In my experience, it’s a threefold problem for large-scale games like RPGs or AAA titles.
Playing the game in short bursts isn’t meaningful enough to be enjoyable. While you could do it, it would either be under pressure, or you would have so little time to do anything that it feels like you’ve accomplished nothing.
To get around that, you have to schedule playing the game into your day or carve time around it. It’s often difficult to do so, and games are usually the lowest priority activity for working adults.
When you can’t schedule the game in, you take a break to play a different game with less commitment requirements. Then, after a couple of months have passed, you realize that you have forgotten where you were in the story and what goals you were trying to achieve. That’s super demotivating, and it’s usually just easier to play a new game than try to figure out where you left off.
When you consider that, it kind of makes sense why small games like Vampire Survivors or handheld gaming (where quick suspend is a thing) have taken off in recent years.
buy exclusives or studio? most big publishers do that.
In the case of studios or intellectual property owned by a publisher, you can (unfortunately) expect that to be exclusive to the publisher. When games don’t have the funding to make it past development, taking publishing deals are a necessary evil that often come with similar provisions.
Epic has a habit with inserting itself in projects that don’t need its funding, however. They have a track record of finding indie games that were funded by Kickstarter and offer up a loan in exchange for timed exclusivity to their storefront—backers who already paid for GOG or Steam keys be damned. They even bought out Rocket League and delisted it from Steam, even though it was already published and had been on the platform for years.
I can’t criticize Epic for making their own properties exclusive, but I can absolutely criticize them for being anticompetitive and consumer-unfriendly. Their publishing deals aren’t made in good faith as an investment in the game or future profits, but as a means to remove the consumer’s choice and funnel prospective consumers into their own storefront.
give free games out? It’s consumer friendly.
This is the one thing I will give them credit for, actually. It is an excellent business model for creating growth and getting users invested in their ecosystem, and it doesn’t actually hurt the consumer.
drive Valve or other store front out of business? lol
That would be the goal of a monopoly, yes.
make EGS/EOS so good and free that no one wants to publish on Steam? lol, any advance in that 2 department Steam as platform will respond way before they take foot hold.
Sorry, I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at with this. Are you saying other storefronts/platforms on PC aren’t free, or that Epic Games Store currently does a better job?
Is run by a CEO who sees astroturfing as a legitimate form of speech, and not manipulative marketing. [Source]
Attempts to gain market share by subverting competitors rather than offering a better product. [Source p. 151]
I’m not saying Steam should be the only platform; competition benefits us as consumers. But Epic is shady, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest they aren’t doing what they are doing for the good of anybody but themselves. Any action they take needs to be looked at critically and analyzed for long-term consequences.
With their win against Google, it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that they create an Epic Mobile Games Store to siphon a large chunk of the massive and extremely profitable mobile gaming market. It’s better than Google having 100% of it, but you can be pretty sure that they would try everything in their power to pull the ladder up after they climb it.
Absolutely, this is still much better than Google winning. Here’s to hoping it gives third-party app stores the power to be more than glorified APK downloaders.
I don’t like Google (and they deserve an L), but Epic really shouldn’t be given a win either. Pardon my Australian, but Tim Sweeney is cunt with ulterior motives and dreams of buying his way into his own monopoly.
Great pick. The X670 and E variants are insanely overpriced for what they provide. People don’t need PCIE 5 when there aren’t even any non-SSD components that use it.
The best advice I can give you is to turn off the FPS counter. If the game feels like it’s stuttering, turn down the quality. If it feels fine during gameplay, don’t fuck with it, and under no circumstances should you enable an FPS counter or frame timing graph.
If you’re anything like me and you do enable the FPS counter or frame timing graphs, you’ll spend more time optimizing performance than actually enjoying the game…
Windows will do whatever frame rate the EDID reports the display as being capable of. It won’t do it by default, but it’s just a simple change in the settings application.
Macs support higher than 60 Hz displays these days, with some of the laptops even having a built-in one. They call it by some stupid marketing name, but it’s a 120 Hz display.
Linux requires more tinkering with modelines and is complicated by the fact that you might either be running X or Wayland, but it’s supported as well.
I summarily addressed the inertia issue already, when I mentioned that they underestimated consumer’s unwillingness to change.
The article is primarily aimed at startups, who don’t have the same amount of money to pour into software development, testing, and infrastructure.
Epic almost did exactly what the article suggested, but it notably did not improve anything over Steam. It didn’t even try for parity with Steam. In my opinion, as someone who plays PC games, that removed any chance of me even considering using it in any serious capacity.
I genuinely think they would’ve had a shot at being successful if they had tried to improve the state of PC gaming. Steam is massive, but it’s not without its pain points. The core of the client is ancient, and the fact that it heavily utilizes CEF makes it a bit of a resource hog. There’s a lot of bugs hidden in the nooks and crannies, and legacy cruft makes fixing some of these issues take a very long time.
Epic had the right approach to getting their foot in the door by giving away games for free and paying/bribing developers to release non-exclusive games on their platform. They just fucked up everything else.
Some things they could have done to help themselves:
Released a client that worked more consistently than Steam:
Steam Cloud is extremely opaque about errors.
Download times are inaccurate, particularly when dealing with IO.
Chat windows are pretty laggy and resource-intensive.
Built-in Nvidia GameStream protocol support.
GameStream has lower latency than Steam Link.
Integrated mods.
They wouldn’t get developer buy-in for a new ecosystem, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t just buy out an existing mod platform and integrate it.
Forums, chat, and social features.
Lacking these, they’re basically asking players to go to Steam whenever they need to find comminuty guides or discussions.
Achievements and matchmaking as a drop-in Steam API replacement.
An equivalent to Steam Input for remapping controller inputs on a per-game basis.
A CEO that knows when to stop talking.
The impression I get from him talking is that he thinks he’s the messiah of PC gaming. The impression I get from his actions is that he’s just like the rest of the publishers trying to grope our wallets at every opportunity. I doubt I’m the only one.
While I can understand the difficulty of trying to come up with competition to a pre-existing and dominant storefront, they went about it almost entirely the wrong way. They underestimated consumers’ aversion to change and overestimated the value their own launcher provided.
Everybody and their mother used Steam at the time, and it provided a whole lot more than just a storefront and icons to click. When Epic launched EGS, it offered absolutely none of that. Without any social aspects or significant consumer buy-in to their ecosystem, it had no staying power. People—myself included—would go to it to play a shiny new free game until it stopped being fun, then fuck right off back to Steam to play our other games with friends. If they had spent more time cooking up the EGS ecosystem into something more similar to XBL or PSN before trying to attract consumers en masse, they likely would’ve been pretty successful. They could’ve even just decided to partner up with (or buy) NexusMods and integrated a mod manager, and a lot of us would’ve had a good reason to prefer EGS over Steam for some games.
Instead of doing something to make their ecosystem more appealing, though, they used paid-for exclusives to make other ecosystems less appealing. It was an obvious attempt to herd consumers into their ecosystem, and it backfired spectacularly. Before that, most people were either indifferent or liked them as a company due to their legacy and/or Unreal Engine. These days, I see a lot of bitching about “timed exclusives”.