Wow Ubisoft game launcher opens in… Never? Wtf I paid money for this game and then I need to buy it again because they didn’t actually give me the account and now the launcher is just dead and I can’t even open it.
Fuck that. I bought one of the assassins creed games legitimately, then had it refuse to launch after a few weeks because they updated their launcher and borked it. I then pirated that same game to bypass the launcher issue and pirated every other ubisoft game since then.
If I have to pirate games to get around a deliberate flaw you worked into your program, I’m not paying for that game.
Yeah I paid $30 for rainbow 6 siege I expect to be able to play it for more than 2 weeks. Like honestly it would be so much cheaper and easier to just use the steam launcher, since the game is already sold there, but no they have to be special.
I’ve been using zoho notes on my phone for a long time now. It started out really good, but somehow has become so bloated that it’s laggy. It’s PLAIN TEXT. How do you make that lag??
Which one? Obsidian for desktop is 400MB, but it lets you make knowledge trees and includes a zotero extension. Although maybe it doesn’t need to be 400MB.
Very rose tinted glasses. I remember horrifying cache corruption bugs that locked you out of certain game areas permanently on that save, random illegal operation exceptions crashing games (no autosave btw), the whole system regularly freezing and needing to be completely restarted, games just inexplicably not working to begin with on a regular basis because of some hardware incompatibility and the internet sucked for finding fixes then and patches weren’t a thing so you were just screwed.
I would say that games not all being written in C and assembly trying to squeeze out every possible performance efficiency with nothing but dev machismo as safeguards is in fact a good thing.
Yes, but they are made by different people and all those bugs have been worked out over time. The people actually making the games are doing so at a higher level with more safeguards and it shows.
I say this because I assume you’re talking about Steam, and as a service comparible to the Epic Store, users have A TON MORE options, choices, even more autonomy on Steam than on the Epic Store. Reviews, reselling of keys, reselling of cards, infrastructure to host communities, support systems, bug ticket systems, the competitive sales events, etc.
Not saying Valve or Gabe Newell are perfect, not at all - they are profit driven - and Steam as a store and launcher does have it’s own issues.
But as far as I’m concerned the fact that Valve wants to bring commercial videogames to libre open source platforms, something Epic Games is against, is the deciding factor of why I continue to support this behemoth.
With the modern stack and infrastructure of today there is literally no reason not to port games to Linux, unless you want to rely on pervasive, kernel-level DRMs, which are inherently unethical because they take away control from the user and puts it in the hands of a company.
But that’s my reason. People have tons of reasons to use Steam, whereas Epic Store is just an exclusivity portal. Also, it’s launcher so soooo bad. Not just undernourished, but the UX design patterns make no sense - and when you do that job worse than Valve? Oh boy…
And again, technically speaking:
Market dominance ≠ monopoly
Epic Games, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo keeping certain fan favourite intellectual property on their store front exclusively? Monopoly. Technically.
We can’t update games or refactor code to make it smaller bc our bosses demand we constantly work harder, better, faster, stronger. They force us into games that require more expensive hardware bc the entire tech industry depends on people upgrading every other year. And it’s online constantly bc we hoover up player data for our new profit centre where we sell all your data.
And now they made a meme that deflects blame off them and onto devs, who have way more contact w the public than anonymous rich people
Qhile that is true the effects of it were lesser since it was more niche. Plus some of the best games are still in their own weird niche, ive been playing STALKER GAMMA which is a free modpack for a free mod, and help I am being consumed! I DREAM OF REPAIR KITS AND GUN ANIMATION, HNNNNNNGH KILL MONOLITH!
Enshittification is just another name for the type of capitalism America practices.
Everything gets worse because it’s not profitable to stay good when there are only 147 umbrella corps worldwide. Capitalism doesn’t reward innovation in products when monopolies exist, it rewards innovations in minutiae of existing products.
See also: DLC, Premium Passes, Microtransactions, Seasonal Content, Free-to-Play*, Ads in AAA tier games and everywhere else, Subscriptions, and every other shitty innovation the market (no not consumers, shareholders) rewards.
That’s to say nothing of how these companies extract the value of their employees labor and then lay them off to keep turnover at whatver level the coke addicts in the c-suite have determined is best. Crunchtime, harrassment, fuck man look at Bobby fucking Kotnick and his blizzard shitshow.
They were shitty for different reasons. Notice that nowhere on this meme is “shovelware.”
E.T. is always cited as the cause of the video game crash of '82, but it was really the rampart shovelware, no QA to speak of, and a lack of reviews to inform customers what was worth their money and what was absolute garbage. One bad game isn’t enough to topple an entire industry; especially one that is only slightly worse than the best game ever made for the Atari.
This problem was, however, mitigated a lot by Nintendo through the late 80’s and the entirety of the 90’s by creating the kind of licensing agreements between publishers and the console makers that still exist today, as well as the increase in review publications. Most of the best shit (from consumer friendly practices to the games themselves) from the industry came specifically in the 90’s thanks in part to actual curation of the software allowed to be sold for these systems.
At least you can easily determine shovelware from something worth your time when everything has reviews attached to the store page. Still sucks that you have to wade through all that bullshit, though.
DRM is nothing new, we just used to have to keep up with the disk or a Key. If always online was an option back then you can bet your ass game publishers would have implemented it.
It was an option back then. They just know nobody would have accepted it then because
Not as many people had the internet, and
The internet that they did have sucked ass
There were still plenty of online-only games. They just had a damn good reason to be online. Always-online in single player isn’t needed as DRM. There are plenty of other DRM options that don’t use the internet at all or at least only check once in a while when you do have a connection to the Internet.
Jesus…ok obviously it was technically an option, but it would be suicidal in a time when not everyone had Internet in their homes and those that did had unreliable Internet. Don’t be obtuse. Those limitations are largely not an issue in 2024.
I was playing video games on my homebuilt computer in the 90s. I know exactly what it was like.
Weird, steam is so much faster for me. And I don’t do anything strange, just log in and use it, but almost every single time it asks for my password. I wonder if there’s a timer - like, if you don’t log in for a week, you have to give your credentials again?
Even without re-entering my credentials or actually completely closing and opening EGS within (reasonably waiting for all related processed to close first) a few seconds, it opens and loads/downloads my library content very late compared to Steam or GOG. Opening the store as default was actually worse.
So far all my friends have the same experience. The top commenter must be very lucky, or maybe their EGS program runs in the background at startup.
Even my friends have similar experiences, between steam and epic taking the same amount of time. Even before I upgraded I never noticed an issue like “minutes”.
No, of course I’m not saying it takes minutes on a computer from the last few years with a nvme. The duration in the meme is likely a blatant exaggeration for meming, or for a weaker computer (still a valid criticism point but another topic).
I just tried both. With the first start, Steam vs Epic timers are about 5vs10 seconds, while with a second launch Steam still keeps to 5 while Epic is down to 7 second for me.
These are all on a Ryzen 3600 with 3500wr nvme and a 3200mhz ram, but friends have both worse and better PCs in all regards and still notice the difference.
5 vs 7, even 5 vs 10 seconds on an enough PC isn’t and shouldn’t be something to fret about. Admittedly, my feelings of Epic being slower comes from still long first post-install runs and usage from 6+ months ago, and in my case Epic opens quite quickly these days.
Edit: Checked your vid, and yeah, something similar on a second-run, but albeit with a flashing Epic logo once, but in a similar duration in total.
Like I get I have few issues from the newness and overkill, but credentials shouldn’t be a hardware issue, and sometimes new components do weird things loading wise. My old 2600k did things better than newer chips for years.
Edit, I wonder if internet speed matters, I’ve got gig internet.
Interesting to see this discussion because I don’t use epic because I don’t play many games outside of TF2 and space engineers and I more or less just use steam to auto update blender and tell me how my PC is doing so all I experienced is steam taking about a half minute to open every time.
Epic takes 2 or more minutes for me to launch. Also when Im in my library, the page keeps refreshing randomly which shoots you back to the top. Very fun UI.
While both of our claims are anecdotal, I’ve had it cause performance issues. It definitely isn’t the normal behavior for EGS and was probably a bug, but on my system it was sometimes sitting in the tray consuming 10 GB of system memory (and causing excessive swapping due to memory pressure).
There are valid reasons to bash Epic. I’ve written about some of them in another comment thread I made on Lemmy, but the overall problem I (and likely many others) have with them is a combination of their CEO’s hypocrisy and the company’s actions.
egs games are drm-free and with Legendary it’s a really nice experience (I’m using legendary with playnite)
never lost my token/login
the epic servers are kinda slow tho
“The inverse square root function in the C math library isn’t fast enough. That’s okay, I’ll write my own algorithm that abuses floating point numbers in a way that gives me a close approximation a bit faster.”
That’s just being intellectually dishonest in the opposite direction.
The truth is some things do get worse, some things get better, and in either case, the right thing to do is examine the tangible effects, positive or negative.
Everyone seems to think that games like Doom and Half-Life came out all the time. I remember looking at shareware disks in shops and seeing loads of games that looked like total crap.
For sure! just go to Abandonware and try to go to a specific year to find something. You have to wade through pages of garbo to find something worth playing.
Rollercoaster Tycoon was 1999, so I’ll choose to believe that the “then” era was after the big gaming crash of the 80s. There was still shovelware, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as during the 80s when you’d see mountains and mountains of terrible, non-functioning games. I don’t think anyone really has nostalgia for that period of gaming, but the late 90s to early 2000s really were as close to a golden age as we ever got.
Gaming crash was more of a console thing. One of the arguments was why you should buy a console when you can buy a computer for a bit more and do so much more. Computer games ran through it mostly unfazed.
One of my favorite pastimes as a kid was digging through the “1000s of Games” disc I had that was full of demos, shovelware, Doom mods, and tons of other garbage. Occasionally you’d find a diamond hidden in the turds.
There’s even a Youtuber who does “Shovelware Diggers” as a show and it’s just that! Him and his community riffle around in old shareware collections looking for treasures, which he showcases. (Edit to add: Looked it up and he ended the show after 300 episodes! He still does other retro gaming stuff too. youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCIZNtotF3Xh0dfQjJx8Xc… )
But yeah, most of the content on those discs would have qualified more as viruses than games, if they even ran in the first place!
I love when gamers hyperfixation only on the bad examples while ignoring the existence of game companies that still do good work. Why elevate the ones doing things right when we can give all our attention to the ones doing things wrong?
I mean this is comparing modern AAA game devs with what would have been considered AAA at the time. I think it’s a fair comparison in that regard, but by manpower, 90’s ID might be more similar to today’s New Blood.
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