Almost like crying about Steam “exclusives”, creating an actual exclusivity PC war, and handing out free games to prop up a shitty marketplace and launcher wasn’t such a good financial decision…
Well, competition for Valve might not be the worst thing.
On the other Hand I’m not sure if we would have gotten vive or steam deck if valve didn’t have a money printing machine with steam.
I’m rather certain that most companies would be worse for consumers, with the level of monopoly (/market dominance) that steam enjoys
@TheYang@Fazoo
Really like your perspective on it. Watching Disney and EA scoop up multiple IPs than misuse them like they are really puts Valve into perspective lol. At least Valve has the Steam Sales which is the most consumer friendly i've ever seen in recent history lol. Next to Sega promoting us to scream at our teachers and parents lmao.
This is the part that blows my mind. When you have a money-printing machine like Fortnite and you still manage to lose money, maybe it’s the CEO you need to be firing.
Like other commenters here, I’m hopeful. Epic owning Bandcamp was pretty scary. They never really answered questions about it and a lot of folks were worried it could have gone the Epic Store route. Epic might honestly have sucked up all the data and sold it off already, though. We don’t know what the future will hold; I feel like no Epic is at worst a neutral position. Songtradr is at least in the music business and isn’t headed by Tim Sweeney.
There's so few instances of corporations doing actually good things so opinions tend to skew negative. Epic hasn't been thought of fondly since they started doing those exclusivity deals to try and bring people to their platform rather than making their platform a worthy competitor to Steam.
It’s very rare that those who hate Epic also hate Valve though, so it’s not about standing against a corporation. People just defend what they are used to and Epic disrupts that.
I'll be the first to say that I only begrudgingly accept Steam exists. However, I avoid using it and vastly prefer GOG due to the DRM-free nature of their store and the offline installers.
Just because the hate on Epic is vocal does not mean that everyone likes the Steam status quo.
You’re presuming the contributors to Lemmy are just the same in their choices of gaming as the broader market.
It doesn’t take that much reading of posts in Lemmy to conclude that it’s heavilly biased towards adults, techies and lefties.
In Statistics you can only make presumptions about a subset of subjects from statistical distribution data from the whole universe of subjects if the subset has been randomly selected, which this one most definitelly hasn’t - if only because of the “Reddit migration” Lemmy is filled with people with a certain kind of mindset (the ones for whom the actions of the Reddit CEO were displeasing enough to make them want to move and who actually had the will to do so) which isn’t at all the average person’s behaviour (the “average” just stayed there) plus even the Reddit population was already not representative of gamers generally (older in general).
The general market share of GOG might give you a hint that here too it’s likely going to have fewer customers than something like Steam, but judging by comments I’ve read here it’s probably more than 2%, at least amongst commenters (no idea about lurkers).
epic is a lawful good with epic mega grants, but their partial owner tencent is lawful evil. if Sweeney ever loses a controlling amount of shares to them, I’m likely done with them for good.
if Sweeney ever loses a controlling amount of shares to them
To be clear, he can’t “lose” shares to them. He might willingly sell shares to them (although that’s unlikely as he’s shown no indication of giving anyone else control over the company thus far), but it’s a private company - the shares aren’t just out there for Tencent to buy up and force a takeover.
It's getting pretty tiring on Reddit. You'd think Sweeney were Hitler. I get that Epic's exclusives were annoying, but they also give us free games every week. The hate is far past justification.
Opposing it? EOS supports Linux, EAC works on the Deck, and Epic regularly invest in things like Lutris. Sure, there are no native Linux ports on the Epic store, but that’s not been the general direction of the industry either. Proton/Wine can still be used to run the games sold by Epic.
Rocket League also dropped Mac support, which would be perfectly compatible with the store, so you can’t argue it was about Linux. The actual reason was the need to upgrade to DX11.
Payday 2 has no connection to Epic, but it’s common for developers to revisit and update games when releasing on a new platform. For example, the upcoming Steam port of THPS 1+2 even has a new developer behind it, and set to include achievements and potentially other perks.
There are also games like Rust that have dropped native Linux support without any ties to Epic.
Why do people always say this as if these forums are some niche group and not a huge spread of the general population?
If you’re seeing multiple communities with a general opinion, maybe it’s “people hate them” instead of “why do all these different groups hate the same thing?”
God damnit if I didn’t open this post to write this, verbatim
Honestly after unity shit the bed and payday 3 looks like a turd they probably realized they don’t need to try as hard anymore on unreal and fortnite, respectively
I say big budget games are too large in scope. Too much going on, too ambitious, too much emphasis on certain aspects that I feel developers value more than consumers. Not every game needs to be the biggest baddest game of the year blah blah blah.
For real, I think it’s rather telling that there are people who exclusively play some triple a games for the mini games.
It’s also interesting seeing indie take larger and larger chunks from the triple a market. Remember when harvest moon and simcity were big corporate endeavors, now it’s indie titles like city skylines and stardew Valley.
I would like to see some smaller projects from triple a studios targeting genres other than open world action-rpg.
studios targeting genres other than open world action-rpg.
With the corporate culture that’s developed in the industry I don’t think anyone should want that. Indie has the small project space covered & they make far better games than EA or Activision ever could in those genres. Corporate sellouts cannot beat passion, but they can make games so large in scope that small studios just cannot compete with that.
Yeah. Every time someone comes up with “games are too cheap” I always point to the fact that the vast majority of AAA games have insane amount of bloat. If AAA devs were struggling to make a profit then a clear way to cut costs would be to streamline the product. If leveling is not vital, cut it. If randomized loot is not necessary, cut it. If horse balls shrinking/expanding with the weather is not necessary, cut it.
There are always ways to cut corners in a AAA games and if the cost was an issue they’d do it. But the fact that they don’t shows how little the actually struggle. So far Bethesda is the only company that is clearly cutting the corners of their AAA products.
So far Bethesda is the only company that is clearly cutting the corners of their AAA products.
Starfield is the sloppiest Bethasda game ever, cutting corners to save cost is not how I would describe its development at all.
I agree with what you are saying though. Spending 40% of the budget on voice acting and cinematographic dialog is extremely wasteful. As long as the gameplay is good and graphics are pretty gamers will like the product.
I’d say its about on par with their past games. It’s clearly their game engine, modified to do space stuff.
If you come at it with the mindset that not every game has to get bigger and more expansive and have more and more realism/mechanics that don’t serve the core gameplay, it achieves it’s goal.
Not saying its game of the year material or anything, but if I was doing an employee review, I’d give it a meets expectations grade.
Starfield is by far their cleanest release. It’s honestly the first game I have played from them that hasn’t crashed in 100+ hours.
There are aspects I wish had received a bit more attention, sure. But to date, Skyrim and Fallout 4 both have stability mods that are basically requirements to reduce crashing.
And I’m saying this as somebody with near 2k hours in Skyrim. So I definitely enjoy that game.
I played Morrowind, Oblivion & Skyrim at release. Compared to Starfield they were far more polished to me. Yes crashes & the odd broken quest happened, but overall they were playable, people without an internet connection could buy the games in a shop & then finish them. Also Oblivion had the best graphics for an open world rpg when it came out, while also running pretty well on the shit tier GPUs of the time. In my mind, Starfield is not pretty on ultra, runs like shit on decent hardware even at relatively low settings and the list of broken things is endless.
I’m honestly not experiencing the same. I’m running on ultra with an RTX 3080 and rarely even see a stutter and the only consistent bug I see is just comical. When I sprint for a bit and enter a door, my companion will be sprinting into a wall for a bit.
I actually do find Starfield to be a pretty game, as well. They have learned better lighting strategies from previous games and the trees look much much better. I wish the facial and running animations were better, but that’s not so bad as to be too skewer the game.
As far as Oblivion having the best graphics of it’s time, sure. But 2006 basically every game that was going for good graphics achieved the best at release. That was a pivotal period for graphics in games.
Honestly, I’d rather have stellar voice acting and okay graphics (not good, just not bad enough to turn it off after it makes me dizzy) than the other way around. Graphics lose their appeal after a short while in-game.
Imagine if people could buy a background music only -subtitle dialog- edition of Baldur’s Gate 3 for €40. How would the sale distribution go? I think this is a rather interesting thought experiment, I would personally opt to buy the cheaper version for sure, even though I do know the voice acting in BG3 is a landmark in gaming.
I would definitely buy that. I usually keep my game volumes on low and click through the dialogue because I already read the subtitle, why wait around to finish having the line delivered verbally? (Interestingly enough I’ve never ever thought “hurry up, speak faster” in an in real life conversation, this impatience only exists in video games.) Because of the value of voice acting, but for me personally voice acting is just not a priority.
I think this might have more to do with the beating that Epic took from Apple in court. The 2021 decision in favor of Apple, of their lawsuit for anti-competitive behavior was upheld this year. That was not cheap to litigate that and was a major loss for Epic.
I think the Bandcamp sell off is a good indicator of all of this. Epic obtained Bandcamp in March 2022, to explicitly have their IAP system integrated into it. Google shut them down and told them they would start collecting the 30% usual due. Epic filed suit and Google gave them an exception for the time being with the agreement that 10% would be held in escrow until the conclusion of the trail. With many of the arguments in the Apple case similar to Google's case, I'm pretty sure Epic sees the loss coming from a mile away.
All in all, what I think can be drawn from this. Epic made a big bet on "their store" and that's fading away with mobile devices locking people into a marketplace that is "distinctly not Epic". While putting such a bet wouldn't normally kill a company, Epic sextupled down on it and I think how hard they went for "their marketplace" is what's done them in.
That and the EGS seem to be where Epic funneled all their profits from the height of Fornite. That neither has worked out puts them on shakier ground. How many billions of dollars has been spent on EGS with it being way behind their revenue targets?
As things stand, Epic has very little in the way of a next big revenue source when Fortnite starts to fade as something new takes its place. That (probably) isn’t right around the corner but it will happen eventually. Their bet was on running major digital storefronts; that hasn’t worked out. UE will continue to make good money but not anywhere near enough to sustain the company as it is. UE is simply far smaller than something like FN.
This is likely them realizing this in conjunction with what you said. They need a new big revenue source in the pipeline, since digital storefronts won’t be it. Whatever that next thing is will need lots of money.
I just double checked and I think I will continue my trend of but buying Capcom games. The few IPs I may have been interested in I can definitely live without.
Godot is an open source game engine that is incredibly trending among the “hipster” developers community and fanatics of FOSS.
It’s absolutely not even close to the features offered by Unreal Engine or Unity but people that are barely informed are all excited because now an open source project with some serious bugs and limitations “will show them”.
Unless there is a serious rewrite, Godot will never be a valid alternative to the two main commercial engines. And with the fact that it had been recently heavily rewritten to be updated to v4, it is really improbable that it will happen soon.
Unless there is a serious rewrite, Godot will never be a valid alternative to the two main commercial engines
How so? I’ve seen complaints about the C# API and some similar challenges, but nothing show-stopping. Obviously you won’t be making a AAA game in it, but for indies it looks like a decent option.
The dirty secret of software is that any given user-facing OSS application is about 15 years behind the closed-source competitors, but the fact is that most software was good-enough 15 years ago and the industry has spent the last 15 years on cloudifying and A-B testing and GUI revamping and other stuff that isn’t basic functionality.
The thing is, even Indies can look and feel like AAA games (well, the good ones) with something unreal engine for example.
I’m not a fan of Epic by any means but all I’m saying is that they asinine aren’t in the same league while with Unity they could at least be close.
Unity have done a real shitty moves but all this “We’ll do even better without it” attitude that I’m seeing around is either coming from people that just think “shitty move” or really really really naive developers.
I guess that since Epic owns Unreal Engine that bad news for Epic means good news for Godot?
I don’t think that Epic is going to want to divest from Unreal considering how much money it makes.
I also don’t think that it’s a zero-sum game. As a developer I want Unreal (and Unity) to be great so it creates more competition. Unreal has led the way in a lot of cool gaming tech that Godot is picking up.
Maybe it was reverse psychology. Epic is trying to destroy the competition by giving them money. Then, paranoid gamers will refuse to use or support Godot, because there’s a connection to Epic.
Epic also gave money to Lutris, while Epic’s CEO was smearing Linux users on twitter, so I wouldn’t count on Epic’s stance on things and where some of Epic’s money going aligning any time soon. Those megagrants feel very disingenuous to me (doesn’t mean that those money do not help those “underdog” projects, though).
I might be jaded, but I’d wager that whoever buys it, is going to be worse than having Epic as a rich daddy who is focused on and making money through his core business and doesn’t really know what to do with Bandcamp. Entities that buy it are almost certainly going to squeeze harder at the expense of user experience.
I dunno, company that sells digital content for young people buys company that sells other digital content for young people. I can see the synergy there. Epic Games Store and Bandcamp aren’t that far apart.
And there’s like 300 of them. With Steam, I had to buy my way into a Buridan’s donkey position where I don’t play anything because I have too much. My man Sweeney made me jaded for free.
A good reason would have been potential “synergies” with Harmonix, which they also own, but I don’t recall ever seeing anything about that. Collaboration between the company that sells music and the company that makes music games seems like a no-brainer to me.
They wanted to use it to sell music licences for games and media production and the like. But it never really worked out, so they’ve sold it to a company that already actually knows how to do that.
Interestingly enough, if the games industry had kept the $60 price point that they fixed back ~2005 up with inflation, games would be costing around $95 today.
Unfortunately people's wages haven't kept up with inflation either, so that would just be a double whammy of making people who already struggling to pay for essentials pay more for entertainment as well, and at that point I'd think some people would just decide they can keep playing their old games.
First of all, consider how many hours of use you usually get out of such a AAA title, and you will see that it's actually quite cheap entertainment. And second, there are good games (to waste countless hours on) that are way cheaper.
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