They all have a chance at getting re-released later, unless they are first party (and these days even then).
I mean, Uncharted 4 is on GOG. Not The Last of Us, for some reason. That sucks.
I'd love to see Mario Galaxy on PC officially, but that's not gonna happen, I'm not gonna get mad about it. But Alan Wake II? Yeah, that'll probably make it elsewhere.
Ultimately all it takes for an exclusivity deal to be lifted is for the people involved to agree to lift it. That can be because the exclusivity is timed or because they got to some agreement on it. There is no fundamentally nefarious reason getting paid for exclusivity is worse than Valve being the only platform that is viable for a particular release. The impact is the same.
Maybe I'm just too old and can't cope with the weird whiplash of being there to hear people rage about Final Fantasy showing up on Xbox only to then see this weird vitriol for a storefront compensating devs to get an exclusive on a game inside the same platform.
Like, I get being mad that you'd have to buy a different console to play a thing, but dude, it's a free piece of software, you can just... install it.
Honestly, both things are sheer tribalism and I've never been there for it. Not since the dumb Sega vs Nintendo schoolyard nonsense.
No, that's not how that works at all. Monopolies are bad (and indeed unlawful) even if people think you got them by being super cool.
Google didn't get a monopoly on advertising and search by sucking at it. They had the best search engine and design in a crowded market and that's why you don't say you "Altavista'd" something. But that's still a bad thing and they still should get broken up into manageable chunks, as current regulators are trying to do. Ditto for Apple and all these other oligopolistic online companies.
And... you know, Valve. Maybe. At some point. Not quite there yet. But that's bad even if you like Steam or if they have the better feature set. Which they do. Especially if they have the better feature set, in fact, because like all these other oligopolistic companies, the more time they have to establish dominance and get people to sink further into their ecosystem the harder it is to break it up later. That's true of kebabs AND software platforms.
So are you okay with exclusives but only when the developer is not getting paid for it? Or only when it's on Steam because you just happen to like Steam?
That's such a weird take. It owns the inconsistency so thoroughly I have trouble navigating it.
Since apparently I have to explain this for some reason, I don't particularly like exclusives in general and prefer platform-agnostic games so I can pick where to get them. but if you're only going to support a store, I'm perfectly fine with developers getting paid by Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Valve, Epic or whever else. You do you and keep your workers employed any way you see fit.
And when I get a choice I tend to pick GOG because... well, they don't need a little reminder that you're not buying the game you're buying in the payment page, so I get to back up my installers and keep them forever.
Now, THAT is a criticsm of Steam that I'm actually making here.
Well, yeah, presumably they all do. I'm sure the kebab place next door would love to have a monopoly, it just doesn't look like it's in the cards, you know?
Oh, it was Sega. That's the thing about having an entrenched dominant position, you don't need to invest money to get exclusives, even when you are paying out a smaller share.
Gaben may be a libertarian, but I'm not. If you set up systemic reasons why I'm getting boned it's still your fault.
Wait, who want a monopoly? Epic? The Epic store is like a tenth of Steam's size, and most of that is down to Fortnite alone. Hard to have a monopoly when you're struggling to break double digit share.
Well, yeah, but if I was going to get pissed about that, then Epic would be way low in my list of priorities. It's Steam sucking up all the oxygen in that particular room. I own every Yakuza game they made available on GOG and they've stopped doing that. That wasn't Epic.
There are a whole bunch of games that actively removed compatibility with SteamOS, and Linux by extension. Apex Legends was the most recent and the most vocal about it.
I'm annoyed when a game isn't on GOG. Epic's issue is that I use it the least and so I'm less likely to boot up a game on it unless I'm actively seeking it out.
Yeah, that's the thing about it, right? It has all the pieces of the architecture of a modern console in a world where none of them make sense. Even with the 360 I was probably an outlier, and the reward you got by being able to access 720p video on a CRT PC monitor was much higher compared to a SDTV.
Specifically the VGA 480p output, which was a big deal for most use cases.
I imagine there is some regional differentiation here based on HDTV adoption and SCART vs component, but for reference VGA out was still the sole way I had to get any progressive signal for gaming all the way down to my day one Xbox 360 in 2005, which did not have an HDMI out (not that I had any displays with an HDMI in, for that matter).
Or the weirdly anachronistic mess that is the Dreamcast in general. I mean, it's not easy to visualize today because a lot of the "just a tiny underpowered PC thing" approach ended up winning the day, but the Dreamcast made no sense whatsoever at the time and produced entirely absurd looking games.
Maybe you could try to rationalize the 480p thing as an advantage today, but at the time screenshot comparisons looked a generation apart next to the PS2.
Well, brand and image are relevant, in more ways than direct sales impact (something that "voting with your wallet" often ignores).
But mostly, and this is important, it's worth remembering that Denuvo's clients aren't the people who buy their games, they are the people who sell the games. That's who Denuvo is selling to. And Denuvo, which is a very big, if not the only, name in town for effective DRM on PC, would like to keep being that.
All else being equal, if Denuvo generates negativity in forums and a similar no-name competitor doesn't a client (that's a publisher, not a buyer of the game), may choose to go with the newcomer just to remove the noise, or to prevent an impact on sales they can't verify.
But also, I imagine people working at Denuvo are kind of over being the random boogeyman of gaming du jour while other DRM providers are actively praised or ignored. I'd consider speaking up, too.
I probably wouldn't because there's very little to be gained from that, as this conversation proves, but... you know, I'd consider it.
EDIT: Oh, hey, I hadn't noticed, but the guy actually responds to this explicitly. Pretty much along these lines, actually:
RPS: A lot of companies seem happy enough with the service Denuvo provides to keep using it. Why are you so concerned about public perception? Why not just let people have their theories and carry on doing your thing?
Andreas Ullmann: Hard to answer. So maybe it's just… maybe it's even a personal thing. I'm with the company for such a long time. The guys here are like my family, because a lot of the others here are also here for ages. It just hurts to see what's posted out there about us, even though it has been claimed wrong for hundreds of times.
On the other hand, I can imagine that this reputation also has some kind of business impact. I can imagine that certain developers, probably more in the indie region or the smaller region, are not contacting us in the first place if they are looking for solutions.
Because currently, there is only two ways to protect a game against piracy, right? Either you don't, or use our protection. There is no competitor. And I can imagine that there are developers out there who are hesitant to contact us, only because of the reputation. They would probably love to prevent piracy for their game, but they fear the hate and the toxicity of the community if they do so. And maybe they even believe all the claims that are out there - unanswered from us until today - and for this reason don't contact us in the first place.