Except that’s also a lie. Steam does keep a higher percentage of the sales price for itself than Epic does, but it also allows people to activate game keys without taking any money. Steam only makes money from games sold on Steam itself. So developers can sell games through other stores and even through their own website, and keep up to 100% of the sales price. Effectively, this means that Steam takes roughly the same amount of money that Epic does, or in some cases even less probably.
This isn’t public data unfortunately, devs with a game on both platforms are the only ones who can tell us where they earn more. However, I did once read an article that claimed the effective cut from Steam is about half what it says on the tin IF the devs (or their publisher) put in enough effort themselves. Because that’s who decides this, Steam doesn’t have and doesn’t want any control over this.
Not to mention— the value for that 30% on platform + 0% off platform cut for steam is insane. The payment processing, storage, hosting, worldwide routing and caching, multiplayer sdks and integrations, and dozens of other publisher / developer available tools are worth every single penny to have valve handling for you.
People should like Epic for giving more money to developers than Steam.
They give more money to publishers* That may or may not translate into more money for the developers, but seeing how the industry is going, I’m more inclined to believe devs don’t see a cent from the extra cut in most cases.
You’re amazing. Format is great. I just scroll past the stuff that doesn’t interest me, but more often than not something catches my eye and I end up reading stuff I wouldn’t have clicked on (let alone waded through ads for) on a regular gaming site. That’s such a good feeling, and yeah, reminds me of the old days of flipping through gaming mags.
I know these are ‘heavy’, but I try my best to break them into sections (*actually, this time I did not do that - typically they’re broken into themed sections like ‘Switch News’, or ‘GOG News’ etc), and make it a little easier to wade through.
I just love writing them in this way, even if they’re not the most convenient. And I do try to ‘pretty’ them up, too! I’m glad you enjoyed this, there’s plenty I’ve done before it if you’re interested in reading others!
I’m playing it right now, and ots actually a lot of fun. Exploration feels fun still like doom 2016 and Eternal, and you have different murder mechanics to choose from in the midst of a hundred enemies. I’d say the reviews are right.
Now, that being said, I think i still like 2016 better, but they both have a very different feel from each other.
As others said, EGS is just a fucking cancer, not a competition. A good competition to Steam is actually Microsoft App Store. It’s a very streamlined mobile-like experience.
Did you play the 2016 one or eternal? My first ever game was the first doom. Doom 3 is a great game but it just wasn’t really doom. Getting into the lore was cool though. A roommate forced me to try doom 2016 and it immediately brought back the memories and feelings, they also use and continue the lore in a non invasive way. I haven’t yet played dark ages but the modern ones are very much the successor to the originals.
First souls game I played was demons souls and nothing came close to that since. You never forget your first etc. Maybe bloodborne. I know most people loved the dark souls series but to me it always felt like a rehash of much of the same that was truly novel and captivating in demons souls. Of course happy that many more people got to experience souls games with the move away from the Sony IP. Yet still for me the best souls games are those that were made exclusively for PlayStation, for better or worse.
I’ll concede the hub in Demon’s Souls is much better than Elden Ring. No matter what, I turned down the wrong corridor. Either looking for the blacksmith, or the twins, or the two fingers, didn’t matter. Every damn time, I’d go down the wrong way.
Plus, it felt… Empty? Demon’s Souls hub is much larger but still has an aesthetic that feels like everyone is scared, tired, or restless. I like that you can “save” people like Dead Rising and see them back at camp. It feels more immersive. Elden Ring has that too, but not as many NPCs end up there from what I remember. It’s more that they’d always leave the hub, like the lady who hugs. Plus, after the burning of the tree, it’s completely abandoned except the black might guy. Always feel bad that I couldn’t get him out. It’s like the people in the hub all just served as exposition on the lore of the world, not “real” people. I didn’t go back there nearly as much as in Demon’s Souls
Bloodborne was my first. It was always… Okay. I still don’t know what the hell was happening. Apparently there’s a night mode you can unlock??? I consider Elden Ring my first true one. I played the hell out of the base game. I’ve only got to complete the final boss twice to unlock all the trophies lol. But I definitely need to pick up the dlc one day soon.
Gameplay-wise, I think I prefer Bloodborne to DS titles for whatever reason. Setting as well. It’s the only other one besides Sekiro that I’ve beaten so far…
As a customer, why would I ever shop at Epic if the game is also available on Steam and typically has more features? Epic doesn’t solve any problems for me and actively introduces others, like a lack of Linux support. Do I want to play Alan Wake II? Of course I do. Am I going to buy it when they could push an update tomorrow that breaks compatibility with my operating system and offers me no recourse as a customer since it was unsupported in the first place? No, I’m not.
There are things worth solving that Steam does poorly (if they also support Linux customers). Finding out if my multiplayer game will be playable without external servers is a nightmare; DRM sucks, and I want none of it; Steam’s multiplayer/friends network has more downtime than is acceptable; Steam Input should be a platform agnostic library; etc. Instead of solving those problems, they made the store enticing for suppliers (publishers) but not customers. If I’m shopping someplace other than Steam, it’s GOG and not Epic.
It’s a lot of cutting out for about a minute, but that’s just enough to interrupt a fighting game match. If it was once per week at a predictable time, that might be okay, but it’s been happening more and more lately when it used to only be on Tuesdays.
Typically, when Steam handles the matchmaking, it’s peer to peer. But in general, they also sort of broker the connection between you and the other player or server. Street Fighter 6 runs its own servers and matchmaking, but if Steam cuts out, I lose my connection to them.
Generally, yes. But Epic is not competitive in any way.
Their idea of being competitive is not to deliver an amazing product, it is to buy exclusivity for games so they can’t be sold on other platforms, which benefits no one except themselves.
Gog, then? Itch? I'm not even going to try with Microsoft or the publisher stores because people were so mad at them they effectively killed them.
Turns out nobody is competitive in any way against Steam, which seems to be the whole problem of lacking competition and having a single player dominating a market.
GOG is competitive for my dollar. DRM-free is a compelling proposition, and they’ve got an excellent refund program. There are a lot of things they could stand to do better, but those two things alone give me an actual reason to shop there over Steam.
Unless it’s infrastructure or something with a natural monopoly.
The main competition with steam is buying physical copies of things. If we want to support retailers selling physical copies of games and bricks and mortar shops, that’s a good thing.
Alas, I think the games industry is chosing to abandon them. And Steam has the ability to add games purchased outside of Steam to it for convenience. Unlike Epic it puts the user close to the top of priorities.
It is a good thing to have competition. The hate is because they are doing things people don’t generally like. Exclusivity deals for one thing. Epic can’t really compete with steam because they are too far behind on features, so they resort to exclusivity deals which aren’t really good for any consumer. One could argue it is the fault of publishers taking them, but that is just looking at it from a purely business perspective. As a consumer, I don’t really care about the business side… I don’t profit from it. So I don’t really wonder why gamers are mad at epic for it.
Say what you will about what it did with the characters, but Sly 4 took the level design and art to new heights, and that was thanks to modern advancements in graphics.
Jak hit differently though. It had a good mix of great platforming and creative use of graphics. If anything without Jak I wouldn’t have played rift apart or sly.
I’m saying is that modern game engines and rendering tech allow a lot of the things that are good about these games to be turned up to eleven, both in terms of gameplay and art.
I will heavily disagree with you on your evaluation of Sly 4. The higher fidelity models doesn't really add much to the characters that you couldn't glean in prior entries in the series, and really only serves to give the characters a more plastic style all while minimizing the features that made them so memorable - their cartoonish aesthetic and stylized design. Not much changed on the design front for any of the major cast, besides more detail regarding their costumes.
I will admit that more details on the smaller bits of their costume would be nice in the older entries, but compromising the style and aesthetic is a much worse tradeoff for what was gained.
There's many other people evaluating the level design in Sly 4 so I won't go into that too much, but suffice to say, Sly 2 has comparable level design, and some are better in my personal opinion, but Sly 3 has the best level design of the franchise. None of those level designs were hindered or empowered by graphical capabilities. The only part that would have a noticeable impact, if anything, would be the post processing effects from some abilities in Sly 4, but I don't really think those added that much to the experience, as most are gimmicks and costume based, meaning they are only used to solve puzzles and don't play any further part in your arsenal except when the game specifically calls for those abilities.
Now I don't disagree that modern computing power could make the series much better, but AAA has this tunnel vision on graphical fidelity, when the indie scene has proved time and again, style always has and always will trump substance.
Ratchet and Clank made the transition successfully because they didn't overblow the graphical fidelity on Clank, it simply looks like a higher quality model of his early iterations, and has been made easier due to the armor and other sci-fi bits of technology in the series, as the genre scales better with the raw fidelity that most AAA developers pursue than other franchises.
Doesn't really help either that the first step that the Sly franchise took into this modern era was spearheaded by a third party studio. I'm not gonna bash Sanzaru that much, as it's clear they had to put in a lot of work to approach Sony and Sucker Punch to even get permission to work on the franchise, and it shows in the humor of their mission design, although they were uncertain of themselves and it shows. So not only was Sanzaru dealing with the difficult position of having the newest entry of a beloved franchise, but also coming up with ways to modernize the gameplay and graphics in a franchise almost iconified in the early 2000's comic and cartoon aesthetic.
It's clear they had more to juggle than could have honestly been expected of them, not the least of which that the franchise had been dead in the water for 8 years at that point, as the industry had slowed to a crawl after the creep of design scope and the upscaling of the industry caused much of the workflow to stagnate or recursion in on itself.
People are overly loyal to Steam and don’t realise the huge market share they have. It’s not technically a monopoly but everyone else is fighting over the 20% that Steam doesn’t have so who can blame Epic for throwing money at the problem.
As someone from the UK, where most of our spines were standardised like the PS1 and PS2. And having personally collected hundreds of the latter. I’ve always preferred consistent standardised spines. A full bookcase of PAL PS2 games looks so much nicer to me than the messy look of one filled with NTSC games in my opinion.
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Aktywne