I was merely making suggestions...heck, they could give them a set base salary per project(with bonuses/incentives) and give them more time over a slightly longer period to complete tasks if need be. As long as a good quality product is released and workers get paid fairly/costs are cut overall i'm happy.

Also, by saying gaming development is difficult....are you talking about the working conditions, the hours worked, the lack of jobs, or what? Because if you're claiming that their jobs are hard compared to stuff like actual hard physical labor.....well, we'll just have to agree to disagree.

To be fair, if games(standard editions) were sold at prices adjusted for inflation, a good number of potential sales would be lost(barring sales and used copies). People still have a limited income in many areas(which hasn't always caught up with inflation), after all.

This is what I meant

Oh, well then I see your point(to a degree), but I still stand by my belief that they're jobs are much less demanding than stuff that involves physical labor to a high degree.

(The jobs are highly mentally stressful, though, from what i've heard)

It's not really extortion, it's just a negotiation. Making it public is probably even less, just some discussion.

And since Steam has exclusives, I guess it's fine if everyone else has them too.

Negotiation is such a bothersome word. One tends to consider it hostile action if their arm is wrenched behind their back and 20,000§ is demanded of them.

Not to mention, I thought we all wanted less exclusive games and stores to deal with.

One also cannot consider it negotiation if one party has absolutely nothing to gain of this.

To be fair, it's not really "exclusive", these games are all on PC regardless of what client they use.

I guess some of us want less exclusive games, others may just want all games on their favorite seller platform and I mostly want cheap, DRM free games, even if they are partly exclusive. But what I really wanted to say is that it's kind of hypocritical to accuse others of pursuing exclusivity when Steam is doing the same thing.

Of course Steam would gain something, they would get Epic games to sell. That's something. It's not really unusual to put up conditions when offering a business deal. My guess is that Steam would do exactly the same if they could.

The only exclusive Steam games are their own games, there is no deal in place (at least that are public knowledge) where Valve has signed a game to only be sold on their platform. same with Origin and Uplay, Unlike GoG and Epic how have both signed third party games to their platforms, though in the case of Project warlock it's understandable you would have missed that given the lack of PR

sounds like a self entitled rich fucker just like most of em tbh who cares

Maybe not today, but when Steam were the same 1 year old as Epic are today, here was how Darwinia launched:-

"We are very happy to announce the launch of Darwinia on Steam. Introversion has teamed up with Valve to release Darwinia on their online games distribution platform making it available to millions of new gamers. As part of the launch and Steam's exclusivity, we will no longer be offering Darwinia as a download option from our site, although it will still be possible to purchase shipped boxed copies. At Valve's request we will also be removing the demo from our site for about a month."

https://forums.introversion.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=40203

This is why I LOL at some of the "Steam would never do anything like that" comments currently doing the rounds. During the Great Ultimatum year of 2005 that would determine whether Steam had enough momentum to become a store for 3rd parties or forever be relegated to being just a glorified Valve DRM wrapper, they did quite a bit of "incentivising" including many cash payments to games not just to come to Steam but also to actively discourage the publishers in question away from self-publishing on their own website (which was the "digital competition" at the time), and even remove free playable demo's if they lied outside of Steam as part of the "agreement" to being on Steam.

oldie but goldie

"Within weeks production had accelerated into a 'mild' crunch: eight hours six days a week. Not bad. Months remained until any real crunch would start, and the team was told that this "pre-crunch" was to prevent a big crunch toward the end; at this point any other need for a crunch seemed unlikely, as the project was dead on schedule. I don't know how many of the developers bought EA's explanation for the extended hours; we were new and naive so we did. The producers even set a deadline; they gave a specific date for the end of the crunch, which was still months away from the title's shipping date, so it seemed safe. That date came and went. And went, and went. When the next news came it was not about a reprieve; it was another acceleration: twelve hours six days a week, 9am to 10pm.

Weeks passed. Again the producers had given a termination date on this crunch that again they failed. Throughout this period the project remained on schedule. The long hours started to take its toll on the team; people grew irritable and some started to get ill. People dropped out in droves for a couple of days at a time, but then the team seemed to reach equilibrium again and they plowed ahead. The managers stopped even talking about a day when the hours would go back to normal.

Now, it seems, is the "real" crunch, the one that the producers of this title so wisely prepared their team for by running them into the ground ahead of time. The current mandatory hours are 9am to 10pm -- seven days a week -- with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behavior (at 6:30pm). This averages out to an eighty-five hour work week. Complaints that these once more extended hours combined with the team's existing fatigue would result in a greater number of mistakes made and an even greater amount of wasted energy were ignored."

https://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html

I'm all for knocking Steam down a peg.

"Dear diary. Today Tim Sweeney said publicly that he took a piss. He's such a jerk!"

2005, we're talking recently. This is literally fresh from the birth of the digital storefront revolution when boxed retail was the default. Key term too that my reply was to 'doing' and 'done' so again, recent.

Steam has loads of games only available there.
GoG lost the Arma series to Steam.