I don't know if it is Steam loyalty so much as appreciating that Steam actually has a decent platform....at least that's where I'm coming from.
I'm mostly in it for the
IDGAF if Epic makes headway in the market or whatever, I'd prefer they not do it via buying exclusives. I blame the developers and or publishers just as much for taking the money, particularly in instances where the games were already slated for launch everywhere or were promised so like the Shenmue case. If you promise something and then go back on it that's just low. I don't blame them on a let's recoup our investment level, but I don't care about that as the guy buying the game.
<incoming rant on another related thing>
Speaking of not caring about that, there's this sort of weird culture going around now of developer boostering and it kind of annoys me. As sort of an example in another thread here about respected developers which is fine. But some of the things people were bringing up like crunch time for workers or whatever, as if that's some sort of unique thing game developers have to deal with. Anyone who works on any project with a drop dead date will crunch at some point. But the sort of games journalism industry and some groups of gamers think this is some sort of massive problem. On the contrary some of the greatest games in history were created in less than ideal circumstances with creeping deadlines and development houses that nearly collapsed in the process. Do we get some of those games without the crunch? probably but not nearly as many I'd suspect. Fallout's SPECIAL system was literally written out on a napkin at dinner and implemented in a couple weeks when they had to scramble to replace GURPS at the last minute. Necessity is the mother of invention is a cliche for a reason. Would it be better if game developers weren't putting in 70 hour weeks at the end of their projects? Yeah. Am I all that broken up about it? No.
And frankly what we've seen often times is if you give these past developers who generated hits in the crunch system more money and more time it often has resulted in either aimless projects or feature creep out the ass with no guiding hand to slap all that stuff down. Look at Star Citizen in comparison to say something like Kingdom Come. Both games had feature creep and pretty big plans but one had unlimited money and the other didn't. Which one have I gotten to play an enjoy already? One of them ended up with some plans cut and altered turned into a pretty cool take on the open world sword play formula. The other could be confused with a scam. Another good example is Ken Levine and Bioshock Infinite. He puts out a hit game reusing parts of the System Shock formulae with some conventional gameplay and good production values. Then he's given a buttload of time and and money to develop a follow up and the development is a cluster f*** that results in getting basically the same game as BS1 instead of the more ambitious vision originally intended because they squandered a bunch of development time on nonsense. You give game developers tons of time, more freedom, and gobs of money and it usually ends up a between mediocre and a disaster unless it's a Nintendo product. The publishers get a lot of deserved crap but in some cases their guiding hand to actually getting releasable games is invaluable to us gamers. Or in the case of indies, limited budgets and making games for the sake of it not looking for a quick Epic Games exclusive payday.
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