There’s been a major victory in the digital download market
You may not have noticed this over the last few years, but there has been a war to win the online gaming market for years now. Everyone wants to be on top, and no one wants to get along. Just recently, this fight has started to get nasty: Steam has been among the big heavyweights in this market, but was dealt a serious blow a short time ago. Dota 3 is the planned successor to Dota 2 (Defense of the Ancients 2) and is a game that all of the online markets have been drooling over to claim as their own. What usually happens is that a new, highly anticipated, game will try to accommodate as many people as possible. They accomplish this by making it available on multiple download platforms, but this may not be the case with Dota 3, as it turns out.
Dota 3 announce
Everyone was pretty excited when the Valve Corporation announced that Dota 3 will be released this year. Dota 2 was very successful, getting hundreds of thousands of players on its launch day. So many people made Dota 2 bets. It even managed to get a ninety percent approval rating on Metacritic. So, Dota 3 was something that many people have been looking forward to. Everything seemed pretty well, until unexpectedly, Dota 3 vanished from the Steam Store only to reappear on Epic Games! As you can imagine, this resulted in a lot of double-takes from many a gamer across the great ether of the Internet. It turned out not to be a dream though, once it was confirmed that Epic Games was to be the exclusive publisher of the successor to Dota 2.
The Valve Corporation followed up with an irate news release from Gabe Newell stating that the Dota 3 creators were acting in a duplicitous manner. He accused them of allowing Steam to take pre-orders for the game while acting secretly to set up an exclusive contract with Epic Games. Newell decried the contract against his company. He went further to say that exclusivity contracts are bad, not just for his business, but the entire industry. Newell then advocated for the end of these type of contracts.
A development team that was previously a part of Valve Software, but now working for Epic Games, also weighed in on the issue. They suggested that the reason for the secretive contract was associated with financial aspects, saying that they get quite a bit more cash as a result.
As for the Dota 3 team, one network engineer gave his opinion on the issue. He said that he realizes it’s inconvenient for consumers to have to install more software on their computer in order to download and run the game. His concerns were alleviated, however, by the extra money flowing into his bank account! This appears to indicate either he doesn’t care about the additional launchers on everyone’s device, or he believes that everyone else will care about as much he does.
As an apparent prank, someone decided to take it upon themselves to place a game on the Steam Store called the Real Dota 3. This game turned out to be a bitcoin miner, and some ransomware, however, rather than the actual game. The Valve Corporation joked that they might actually keep it depending on how well it does.
