I’m one of the few who actually like the existence of Epic. Like, not necessarily Epic itself, but some serious competition is needed. I personally would’ve loved it if the competition was GOG, but it seems consumers don’t particularly care about ownership, so we have Epic.
If you are trying to argue that ownership was not even a part of the multitude reasons Stadia failed and is off the table, you should seriously need to consider evaluating your critical thinking skills.
This was supposed to be the comment where you show why ownership was a major factor in why Stadia failed, not a comment where you huff and puff and complain that something you insist on isn’t being accepted.
The problem is that all the competition to steam is far far inferior to steam in technology and ideology and future prospects. Steam isn’t a publicly traded company, has features that are pro consumers, is supporting other OS’s and doesn’t have a CEO that is a prick like epic.
Sure. But what if Gabe newel decided to sell tomorrow. Just wants to retire maybe he’s pretty old. What if Microsoft buys it and you’re left with a monopoly you don’t like. That’s the eventuality of every unhealthy industry.
Well it will be a sad day and Ubisoft, Microsoft and Epic competition won’t fix anything if steam goes to shit. Steam is basically the unicorn and once it becomes extinct we won’t get anything half decent to replace it with. Publicly traded companies are the bedrock of unhealthy industries.
Competition in the marketplace is the only thing that has any chance of saving you when that day comes.
You are in lucky days today. Tomorrow won’t be so good, but you can choose to support an industry controlled by a monopoly, or you can support an industry with healthy competition.
I would hope that Gamers aren’t so near sighted, but I’ve been proven wrong over and over again.
When steam shuts down and we have Ubisoft and Epic to replace it with I’m just moving to itch.io and probably torrenting my steam library if it comes to the worst. Also I might actually stop playing games since steam is pushing proton development forward and without them I have no reason to play or buy anything new. Epic’s shitty CEO has made toxic remarks against linux before and Ubisoft just couldn’t care less. I’ll support a company that supports my interests, epic doesn’t so I don’t simple as.
“Supporting competition” is not a good enough reason to use a shitty service. If I start a service that charges twice as much as Steam and has none of the features would you use it in order to “support competition”?
If the only reason to purchase from Epic is “they exist” that’s not good enough.
I will happily avoid Epic’s attempts to be a monopoly now over worrying that Steam might be shitty in the future.
It’s super weird to me that you guys think epic is trying to be a monopoly. Epic had 0.00001% of the market. In their wildest dreams they might expect to get ten percent.
I feel Steam vs competitors is like how after 1st wave MCU, everyone was jumping on that bandwagon, but instead of putting in the groundwork just skipped ahead, or like the monsters one just abandoned it because of one bad movie.
No, 99% of the reason they use it is that they were first to market, made it mandatory for their first party games that were extremely popular at the time (and even today) and became defacto mandatory for many third party games as it made it simpler to control piracy to just sell through them or include a key in the physical copy and force people to install Steam. The majority of Steam users are casuals that couldn’t care less about their forums, cards, social profiles and so on. It’s the same thing in everything, there’s enthusiasts that think everyone is as crazy as they are about their hobby, the majority are just casual users that will never know/use half of the possibilities available to them because they don’t care.
i would love for steam to have some competition. i will gladly switch over to the first competitor that has
a big picture / controller-friendly interface
controller configurator that
is more powerful than rewasd
is editable in the overlay
has import/exportable configs (incl. with the community)
supports the best controller i’ve ever used, the steam controller
cross-platform client
cross-platform cloud saves
workshop/modding support
proper reviews system
community page for each game
etc.
and doesn’t
buy exclusivity rights to games
i don’t mind revenue deals for exclusivity, but buying existing games takes the biscuit
actively worsen existing games
e.g. removing the impeccable siapi support in rocket league, and making it run on the shitty epic servers so it disconnects all the time
particularly now that steam has switched over to electron, so the client runs like shit
i do sometimes use gog because i like their ideology, but they’re missing quite a few from this list. any gog or itch.io games i buy, i inevitably add to steam as a non-steam game. which adds a lot of these handy features, but not all
unfortunately, until a competitor brings along something new to the table, i’m quite happy to wait and pay more for a game on steam. it just has too many features i can’t give up
particularly now that steam has switched over to electron, so the client runs like shit
It uses CEF not Electron, which it has used for over 13 years. This isn’t something they just added. If it’s running slow for you you probably have an issue with hardware acceleration.
you mean that the store has been an embedded browser? in that case yes
but the whole steam client? has always been vgui, not electron . did you even read the link you sent? just because there is reference to chromium in the commit log doesn’t mean the whole thing’s built in chromium, and just because a programme can render web content also doesn’t mean it’s built in chromium. when firefox switched from xul to html did you go “akshyually, it was always able to render html content so it hasn’t switched at all”
If it’s running slow for you you probably have an issue with hardware acceleration.
it’s not just me who has performance issues. at one point it was everyone on linux with an nvidia gpu. which is supposedly fixed (and it’s definitely better) but it’s still unusably slow on both linux and windows. also, so what. “it works on my machine” isn’t a great excuse to ignore the biggest gaming gpu brand, and electron is notoriously non-performant (if my pc can handle playing a video in ffx whilst playing recent 3d games, i think it should also be able to display my list of owned games without stuttering). my point was that i never had issues with vgui, and now i do.
edit: ah, i’ve just looked through your comment history. i don’t believe anyone who’s not a troll has -10 karma and no negative comments (especially with some comments with >100 points), and i also suspect vote manipulation. i should never have engaged. sorry. i won’t engage any more.
but the whole steam client? has always been vgui, not electron cef. just because there is reference to chromium in the commit log doesn’t mean the whole thing’s built in chromium.
The “whole client” hasn’t been VGUI. Yes now every element is CEF but many, many pieces have been CEF for a very long time. “Switched over to Electron” implies it was entirely changed but it’s just using more of the thing it was already using. Those are two different things.
it’s not just me who has performance issues. at one point it was everyone on linux with an nvidia gpu
The issue you linked had nothing to do with Steam it was a bug with the Nvidia driver itself. Not sure what that’s supposed to prove.
my point was that i never had issues with vgui, and now i do.
And my point is that is not an inherent problem with Steam, that is something specific to your configuration. If it runs fine for other people it can run fine for you. I’m on Arch with an Nvidia GPU. I have zero issues with the performance.
How is a competitor ever supposed to compete with a feature list like that? It has to come out of the gate with all those things? This is why monopolies exist.
honestly? i kind of agree. but gog spent a lot of dev time revamping their client into "gog galaxy 2.0" just to make it less controller accessible; and the epic client is just unusable
i would have more sympathy if they were little indie companies. but the itch.io client is better than either. these companies are pouring money into breaking into a market, but not bothering to develop features
that comment was more an example of why the egs isn’t yet a real competitor than a criticism of any as yet nonexistent competitors
I don’t know who’s idea it was to put out the update that overhauled the classes and game modes in Tribes:Ascend (Out of the Blue, 1.3, 2015)… I had lost the niches that I loved with my specific class and it felt like the game I was playing was different compared to the one prior to that patch.
I was a bad shot then (I was but I still am, too), but god damn if I couldn’t rack up those points with my turret placement.
Worst part of reading this is that I do not remember the year. Or the patch number. But Im fairly positive I know exactly about what you are talking about.
I cry every time. I don’t understand why some indie dev hasn’t created a mechanical rip off yet, imagine battlebit but instead of battlefield it’s tribes. I want to believe it would be huge.
It’s not gimmicky enough for modern players. Sure, skiing took skill and you had different armors and loadouts, but aside from that it was still simple.
The funny thing is that Valve kickstarted the digital sales with Half Life 2 back in 2004. Steam was an utter piece of shit for, what, some 6 years? It took them a lot of time to make it bearable, then good.
That the EGS launcher is a fucking Unreal app, needlessly bloated as fuck and with barely working UI shows their complete disregard for what is supposed to be their “money givers” (us, customers) and, like every other stupid company with their own launcher which manages to be worse than their fucking website, shows they refuse to learn the obvious.
I fucking hated Valve for making me buy a physical CD of Portal, only to get a CD with the Steam Installer and a code to download the game on their store.
Same thing happened to me but with portal 2. I had DSL at the time and it barely hit 10 Mbps on a good day which was great because I thought the disk had the game on it. Despite all of the pain I still love steam to this day lol (and I’ve gotten better Internet)
There are so many companies that have all the pieces to make good competition to Steam but their greed gets in the way. Microsoft in particular should have been a shoe-in for it, but GFWL was an embarrassing failure, the WIndows store is rubbish and insists on a new file format that (at least in the past) caused all kinds of issues for games, and now their Game Pass service has no focus on a buying element. This is without going into both Amazon and Google tripping on the starting line when it comes to getting in the gaming space. A launcher that was tied in with Amazon’s web store would be a really quick way to get a lot of people in naturally.
I really wish more people used GoG to where it could be a competitor. Unfortunately the game selection is much lower due to companies turning their noses up at no DRM. Also, I will admit that I tend to buy things on Steam in favor of GoG due to a lot of the features Steam has.
I’ll never buy another game on Microsoft’s store ever again. And this is AFTER all that GFWL bs. Bought Forza 7 and it refuses to install. It did once before but now it says it’s done immediately and is nowhere to be found. I’ve tried everything short of a reinstal, which I will not do
I have a lot of problems with them too. I gave Game Pass an honest shot once, but could never get any games to run or install properly. Can’t imagine the normal store front is any better.
Yup. For some reason some companies seem to think throwing all your eggs in one franchise basket is a great idea. You would think with all the easy money Fortnite is bringing in, you’d diversify your library of games. Angry Birds developers thought they could ride that thing for 20 years. Sanrio is smarter then that. Hello Kitty is their reliable money maker, but they’re always trying something new.
I think it was more so that they needed those devs on Fortnite to scale it… Then when they got some breathing room to look at other projects, Quake Champions had already released and flopped … as has since Halo Infinite and Diabotical (which Epic partially funded) … AFPS is a genre that isn’t getting much love from consumers.
So, I think Fortnite caused the project to get dropped, but it’s not the reason it wasn’t picked back up. I’d imagine Epic is working on other games, these things just take a while (and they’re going to want bigger profits than they expect UT4 could bring in).
I don’t think Epic is working on other games. If Fortnite wasn’t going to be their only brand, they wouldn’t have delisted Unreal and shutdown the master servers.
Same, I always check whether GOG has a game first, and whether it’s patched up to par. Sadly, surprisingly often while games release on GOG they then lack features (although personally I do not really care about achievements) or worse, the devs give up on releasing patches for the non-Steam versions.
Sadly, surprisingly often while games release on GOG they then lack features
This is almost always a situation that can be pinned on Steam, actually. The games that end up doing this are usually using Steamworks, which essentially forces them into a sort of soft-exclusivity on Steam since their multiplayer features and such can only exist there.
This is almost always a situation that can be pinned on Steam, actually. The games that end up doing this are usually using Steamworks, which essentially forces them into a sort of soft-exclusivity on Steam since their multiplayer features and such can only exist there.
But Steam doesn’t force them to use Steamworks, so I don’t really see “steam’s fault” fault here. Although, of course, it’d be cool if Steamworks would work for non-steam games at least for modding/multiplayer. Granted.
Although, of course, it’d be cool if Steamworks would work for non-steam games at least for modding/multiplayer.
That’s the point. No, nobody’s forcing them to use Steamworks (especially since Epic has rolled out their cross-platform, store-and-OS-agnostic free competitor to it), but anyone who chooses to do so (which is a lot of devs) ends up locking those features to Steam (barring a ton of extra work for themselves) simply because of Valve’s chosen policy.
Don’t think Valve doesn’t understand this. They found a way to get devs to all but lock their games to Steam and thank Valve for the opportunity to do it.
A stand-up move from Re-Logic. You love to see it when the people at the helm of a lucrative publisher are industry stakeholders rather than the all-too-common quarterly cash extractor types[^1].
[^1]: Yes, I am all too aware that such seemingly altruistic gestures can be calculated PR moves in disguise. I certainly understand that this move will earn them (as a publisher) brownie points with various indie studios who may just so happen to be seeking publisher funding in the wake of an expensive mid-project engine switch. Such is the way of the world; sometimes a move can be simultaneously altruistic and good business.
Valve supports linux gaming! The Steam Deck is awesome and with an even better configuration (or the rumored valve's own new steam machine) this is only getting better. So, only Valve gets my money.
I buy games pretty much exclusively on Steam because of the Linux support (my gaming PC runs Linux only).
Hopefully more places follow suit because I believe competition is a good thing but for now it’s Steam all the way pretty much apart from Starsector and until recently Dwarf Fortress.
I interviewed with the Pokémon Company recently, and their benefits were the absolute #1 I’ve seen of any enterprise level company. If I get the gig I doubt I’d ever leave. I mean, these are CEO level benefit packages for mid-level (minus the goofball CEO golden parachute).
You can get as good as that as standard in the UK.
I get 36 days PTO, the legal minimum is 28 days. 25% bonus. Pension contribution, I pay 4%, company pays 8%. Health insurance included, but the NHS will cover most stuff.
This isn’t even a senior level position, it’s bottom level. Seniors get way more.
<span style="color:#323232;">Free Update:
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* Redesign skill trees and perks
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* Revamped cyberware and new capacity system
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* Vehicle combat and car chases
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* Combat AI improvements
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* New police system
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* UI and UX improvements
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* Loot, items, and crafting changes
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* New radio stations (including Community Radio Station Growl FM)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Paid Expansion:
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* Dogtown - a dangerous new district
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* Brand-new storyline and characters
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* New quests, gigs, boss fights, and more
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* Vehicle missions and airdrops - endless dynamic events
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* All new Relic skill tree and abilities
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* 100+ new items - weapons, cyberware, cars, and fashion
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* Vehicle missile launchers
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* Level cap increased to 60
</span>
What’re you even talking about??? Epic takes a revenue share of every game made with unreal engine, plus Fortnite runs exclusively on mommy’s credit card and is still insanely huge. Even if the epic games store doesn’t take as big a cut of every sale, they’re held by daddy Tencent who’ll probably kick em some lunch money if they’re actually desperate.
This. They’ve been burning money trying to give games away for free to entice people to their platform. It’s quite possible they have a cash flow problem. That they just layed off 900 people definitely supports this idea.
I doubt it. Fortnite alone probably covers all of those free games and then some, it’s an insane cash cow. Add to that Unreal Engine revenue and they’re not hurting at all for money.
Layoffs just means they probably finished the bulk of UE5 dev and are seeing softening revenues with the COVID spike being over, so they don’t have as much demand to get that and related projects done sooner. Amazon and other big tech firms have done similar layoffs, and it’s not because they’re losing money, but because they’re seeing an end to the crazy growth in the gaming industry due to COVID-19 demand changes.
So no, I really don’t think Epic is hurting for money, they’re just cutting costs to improve margins now that revenue is likely falling.
Epic Games is a privately owned company, thus we don’t know their financial state. We don’t know which debts they have and what ventures they have undertaken over the last few years. They might have huge debts and Fortnite might not be enough.
Sure, it’s possible, but I think unlikely. This sounds like the normal BS reasons companies give when their investors want better margins. I’m guessing Tencent isn’t happy with profit margins and wants a better short term return for their stake.
But you’re right, it’s all speculation at this point.
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