[Kathy]

Zaxx, on 24 February 2019 - 03:52 PM, said:

Quote

If Epic needs exclusivity, then it doesn't provide other incentives.

I think that's kind of a flawed argument, I mean what they could provide? Steam pretty much has everything you'd want from a game client covered now apart from providing DRM-free versions of the games you've bought. That's the only "plus" Epic could provide but in reality that's pretty impossible since big publishers still believe in DRM so they won't sell their games without it.

They could provide a better client, better customer support, better deals and a vast library. You know, competition. Instead, they provide nothing of value for consumers(players). Only sadly the incovenience.

Quote

On the other hand I think Epic is fucking up consumer good will by buying up shit instead of them making proper first party games for their platform. It's clear that the kids playing Fortnite won't be enough to get customers so what they should be doing instead is stuff like finishing up UT4, remastering Unreal / making an Unreal 3, remastering Jazz Jackrabbit / making a new Jazz game, somehow getting their Gears of War titles on there etc. Every single one of those games could get a small but significant when combined number of customers.

Their own games don't matter. It's miniscule and we're talking about Stores, not developers. They can sell their own games on whatever store they like(exclusive or not), like many other publishers with own stores do.

Quote

But at least they managed to get Journey from Sony and I missed out on that one on PS3 so I'll buy that.

What was Epic's role in that?

[leilei]

My general beef about the Epic store have been Epic's history of handling forum security breaches in recent years not putting in a lot of trust...

[MusicallyInspired]

Never heard about that. Can you elaborate?

[leilei]

2015 and 2016 had their old and new vBulletins breached. They had to delete the old one (which goes back to an atari-hosted UT2004 forum in 2004)

[Zaxx]

Kathy, on 24 February 2019 - 06:33 PM, said:

They could provide a better client,

How? There is no better client than Steam, you literally can't do it at this point.

Quote

better customer support

That's rather "empty" in itself, I mean in terms of customer support Steam is pretty disconnected from third party publishers. Sure, Steam customer support in itself could be improved but not to a margin where it really becomes a valuable part of the experience. They have the refunds, that's what matters and Epic adapted that too so you know, there is not much of a difference to make here.

Quote

Their own games don't matter. It's miniscule and we're talking about Stores, not developers. They can sell their own games on whatever store they like(exclusive or not), like many other publishers with own stores do.

What games made Steam relevant as an application? CS: Source and HL2. Sure, in the long run those games don't matter much but they were very important in building up the platform. You know, at this point they have to get people (core gamers, not just the Fortnite audience) to install the app on their computers and strong core games can do that.

Quote

What was Epic's role in that?

Journey will be published by Annapurna Interactive on PC and they are strongly supporting the Epic Store (they gave away Edit Finch for free and I think there will be other free stuff coming from them) so I'm pretty sure that Epic is supporting them financially. I do consider Journey a good idea even if it's not a first party Epic title: people know about, they know that it was a console exclusive so there will be a connection that says "Epic made Journey happen on PC". That's much better PR than the Metro Exodus fiasco where the publisher pulled a previously announced game from Steam weeks before its release.

[MusicallyInspired]

Steam has a lot of features but its maintainers do a horrible job. Steam has been ticking consumers and developers off more and more for years now. I would be happy to switch over personally if Epic adds many of the features Steam has.

[Sledgehammer]

Chinese providing anything quality. Don't make me laugh.

[----]

And GoG just let a dozen of employees go ... on of these said it is because of financial trouble.


But back to the topic.

What EPIC did wrong, IMHO, ist that they started their store with a lot of media exposure and these "forced" exclusives. They should just have opened their store when it had most of the needed features ready (including a working workshop equivalent) and then instead of forced exlusives early on, have the better deals for devs and have their free game every fortnight. WIth the better share ratio for devs it automatically had gotten the exposure it needed ... when ready.

And yes, Steam needs to improve, no matter if there is an EPIC store or not.

[MusicallyInspired]

An Epic store (or any good competitor) will encourage Steam's improvement, though. Either that or its demise. I'd like Epic to improve and succeed so Steam can improve and succeed again if nothing else.

[Sledgehammer]

It's not even a question if Steam needs to be improved or not. But it needs healthy competition to do so, a good alternative which can benefit consumer and not the store owners with developers alone (that smaller cut is irrelevant to buyers anyway with a very few exceptions where developers indeed can improve their games with more money, AAA devs on the other hand have their business strategy already set and it's not about making quality games). But I guess it's just easier to make competition artificial instead of actually getting the trust of consumer, especially when it's against your own principles such as collecting user data for Chinese government. I don't think Valve is afraid to lose their consumer base with Epic Store, I know I wouldn't be if I were them.

Anyway, people tend to hope for SEGA to release a new console, but I wish if SEGA came up with their own store and used good business practices like in their old days. No artificial competition like buying out exclusives or tying online shit to another DRM client, just make your own games if you want to sell your platform, then with consumer you'll get companies. Mix that with regional pricing, refund policy and other features from which consumer can benefit. Consoles aren't as relevant anymore since these are hardware-locked PCs, but they could try their lack on PC.

I hope to see a good Steam competitor one day. You say that you can't do shit to attract people anymore, but with recent censorship crap happening (which mostly affected Japanese games) which also affected Steam with them starting to silently and without explanations remove the shit they don't like without returning money to developers and in some cases outright banning them despite how people freaked out about their censorship at first (Valve's behavior is surely very professional and not childish at all). Not to mention that there is potential for someone to be successful in this business and there are things which can be done right because there are a lot of things which can be improved in Steam. The only big company left which doesn't censor things they don't like is ironically Nintendo with their Switch, but I can bet my money that it won't last long.

[MusicallyInspired]

Geez they just started. Steam took years to get to the level of functionality it has now. GOG too. I'm not expecting Epic to break any records right out of the gate like this. But I expect it to grow and give Steam a run for its money over time. If it doesn't meet my expectations, then fine. I'm not saying it's going to happen. I just would very much want it to happen.

I don't know what you're talking about with the rest of your post, maybe you weren't talking to me specifically. All I'm saying is I'd like Epic to do well to get Valve out of its complacency that it's been wallowing in for years now.

[Doom64hunter]

MusicallyInspired, on 25 February 2019 - 03:35 PM, said:

An Epic store (or any good competitor) will encourage Steam's improvement, though. Either that or its demise. I'd like Epic to improve and succeed so Steam can improve and succeed again if nothing else.

What you don't seem to realize is that Epic isn't competing for Steam's users, it's competing for the developers producing games for the platform. They are primarily doing so by lowering the cut Epic gets for each game purchased, down to a point where Valve can't keep up (thanks Fortnite), and by offering bonuses for exclusivity deals, among other things. Of course the idea is that once enough developers switch over to the Epic Store, the userbase would eventually follow; not out of choice, but out of pure necessity.

Edit: Note that these are actually abstract cases of Dumping and Exclusive Dealing, i.e. anti-competitive practices that actually reduce competition in the market (https://en.wikipedia...itive_practices). In this case, rather than Epic directly selling the product at a lower price to the customer, they are essentially "selling" a spot on their platform for a lower fee than Valve could manage. The developers are their primary customers in this sense, whereas the people who purchase the game are secondary. Furthermore, rather than tying retailers to exclusivity deals, they are contractually obligating the developers to sell only on their store in order to receive benefits, such as free Unreal engine licensing. The power balance is flipped -- rather than the supplier having power over the retailer, it's the other way around.

As a result, Epic has little incentive to improve the user experience, and Valve cannot compete by improving the user experience. In fact, in many cases doing so actively goes against the interests of publishers and developers. A malicious publisher, for instance, could see Steam's review system as a problem, as it acts as a last line of defense for users to prevent them from purchasing a bad game. If a game has a yellow "mixed" rating, users are more likely to think twice when buying the game than when it is labelled with a blue "Overwhelmingly Positive". This effectively means that a publisher will make less revenue on Steam when a game turns out bad or has some sort of controversy attached to it.

However, I do have to mention that reviews can have a positive effect on the sales of a game -- namely if the review consensus is positive. As such it only makes sense why Epic is working on an opt-in review system. Publishers who are known to release bad/controversial games will want to turn reviews off, while publishers who produced a good, non-contentious game will turn them on. This system is made with only the interests of the developers/publishers in mind, not with those of the customer.

Similarly, every game on Steam automatically receives a discussion hub, which in turn requires moderation, and serves as an outlet for people to ask questions, report bugs, share their experiences or express their approval or dissent. By not having a discussion board, the developers/publishers won't have to spend time, money and effort on having someone moderate it, and moreover they don't have to worry about a shitstorm brewing in their own back yard.

That is why Epic described discussion forums as "toxic", and it's why they declared "review bombing" to supposedly be such a big problem (it isn't). They are using these contentious talking points to disguise blatant anti-consumer actions. They hired the guy who made "Steam Spy" after all, who collected data on how customers behave on Steam for many years prior to the launch of the Epic Store. They know exactly why they're doing these things, and it's not what they claim to gaming outlets like Kotaku.

MusicallyInspired, on 25 February 2019 - 09:29 PM, said:

Geez they just started. Steam took years to get to the level of functionality it has now. GOG too. I'm not expecting Epic to break any records right out of the gate like this. But I expect it to grow and give Steam a run for its money over time. If it doesn't meet my expectations, then fine. I'm not saying it's going to happen. I just would very much want it to happen.

I don't know what you're talking about with the rest of your post, maybe you weren't talking to me specifically. All I'm saying is I'd like Epic to do well to get Valve out of its complacency that it's been wallowing in for years now.

Epic didn't have to launch the platform in its current state. They could have added many of the features already present on the Steam or GOG store long before it was made public. They had all the time in the world, since Fortnite is making insane cash, so there's absolutely no time pressure. It was a deliberate choice to have a simplistic barebones store without many features beyond offering the publishers a deal they can't refuse. They have even said so on multiple occasions.

Any hopes that Valve's service could improve as a result of this are entirely misplaced, because as already mentioned, the main point of competition isn't the users, but rather the developers. The only way for Valve to compete in this area would be by hurting themselves (less share in revenue) or hurting their users (opt-in reviews & forums) -- the latter of which could actually damage their customer relations, the one advantage Valve still has over Epic. (and even those are rapidly eroding away, thanks to their recent conduct and decisions, i.e. Artifact, censorship of Japanese H-games, Greenlight, the handling of HL3, TF2, CS:GO etc.)

Epic may still add some customer-friendly options to their store eventually -- but only if their addition has a tangible benefit to attracting users to their store, and only if these options do not stand in conflict with the interests of the publishers. Perhaps, if their ploy to draw developers away from Steam using exclusivity deals doesn't work out as well as they hoped, they will start to invest more on pro customer services.

But even with that, I can still see some other reasons why the Epic Store is bad news:

• Steam isn't the only one affected, GOG is also a competitor in the market, and since DRM-free games are not exactly a popular thing amongst publishers, you can forget that feature ever making it to the Epic Store.
  
• The Epic store's EULA is shady at best and malicious at worst. Take this section for instance:
  

  Quote

  4.User Generated Content
  Any content that you create, generate, or make available through the Epic Games store application shall be “UGC”. You hereby grant to Epic a non-exclusive, fully-paid, royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, distribute, prepare derivative works based on, publicly perform, publicly display, make, have made, use, sell, offer to sell, import, and otherwise exploit your UGC for any purposes, for all current and future methods and forms of exploitation in any country. You may not create, generate, or make available any UGC to which you do not have the right to grant Epic such license. In addition, you may not create, generate, or make available any UGC that is illegal or violates or infringes another’s rights, including intellectual property rights or privacy, publicity or moral rights. Epic reserves the right to take down any UGC in its discretion.
  
  This means that should a service like Steam's "Workshop" to distribute mods ever be implemented in the Epic Store, then anything you publish over this service will automatically become Epic's property, to the point where they could even SELL your mods. Of course, any mod that includes content to which you don't have the rights to (like sprites from a another game, Shadow Warrior for instance) would automatically not be allowed on the Epic Store's workshop equivalent. This is a gross overreach, and nowhere near what Steam's EULA states. Steam's EULA, for the record, only permits Valve to use your content for the purposes of promoting Steam, and only for as long as the content is uploaded to the Steam servers -- and nothing else, which is entirely fair given that you are using their services to publish your content.
  
• The final issue I want to touch on is a bit more sinister. Tencent, a Chinese megacorporation, owns 40% of Epic Games, meaning that they have considerable influence when it comes to decisions. Furthermore, Tencent has shown to bow to the will of the Chinese government on more than one occasion (the most recent being https://techraptor.n...ing-rules-china). Should Epic Games become the market leader in digital distribution platforms, then China will have succeeded in a major powergrab over online communication. Removing forums isn't only in the interest of publishers, but also in the interest of China suppressing dissenting opinions. So by supporting the Epic Store, not only do you support anti-consumer practices, but you also support a major expansion of China's sphere of power.

I'm gonna say this as discretely as I can -- if you buy things from the Epic Store, you are fucking yourself over. And the only party that can prevent Epic's strategy from working out are the consumers themselves. Boycott Epic, and don't buy any of the games they offer on their store. Even if they do at some point engage more in customer friendly actions, do not fall for it, as they are still owned in large by Chinese investors. You can only lose here.

[Sledgehammer]

MusicallyInspired, on 25 February 2019 - 09:29 PM, said:

Geez they just started.
I don't know what you're talking about with the rest of your post, maybe you weren't talking to me specifically. All I'm saying is I'd like Epic to do well to get Valve out of its complacency that it's been wallowing in for years now.

The problem is the way they started it. Their anti-consumer practices is a big red flag which is nothing surprising considering that Tencent has huge influence over Epic. I don't believe they magically will change their approach in the future. Besides, see Doom64hunter post. These days nothing really stops you from copying or even improving Steam features. 2003 overall was a different time.

MusicallyInspired, on 25 February 2019 - 09:29 PM, said:

I don't know what you're talking about with the rest of your post, maybe you weren't talking to me specifically. All I'm saying is I'd like Epic to do well to get Valve out of its complacency that it's been wallowing in for years now.

Just my general thoughts on the subject. Specifically that "attracting people" part was mostly related to Zaxx's posts about how hard it's to make something better. Steam has a lot of flaws which likely will never be addressed not only by them (until they get rid of morons who behave unprofessionally, I bet most of these people even came with Firewatch buy-out) but also by their competitors unless someone will come up who actually care about proper consumer support.

Doom64hunter, on 26 February 2019 - 12:50 AM, said:

Epic isn't competing for Steam's users, it's competing for the developers producing games for the platform.

This is a perfect way to describe Epic Store. The rest of your posts pretty much sum up my thoughts, I don't think I have anything to add.

Also

Doom64hunter, on 26 February 2019 - 12:50 AM, said:

They hired the guy who made "Steam Spy" after all, who collected data on how customers behave on Steam for many years prior to the launch of the Epic Store.

this is interesting, wasn't aware of it.

[----]

Doom64hunter, on 26 February 2019 - 12:50 AM, said:

I'm gonna say this as discretely as I can -- if you buy things from the Epic Store, you are fucking yourself over. And the only party that can prevent Epic's strategy from working out are the consumers themselves. Boycott Epic, and don't buy any of the games they offer on their store. Even if they do at some point engage more in customer friendly actions, do not fall for it, as they are still owned in large by Chinese investors. You can only lose here.

I am only getting the free games, because I already have an account there anyways (because of the now halted Unreal Tournament, so it was long before Fortnite became a thing). They don't have my creditcard or any other info about me.
And since UT4 is still getting amazing content from users, I plan on continuing to use the EPIC Launcher (the UT-content is hosted on an external site not affiliated with EPIC).

Conclusion: Take from EPIC, don't give. They have taken UT away from the players*, so we take from them.

*) It is a bit like the section of Mark Laidlaws "Epistle 3", where he states in a meta narrative how the people around him (i.e: at Valve) have changed and that now this isn't the world (i.e: company) he once liked. For UT there are still employees/contractors who said they only still work for EPIC if they can work a bit on UT. But it seems to me, that they aren't happy with the situation there.

[NightFright]

I wonder when they will realize that some people just get games for free w/o buying any. Can't imagine they will keep it that way. Unless this is a "calculated risk" from their side.

Personally I can't forgive Epic for kinda pulling the plug on the new UT. For that alone I already hope they'll choke on their crappy launcher. Hard.

[----]

NightFright, on 26 February 2019 - 02:50 AM, said:

Personally I can't forgive Epic for kinda pulling the plug on the new UT. For that alone I already hope they'll choke on their crappy launcher. Hard.

That's the general consensus on the official UT Discord channel.

[Kathy]

Zaxx, on 25 February 2019 - 06:56 AM, said:

How? There is no better client than Steam, you literally can't do it at this point.

Is this sarcasm?

Quote

What games made Steam relevant as an application? CS: Source and HL2. Sure, in the long run those games don't matter much but they were very important in building up the platform. You know, at this point they have to get people (core gamers, not just the Fortnite audience) to install the app on their computers and strong core games can do that.

It doesn't matter what made Steam relevant, it was a long time ago and they started as a client for their own games. Then slowly grew into what we have now. What matters is Epic shouldn't start from the same square. If they want compete, they should make a better product. Their effort is obviously rushed.

Quote

Journey will be published by Annapurna Interactive on PC and they are strongly supporting the Epic Store (they gave away Edit Finch for free and I think there will be other free stuff coming from them) so I'm pretty sure that Epic is supporting them financially. I do consider Journey a good idea even if it's not a first party Epic title: people know about, they know that it was a console exclusive so there will be a connection that says "Epic made Journey happen on PC". That's much better PR than the Metro Exodus fiasco where the publisher pulled a previously announced game from Steam weeks before its release.

Unless Annapurna/thatgamecompany state otherwise I doubt Epic had any role in Journey's port to Windows. And even if they had, it probably was insignificant.

Doom64hunter, on 26 February 2019 - 12:50 AM, said:

What you don't seem to realize is that Epic isn't competing for Steam's users, it's competing for the developers producing games for the platform.

This. And competition by exclusive is out of our hands anyway.

[Zaxx]

Kathy, on 26 February 2019 - 04:16 AM, said:

Is this sarcasm?

Nope: Steam is full of features, stuff that's capable to serve 99.999% of the userbase well. Sure, there are issues and they can fuck up things but making a client that offers only just 50% of Steam's feature list is a MASSIVE undertaking. Just a few examples of what Steam has:

- Trading cards and in-game items with a fully fledged marketplace economy backing them up.
- Workshop for easy mod implementation.
- Controller support for all kinds of controllers + a dedicated Steam controller.
- Wishlisting, recommendation algorithms, user reviews, a ton of community features like guides, family sharing, whatever.
- Streaming.
- In-house game streaming (you can play your games on your low end laptop instead of your gaming PC through wifi).
- More and more capable Linux support (they have their in-house Wine now basically).
- Etc.

It's an amazing piece of software that had 15+ years to mature... and you say make a better product than that??? Impossible, it will take years to even get close even with Epic's Fortnite money and the Gabe Newell-level smarts of Tim Sweeney.

[----]

Zaxx, on 26 February 2019 - 11:14 PM, said:

- Trading cards and in-game items with a fully fledged marketplace economy backing them up.

Speaking of that: The biggest killer feature on a digital store would be the ability to disable them and the notifications about them.

[Zaxx]

Haha, true.

[Sledgehammer]

Seems quite relevant to this thread.

Quote

On March 31st we are going to discontinue the Fair Price Package program. Let us explain the reasoning behind this decision.
We came up with Fair Price Package (FPP) as a way to make up the price difference between various countries. Some games on GOG.COM have regional pricing, meaning the price of the same game in one place can be higher compared to its price in North America. In countries where the game is more expensive, we give users the equivalent of the price difference in GOG Wallet funds. In actual numbers, on average, we give users back 12% of the game price from our own pocket. In some cases, this number can reach as high as 37%.
In the past, we were able to cover these extra costs from our cut and still turn a small profit. Unfortunately, this is not the case anymore. With an increasing share paid to developers, our cut gets smaller. However, we look at it, at the end of the day we are a store and need to make sure we sell games without a loss.
Removing FPP is not a decision we make lightly, but by making this change, we will be able to offer better conditions to game creators, which — in turn — will allow us to offer you more curated classic games and new releases. All DRM-free.
We wanted to make sure you have some lead time to still benefit from the Fair Price Package. The program will last until the 31st of March, 2019, so if you would like to take advantage of it, now is the time. The funds you gather from the program will keep the 12 months expiration date from the moment you’ve been granted your last funds.

Source

And they dare to say that bigger cut for devs will somehow magically benefit the people who buy games. Yeah, right. Somehow this reminds me of "free market" meme which is pure bullshit and works only on paper.

Spoiler

To elaborate, basically if the game in your region cost more than in US, GOG would offer you the difference, so now they're closing this. This definitely will affect Europeans because now they'll have to deal with publishers retarded regional pricing practices.

[Kathy]

Zaxx, on 26 February 2019 - 11:14 PM, said:

Nope: Steam is full of features, stuff that's capable to serve 99.999% of the userbase well. Sure, there are issues and they can fuck up things but making a client that offers only just 50% of Steam's feature list is a MASSIVE undertaking. Just a few examples of what Steam has:

So to counter that Epic decided to do jack shit with their client? I'm not saying they could have had came out with client supporting all of this right away, but they could have at least supported some chunk of it. Yet they simply decided to force people onto itself. Because forcing is better than choosing. Good job. They don't even have a search impemented in their client for fuck's sake.

Quote

And they dare to say that bigger cut for devs will somehow magically benefit the people who buy games.

If said developers charged far less on Epic because of that, then it would have been a great incentive to buy there.

[Mark]

Every time I start to consider signing up for one of these game clients I read posts like these. I come back to my senses and say once again " I hope they come crashing down and we go back to simply buying a box from the store or online". Yes, I'm stuck in the good old days.

[Avoozl]

Zaxx, on 26 February 2019 - 11:14 PM, said:

- Workshop for easy mod implementation.

The problem with workshop is it adds a layer of DRM to mods, if you own the game from elsewhere such as GoG or an original retail box copy from before Steam you can't download the mods. I am tired of many people only putting their mods on there and not on any of the other available mod websites.

[Kathy]

Mark, on 27 February 2019 - 06:46 AM, said:

Every time I start to consider signing up for one of these game clients I read posts like these. I come back to my senses and say once again " I hope they come crashing down and we go back to simply buying a box from the store or online". Yes, I'm stuck in the good old days.

Except there would be almost no difference on PC in buying box or digital. Only the time/petrol/etc. wasted in going to a shop. I'm not even sure there's a disk in the box anymore.

[----]

Avoozl, on 27 February 2019 - 02:39 PM, said:

The problem with workshop is it adds a layer of DRM to mods, if you own the game from elsewhere such as GoG or an original retail box copy from before Steam you can't download the mods. I am tired of many people only putting their mods on there and not on any of the other available mod websites.

Yes, that's a problem. Additionally you are better off copying the contents out of your local workshop folder, as mods have disappeared from Steam Workshop and so got deleted on your local harddrive.

[Kathy]

Seriously? Damn... Come to think of it, I remember that GTA games used to have their soundtracks altered, which "updated" everyone's installation.

[necroslut]

Avoozl, on 27 February 2019 - 02:39 PM, said:

The problem with workshop is it adds a layer of DRM to mods, if you own the game from elsewhere such as GoG or an original retail box copy from before Steam you can't download the mods. I am tired of many people only putting their mods on there and not on any of the other available mod websites.

With a centralized mods platfom also come the matter of censoring or banning mods for un-PC, sexual or copyright infingement reasons. I imagine a lot of older Duke mods wouldn't have lasted long on something like Steam Workshop.

[Sledgehammer]

So, Steam decided to revisit User Reviews and deal with so-called "Review Bombing". The post is too long and you can read it from a link, but I'll post the relevant part:

Quote

Q: I care about some things that I worry other players don't, like DRM or EULA changes. Review bombs have been about them in the past. Do you consider them unrelated or off-topic?

A: We had long debates about these two, and others like them. They're technically not a part of the game, but they are an issue for some players. In the end, we've decided to define them as off-topic review bombs. Our reasoning is that the "general" Steam player doesn't care as much about them, so the Review Score is more accurate if it doesn't contain them. In addition, we believe that players who do care about topics like DRM are often willing to dig a little deeper into games before purchasing - which is why we still keep all the reviews within the review bombs. It only takes a minute to dig into those reviews to see if the issue is something you care about.



Q: So if I post a review inside in the period of an off-topic review bomb, my review won't be included in the Review Score?

A: Unfortunately, this is correct. We've tested our process of identifying off-topic review bombs on the entire history of reviews on Steam, and in doing so, we've found that while we can look through reviews and community discussions to determine what's behind the review bomb, it isn't feasible for us to read every single review. But as we mentioned back in our first User Review post, our data shows us that review bombs tend to be temporary distortions, so we believe the Review Score will still be accurate, and other players will still be able to find and read your review within the period.

Steam is becoming quite shitty as of lately, although I already stopped giving them real money because of censorship bullshit and double standards (for example they allow shit like this fully uncensored). I wonder if they decided to appease publishers because of Epic Store though.

At least you can disable this thing (I wonder if it's automatically turned on though, because the problem is that not everyone read Steam news and may not notice this). If you don't know, they already did something like that with making your games activity private by default what killed Steamspy.

Quote

Finally, we've also enabled you to opt out of this entirely, if that's your preference - there's now a checkbox in your Steam Store options where you can choose to have off-topic review bombs still included in all the Review Scores you see.

EDIT: just checked, yep, the "off-topic" filter enabled by default.

[Tea Monster]

"We aren't spying on you!" says Epic. But of course, they are. It's been revealed that the new Epic Game Store now raids your Steam profile for friends information - even if you or your friends have set their profiles to private. Good job!

Source: https://arstechnica....-spying-on-you/