Yeah, but frankly the high seas usually provide less than Steam does even with money in the equation. And that’s probably the only case when high seas is worse, with all the other services in my experience the high seas provide better service(spotify was close). So the point is if a game doesn’t release on Steam it’s release date just moves to the moment it releases on Steam. Not the best scenario, but Steam really has little competition and Epic surely isn’t trying to be one.
Pretty much everything really. It’s basically a store and that’s it, no cool features that Steam has. They may have achievements now but not positive. Think it took two years just for them to add a shopping cart. They dump money on developers to release exclusively on Epic instead of spending it making a good experience for customers. No reviews, no forums, no workshop etc.
I grab the free games they offer every couple weeks and use Heroic to play them, not touching their launcher.
Tldr: Kickstarter Game with a lot of interest while in development announces a release date on Steam. After the date announcement they get contacted by Epic saying “we’d love to host your game” for an exclusivity deal.
Dev responds that they would be happy to have their game on Epic but promises were made during crowd funding that it would be available on Steam.
Epic replies that they aren’t interested if it’s not exclusive.
This tells me that
Epic is full of shit. "We’d love to have your game, but only if it’s exclusive.
Epic doesn’t care about being a better service for its customers. Having the game available on Epic as well is strictly better for Epic’s customers and they easily could have done that. They chose not to.
Epic is not interested in actually having to compete with other companies. This would require them to provide a better service in some fashion. They are only interested if they can force people “if you want to purchase this game you have to buy it through us” which is anti-consumer.
Everything but I will focus on the main point of the apps. Selling and managing games.
Steam store page has tags for what genre the game is and user reviews as well as information about system requirements. Plus links to click on to go to the developers and publishers pages to see what else they’ve made. You get plenty of information while it’s still easy on the eyes and digestible.
Managing your games with steam is a breeze. They’re listed down the side and the search is there and quick. Click on a game and get more information about it and see a large install or play button. Scroll down to see info about the latest update or activity from friends playing. Right click to get more information like where it’s installed locally.
Epic, at least when I last used it. Didn’t have user reviews, the page had large widgets for all the information making everything feel clutter while giving you less info about the game. Didn’t have tags and sure it did label the publisher but not the developers and you couldn’t click to see their other works.
Epic’s library management once again large widgets while giving less information. Feels cluttered. Install button is small. At the time I used epic there was not easy way to open install location. You had to go in file explorer yourself and find it.
While I’m on the topic of stores to why do console store pages suck as well compared to steam?! The console is literally sold at a loss and make money by selling you games but their store pages are shit compared to steam.
Hey now, I know a bunch of farm laborers and started out as one myself.
They are nowhere near qualified for farm labor. That requires being able to work, not just regurgitate platitudes from the most recent bullshit management fad.
There’s a world where management is treated as an important but not godly position. Where they are schedulers and arbitrators of conflict, and where they aren’t free from consequences because they’re already at the top. And holy hell it’s also not the place where the position is used to promote someone out of where they’re useful simply because paying a labourer more than a manager is seen as unthinkable. It ain’t this one, but I like to think about it sometimes.
Yeah then they’d get to suffer being the incompetent bumbling idiot that does the back breaking stuff. MBA appropriate due to their avarice of wanting to exploit people, to clarify.
edit: Not trying to say farm labor isn’t skill intensive, moreso giving them a taste of their own medicine
This was due to something that happened between (roughly, very roughly) 2005 and 2015. Games went from being made by a bunch of nerds who really wanted to make games, to a more corporate setting, to a marketing setting.
Fifteen years ago QA would declare Alpha, Beta, etc, in that the build fit the criteria for each state. Then, marketing would set a date, and on that date, Alpha, Beta, etc would be ‘ready.’
This lead to huge problems. There was a time where Alpha meant Feature Complete, and that there were only a few major crashes. Beta meant you had no, or virtually no, reproable crashes, game ending bugs, etc. (Then later) once marketing took over, it didn’t matter. Instead of Beta being a checklist, it was just ‘March 10th.’
In addition to this, innovative and cool game design ideas are harder to sell visually than ‘we doubled the poly’s!’ So more and more focus was put on visuals to the point where marketing would assign things to the design team, IE. “It has to have battlefield COD tarkov CSGO TF2 Popular Game-like mechanics, gameplay, etc.”
So now you get games shipped with incredible graphics and garbage stability. I’ve been on projects where crashes later in the campaign were changed from P1 to P2 because reviewers likely wouldn’t make it to the point where those would come up. (This is called ‘punting’.) In addition, having arbitrary dates decide major milestones means that builds are constantly broken, all through the process of creating them. You know how people get that ‘beta’ build of a game and ask why it’s so crash happy, why it runs like shit, etc? It’s because the game has literally never been stable. It’s been assigned Alpha and Beta based on a calendar, and time is never allowed to delay to fix issues. Add to that that the owners of game companies will give publishers absolutely asinine claims about how long a game will take. Most franchise games, ‘AAA’-wise, are made in 18 months. However, they often also had six months of pre-production before that. Marketing took that out, and focused on a game every 12 months. They used a secondary studio for the ‘B-Team’ and thus every second game in the series was made by said ‘B-Team’. B-Teams were given even less time, and often no pre-production, so the entire game would effectively be made in 12 months.
Then they lay off 50-70% of the staff, and start all over.
So if I may end this way, do not go into games. If you like them make them in your free time. You will be treated like an animal and be unemployed about 1/4 of the time if you choose the industry. Of all the people who I worked with in my first company, maybe six are still in games.
No worries. I see a lot of posts about what’s happening that are close, but don’t quite understand this is a managerial issue. The devs themselves are (mostly) good people who want to make games. The owners of smaller companies don’t get called out enough though, in my opinion. Every time you see ‘EA just bought and closed another…’ keep in mind the vast majority of the time the company didn’t need to be sold. Some guy who inherited a bunch of money created a company of people who do the actual work, then waited till the worth of the company was high enough for them to sell. It happens constantly and it’s easily the most disheartening part of game development.
Imagine spending 80 hour weeks and 30-90 days without a single day off, making a breakout game that is beloved… and realising you’re not going to make it to 5 years at a company, because they’re selling it to Activision.
Maybe the most fucking disgusting part of all of this is that it doesn’t even lead to more money. The shitty western companies are all fucking floundering right now because they have no institutional knowledge, there’s no way to become a veteran game dev at a company that churns through their workforce every 12 months, and suddenly you have out of touch execs at Ubisoft and EA wondering why people don’t play their games. All the innovation that comes from pouring your soul into a project for the long-term comes from indie developers now, and it’s left AAA games feeling as soulless to play as they are to make.
Meanwhile in the east you have companies like FromSoftware and Capcom who are just laughing all the way to the bank, because their competition is all run by idiots.
Oh don’t get me wrong, the execs in the east aren’t immune to doing batshit insane things. Capcom is on some wild shit with their microtransactions. Konami really feels like they’re just taking a shovel to Kojima’s legacy and pulling out whatever they can. Nintendo is trying to find out if they can legally punch developers in the face.
But they aren’t putting out multi-million dollar flops. They’re not decimating their workforce to increase CEO compensation packages. They’re not getting swallowed up by the handful of fish who are too big for the pond. They’re just being kinda weird, which is a fine change of pace.
If you allow for some cultural differences Nintendo is not really acting all that weird. It’s a conservative (in the original meaning) company in a very conservative country. They play it close to the vest and are very careful about protecting what they feel is theirs to protect.
Don’t get me wrong though, I dislike what they’ve been doing as well and I’m not defending them. From their perspective they probably don’t look at it like that though. For them it’s mostly what they feel like is defensive measures to protect their stuff. I’m certain they won’t stop until they’ve done their best to utterly destroy the emulator market at large. For me at least that’s the only reason I need to completely boycott them.
It fucking sucks, but this is what capitalism comes down to. Hopefully they get some sense slapped into them at some point soon by a judge somewhere.
Konami on the other hand, that shit just boggles my mind. I don’t understand any of the choices they’ve made for a while now.
Meanwhile in the east you have companies like FromSoftware and Capcom who are just laughing all the way to the bank, because their competition is all run by idiots.
The worst part is the CEO’s/whatever of each company know each other, too. You’ll get C-suites come into game companies who not only have never played a game before, but don’t even remotely understand how software development works. I worked for a company where the owner made himself Project Manager and ran that project straight into the ground. Tens of millions on worthless overtime while we sat around waiting for another build that would fail, on a weekend, for months.
Larian sounds like some sort of a bizarro-world company. They even have awful investors but managed to keep creative/overall control.
I do remember seeing one of their terms saying something along the lines of “similar games will count as one” for the purposes of installs+revenue, that or someone mentioning it. Can’t seem to find it anymore, maybe they removed it? EDIT - Found one mention of it, “Games or apps with substantially similar content may be counted as one project”, Unity probably went back on this one, as it’s not listed on the FAQ right now
Though considering Pokemon Shining Pearl/Brilliant Diamond runs on Unity, I doubt they’d want to let such a high selling game go untaxed.
Just goes to show nobody at Unity bothered to think this shit through. With the clause they’re going to have so many lawsuits with similar-but-not-same games, without the clause devs can dodge the fees like this.
The terms have been changing every day, it’s such a shitshow. Like maybe they should’ve discussed and ironed out the specifics with the community before changing everything idk.
Jan 2022: “Heres xenoblade 3, an absolutely gigantic single player game, no microtransactions, pushes the console to it’s absolute limit, Monolithsoft at the top of their fucking game. Announced today, out in september.”
April 2022: “Lol, it’s now out in july. Enjoy.”.
Baldurs gate is fucking sweet, but let’s not act like it’s a unique occurance in AAA gaming.
This isn’t a pissing contest and no one is acting like this is unique. We saw the same excitement for the last 2 Zelda games, God of War, Spiderman, Elden Ring etc. (post more examples, I don’t pay as much attention to the industry anymore so I’m sure I’ve missed a bunch). Let’s celebrate them if that’s what you’d like to see more of. They’re all awesome and they all add to the evidence that there is a large population that still want to experience games this way.
Yes actually, they are. That’s the entire reason this debate began; some developers claimed that Baldur’s Gate 3 is a unique occurrence and should be treated as such, rather than an example of a AAA video game meeting the expectations of consumers.
I think that was the point the person you replied to was getting at: not only is it completely fine for consumers to have these expectations, but it’s actually not even as rare as these developers are making out. There are other examples of AAA development studios and publishers who aren’t engaging in blatantly anti-consumer practices, so the ones that do really have no excuse.
My example was just the first that came to mind. But like baldurs gate, you can tell the amount of care and passion that has been put into it. And it’s a AAA title no matter whether people think otherwise due to it being a Switch exclusive (admittedly, I only play switch games nowadays on my PC emulated in 4k60fps but still…)
botw and todk are fps limited to 30fps by default due to their physics engine being tied to the framerate. There are workaround/hacks though to get them running smoothly in an emulator. (At least there is for the wii u version of botw in cemu, I’m not quite up to date with switch emulation but I’d be surprised if there wasn’t)
No, that was 2. That mechanic and plot point doesn’t exist in 3. 3 has very little, if any, fanservice, most due to its dark subject matter (infinite war, limited lifespans)
And yes, AAA. It cost multiple millions, hundreds of staff working on it, hundreds of hours of VA including notable UK talent (Jenna Coleman, etc), a fully orchestral soundtrack by Yasunori Mitsuda recorded in multiple countries, and the game itself pushes the switch to breaking point. It absolutely counts and is considered by Nintendo as one.
There’s loads of other examples of decent single player experiences without bullshit, this one just came to mind first. And I hope Baldurs Gate’s success brings more like these
They have 30+ bundles listed at the moment and I’m sure some of them are great but I’ve unsubscribed from their notifications, they’ve lost some focus and quality control from when each bundle was a notable event.
You can still customize it, but it has hard minimum at what I think is $7. The old humble had no minimum at all. They also deceptively set the “default” cost 1 tier above the actual “get all the items” cost for bundles. A very irritating and obvious dark pattern.
Just IGN brutalizing a beloved name in gaming via enshittification to make its money back.
I think they’d already lost their way a long while before that.
They started as indies grouping together to get visibility, at a time when Steam still curated every game and accepted maybe 4 games a month (yeah, hard to imagine today. It’s still hard to be noticed, but for the opposite reason). Back then they distributed only DRM-free games too, with eventually a Steam key option.
At some point they opened their own store and started including big publisher games, and really became just another store, and mostly a key store too. They spew some bullshit about not being specifically a DRM-free store, but really “DRM-agnostic”. “We don’t restrict publishers’ choice of DRM, they can be DRM-free if they want!”
And I’m like, dude, it’s not a stance, Steam technically doesn’t either. You may need the client to install but plenty of games don’t run on any DRM, not even Steamworks.
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