I always wonder this with these brand crossovers that fortnite has become synonymous with. My guess is that it’s something close to “neither” - there is a contract that is signed, but I think because both parties benefit, very little money actually changes hands between Epic and the IP owner.
Car manufacturers get the last say on how their cars are used on any media; and they typically go with licence agreements of some sorts.
The licencing is typically done on a set time frame (which is why most car games that uses real cars does get taken off of stores like 5-7 years later.).
On Fortnite, revenue sharing is done between the IP owner and Epic Games based on how much the said item sells. Since they can this item launch as a limited time sale; this gives a big playerbase an incentive to buy it.
Usually, when it’s a one-off like this, the video game gets “paid” to put the stuff in their game. That payment may be in-kind advertising campaigns, etc.
For something like Need for Speed, Forza, etc, the game will be licensing the likeness of the vehicles and the company logos in the game. I don’t know the costs, but the fact that it’s also advertising will factor in.
In this case, there are a few likely scenarios:
The game director or art director or someone high up at Epic has a hard-on for the Cybertruck and really wanted it in the game. So they pursued Tesla and made a deal.
Epic wanted to add vehicles to the game and decided to go with licensed vehicles. Their merchandising people reached out to merchandising people at all the auto companies and then figured out some deals.
Someone high up at Tesla (maybe even Musk) loves, or has a kid who loves, Fortnite and decided they want the Cybertruck in the game. So they pursued Epic to make a deal.
Number 2 is most likely, but I don’t know the game well enough to know the vehicle situation in it.
For all of them, you have to factor in a bunch of details to figure out who is paying who:
who wants it more (/ power imbalance)
how much money is it going to cost to make the models, animations, etc
how much is it going to cost players to get the item
are there aspects that either company finds undesirable (E.g. sometimes car companies don’t like their cars shown with damage)
who will be doing the bulk of the marketing, and who has the marketing budget to spend on the venture
probably a lot more
So, it’s hard to say without more inside info. Games I’ve worked on have had 1 and 2, but not 3 as far as I know. I think it was pretty much an in-kind deal for the 1 situation though (like we got the likenesses, they got advertising through the game, ostensibly we sold more games with the likenesses, but I think it just stroked someone’s ego…) All of the 2 situations were done to bring in money for the game’s marketing budget / or were in-kind marketing deals, possibly bringing money directly to the bottom line, but I don’t know.
Started playing it and I’m liking it so far! The low health regen is very clever. Solves the problem in Half Life 1 where the player is always finishing encounters at 1 HP without the need for excessive health pickups. Now the player is guaranteed to have at least 35 HP.
The immersion is really great as well. Often I forget that all the enemies are just 2D sprites.
Honestly that’s what made me stop playing OG Half-Life until Black Mesa came out. I wanted to do it without cheats or anything, but goddamn do the enemies pack a punch.
This is the big problem with modern gaming. Too many companies are now in hock to investors and publishers. To those at the top of the hierarchy, making a game is an investment, a bet. Innovation is stifled in favour 9f ‘safe bets’, no wonder gaming is stagnating.
It’s not all doom and gloom, there are still exceptions to the rule. But it’s certainly not looking good for fantastic single player games.
I’m expecting gta 6 to have a much shorter single player campaign with most of the focus towards online (and more obscene earnings from shark cards 2.0).
I agree with the rest but it’s not just modern gaming it was happening back in the 90s on consoles and earlier in arcades. One of the first games I played was an obvious cash grab by Marvel, Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge for the Gameboy. It was barely playable.
Ive commented on this before, as sad as it is if we want innovative, expansive, beautiful AAA titles we have to accept that investors arent going to keep backing the money truck up on maybes. Microtransactions, subscriptions, dlcs… there has to be an ongoing income stream or an absolutely eyewatering launch price OR we get used to safer and safer bets or games with very narrow scopes.
Yep, it’s a real quandary. I’m not sure what the solution is, or if there is one from our perspective… it’s no point voting with my wallet when there’s millions of others who won’t.
I think you have to ask yourself if the company is behaving ethically.
If a game is F2P but has microtransactions that arent P2W and the devs are continuing to maintain the game then its hard to be mad that they want to make some money off the basic game you get for free. (Mechwarrior online is a pretty good example of this)
If its a subscription, are you getting regular additional content for the money or is the subscription just allowing you to play the game you paid for? Do you still have to buy DLCs and pay subscription?
If its DLC, is it meaningful storylines/maps/characters? Does it make the prospect of another playthrough different or more interesting? Is it a reasonable price for what it gives you?
You make excellent points. Personally, I rarely have a problem paying for proper DLC (and buy proper DLC I mean, additional story content that wasn’t obviously cynically cut from the OG game). Notable past examples for GTA, stuff like ‘The Ballad of Gay Tony’ were amazing expansions.
Also sticking with GTA, they’re a good example of bad practice nowadays (imo). They pivoted to online-only DLC once they realised how lucrative a pay-to-play system can be when leveraged against not being bullied by players with more disposable income. There was amazing single-player content in dev for GTA5 and they cut it to focus on MP. Worse, they left the dregs of that content in the game, allowed a ‘GTA5 mystery’ concept to flourish and left people hunting for the mystery thinking they were going to find something like GTA4’s bigfoot. Knowing all along it didn’t exist. But of course, happy that people were still playing and hoping they would get bored and try online mode.
I personally like to think this trend of enshittification in the gaming industry is geared more towards the triple AAA side of things because a lot of the actual indie devs (not the people putting out low effort mobile games or shovelware or scams or straight up large corporatios masquerading their games as indie titles) are putting out some of the best games I’ve seen in years for single player experiences.
Though I absolutely agree with your assessment of the situation in general.
This was what I meant. It’s these smaller devs that seem to be innovating to any extent at the moment!
Maybe I’m just a bit jaded due to being an old fart nowadays… I remember playing the original Doom / Wolfenstein so especially FPS feel so overdone to me. When was the last time you saw a truly novel game concept? I’m sure I’ve seen a few over the last few years but can’t remember (see, old fart).
I don’t think I can recall something truly novel since I think we’ve pretty much gone past the point of novel concepts in the majority of genres, but there have definitely been standouts in certain genres over the years.
In the deck building and rogue like genre we’ve seen Balatro, the poker based game. In the retro inspired games genre, we’ve got Corn Kidz 64, a shorter game that controls and looks like an N64 title.
Burned all of my rope with the battle.net “2.0” complete with Facebook integration, rmah, “get the game for free with a years subscription to world of Warcraft” and killing deckard Cain in act 2 of D3 (along with ACT 1 being the only ACT with any love put into it, and that being the entirety of the demo, also pretty clear that’s when Activision bought blizzard)
Never played any of the sc2 expansions, never watched another blizzard tournament, never bought a wow expansion (after TBC), I lost a lot of really great memory associations, but the nostalgia isn’t worth supporting the corpse-puppet of blizzard.
“How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?”
The industry should’ve already learned this lesson from the MMO crash, of everyone trying to replicate WoW’s success and then later realizing that a business model of investing a ton of money to try and compete for both consumers’ time and money is a bad idea.
Sadly its also going to steal the position of a lot of people on AA and middle to indie size studios that need to cut costs to actually stay alive. Obviously some studios will stay afloat without cutting people or going deep into AI content but expect that to the exception not the rule.
It’s so dumb. Instead of struggling with AI to do what your employees did you could make your workforce 20% more productive using AI. Go further faster
Those two things are linked. I'm a frequent Economics Explained viewer, and the old comparison is that 1 accountant with a spreadsheet program can do what 5 accounts could do without one. If you only need the amount of productivity that that one accountant with a spreadsheet can output, that means you don't need four of your accountants anymore.
To use the accountant exemple AI right now or at least the way corp seem to use it is like asking someone without any accountant or spreadsheet knowledge to do the job of 5 accountant sure it might work but for how long and how many accountant you gonna need to repair and clear the problem later but that part don't interest them only short sight profit is important
If they want to put out poor quality products in pursuit of short term profit, they can deal with long-term consequences as they lose their customers' trust. This game is reviewing quite well at the moment, and most of the ways we're fearing AI will be used will result in poor quality products. I'd argue Ubisoft has been putting out poor quality products for a long time, and even this game won't be available in a form that I can consume it due to the short-term deal they made with Epic.
I don’t know if you could call this a positive, but I’ve definitely seen signs that the results of these projects will routinely turn out soulless and flop hard. In the past few years we’ve seen some VERY well-funded projects turn out as total flops. If that’s happening even with human creative input and corrective steering, what should we expect from AI following a straight algorithm?
How are people still hyped like this for video games? I personally haven’t been for a very long time because most of them are just money-grabbing shit.
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?”
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