With “optimized for gaming” premise? That’s obviously nothing more than “hey we decided to allow you to terminate resource hungry explorer/copilot/edge when you play”.
Here is the mistake. It does not trying to compete. It only tries to catch as many fish in its bucket as possible, while leveraging (burning) Fortnite money.
It’s a wasted effort, and it will never come close to Steam like this. It may even die along with Fortnite, or degrade further.
They didn’t start the fight. They were sued. If you think “picking a fight with Nintendo” is something you can do any time, and on your own volition, you must be missing something.
That sounds like a “look someone managed to pull that off so it’s definitely possible” argument. In other words “you can enter the collectable creatures scene by spending that amount of effort”. And it shouldn’t be that way. The price in effort shouldn’t be that high.
Actually, it should be the customers who decide if your product is worth the effort of playing it. There are a lot of rehashed games in various genres (e.g. horrors, walking simulators) and wee see no issue with them even though they are using exactly same mechanics, or sometimes even assets. What matters is users’ reception. If users think your product is worth it - it means you spent enough effort already. If your product would be a low effort creation users wouldn’t spend money on it in the first place.
I’m sure if Cassette Beasts could accumulate that kind of playerbase and profits, Nintendo would’ve sued them too.
I just assume that as long as everyone is fine with derivations produced by AI (text, pics, music), all derivations that don’t look exactly like original Pokemon are fine (also real people put some effort into those). Palworld compared to Pokemon is a much better product than, say, Fifa XX compared to Fifa XX-1. Also Pokemon series is notorious for useless editions of the same games masked as separate products - that level of rehashing feels much more illegal to me.
but anything built on top of web engines is going to be a little dogshit on native platforms.
Hard disagree on “little”.
Software designed for “native first” experiences like Flutter aren’t as popular in web dev because they work on that same, but reversed, assumption of a local disk being your source.
Popularity should not be dictated by what web devs prefer. As long as they build for desktop, I won’t pardon excessive resource usage. And I’m not talking about Flutter. Better performance oriented frameworks exist, see sciter.
It’s not CEF that does most of the impact. It’s the contents web devs make it load and process. And web devs generally not being very competent in optimizing is just a sad reality.
Think of it as a “this game is not yet available for purchase” seal. It may also mean “we know our game is not up to standards (it wouldn’t sell well on Steam), so we chose to let idiots at epic decide if they want to pay for it, and hey it worked so that’s something”.
Developers have full control over servers in most cases. A viable server side anti cheat should be a thing. For every case of “client sending false data to server” we can come up with a solution to verify that to some degree. Finally, it should help a lot to rely on player generated reports and utilize replay recording on server.
But no, developers will continue to rely on 3rd party solutions (made by people who never developed a game), even infect their co-op-only games with it, and complain “uh oh we can’t handle Linux cheaters”.
Steam getting better isn’t linked to anyone becoming a billionaire. That sentiment sounds like people can’t stop looking for things to blame Valve for.
Is it too difficult to accept that every single company failed in competing with Steam? I’d say they didn’t even try their best (especially Epic). Must’ve assumed that just serving a website with a web app is all they needed to get as rich as Gabe.
Well did it help Epic when they added achievements? Guess not much. Either they never marketed this feature enough or most spending users never cared about achievements on Epic.