Yeah, some offense, but the Triple-Eh companies have been "dying" for over a decade now and it doesn't look like they're actually going anywhere anytime soon. Unfortunately.
Contracting feels like the wrong word. It’s not gaining less money. It’s gaining more. Just companies are now converting their buyouts to simply IP grabs.
Live service games that were fully developed are being cancelled at the finish line because they don't think they'll make that money back. Companies like Bioware have laid off a bunch of developers in advance of marquis releases, but if everything was rosy, they'd definitely want those developers around through launch. Smaller studios have been hit too.
It would be less disrespectful just to leave the steamdeck version equally fucked than to openly slap people in the face with "it's arbitrary, but fuck you".
I feel like EGS is a wash for anyone older than the elder Z generation. They might get the Fortnite kids to stick with em if said kids grow up and want to play anything else. Giving out free games is a way to solve the “all my games in one place” problem. If I started PC gaming 2 years ago on Fortnite and collected every free game I’d have about a hundred games in my library now., whereas I may not even have a Steam account.
The one true way to beat Steam would be to undercut them in price across the board but from what I hear Valve will ban your ass if you sell a game there for $70 but EGS at $50. (Full price, not on sale), so that’s not an option at all which leaves it to exclusives, which wouldn’t been as hated if Epic was publishing/funding them.
I get the sense that people still won't take kindly to exclusives that they publish, which we'll see when Alan Wake 2 comes out. For me, they still don't answer the question of why I should shop with them instead of Steam if the same game is on both stores. There are answers to that question, but they think the problem is that we need to get all of our games on the same launcher.
The day they stole games that already had a steam page and had sold steam copies to be Epic exclusive, there was no path to any Epic exclusive for any reason ever being forgivable again.
And yet the games on EGS are not cheaper, even if they are exclusive, taking the exclusivity deal and have less to pay to Epic Games. They still cost as much as on other platforms. So no, publishers would not sell the games for less, even if they could, even if it's a viable option. So exclusives does not solve this issue with pricing at all. The thing people "hate" is, that Epic forces exclusivity, taking the option to buy on their favorite platform/store, without giving the player anything in return. It's the same price. These deals incentives the publisher, not the player to sell/buy the games on the Epic Games store.
In example Epic does not even support Linux. Why would I pay money on their store then? On the other hand Valve actively developed and improves gaming on Linux; improving the situation against he Windows gaming monopoly. I would have supported Epic Games to build an alternative, but if the alternative they provide is like this, then I am not interested into it. I want to buy and play on Steam, because it is better. From my perspective, another game goes exclusive to Epic and I have to wait. If the game does not come to Steam, well, there is plenty other to buy and play for me. My money and time is limited anyway.
What’s sad is Epic used to consider Linux a top tier support. My copy of Unreal Tournament 2004 has a tux logo on it and the Linux installer is on Disc 1. I never even played that game on Windows. Valve was very anti-Linux back then too.
Solution for Linux: look into Heroic Game Launcher. It’ll solve all your EGS Linux issues by not even using EGS client. It’s great I use it for GOG as well.
I know about Heroic, but I refuse to support a company that is so much against Linux. They purchased Rocket League and took away the perfectly functioning Linux version back then (and made it unplayable for a while for me). Why would I pay Epic Games money, if they don't support Linux, while Valve actively pays developers to program and help the Linux world of sides?
I'm not interested into Heroic Game Launcher. It does not address the problems I have with Epic and does not support everything Steam has, when I purchase it on Epic Games.
In the past I have used Lutris for itch.io and Humble Bundle (and GOG), plus the additional games provided through Lutris scripts itself. So I would use Lutris over Heroic, as it supports itch.io and Humble and for the familiarity I already have with the software.
For some reason Lutris gives me trouble when downloading GOG games quite often, so I was forced to look for alternatives and that's when I found about Heroic
Yes, Valve requires price parity across platforms. Sales may or may not matter. The wording is vague enough that sales would in fact need to be paritied too but they don’t seem to go after people for it.
sales are supposed to matter. You aren't supposed to offer a bigger sale on another site than you will offer on steam in a reasonable time frame. Funny that never applied to the makers of the Witcher when they gave that away for free. I never saw valve force them to make it free on steam. What you'll find is a lot of steam's policies only apply to smaller indie devs, not big companies.
Good riddance, but the fact that he's getting to walk away with a presumably hefty payout kind of sours the whole thing. Hopefully, Activision employees get better management out of the merger, although that is a pretty low bar to clear.
people really enjoy the boot of anti-cheat on their necks.
maybe these companies could move their cheat detection to the server where they control the code. maybe don't just send all player positions so wall-hacks become impossible. maybe use some machine learning to look at input patterns and detect when a player is sending things that don't look human.
the list of things companies could do to actually fix cheating in pvp games is long and all they want to do is pay for ridiculous anti-cheat that impacts normal users.
maybe these companies could move their cheat detection to the server where they control the code. maybe don’t just send all player positions so wall-hacks become impossible.
That’s not how video games work. If you want interpolation of positions then you have to send the positions of the players that you can’t see but are heading towards a place you can see. You could take a bunch of difficult math to do and filter out who to send the data to or not. It would create a lot of bugs. So you could just send just the people who are within X distance of you and call it good. Most, if not all game engines do it this way.
You have to have interpolation on the client side, it’s the only way you can play the game on the internet. It’s what Doom did to get multiplayer working and we’ve never been able to find anything better.
maybe use some machine learning to look at input patterns and detect when a player is sending things that don’t look human.
They already do that. It’s called heuristics.
the list of things companies could do to actually fix cheating in pvp games is long and all they want to do is pay for ridiculous anti-cheat that impacts normal users.
Yes.. honestly, imho, any game that's competitive should either embrace "cheating" and design its gameplay to be as transparent as chess (ie.. make it ok to be tool-assisted) or be designed around controlled environments that forbid using tools like that.
Anyone who doesn't want to surrender to a controlled environment (whether it's in the form of some kernel-level control or VPN / Stadia-like platform) should just look for coop games.
It's sad that FPS have evolved towards the competitive landscape... to me, the best experience in the original classic Doom was coop mode. Yet Doom Eternal, at most, only supports some wacky asymmetric team deathmatch.
One thing I realized actually is that I meant Quake which first used network interpolation. I think classic doom didn’t have networking but I am not sure, to be honest. Either way, it’s before my time.
That said I think it’s a bummer that even casual non-ranked experiences have had a large problem with cheating. Even co-op games have lots of cheating but the nature of the game means the cheating affects people who don’t want to cheat less. They aren’t directly subjected to it, it’s still a problem though, the cheating still affects things like the game economy and player perception of the game.
That said everything has gone towards the competitive because even casual versus experiences are competitive now. Super Smash Bros. was just supposed to be the silly, not-serious fighting game that now has large tournament play. Every game, no matter how casual, has gotten competitive. Our culture is so ingrained with competing that we might as well have spitting tournaments… Wait let me google. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_pit_spitting They totally have spitting tournaments. Honestly, human culture is that of competition. I don’t see a way we work around that at our evolutionary core we are competitive but I don’t see it as a good thing.
Doom did have networking, using IPX. You had to start the game with a parameter from the DOS commandline. Like Quake, the maps had special player spawn points & items for deathmatch too. The term "deathmatch" was coined by the Doom game mode.
However, there was no frame interpolation in the original Doom, instead, there might be a latency in the inputs. The game state only advances when all players have sent an update for that "tic" (1/35 of a second), so the game might be laggy for everyone if the connection from one of the players is slow.
But multiplayer back then was mostly for LAN parties. At least in my area. I didn't even have an internet connection at that time, personally. In fact, even during the Quake age, I was only able to play on LAN... and I still liked coop better.
Even co-op games have lots of cheating but the nature of the game means the cheating affects people who don’t want to cheat less. They aren’t directly subjected to it, it’s still a problem though, the cheating still affects things like the game economy and player perception of the game.
Yes, what I meant is that cheating becomes irrelevant in coop, not that it doesn't exist.
If a game has an economy that makes some players richer than others (like say.. in many MMOs), and you actually care a lot about being rich in that universe, then it'd starts being more of a competitive thing and less about coop... a game can be competitive and be PvE.
Even singleplayer games can be competitive if you make it about beating your friend's "score" or speed.. almost anything is susceptible to speedrunning.
I guess the question on coop vs competitive is more about what are the goals of the players. If people play games to have a fun time, or if it's because they want to have some way to prove themselves they are good at something :P
Absolutely, the goal of the player is mutable, and thus really anything, even co-op games, becomes competitive with the right player mindset. I feel like even with co-op that mindset can affect almost any game.
I wrote a snarky response because of the final insulting comment in yours but then thought better of it, going to try to address a couple of your points legitimately even after the unnecessary personal attack.
It's a lot cheaper to make your server dumb. It costs you less in programmers with deep multiplayer programming experience, it costs you less in ongoing hosting because of reduced CPU usage, and it makes the problem less "yours" as a developer.
I'm saying that's shitty that the developers will try to save money that way rather than investing in actual effective, privacy-respecting cheat prevention.
Your argument seems to be that a quake-style predictive algorithm is the only solution possible for online games. I doubt that is the case, but even if it were, using some raycasts on the server for some basic sanity checks on what data to send to players is an example of where lots of developers just can't be bothered.
If you want to dismiss machine learning as heuristics, I'm sorta ok with that, as I think they are just glorified heuristics, but even the most basic analysis isn't done by most developers. Instead, they rely on the sales pitches of various anti-cheat software and don't implement anything beyond it, even when there might be some low hanging fruit.
I am not saying developers are lazy, there's tons of stuff to work on. I am mad that this problem gets repeatedly pushed onto the users rather than the developers, though, and I think it's reasonable for me to offer some pushback when both my CPU cycles and my privacy are being abused.
I wrote a snarky response because of the final insulting comment in yours but then thought better of it, going to try to address a couple of your points legitimately even after the unnecessary personal attack.
Sorry, It’s not meant as an attack. I am simply calling it as I see it because I get a lot of gamers who think they’ve arm-chaired thought far more about my job as a networked gameplay engineer than I have. I’ve been doing this for a very long time and I know where developers cut costs. Anti-cheat isn’t just a slap-it-on and call it a good solution. There are a lot of reasons you want to trust the client and it makes the gameplay feel far better.
It’s a lot cheaper to make your server dumb. It costs you less in programmers with deep multiplayer programming experience, it costs you less in ongoing hosting because of reduced CPU usage, and it makes the problem less “yours” as a developer.
Typically, the server, especially in counter-strike’s case, isn’t dumb. In all games, the server still handles the dealing of damage which typically includes validations of that damage. In counter-strike’s case, very little data is calculated on the client. Most of it is raw data sent from input to the server.
Your argument seems to be that a quake-style predictive algorithm is the only solution possible for online games. I doubt that is the case, but even if it were, using some raycasts on the server for some basic sanity checks on what data to send to players is an example of where lots of developers just can’t be bothered.
Lots of game engines including source include and utilize ways to ensure the player is reporting sane inputs. Also, interpolation is different than extrapolation. Lastly, you don’t need to do raycasts to double-check this data. A lot of the time the raycasts are done on the server itself. In counter-strike’s case this is also true. Raycasts are done on the client typically for cosmetics only. You can see this with 3kliksphilip’s videos on sub-tick.
If you want to dismiss machine learning as heuristics, I’m sorta ok with that, as I think they are just glorified heuristics, but even the most basic analysis isn’t done by most developers. Instead, they rely on the sales pitches of various anti-cheat software and don’t implement anything beyond it, even when there might be some low hanging fruit.
Heuristics haven’t been done by developers in a long time. A lot of that is actually done in Valve’s case by Overwatch. Also, Valve makes it’s own anti-cheat called VAC. They aren’t getting sales pitches.
I am not saying developers are lazy, there’s tons of stuff to work on. I am mad that this problem gets repeatedly pushed onto the users rather than the developers, though, and I think it’s reasonable for me to offer some pushback when both my CPU cycles and my privacy are being abused.
Frankly, I feel like it’s wrong for you to say that the problem is pushed onto users when you don’t understand the code and effort the developers are writing to solve this issue specifically with counter-strike. VAC is probably the anti-cheat with the least amount of client code. It rests almost entirely on the server. One thing VAC does do is lock down the client on Windows to prevent modifications. One thing you can easily do is replace assets for walls with transparent textures to see through walls. That’s why things like the code and assets can’t be tampered with. Most game engines only send updates to the positions of actors in a network bubble. Maybe Counter-Strike’s network bubble is too large at the time but that’s not an argument you made.
Frankly, I feel like it’s wrong for you to say that the problem is pushed onto users when you don’t understand the code and effort the developers are writing to solve this issue specifically with counter-strike
You are the one who continues to make assumptions about what I do and do not understand about the code that makes this work in various games.
I don't really feel like getting into the nitty gritty here in comments, but if your experience is what you say, I'm very surprised at some of your unqualified statements.
Your comments are enough to see where your knowledge of what a networked gameplay engineer does at Valve lies. Especially since you make assumptions that the developers aren’t doing things when very clearly there are proof and industry standards that say they do those things. If you are Andrew Burke who works at Valve as an Animator, I would recommend talking to the engineers there.
Edit: Who I am shouldn't matter to you. Addressing the idea that you can shift some or all anti-cheat to the server is something you should try to engage with directly rather than appealing to authority. For what it's worth, I've spent time as a programmer in the game industry in a handful of different roles and your search will eventually find me if you keep going down that road. My experience isn't what I am arguing here, though.
It’s not really an assumption if I say “if”. I can agree with you that shifting as much data as possible on the server is best. Valve already does that pretty well for counter-strike. Far more than other competitive FPSs. They still keep shot registration on the server whereas most competitive shooters now have that on the client to have the correct gameplay feel. The big balance between keeping stuff on the server and putting some authority on the client is the gameplay feel. Counter-Strike has been and still is notorious for getting shot around a corner when you don’t see who shot you. This is because of server authority rather than client authority.
Considering Microsoft own Bethesda and they pulled the whole 'xbox and pc exclusive' bullshit. It seems like Microsoft are trying to create a monopoly of gaming companies so they can compete with and try pull people away from Sony. They hate that Sony continues to beat them in console sales.
So my concern is they're going to stop selling things on Sony, such as overwatch, diablo etc. They only promised call of duty for 10 years. I didn't read any other games with this promise in the merger deal. I honestly think it should have been blocked cause they are trying to monopolise the gaming industry and basically force a switch to their game pass or console.
Yes blizz was a shit show. But Microsoft are children who don't like that people have friends other than themselves.
I was meaning more the fact that Bethesda released on playstation until Microsoft bought them. If Bethesda only ever released on Xbox I wouldn't have an issue. But my issue is Microsoft are already pulling their bullshit with another company they acquired.
I was meaning more the fact that Bethesda released on playstation until Microsoft bought them.
Sony has been playing this game for a longer time, as @CoderKat said, and nobody cared
Do you know Psygnosis of WipEout fame? They developed multiplatform titles for Staturn, PC and N64, when Sony aquired them that stopped (Well, they launched WipEout on the N64 and that angered Sony but they stopped after that)
Sucker Punch (Ghost of Tsushima) first game was for the N64
Guerrilla Games (Horizon Forbidden West) started developing on the Game Boy Color, and also made games for the GBA and Xbox
And a very long list of developers now owned by Sony, most of them developed for a bunch of different platforms before Sony's acquisition
But the thing is most people think those studios were created by Sony rather than purchased
The frustrating thing is they’re both being shitty for consumers. It’s terrible that they’re acquiring these previously cross platform publishers and making them exclusives, but at the same time, this is what Sony has been doing for a while (at best, they very recently have started doing PC releases but with a multi year delay, which I don’t really count as truly cross platform).
I’m not into consoles so as long as there’s PC support, I’m good. I wouldn’t call something exclusive if it’s on PC… As long as there isn’t a crippling anti-cheat, that means it can be played on Linux!
But there's people who don't play on pc. That's a pretty crappy thing to say. 'i don't care about it unless it affects me.'
I console game, cause I grew up on consoles, I can't do the whole sitting in a pc chair thing. There's more than just people who play pc. And if it's on pc only, that is pc exclusive.
Picking up a console means locking yourself down to (and supporting) a platform designed around creating exclusives. PC games aren’t locked down and can work on a much wider range of hardware and even operating systems.
I use my PC almost exclusively from the couch with my OLED TV. Sometimes from bed with a tablet on a flexible arm via Sunshine/Moonlight.
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