JANUARY 2020 PCWorld 113At the very
least, we can
surmise the
month-long
embargo probably
hurt Steam sales.
I’d go further and
wager that the
vocal “No Steam,
No Buy” crowd is
a minority though,
and that most
people simply
don’t care about the backroom dealings and
the drama. They just want to play the games
wherever they end up. Epic? Steam? They’re
probably two sides of the same coin to a large
portion of the audience.
STEAM, REVIVIFIED
For every game Steam’s lost though, it’s
gained another. That’s the most surprising
story of 2019, and it feels like the competition
from Epic is at least somewhat responsible.
The once-fractured PC landscape is instead
coalescing around two poles, which has led
to some fascinating alliances.
Microsoft and Valve (go.pcworld.com/
msvl), for one. Microsoft, the company that so
enraged Gabe Newell, Valve built its own
Linux-based operating system (go.pcworld.
com/lnxb) to try and escape. Microsoft,
which locked its first-party releases to the
Windows 10 Store for almost the entire Xbox
One console generation even after warming
to the PC.
And yet as I write this, a Halo remaster is
the number four game on Steam (go.
pcworld.com/nmb4) with a daily peak of
123,000 players. It’s the third major Microsoft
release to hit Steam this year, after Gears 5
(go.pcworld.com/grs5) and Age of Empires II:
Definitive Edition (go.pcworld.com/emp3),
with more to come in the future.
Shocking, right?
It’s not even the most surprising alliance of
2019 though. That’d be the hell-hath-froze-
over handshake between Valve and EA (go.
pcworld.com/vlea).
EA was the first major publisher to
abandon Steam, and arguably the only one to
have any success. Nobody really loves Origin,
but it’s at least come to be tolerated since its
launch in 2011. Lest we forget, Origin
pioneered the two-hour refund window we