Developers. UE5 is chalking up to be the defacto standard for modern titles that don’t have budgets large enough to make their own engine.
EGS, on the other hand, is still an abysmal failure beyond the lure of free (and increasingly shittier) games and a yearly 25% off discount coupon that people fall for.
I really wish they’d start by not making the EGS program a fucking UE5 app. Seriously, using the whole ass engine to render html is stupid beyond belief
If you peruse the folder where it’s installed and compared to any UE4 or UE5 game, you’ll notice all the other similarities in .dll files, folders and whatnot. Even the CrashReporter.exe is the same you see in unreal games. Or you can check the config files at Epic GamesLauncherEngineConfig which has stuff like BaseEngine.ini which, among other networking configurations, also has this:
Meanwhile, in Epic GamesLauncherPortalConfig, the “game” part of the launcher, you have DefaultGame.ini and DefaultEngine.ini, the latter’s first 2 lines pointing back to the Engine folder: [Configuration] BasedOn=…EngineConfigBaseEngine.ini
So, yeah, it’s the actual engine. I was going to complain about disk bloat, but my Steam install is currently sitting at 1.3GB and I’m not entirely sure how much of that is from cached stuff. GOG Galaxy is taking ~980MB, but roughly 650MB are from redist installers (MSVC2005, 2007, dotnet, etc), so a “clean” install would be way lighter than Steam or EGS, the latter at 1.1GB on a clean install.
Ever heard the saying “Everything looks like a nail when you have a hammer”? Basically, just because you have a tool, it doesn’t mean it’s the best tool for every job. UE5 is great for making games, cinematics and loads of other stuff. But why use it to effectively behave as a browser like Chrome or Firefox, but worse, when there are alternatives made specifically for that?
I don’t think benchmarks are really needed to explain this. The whole game engine part is an unnecessary step.
To initialize a web browser component within UE5, you first need to initialize UE5 and then the web browser within it. Or, you could initialize a web browser directly, saving the memory and time needed to start up UE5.
They clearly have developers who know how to use CEF or whatever web view framework since they added it to Unreal Engine, so it’s not like they don’t know how to add it to a standalone application.
Wait, wait. Do you think that “the whole engine” is loaded for every UE5 executable? I can tell you that’s not at all how this works. The point of a scalable engine is that it loads whatever relevant libraries or portions of the engine that would be needed, including swapping for custom code where appropriate. The idea that the storefront is unoptimised purely because it uses a game engine is just as ignorant as saying that you should measure all computers purely by a single metric. Maybe you could also compare EGS to other stores and measure only the executable’s size? By your reasoning there’s no need for benchmarks, so surely the store with the smallest exe wins, right?
When I said “the whole game engine part”, I was referring to the usage of the engine at all. The whole engine obviously isn’t loaded, but there’s further abstractions and initialization code compared to using CEF or the Edge web view directly.
I’m simply saying that it’s a waste of resources to require loading or initializing any other part of Unreal Engine (including the component loading code!) when they’re only using it as web view.
I’m also not saying any other storefront is better. Steam is a bloated pig that half uses CEF and half uses Valve’s own proprietary GUI library, and the various other Electron-based publishers’ launchers suffer from different but equally stupid problems.
You have provided absolutely no proof that using UE5 to run EGS is a waste of resources nor that your idea of using a browser directly would be more performant. Just saying things isn’t proof and the burden sits with you.
I’m not about to install EGS to prove something that can be deduced using common sense and critical thinking.
Abstractions are not free. The more of them you add, the more resources will be consumed by the application. Unreal Engine is an extra layer of abstraction sitting above some web view framework. Ergo, using the same web view framework without the Unreal Engine component abstraction would be cheaper.
I know Godot exists, and it’s preferable to supporting Epic, but it isn’t up to feature parity with UE5. Particularly, when it comes to asset streaming and open world games, Unreal has better support out of the box.
I would love for Godot to be the standard and first choice for every developer (including AAA), though.
UE5 had turned into the standard whether you like it or not. I personally don’t like the engine, but that doesn’t mean I’ll lie about its position in the market, and neither should you. You aren’t doing Godot any favours with it
When said “major players” only pump out trash that’s not fun to play, yes, I will ignore them gladly. The last AAA game I bought was Fallen Order, which I promply refunded after finishing, since it was more of a walking and climbing simulator than anything else – and that was one of the better AAA games to come out in the past decade.
Indie devs and studios are the ones actually carrying the industry forwards.
Your preference doesn’t dictate what’s industry standard is my point. It would be like someone only playing exclusively Total War games claiming the Warscape Engine is industry standard, sounds pretty stupid doesn’t it.
The last AAA game I bought was Fallen Order,
A shame you missed out on Baldurs Gate 3 then. Alan Wake also got great criticism.
Fallacious reasoning. “Indie” isn’t a genre of games. I don’t claim AAA games are garbage because of a preference – they’re objectively slop made without passion as a cashgrab.
Steam is largely driven by Valve’s own games and freebies as well. 1.5M currently playing Dota 2 and CS 2, with the next best being F2P games: PUBG with 370K online, Apex Legends, and Naraka.
I really wonder how the palworld devs feel about being gamepass day 1. I have no idea what the payouts look like for them. It probably got a lot more people to try their game, but would they have done better selling it only on steam? They probably weren’t in a position to negotiate a very favorable contract with Microsoft.
I think that’s looking at the deal in hindsight. Palworld had just as good a chance at flopping completely as hitting #1 worldwide, I imagine they were grateful for the opportunity to have some guaranteed income at the time.
I think they meant guaranteed income prior to selling the game, since they had no way of knowing how successful (if at all) the game was going to be once released.
Because craftopia and palworld have a social aspect getting a big seed of players who only played it because it was free (for them) was I think a catalyst in making palworld blow up like it did. There are too many games out there for people to look through so it probably helps get word out effectively to sell out cheap for a big initial audience like gamepass when you’re a small dev. I only knew of craftopia or palworld because of gamepass at least
The flip side is Microsoft is 100% giving the above as a sales pitch to devs why they should put their game on gamepass for peanuts (paid in exposure!). That’s probably some of what drives the shittier deal devs get now
Just because you only know three games, it doesn’t mean the rest of us do too. Slay The Spire, and Darkest Dungeon, are a couple of really well known and community loved indie games. Both excellent examples of what can be done with limited resources
How does this contradict what they said though? Just because some niche community knows these games, it doesn’t make them platform-selling games. Valve had HL2 with episodes, Portal, TF2, CS, and Dota 2.
These are enormous classics, made by small studio is not the same as unknown game. Sold much more than many triple a games, this is a very dry weak take
Unfortunately the more I read the less this seems like a long overdue accounting of the video game industry’s hubris and the more it seems like someone with looking for someone to blame for their failson. These companies have literally hired psychologists to come up with ways to more effectively manipulate their players into buying their digital bullshit, and surprise surprise many of the things those psychologists have come up with are basically unregulated gambling.
“I talked to at least five small teams, like 35 [members] and under, during GDC, and they’re like: Cuts, cuts, cuts, funding canceled, talks that were going on for a year, canceled,” said Casey Yano, the co-founder of Slay the Spire studio Mega Crit. “It sounds like it’s shit. We’re definitely very privileged to be able to self-fund. [Otherwise] I’d be very, very, very scared right now.”
If these deals didn’t exist, lots of games simply wouldn’t get made. You can hate on the platforms all you like but the deals are one of the only sources of funding for small & solo developers.
You do realize those are usually exclusive for only a year, right? So EGS pays them out for a year of exclusivity and then the devs are free to launch on steam and others.
The thing is, often if they don’t get that first infusion of cash from a deal with EGS (or another investor) they don’t get to complete or even launch the game at all. So it never would make it to the other markets.
Usually by the time they’ve made it off EGS, I’ve forgotten they exist. There’s been many sequels to games I loved that I forgot existed because of this.
This is a pretty complicated topic that touches video games, gambling sites, social media algorithms, and marketing in general. It also touches fundamental philosophical questions like the existence of free will.
We have lots of established law on which sort of “mind tricks” are fair play and which aren’t, but we have not advanced those laws to keep pace with the science. Currently, lying is really the only thing off limits and is covered by fraud statutes. We also have some limits on marketing to children. But one could argue that there are several “persuasion” tactics that can be just as effective as outright lies in manipulating the behavior of others. In fact, licensed therapists are ethically barred from using these tactics, yet we allow salesmen, marketers, etc to use them at will.
I don’t really have an opinion on this lawsuit, nor do I feel qualified to offer a solution. But let me give you an example of how the human mind works which underpins addiction to gambling.
Dopamine is a signaling molecule that regulates a lot of our reward responses. If I find honey in a honeycomb, dopamine gets released and now I am more likely to seek out honeycombs in the future. You can see how this is evolutionarily beneficial. Dopamine release reinforces behavior that increases survival. But let’s say that only about 1/3 of all honeycombs have honey. Now I have a lower chance at a reward, so does that mean the dopamine release is likewise diminished? No, the opposite is true. Dopamine release skyrockets. Evolutionarily this makes sense, we do not want to miss out on a reward simply because the probability is diminished, so the high dopamine release counterbalances the diminished probability such that reward seeking behavior is reinforced so long as the probability of reward is reasonable (it peaks at about 1/4). In fact, dopamine is released even when the honeycomb has no honey. You can draw a direct line between this physical phenomenon and gambling addiction. What people don’t appreciate is that this physiological response is very similar to addictive drugs in effectiveness. It can be hard to acknowledge that one of the reasons you are not a gambling addict is simply that you didn’t start gambling to begin with, not that you are somehow superior to those that are addicted.
We have lots of behavioral quirks like this that can be exploited. At what point does this manipulation cross the line? That is a hard question. For me, gacha games cross that line. But if we want to enact meaningful regulations we need to acknowledge that these mind exploits exist and confront the fact that free will may not be as free as we hope.
Dopamine is a signal substance that is present in several places in the brain, and animals, doing different things in different places. It is not as simple as an exploitable chemical that is enabling this or even involved in the behavioral studies targeted and implemented by gambling companies.
Many things in life is exploitative. The plastic in almost all your utility is designed to break so you have to buy new products. The insurers are purposefully hiding clauses to steal from actual people in distress, at the moment where they lost everything. Oil companies astroturf and lobby to keep the transportation and air quality at this unsustainable level just to make even more money when they already have most of the money in the world, enough to buy whole continents, just lying around in Panama.
Music, film, and other forms of art are the few places where the consumer is more actively engaged and sensitive to being exploited, yet it is also the space where that just doesn’t fly. The gambling area is the most interesting place to view these moral questions in. Why is it okay that their entire business model is to work around regulation as much as possible to reach those most vulnerable in society to take their money?
Games with exploitative practices are going hard out of fashion. The people that engage with those systems unhealthily is the same people that are gambling addicts.
To me it’s just very easy and obviously best to use policy involving support networks and social safety nets to protect people rather than using prohibitive regulation and hope that soulless corporations will ever grow artificial moral spines. These psychopathic global machines will never be human or act human ever
I have obviously simplified the role of dopamine in the brain to make it more digestible, but you are dead wrong about dopamine’s role in intermittent reward and the link to gambling addiction. It has a very strong influence on behavior. Like many aspects of human behavior, the effect is not an on-off switch to enable gambling addiction. We have lots of things going on in our head that are, at times, working against each other as far as behavior is concerned. It is more like an analog adjustment that “pushes” toward a specific behavior much harder than it otherwise would. And this effect is just as powerful as addictive chemicals in potency.
Dopamine levels can measure that effect, it is neither the cause or effect. It is like saying the salt in sea water is the active ingredient making fish live. Only certain fish, only one of the things required, and so on. “it” does not have influence on behaviour, “it” is a chemical used in many different parts of our brain, for instance used to keep us breathing among many other things also in animals and even plants, not affecting their behavior in any way.
Oh right, this is .ml, where we’re playing make-believe that the lifetime figurehead who won an election against nobody is toootally a legitimate example of popular democracy. Because it would be impossible to criticize The West™ unless the immediate alternative was completely flawless.
Inventing a domestic video-game company obviously isn’t totalitarian, but it’s some Kim Jong Un shit. It’s an autocrat copying a theme park, with blackjack, and hookers. (Oh god. Tell me I’m not gonna see people pretend the Kims are anything but a hereditary monarchy.)
At first I thought it had to do with lootbox mechanics and scheduling and reward system gaming, but nope, this one was straight up just “he played vidja too much and I’m afraid of him when I take away his games”
One is multiple parallel goals. Makes it hard to stop playing, since there’s always something you just want to finish or do “quickly”.
Say you want to build a house. Chop some trees, make some walls. Oh, need glass for windows. Shovel some sand, make more furnaces, dig a room to put them in - oh, there’s a cave with shiny stuff! Quickly explore a bit. Misstep, fall, zombies, dead. You had not placed a bed yet, so gotta run. Night falls. Dodge spiders and skeletons. Trouble finding new house. There it is! Venture into the cave again to recover your lost equipment. As you come up, a creeper awaitsssss you …
Another mechanism is luck. The world is procedurally generated, and you can craft and create almost anything anywhere. Except for a few things, like spawners. I once was lucky to have two skeleton spawners right next to each other, not far from the surface. In total, I probably spent hours in later worlds to find a similar thing.
The social aspect can also support that you play the game longer or more than you actually would like. Do I lose my “friends” when I stop playing their game?
I don’t think Minecraft does these things in any way maliciously, it’s just a great game. But nevertheless, it has a couple of mechanics which can make it addictive and problematic.
The social aspect can also support that you play the game longer or more than you actually would like.
This is the part of any online game I absolutely hate. The feeling of being even slightly beholden to someone else, like now I have to think about them having a good time too.
Games that forbid direct communication, and allow you to drop in and out of a match without hurting others feel a bit better in this respect imho
Isn’t that more of just part of interacting with people, though?
Like, if you play some kind of real-life game with no regard for anyone else, that’s generally considered poor sportsmanship. That wasn’t invented in online gaming, it’s been a concern as long as people have been coming up with games to play together. We accept that if you sit down and play a game of chess or golf or pool or D&D or paintball, you’re going to try to not cheat or blow the game off or be a jerk about it. Some people are better sports than others, but the general idea is that we accept the wins and losses and the game going in different directions, because otherwise there’s no game.
What’s an aberration is this concept that people you meet with over an electronic connection aren’t real, don’t matter, and are never owed anything.
What’s an aberration is this concept that people you meet with over an electronic connection aren’t real, don’t matter, and are never owed anything.
What you said is all true, but what I’m saying is precisely the opposite of this. I don’t like playing certain games with others because I empathise with others and want them to have a good time.
So I usually avoid games (video and otherwise) that are designed so that my continued enthusiastic participation are required for the enjoyment of others. To me, that doesn’t feel like play; it feels like work.
I’ll do it, but it’s exhausting. Maybe it’s an introvert thing, because I’ll come away from those games feeling completely drained.
Note I’m not saying those games are bad, just that i hate them. At least, if my social battery is already used up for the week (which it usually is just from regular life).
In the case of Minecraft the issues you listed are pretty much present in almost anything entertaining, video games or not, including in-person events and social functions.
As with anything moderation is key and people just need to learn not to let it control them. Some people are incapable of that though.
There are definitely certain things that game companies need to avoid doing but multiple goals, a little bit of luck, and online cooperative play is not it.
This is the same as Trump saying he was just challenging the results of the election.
Namely, nobody is trying to prosecute him for his legal challenges…and nobody is complaining that games are too entertaining. They are bold strawman arguments that most people see through immediately. “Complete bullshit” is now a common argumentative tactic.
For a long time I’ve argued that there needs to be stronger language differences between physiological addiction and psychological addiction, especially in non-academic discourse. Academic papers usually define their terms pretty well, and often use terms like “habit forming” or “dependency” instead of addiction.
A lot of work has been done to remove the stigma of addiction to shift the blame from the individual to the product, and I have no objections at all to that for physiological addiction. Nicotine, alcohol, opioids, etc.
The problem is that zealots have co-opted that model to try to ban anything they don’t want other people to be able to enjoy. Comic books, television, videogames, marijuana, pornography- all of these have had the word “addiction” attached in news media without solid scientific evidence of physiological addiction. At the same time, you can find case studies of individuals with mental health disorders who get addicted to literally anything… I’m not saying there are not individuals who don’t have problems with these things, but a lot of the effort into stigmatizing and restricting these seems to have ulterior motives. It’s parents who don’t want to teach their children about responsibility and discipline. It’s religious zealots trying to push their worldviews on others. It’s large corporations trying to gain market share by attacking competing industries. In some cases like “sex addiction” it’s used to try to excuse or justify criminal behavior and portray abusers as victims. It’s notable that efforts usually go to just banning and shaming these things rather than helping the alleged “victims”. At the same time, efforts at harm reduction for physiological addiction seems to be constantly undermined.
With all of that being said, there is a separate issue that applies to this case- consumer protection. History has clearly demonstrated that without regulation and enforcement, corporations will engage in all manner of activity to screw over every stakeholder (consumers, vendors, employees, lenders, etc) in order to enrich ownership.
Looking at videogames in particular, there are definitely marketing practices and pricing structures that need to be banned. I just hate this idea that “videogames = bad” when the real issue is corporate greed, and a lot of these issues apply to other industries too.
In counseling, we call those process addictions. Internet gaming, sexual addictions, gambling, shopping etc. are all process addictions. Psychological addiction isn’t precise enough as any chemical addiction could have a strong psychological component as well, and almost always does because addictions create habits of use and habits are difficult to break. Also, for instance, we might have to ditch our drinking buddies when we have alcoholism because being around them triggers our urge to drink psychologically.
Engagement is merely the ability to, or the degree to which you are able to, maintain interaction with something (a system, a game, a fidget toy, whatever) over time. It has absolutely nothing to do with entertainment, although you can use entertainment as a means of achieving or increasing engagement. However, entertainment is hard. People are entertained by different things to different degrees, and respond to their entertainment in different ways. Engagement on the other hand is a fairly simple behavioural matter and that’s a whole field of science (which is mostly bollocks, to be fair, but its lessons can be very effective when applied at scale).
Source: I used to be a behavioural engineer, specifically a gamification specialist. Engagement was the oil I was employed to extract, and entertainment the excuse my field used to pretend what we were (and still are) doing isn’t just social manipulation at scale.
Yes yes yes, I’m very on board with this. I think we all know what we’re doing is wrong and manipulative on some level, but the general consciousness hasn’t caught up to recognising the tort.
It may be just be association, but I’m not a huge fan of the term “entertainment” either. It strikes the same hollow note for me as “content.”
Yes it’s an apt description for a part of an experience, but it comes so laden with its own associations and preconceptions, that it doesn’t feel useful in most contexts in which it’s deployed.
That said I have no objections to how you’ve used it in your comment.
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