@chloyster Still playing Stardew Valley. But I just got a dock to my Deck, and an SD Card. Moved all the remaining games from my PC to my External Drive, plugged that shit into the dock and installed whatever the fuck I'm not finished yet or wanna play. Fuck yea, let the fun begin!
No key reseller/ gray market sites are truly legit. You may get a key that activates, but you have no way of knowing if it was stolen and if it gets deactivated later you have no recourse
The multi-billionaire owner with the backing of the Chinese government is claiming that he’s the underdog against a popular company/piece of software/GabeN. He’s made some poor choices interacting with the community.
Yes, it’s probably nice for a publisher to have a guaranteed income, which is why they sell exclusivity. It leaves a sour taste in my mouth, so I choose not to support it.
The rest about the launcher being bad sounds unhinged to me, but some people are really into that.
They bought Rocket League and actively made it worse.
The multi-billionaire owner with the backing of the Chinese government
Who cares about the backing if it has no effect on anything? I’m more concerned about Valve having a separate Steam client for China, censoring their games specifically for China and even reportedly banning for bringing up Winnie the Pooh.
Most investments aren’t to gain influence but to profit. At this time, there is no sign of Epic doing anything that could be explained by the alleged influence of the Chinese government, and as the majority owner, Tim Sweeney has the final say anyway.
I never said it was not for profit. I said you invest to gain influence, which is true by fact, not an opinion. If I buy a significant number of shares in a company, I do so because I want more than money; I want influence on decision-making. I do not think the Chinese government is only interested in monetary gains; do you think that’s their only goal?
And again, do you believe a country/government able to indoctrinate any business that wants a share of their market, like the Steam example, is only invested for monetary gains and nothing else?
Tim Sweeney can do and decide many things, but opposing the Chinese government is certainly not one. And I don’t know how you imagine influence, but having 40% of a company is something I call influence, wouldn’t you? Even if they can’t tell him how to run the business, he sure as hell will do nothing that could worsen the relationship between him and his biggest investor, aka Tencent. And who is behind Tencent? The Chinese government.
It’s all in the realm of “what if”. Sure, it could attempt this or that, but it hasn’t, nor is there any guarantee that it would fly. That just brings me back to the original point of when a company that is not partially owned by the Chinese actively works to please the Chinese government to further their business interest but I don’t see much of that with Epic. If you look at some of the other companies in which Tencent has a large stake, like Dontnod, there’s absolutely no sign of the Chinese agenda in the games either.
Yes, and you are entitled to your own opinion, but that does not change the facts. No, the influence is not “what if it is there” – it is there, plain and simple. That’s not up for discussion. It’s public knowledge that Tencent owns 40%, and Tencent is a government-controlled entity. It does not matter if they “abuse/use” it actively or not. It sounds like, in your mind, influence is only relevant when you use it actively, which is not true.
They’re also just plain unethical. There’s never been a government as insidious as the CCP in exploiting vulnerable foreign nations like South Africa or South East Asia thru incentives that are basically just a debt trap.
I don’t disagree with everything you said here but come on, Steam is basically a privately owned PC games store monopoly that has now been going on for 25 years. Since it’s not public we can’t really know for sure but there’s a very real possibility that Epic is the underdog here
Epic doesn’t make nearly as much money from Fortnite’s players as steam makes from their users though. Same for UE royalties. I don’t think there’s a single UE license that has a 30% rev share (which is what you get on steam if you don’t have big AAA sales). Hell, I don’t even think there’s one at 10%.
Steam doesn’t have anti competitive behavior yet. Gabe has made some bad decisions in the past (may I remind you that he greenlit Bethesda’s paid mods idea ?) but he does seem to generally put the users first. But what happens after him ? Imo the company will go public at some point, and it’s pretty much downhill from here
Horse armor was a dlc, not a mod (well, there were also joke mods), and it was for oblivion. They tested the paid mods on Skyrim back in 2015 (Bethesda is apparently having another try right now, although it looks like valve is out of the picture this time). Officially implemented on the steam workshop and all, and obviously valve was supposed to get a cut out of every sale which is probably why they were A-OK with it
Steam somehow prevents publishers from selling games at a cheaper price in competitors’ stores, even if their cut from the store is lower. That is extremely anti-competitive and has to be illegal.
If you sign up to use Steam to distribute your game then one of the things you agree to is to make it available on Steam at the same price you offer anywhere else. This protects Steam’s business and ensures that Steam customers aren’t disadvantaged.
However, it also applies even if the alternative channels don’t make use of Steam directly (e.g selling on Epic). This is where the Wolfire Games lawsuit comes in. Will be interesting to see how it goes.
They bought the game and changed out the graphics API to kill the Linux native builds, then after the community got it working via Wine, they added anticheat. Epic went further than incompetence on that one.
Epic Games paid big money to make some games platform exclusive.
Their launcher is, just like Origin and Ubisoft’s one, features wise vastly inferior to Steam.
Smaller indie level multiplayer games do not have crossplatform play with Steam, or other issues like DNF duel breaking player room ping indicators.
None of these explain the amount of frequency of anemosity towards Epic for their store. It seems some are in a parasocial relationship with their Steam launcher. A bit like console fanboy wars. And for some reason they prefer a monopoly without alternatives than one with alternatives. Perhaps some see the installation of another program as an intrusion to to their private comfort. Not rationally like Microsoft’s ill willed spying telemetry, but emotionally led. I encountered a few people who just don’t want to install new programs and perhaps see Epic a threat to their habits.
But I dislike them for dropping Unreal Tournament.
Buying out a game after it was already set to sell on other platforms, and after people had already preordered it from those platforms, because your store lacked such basic functions as a check out cart so no one wanted to use it put them on the curb for me permenantly.
In a capitalist system, companies get worse in quality as they think they can get away with it to improve profit. Starting your store off at such a low point for your customers tells me that they are going to drop much lower once they think they have the stable playerbase to get away with it.
So I am completely disinterested in building a library of games on a platform I see as destined to become worse than the starting line of in the gutter.
Your points are very valid and it was a terrible thing for Epic to do, but they backpedaled on that and have never done the removing a product from Steam afterwards ever again.
No, they have never done it so far. Because it cost them a large amount of public opinion when they had almost nothing else to lean on. It was a decision that they survived only because their other products like unreal and fortnite funded it.
Once they think they have enough dedicated users, who are unwilling to leave their libraries, and they believe they have earned a steam equivalent customer reputation? They will do it again.
System scanning: EGS is known to automatically scan your system and send your data back to them. While this seems to be the same type of analytics Steam does occasionally, in Steam’s case, it’s opt-in, and done with full, informed consent.
Paid exclusives: Epic has been known to pay publishers to make their games artificially exclusive to their own store. They regularly claim this money is to support the development of the games in question, but this is easily disproven, as they’ve been seen buying games known to be complete more than once. Additionally, this has resulted in bait-and-switch-like situations, where users would prepurchase Steam copies of games, only to be informed that they wouldn’t be getting them.
Publisher-centric behavior: Another user here claimed that EGS is pro-developer and anti-consumer, but this is only half true. This only rings true in the case of self-published games. There have been cases of developers getting unwarranted backlash after aforementioned bait-and-switches, when they were just as surprised to learn about all the “development support” they received as anyone.
Tim Sweeney: Tim Weeney, the CEO of Epic, is an asshole. A giant, narcissistic, hateful shitbag. Just look at his Twitter, the dudes a giant POS.
Additionally, this has resulted in bait-and-switch-like situations, where users would prepurchase Steam copies of games, only to be informed that they wouldn’t be getting them.
I didn’t know about this.
It happened to Metro Exodus (great game btw) but iirc all pre orders were honoured and the game was just delisted.
Instead of offering anything to be a better platform they are burning money on the platform in hopes they can pay their way to dominance by paid exclusivivity and giving away games. One of those isn’t bad for users. Now consider what Epic offers beyond being able to buy and download a game. Nothing. Epic is only a storefront and they’ve had years to work on this at this point. Steam has gained dominance and maintains it in no small part due to all the additional features available to everyone. Do you use the steam workshop for any of your games? Have you used the steam community forums to troubleshoot a problem? Do you use big picture mode for a more console like experience? Do you customize your controller settings with the pretty expansive controller support built into steam? The overlay? How about the custom profiles and badges and trading cards? Epic is only a storefront. That’s it. That’s all that’s on offer. So they supplement it with bribing devs to be exclusive to their store and giving away games to try and attract users.
I love the steam chat, as someone who doesn’t use discord very often at all. Having the chat is an easy to too flick a message off to someone while i play
These are true criticisms, but I’m not sure if they’re fair. To the best of my recollection, Steam had none of those things in 2008, either, about the time they were the age of the EGS, now.
You could say they should (be able to) compete on the merits alone, without free games or paid exclusivity, but that argument wouldn’t reflect reality: you need a hefty carrot to lure people away from their comfort zone.
Yes, true. But it’s not 2008 anymore. It makes no sense for companies to compete based on features and functionality equivalent to their age.
If someone starts a company today offering only old 1960 color TVs, I’m not going to say “Well they’re new, and that’s what TV manufacturers would have had at the time”. That makes zero sense.
If Epic wants to compete with steam they need to actually compete. They offer nothing of value presently. They have the money and the technical talent to make a good launcher. They just appear to choose not to.
They have the money and the technical talent to make a good launcher. They just appear to choose not to.
This is completely the case. You can’t tell me the makers of Unreal Engine couldn’t figure out how to replicate at least some of the more commonly used features of Steam. Of course they can do it. Someone somewhere in the corporate ladder decided they don’t need the extra features to compete with steam. Maybe burning money on the exclusivity contracts and game giveaways will work out in the long run, but I doubt that when they flat out said they’re spending more money than they earn in their 800+ person layoff just a few months ago.
Steam also releases pretty cool stuff, and continues to support them way after release… My steam link got an update about three weeks ago, despite being discontinued back in 2018
Also, the steam link can run custom apps (like Moonlight for those who would want to use it for generic low latency streaming without a Steam account) and has the ability to enable a SSH server and root access. There are some limits though on what things you can modify, particularly relating to the boot sequence and the included kernel, as it has a hardware secure boot implementation. The OS is on GitHub anyway.
I will happily give my money to companies like this that actually provide value to their users, even years after the fact. Doubly so if they are domestic or western - it is so rare nowadays to find a western company that isn’t blatantly and purely leeching their users
Why are paid exclusives worse, though? I’ve never understood that. I understand why we hate exclusives, but I’ve never heard anyone explain why paid exclusives are worse. Steam has tons of exclusives, some of which are exclusive because they targeted Steam APIs that are proprietary and the developers don’t have the resources or incentive to port the game to another platform. Why isn’t it bad to encourage developers to use proprietary APIs that make it difficult to port games to other platforms?
As a consumer, exclusives are shitty because they restrict where I can buy and play a game. This is true whether they’re paid exclusives, technical lock-in exclusives, lazy developer exclusives, etc. All types of exclusives suck. Is it worse that Borderlands 3 was exclusive for 6 months compared to Borderlands 2 being exclusive for ~7 years, just because one was paid? I can’t understand why the 6 month exclusivity period is worse for a consumer than the 7 year one.
Most of the salt I have for this behaviour from games that were pulled from Steam because Epic threw cash at the developers, or they’re exclusive despite there being no reason to be.
I have no issue with Epic releasing their own games in their store, just like valve do, or EA/Actvision did.
This is the same kinda shit that Valve / publishers pulled when Steam launched, though.
Half-Life and Counterstrike originally didn’t require Steam, and then one day Valve told everybody they’d need to start using Steam if they wanted to keep playing the games they’d already bought. That’s a Valve game, but it’s akin to Epic moving Rocket League to EGS (which also pissed people off).
For more general / non-Valve games, there was a time period where you’d pre-order a physical copy of game and honestly not know if it would require a launcher. Tons of games that launched in early days of Steam didn’t bother to tell consumers upfront that Steam was required, and consumers wouldn’t find out until the game hit the shelves and there was a little note on the back of the box, “Internet access and Steam account required.” In that case, non-Steam pre-orders weren’t even given an exception – every copy required Steam. That seems even worse than the Epic mess IMO. There, the publishers at least made an exception for people who thought they were ordering a Steam game. If you thought you were gonna get a real physical copy of game that didn’t require a launcher, and it ended up requiring Steam, the publisher just told you to either use Steam or pound sand.
I don’t like the behavior either, but pulling already announced / released games and forcing them onto a different launcher is standard practice when a new launcher comes out. It’s happened to paid and non-paid exclusives. It’s happened to EGS and Steam (and probably Origin or Uplay or others too). I don’t see any reason to be any more upset at publishers over the EGS debacle than the Steam one.
My take is that launcher exclusivity shouldn’t exist, because every single launcher has just pissed off / screwed over consumers when there is exclusivity / any requirement to use the launcher.
Yes, in the long run it always is. That’s my point. EGS will probably be successful, and 15 years from now someone will bring up a story about how EGS really infuriated people “back in the day”, and everyone will say it’s irrelevant.
Nobody cares how the service got started. They only care where it goes. It doesn’t make a bit of difference how pissed off everyone is at Epic. It didn’t matter how pissed off everyone was at Steam in the early years. There’s a reason these companies start off by pissing everyone off: it works. There’s no long term downside, and, in the short term, it gets you users. Users don’t show up voluntarily on the early days, and they defend the service once it’s established.
As long as Epic lasts long enough for everyone to later forgive them for their anti-consumer beginning, they’ll be golden. It’s the market standard. The early days will always be viewed as irrelevant. “It was a different time,” people always say. “You can’t compare it to now.”
I’m making a wild and probably spectacularly wrong guess here: C&C 1 has German text on it and there’s Sternenschweif, and the white plastic thinggy might be a Schuko / Type L adapter (it’s kinda hard to tell with that camera angle), which would suggest a place somewhere in Southern Tyrolia.
Looking forward to OP’s answer though. If it’s close to me, I’m gonna book that room and spend a day ripping all of those to SSD.
bin.pol.social
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