It’s always been a race to gobble up the handful of whales that keep the mobile game industry alive. Now add hundreds more desktop and console games to that list. Sure, there are lots of people that will happily spend thousands of dollars on any shitty game, but once you’ve got the entire industry spending billions fighting over those players, the well runs dry eventually.
Pure speculation: of the people who don’t like Epic, maybe 25% are legitimate, principled objections to their business practices. The rest are split evenly between people who just want to manage their entire library on a single platform, and folks just going along for the hate-ride because it seems like the “safe” position to take.
From a technical stance, Steam and GOG are superior platforms (for different reasons). For equal-price purchases, I can’t think of a single reason to choose Epic over other options. But claiming a game for free? That doesn’t make anyone a bad person.
Tell it to only update on launch. If you then ONLY launch the game through the Script Extender, this doesn’t count as a steam launch, and it shouldn’t update. You don’t necessarily need to be using any SKSE mods to launch that way, it just bypasses the normal launch process.
At least, that’s the way it has always worked in the past. If you installed SKSE through Steam, YMMV; just get it direct from the dev website.
Edit: Just tried it out, and this mostly works. “Online Services” are disabled until you update, so any Bethesda.net mods installed inside the game itself may break, but mods installed from Nexus appear to be fine.
What’s your number? The amount of money you would need to just walk away from it and live. See, I find that everybody has a number, and it’s usually an exact number. So what is yours?
Right. Here’s how it works: Your game is on Gamepass, and a user installs it. Now instead of Microsoft paying you $0.15, then you paying Unity $0.10, Microsoft will just pay us directly the $0.10, and you still get your $0.05! See, it’s a great deal! Everybody gets their money and you don’t even have to deal with the Unity costs! Please, don’t go!!
Live Service Game, the idea…I find unappealing and just plain skippable. Live Service Game, the phrase…is so much better than “Game as a Service.”
But hey, not every game/genre/delivery method is going to appeal to everybody. The industry is big enough to cater to multiple niches, even if some are much (much, much) bigger than others. I’m happy that people can find whatever game they like, and I can find my favorites as well. That doesn’t make anybody more correct than the other.