Huh, it’s almost like when you make the same game 12 times, force shitty DRM, and then outright disable access to content, people are not going to support your business.
I remember seeing it the first time as a kid on AC2 and I was like “wooooooaaaaah look at this kick ass view and sick spin around” and then I saw it for the next 10 games and I was less impressed.
My guess is that the Venn diagram for the set of people who know Ubisoft is the publisher and the set of people who would read this article is pretty much a circle.
I just bought the only game I’ll likely ever buy on EGS. It was Alan Wake 2. Being published by Epic, it will unlikely ever be anywhere else until EGS shuts down.
My justifications are as follows: I love the developer and want to support them.
That’s it. The experience was… fine, but far from streamlined. The Epic achievement system is terrible. Imagine walking around in a horror game, immersed in the atmosphere, then a loud cheery mobile app chime blaps through your headphones and a giant banner splatters across the top of your screen announcing your achievement totally jarring you out of the atmosphere.
Then, imagine you find out you can turn on a ‘do not disturb’ mode by pressing shift+f3, then imagine you need to turn it on every time you launch the game. That’s the Epic Games Store experience in a nutshell.
A scam for whom? My epic library is full of games that they literally gave away for free. I didn’t pay for any of them. Hard to see how I’m being scammed. I’m not surprised that it’s a shitty business model though, and I suppose their investors could argue they’re being scammed.
How does them giving free games have anything to do with their desire for a “monopolistic” market share? Couldn’t they just do the same if they wanted any market share?
Because if you have to subdize to get marketshare then how are you going to maintain that marketshare once you stop subsidizing?
This has been the play for the last decade of cheap VC debt in tech. Wework, Uber, etc all these businesses operate at a loss in the hopes they can someday get a monopoly. That’s the explicitly stated business goal or Uber!
It’s not sustainable. It’s stupid and the bill will come due eventually.
Games as an industry is impossible to make money in unless you’re a platform owner. That’s just how it is. The 1983 game industry crash and Nintendo resurrection showed that. It’s just repeating the cycle.
They operated at a big loss until people were only using their platform and then hiked prices.
They literally price undercut up and coming websites by a ridiculous margin (20-30% sometimes) subsidized by their rich benefactor loans until they were driven out of business and then jacked up their prices to make profit.
The whole game is getting people using your platform as exclusively as possible and then return to normal prices once you gave enough market share.
The scam is that they undermine the actually viable platforms by offering something that is literally too good to be true. Then when all their competitors are dead their store will go to shit and you won’t have an alternative. When the time comes, you will wish you’d spent some money on a real store rather than play for free on theirs. See enshittification.
I could be wrong, but I believe Epic or Sweeney threw something like that around about Steam's pricing model. Or maybe it was just an Internet thing. Regardless, the idea floated was that the only reason Steam took such a cut was it's monopolistic powers. What I believe jaden is trying to say is that that line of reasoning is being shown to be bullshit and that Steam takes that much so it can be profitable.
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