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Bugs aside, but I am very unlikely to buy Civ VII, despite I own every single previous game of the franchise, dating all the way back to the first. But I absolutely hate the idea to force you to play a new nation whenever a new age dawns. It reeks of changing things for the sake of changing them. Yes, I get it that playing as the U.S. in 3000 BC isn't historically accurate. But I never heard anyone complaining about it.

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What Valve really should do about the anti-cheat situation is flat out telling developers that games containing malware-like components cannot be listed on Steam. Maybe Epic won't be overly bothered by this move, but as recent history has shown, developers cannot afford not being on Steam. Some tried and all came crawling back.

It would do Windows users a favor, too. They don't like malware any more than we do.

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