I'm unconvinced that the Nemesis system would have worked well in too many other settings, but one game patent that had a tangible effect on the industry was Bandai-Namco's patent on loading screen mini games. Remember how you could make the Soul Calibur II characters yell stuff while the match loaded? Funny that we didn't see it again until Street Fighter 6, isn't it? Conveniently after a patent would have expired. We went through an entire era of games with load times that could have benefited from mini games, and by the time the patent expired, we had largely come up with ways to get rid of load screens altogether.

What a bunch of scumbags.

Hallelujah. I don't know why so many companies went down this route, particularly when it's not the likes of Ubisoft or whatnot with their own desire to half-ass the attempt at making their own Steam. My guess for its removal is to better support Steam Deck, perhaps?

The peak concurrent users for the game thus far has been less than 1/10th of that (EDIT: slightly more than 1/10th of that). They were well within the bounds of what they simulated. They just screwed up.

Here's hoping! Not only has it ruined a lot of once-smaller games, but it's also largely responsible for ballooning development budgets, so let's get that down to something sustainable.

That direction is straight toward the courthouse.

Despite the best efforts of major publishers including Activision, Electronic Arts, Rockstar, Bethesda, and others, not to mention the far better deal offered to developers by Epic, Steam is more dominant than ever—and in the end, they all came crawlin' back.

They're all crawling back because they did not give it their best effort. They just wanted the full 100% of the sale revenue without doing the hard parts. To be fair to EA, for the first few years, it looked like they were actually going to try.

The game was alive for about 1.5 days for each year of development that they put into Concord.

Let's acknowledge for a second that well over 100 developers are about to lose their livelihoods. Now let's acknowledge that they were building a product from the start that disrespects consumer rights and preservation of the medium, and I'm still glad it failed.

It's an open question whether Epic's limited success is a result of the company's failure to "press its advantage," as Pitchford opines, or just a sign that Steam's massive entrenched network effects have proven more resilient than he expected.

It's not. EGS doesn't solve any problems that Steam leaves on the table to be solved. Customers have no reason to shop at EGS when Epic takes its thumb off the scale.

Boy, it was frustrating to see Thor completely misrepresent the position of the campaign. It wasn't "vague enough to also include live service games"; it purposely includes them.

Or the people who care about it already have it. It doesn't have archaic controls or graphics or whatnot, so the need to buy a new version is way lower than the likes of a Resident Evil remake.

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.