What’re you even talking about??? Epic takes a revenue share of every game made with unreal engine, plus Fortnite runs exclusively on mommy’s credit card and is still insanely huge. Even if the epic games store doesn’t take as big a cut of every sale, they’re held by daddy Tencent who’ll probably kick em some lunch money if they’re actually desperate.
This. They’ve been burning money trying to give games away for free to entice people to their platform. It’s quite possible they have a cash flow problem. That they just layed off 900 people definitely supports this idea.
I doubt it. Fortnite alone probably covers all of those free games and then some, it’s an insane cash cow. Add to that Unreal Engine revenue and they’re not hurting at all for money.
Layoffs just means they probably finished the bulk of UE5 dev and are seeing softening revenues with the COVID spike being over, so they don’t have as much demand to get that and related projects done sooner. Amazon and other big tech firms have done similar layoffs, and it’s not because they’re losing money, but because they’re seeing an end to the crazy growth in the gaming industry due to COVID-19 demand changes.
So no, I really don’t think Epic is hurting for money, they’re just cutting costs to improve margins now that revenue is likely falling.
Epic Games is a privately owned company, thus we don’t know their financial state. We don’t know which debts they have and what ventures they have undertaken over the last few years. They might have huge debts and Fortnite might not be enough.
Sure, it’s possible, but I think unlikely. This sounds like the normal BS reasons companies give when their investors want better margins. I’m guessing Tencent isn’t happy with profit margins and wants a better short term return for their stake.
But you’re right, it’s all speculation at this point.
Steam’s de-facto monopoly is so strong, Epic can’t break it. Epic made four billion dollars per year on one game. Epic licenses the engine for like half of all noteworthy games. Epic has the only platform not seizing one-third of all revenue from developers, and that platform throws free shit at customers in constant desperation. And they still can’t move the needle.
Monopoly doesn’t mean there’s zero competition. It means the competition does not matter.
PC gamers have alternatives to Steam the way that Android users have alternatives to Google Play. Yes, there are dozens. And that’s how many users each one has.
If it’s even possible it would take years or decades of work building up good will. It’s kinda Valve’s game to lose right now. They just need to not make any enormous mistakes and they win by default. Fortunately for Valve, they seem to be one of the few companies in game dev that isn’t managed exclusively by misanthropes and buffoons.
Would it though? Being a competitor to Valve, not sucking, and not pulling shady anti-consumer shit would result in immediate good will for a decently large (though disproportionately loud) section of the market. Hell, EGS failed at the 2nd and 3rd thjngs in that list and they still got a loyal fanbase
Epic can't make a dent because their product is dogshit.
Customers don't care that Valve takes a well earned cut (that only applies buying directly from Steam); they care that their games are on a platform that's actually fucking useful. If Epic didn't insult gamers shipping that piece of trash and had put work into actually providing a product that could possibly be considered acceptable, they might have been able to make a dent.
You're not going to take market share with shitty gimmicks if your actual product is a crime against humanity no one wants.
For starters, they put so little developments money into EGS that they went two years without a shopping cart, a feature that effectively every other online store has and could be custom coded properly in a day
And every one of them comes back because paying Steam 30% is by far the most profitable way to do business. They absolutely deserve every single penny of it.
30% commission on an all margin product is not even sort of unusual or unfair.
The fact that using their services and paying them their cut is more profitable than not doing so absolutely, in and of itself, proves beyond discussion that their cut is fair.
Yes, sales should cost money. Moving units is a fucking massive value add. Valve deserves every penny they take and more. They're the best thing that ever happened to PC gaming and nothing else is remotely close.
Continued use only proves this is a way to make money. Probably the best available way. But to suggest that, so long as people are doing it, there cannot possibly be problems, is obvious crap.
Especially when you add “and more.” Oh: so this isn’t the exact right amount, as decreed by mighty god himself? We can talk about the middleman’s cut, so long as the rent goes up?
If your complaint is the money they take in exchange for sales, it's literally impossible for anything but the fact that paying them nets you significantly more money to be meaningful.
Valve built PC as a platform. If they never existed, you wouldn't get 10% of the PC sales. That absolutely means they're entitled to their share. Platform development is a massive value add, and useless jackasses trivializing their contribution by pretending that the massive development project of building a platform isn't every bit as important as single products on the platform can fuck right off.
Valve could take a lot less and it wouldn’t kill them. Or PC gaming. Wouldn’t be whatever frothing insult you pretend it is, either. It’s just… less money. They’d still make a shitload of money. Just… less.
The number can be smaller and the sky wouldn’t fall.
The number right now is obscenely high. It’s the most they think they can get away with. And they can only get away with it because of their de-facto monopoly, which should end.
Also key activations cost the dev zero on Steam. And the dev can generate keys for free to sell elsewhere. details here: partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
Weird because I provided actual services and functionality that steam provides in exchange for that cut, and your response was that me mentioning devs do have other options isn’t “understanding criticism”
Your response to criticism of Steam was ‘there’s other services.’
That does absolutely nothing to deflect from criticism of Steam.
Praising their various features comes a little closer, but still doesn’t justify taking an entire third of every game’s revenue. It takes a whole fucking lot of hypothetical work, which you imagine developers would have to do, to amount to the slice Steam takes right off the top.
What Valve offers that makes companies put up with that is their de-facto monopoly presence. They can sell many copies through Steam - or they won’t sell many copies.
Then developers can release games off steam, and some do.
‘There’s other services.’
But steam has many features people want and use that would add development costs if every dev had to make similar tools in house.
’ It takes a whole fucking lot of hypothetical work, which you imagine developers would have to do, to amount to the slice Steam takes right off the top.’
Do you think it’s simple for a developer to create a friends list network, host/moderate community forums, host/moderate a mod website integrated into the game, achievements syncing, ability to share the game with friends, and integrate VR functionality for the above, on their own dime?
These are recurring ongoing costs for server and continued developmental changes, you are severely underestimating the time and money cost to create/host/maintain all those services?
You are asserting without evidence that Valve needs to take all that money. As if they would go broke if they only took a quarter of all the revenue on most PC games.
Valve makes ten billion dollars on Steam, every single year. Their margins are not slim. And being an established de-facto monopoly, people go there because that’s where the products are, and products are there because that’s where the people go. They could slash costs to nothing, do the bare minimum work going forward, and still rake in the money on sheer momentum, for years and years and years.
The only feature that really matters here is adoption. And that’s not a feature you can design. Even Valve didn’t rope people in with a convincing sales pitch. They forced Steam onto everyone who wanted to play Half-Life 2. If you didn’t want to put up with an always-online DRM service aimed to take over PC gaming - you didn’t get to play the most anticipated game of the year. Whatever benefits you ascribe to the service, whatever functionality you argue developers would otherwise budget for, the core was always ‘accept this or pound sand.’
It’s cool how you can be providing the labor for a company and then that company gets bought by another company and the shareholders who don’t actually make the thing get rich and then you get fired because the other company has a bad year even though the thing you labored for is incredibly successful.
Tangentially, I haven’t played in ages but they should have made it local coop so we can have fun on the courses without having to play through the same few opening courses and deal with lobbies.
Yeah, them deciding that no stage is sacred and not allow for any offline or private play was extremely frustrating and made it so that I just lost the ability to give a shit at all about the game
Custom lobbies (i.e. the exact feature you’re asking for) were launched in December 2020, in beta mode, then March 2021 to everyone. So the feature you wanted has been there for over 2.5 years.
It’s always fascinating to me to see highly rated comments that are pretty out of touch with the actual subject matter.
To me it just shows that they made the change far too late for anyone to even notice. It’s not reasonable to be a subject matter expert in every game one’s ever played.
Exactly this, I see this a lot in the Joe Rogan…“I bet you haven’t watched all his shows, so how can you say you don’t like him” you should’nt need to know everything in detail to form an opinion
Doubling down on what exactly? Man why are you so weird accusing me of editing comments and “doubling down” when all I’m doing is no changing my view based on an irrelevant reply from you.
And I compared the argument that “you can’t have a view on something without having an intimate and indepth knowledge of topic” especially when that view is whether or not you take part in the piece of media.
CS2 feels like a downgrade from CSGO in a lot of ways, but CSGO at launch and CSGO at end of life were two completely different games, the same is probably true for CS2. Long term support is what keeps games going.
It’s definitely not starting from scratch, it’s just throwing away what they built so far.
To be honest though although I’m not a game dev it does seem like a pretty reasonable decision given presumably the difficulties of maintaining your own engine. This will hopefully allow them to invest more time into different parts of the game and avoid a repeat of the Cyberpunk launch. I wonder if that launch and issues that lead to it was a big part of the drive behind the decision.
That said, I am a bit worried about what seems to be a bit of a consolidation happening with game engines after Unity burning a lot of bridges and now CDPR not moving forward with their in house engine. It’d be nice to see some more competition in this space I think. That’s my layman’s take at least, maybe there are already plenty of options that I’m just not aware of.
The stuff you can do in UE5 just makes it a no brainer for everyone. Especially if you want an object and detail dense environment where lighting is super important. UE5 and cyberpunk is a match made in heaven.
I do home Godot can get similar features to UE5 one date. I’m rooting for those guys.
I’m also a little sad that REDengine is getting scrapped after seemingly finally getting to a pretty decent spot, and I definitely wish there was more competition for Unreal.
That being said, it’s a very understandable decision given not just the capabilities and ease-of-use of UE5 but also its popularity, which means finding new developers competent with it is easier and onboarding is faster.
And as you say, it lets them focus on actually making games.
Actually, a surprising number of areas with doors or fast travel between them don’t need it. The entirety of New Atlantis’s exterior is a single cell. Same with Neon
I would say, being even more pedantic, that the game uses a blockchain (which is just a different type of database) to record in game digital asset ownership. This game could have been made with a normal db taking that roll and would probably run no differently.
He is mentioning and using a blockchain over a normal db for no other reason that it probably helped to secure funding in 2017 as it was a massive tech buzzword at the time.
It could, sure, but I’m positive the only reason he’s making it is because of blockchain. I seriously doubt Pete was rolling around a game idea for online real estate separately and just threw blockchain in as a way to get funding.
Well it runs - just not as fast as you want. I personally would never want to play those competitive shooters that need pixel perfect aim on a handheld console… but that’s just me.
No, a 3ds to switch is a pretty apt comparison about a modern pc to a steam deck actually.
There is absolutely no reason why anyone would assume this should be optimized for a mobile device. You would be limiting its potential in PC, if they can’t provide the same experience across all devices, they aren’t going to. It’s a competitor shooter for one thing….
Where am I comparing apples to oranges…? I’m using different approaches to show that not everygame a company designs is going to be playable on all devices, it’s NEVER, been that way. So why would it suddenly change just for this one case…?
How is any of that relevant to a company being able to design games for what they want…?
But I will address this point. Yes it would limit what they could do to the PC version, look at what happened to coop for BG3 on the series S, sometimes devices just can’t do everything….
I also never put words in your mouth. I’ve used different methods to describe how companies make games for other hardware all the time.
Why should this game be different? Are you going to answer any of my questions or are you just going to continue to deflect with these endless fallacies?
I’m glad you’re making it apparent that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Sure you can’t compare it to a two thousand dollar PC with top of the line hardware, but it’s plenty capable, affordable and you can take it anywhere. They’re fucking awesome and have made PC gaming accessible to lots of people
I think people expect a game made by Valve to run on gaming hardware made by Valve, even if it’s only for casual playing.
Yes. Why else did CSGO get controller and gyro support? While Valve did not promise anything in that regard, there was the expectation that CS2 would basically be fully optimized for Deck. Maybe it will still happen. The “final” release is nothing but an open beta.
Sure but they haven’t cared about the state of their games in ages. Iike I’m all for pushing to get them to fix it and all, but think it’s weird that people are surprised. Especially when the vast majority of their focus has been on steam for the last forever
I play Destiny 2 on my Asus ROG Ally almost daily, and have played lots of PVE and Gambit, but hate Crucible. It’s really powerful, so I think it’s possible to play competitive games on a handheld if you’re comfortable with using a controller. Of course, you can plug it into a monitor and use the XG Mobile to get a decent graphics card. So yeah, I think a handheld can hold up to a gaming PC if you temper your expectations. You’re not going to be playing at 4k, 120 fps, but instead 720p 50-60 fps. Good enough for casual play all the time.
It has competitive modes, but I don’t know how well it would do at tournament play. I’m not a big fan of PVP, but I’m pretty sure the Ally is powerful enough to play most of those games if you lower the graphics to get a nice FPS. I just cited Destiny because it’s what I’ve been playing lately.
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