How does one steal Funko Pop’s IP? Create an ugly figure with a giant head and no face? Is that so common that they need an AI system to watch for IP infringement?
If a company wanted to get into the figure business, maybe they could just make figures that look good, and thus avoid infringing Funko Pop’s style.
And make sure to avoid stores that actively promote the store exclusives concept, even for stuff that isn’t an exclusive (anymore). They don’t deserve our money. Looking at you Epic.
I remember when Metro Exodus was about to release, Epic bought them out and they made the game unpurchasable on Steam after people already preordered. So only those who preordered were able to play on Steam for the first year after release. Valve left this statement on the store page.
Ubisoft pulled something like that with Anno 1800. If you pre-ordered it on Steam it was possible to install and play it, as it was only delisted but not removed entirely. Buying the DLC was a bit of a pain as you couldn’t search Steam for it, you had to dig up the direct Steam Store link from one of the official posts on the Ubi forum. It wasn’t ideal, but at least they had the sense to make everything available immediately on Steam for those that already bought the game there.
Store exclusivity is paid, this means that the devs get a guaranteed income instead of relying on the Steam gamble.
Would you work for your employer if you might be paid more than average but no guarantee on that and only in two years if it happens at all as it depends on the number of clients you got and how influencers feel about your work once it’s complete?
I don’t know about you but I look around and I don’t know anyone who would accept those conditions. That’s where exclusivity becomes an option, you might not have as high an income, but that employer tells you ahead of hiring you how much you’ll make in the next year with a commission on every sale you make once your work is complete.
I’m fully aware, and I don’t even blame developers, especially indies, as I can completely understand their reasoning and commercial consideration. But from a user perspective I just see a store trying to buy market share and either forcing customers to wait a year or cave and use that store. Epic doesn’t fork over money to help developers, it does so to grab a piece of the pie and create value for shareholders.
Personally I prefer not buying or using platforms from companies whose policies I don’t agree with. I avoid Amazon for that reason, and Epic’s store is therefore also on my personal blacklist.
It’s a choice I’m allowed and willing to make. Of course you are free to disagree and by all means, do whatever you feel is right.
Do you purchase on Steam? Because it is in a monopolistic position and that’s much more anti consumer than anything Epic or GOG can do in their position.
That’s not even talking about the 30% cut which means less money going to the devs (and before you say they use the money to innovate, devs being able to afford making games is much more important for gaming than developing virtual trading cards or enriching a billionaire with a yacht collection).
Do we need to wait until they start abusing their position before we react to the fact that they can do whatever the fuck they want with the PC gaming market?
Do we need to wait until they start abusing their position
Should we be punishing Steam for things they haven’t done?
Epic was already trying to abuse their position as soon as they started up.
“You should purchase from the shitty company because if you purchase from the better company they might maybe one day become shitty” is not a compelling argument.
If Steam starts abusing their position and becomes shitty then I will stop using Steam. There is nothing morally or ethically wrong (or difficult) with “pirating” the games I have legally purchased on Steam in order to access them outside of the Steam environment.
Except that yes it does. You’re expecting all devs to spend their life savings to develop a game in the hope that Markiplier or Northernlion or whoever else decide to play their game out of thousands of suggestions they get? Some of them prefer a guaranteed salary in exchange for exclusivity, just like the vast majority of people exchange a guaranteed salary in exchange for work exclusive to a single employer. But somehow you guys expect devs to just gamble while you wouldn’t play slot machine for a living.
I’m making a parallel between those businesses who still need money to come in in order to pay employees and the way people who are complaining about exclusives wouldn’t submit themselves to the same process of working without any guaranteed income. Money to pay employees doesn’t come out of nowhere and plenty of publishers have went bankrupt leaving the employees without anything to show for their hard work.
You’re also completely forgetting about indie devs.
You can’t hide behind a bad analogy simply due to it being an analogy. It’s still bad. McDonald’s doesn’t get paid until someone buys a burger. Walmart doesn’t get paid until a customer leaves the checkout. This is very normal for businesses that you don’t get money until the consumer buys your product. If I start an independent business selling socks I can make all the socks I want, I don’t get paid unless people buy them. That’s a normal risk to starting your own business.
All of this is besides the fact that I don’t blame devs for taking the offer, I blame Epic. If a game later becomes available on another service I will consider it then, I will not let Epic have any of my money.
You’re also completely forgetting about indie devs.
To make that burger they need to acquire the property, get permits, build the restaurant, purchase and receive equipment, get more permits, train staff, get supplies, advertise…
Yes, all that will take 2-3 years. I worked at a McDonald’s that was getting rebuilt and the process for a restaurant that already existed took longer than 2 years.
Thank you for focusing on the last relevant part of my comment to signal that you don’t have any actual valid criticisms of what I said.
Hey, you do you. Just don't try to sell me a moral high horse about exclusivity. I grew past console wars when the kids in the playground were excited about Terminator 2 coming out. If we're going to bring the conversation back to that level I demand my knees stop hurting in the proces of de-evolution as well.
Any good thing about Epic Store other than Free games?
Why would anyone want to buy it on Epic if it available on GOG, Steam or Itch? Personally, I will never because it didn’t even provide good regional prices.
I don't know, I don't care. I don't often buy things on Epic, myself. Seems to me that "free games" is a pretty big thing to dismiss out of hand, though. That seems like a good thing, free games.
In any case the fact that Epic isn't my store of choice for anything but exclusives and free games also means I don't spend my time posting stuff about how much they suck. That seems like an undue amount of effort and attention for my what? Fourth, fifth favorite online games store on PC.
There's also nothing particularly bad about it. Bit of a simple, feature-light UX. Free games is nice. They are smart enough about allowing third party logins, so you can easily import your games automatically into other, better launchers like GOG Galaxy, Launchbox or Heroic. Seen worse.
Ah, the killer retort of the online argument. "If you don't care about this thing I'm mad about for no reason, why are you explaining how I'm wrong about it?"
See, the answer is "because you whining about it on the Internet bothers me more than the thing you're mad about", which doesn't make anybody involved look good. I didn't say I was a dignified commenter, I said the console wars nonsense is too undignified even for me.
One reason is that the Epic Games revenue split gives more to the developers. That being said though, they do enter exclusivity agreements with publishers all the time, which is anti-consumer.
But MudMan’s comment was more about how the meme denounces store-exclusive games, yet games that are available only on Steam are also store-exclusive.
GOG is a bit of an outlier. They allow developers to list their games DRM-free so their customers can truly own their games. If store exclusivity is the problem, GOG is the solution - not Steam.
Some game on Epic cost more for me than Steam(BTD6, Brotato and some other). If a game is available on Steam and Epic, I will buy it on Steam. If a game is available on Steam, GOG and Epic I will buy it on GOG. If it’s available on itch.io then itch.io.
Yeah. Those assholes. Taking 12% of the gross of a game sales instead of Valve’s 30% at a time when studios are struggling.
That better overlay and browser is totally worth 18% of the total value of a game and shouldn’t go to the employees making the product or into more features. I need my virtual stickers!
Steam also has anti-consumer policies. They just hide it better.
You think the reasen that games that are on both platforms don’t cost 20% more on Steam is because the devs love Gabe?
He’s a fucking billionaire who makes infinite money running an app store that takes a bigger cut of the game’s income than the combined pay of all the developers working on the game combined.
He’s not your friend. He’s a leech running a glorified app launcher.
This is a conversation about steam, the platform not Gabe. Yes, he is a billionaire, yes that makes him shitty, but guess what? Steam is a fantastic service for the end user, and that’s what matters.
If they charged less.fpr the platform, they’d still be raking in more than they can spend while also not taking an extra 20% out of game development budgets versus the competition.
As a consumer I’m more concerned about Epic’s anti-consumer practices than what they are paying devs.
Talking about how much they could charge devs does not change my experience as a consumer. It does not provide a compelling argument for me to use a service that does noticeably make things worse for the consumer.
You think Valve taking an extortionate amount of the budget doesn’t affect you as a consumer?
Games have budgets. With Valve taking as much money as the actual development budget for many games, the end product is significantly impacted. Games are regularly released late while missing features and so buggy as to not work. The extra 18% of the gross taken up by Valve versus EGS could be used to put more resources into the actual game.
Walmart and GameStop provide a physical place, that’s it. The Developer sends them the physical product.
Steam provides unlimited downloads, user forums, automatic updates, remote play, user reviews, Steam workshop etc…
None of these other stores provide these things.
Maybe Epic should charge more than 12% and invest that money in improving their client, or at least do that instead of wasting it on exclusivity deals. Then maybe I as a consumer will give a shit about Epic.
Yeah I love Epic’s cloud saves… Wait… I mean I love their supreme 80% discounts… No wait, I mean I love their integrated friends li… Their API?.. No, I mean their customizable launche…Well, the two free games they hand out once a month are alright.
I love their tags and vast user game reviews the most, myself:
This game that is 🛁 relaxing, has 🌐 diverse characters and is 🐣 great for beginners has 4.7 stars, from the “players in the Epic Games ecosystem.”
It’s the action adventure game GTA 5, of course.
Epic deserves shit for being a shitty company overall. The lower sale tax is great for devs, but most consumers don’t care, because the program is a shitty Unreal application pretending to be a shitty web browser
Valve can definitely lower their sale tax, they get loads of money off trading cards and skin sales, maintenance of that shit is waaay lower than the petabytes needed for games. At least some of the money is spent making better consumer stuff, like Steam deck and increasing the number of games that you can play on Linux with Proton. Doesn’t explain the 30% either way
A PC game is either on Steam or GOG or it doesn’t exist to me.
I subscribe to the humble monthly bundle thing and if a game doesn’t activate on one of those two I’m probably never going to play it despite owning it.
I’d maybe have added epic to the list if it wasn’t for the store exclusivity stuff. I know that they’ve dialled it back significantly, but anti-consumer stinks like that don’t readily wash out.
Conversely, GOG is on the list because they’re expressly pro-consumer, particularly with their preservationist initiatives. My monkey brain would prefer everything in one place on Steam, but I recognise behaviour I want to support in these companies, so GOG gets my money too
You forgot patreon. Steam censors the library in places (hello German government & fuck you hard with a rusty rebar). But even outside censorship, patreon game developers usually do not lock in their games into rootkit-protected anticheat/copy protection/whatever bullshit.
Not censored but mandated by a government body so they literally have no other option other than doing that.
If the dev is too lazy to fill out a questionnaire for self-categorizing the age rating why is Valve responsible for that?
I am not talking about the age categorization, I am talking about having to implement a customer age verification which they won’t do for the German market, and again, while this would be easy, I don’t necessarily blame steam for it. But that they do censor is unquestioned, and therefore more options are welcome, as long as those stores do not require a launcher, installer or otherwise intrusive software.
Slice and Dice. Turn based RPG dungeon fighter where your party are all unique dice that you can modify with items and such. The interface is super slick and well done.
I’ve put in hundreds of hours and I’m going to likely be putting in hundreds more. Well worth the price!
I don’t know much about android handhelds or anything, but I feel like Mindustry on F-droid could be a fun game. No idea if the device is touchscreen, nor if there are physical controls whether they’ll work natively.
Why yes your honor, I did pirate 47TB of games. But as Infomatics90 clearly indicated, my reasons prove I am a child, and therefore I argue I can’t be tried as an adult. I rest my case!
Capitalists do whatever they can get away with to goose profit.
Which is basically everything since they hired the people who wrote the laws and bribed the politicians to pass them. (see ALEC)
What is immature to doing what can be gotten away with to them in kind? Isn’t that just, as the capitalists say, exercising our highly virtuous rational self-interest?
Whether or not it is on gog doesn’t really impact how easy it is to pirate. For me it’s almost like streaming where the convenience is so high that I’d rather just pay on gog and get the perks that come with that then look elsewhere.
I just like how they package things, and I’m a Linux user.
Nah, I own most of the games I have stored executables for, I just don’t have the most faith in the future of American internet, so making my own repository of easily installable pirated crap is more like a failsafe.
bin.pol.social
Najstarsze