Tldr: Kickstarter Game with a lot of interest while in development announces a release date on Steam. After the date announcement they get contacted by Epic saying “we’d love to host your game” for an exclusivity deal.
Dev responds that they would be happy to have their game on Epic but promises were made during crowd funding that it would be available on Steam.
Epic replies that they aren’t interested if it’s not exclusive.
This tells me that
Epic is full of shit. "We’d love to have your game, but only if it’s exclusive.
Epic doesn’t care about being a better service for its customers. Having the game available on Epic as well is strictly better for Epic’s customers and they easily could have done that. They chose not to.
Epic is not interested in actually having to compete with other companies. This would require them to provide a better service in some fashion. They are only interested if they can force people “if you want to purchase this game you have to buy it through us” which is anti-consumer.
Obviously that steam guy was probably coming from a place of bad faith
The Steam forums actively encourage this kind of bad faith behavior:
when a post gets a new reply it’s moved to the top of the forums. So as long as people are engaging with a post, even if it’s just to make fun of a bigot, it keeps getting pushed back to the top.
Users can “award” posts for various things (helpfull, cool, funny, etc) and users have taken to giving ‘Clown’ awards as a way of making fun of posts. Whenever one of your posts gets an award, you are given Steampoints you can use in the Steam cosmetics store.
This results in every game having bad faith posts “complaining” about wokeness so that people will make fun of them with Clown awards as a way to farm Steampoints. The developer bringing attention to it just helps them get more.
There’s also the fact that people will pay for it. Would you take a million dollars to let your favorite game put a skin of you in it holding a sign saying “I care more about the money I made from this skin than the quality of this game”?
I hate the practice, but I despise the fact that it always turns out to be so damn profitable.
What did you expect to happen after Diablo 4 immortal?
After Diablo Immortal I knew not to purchase Diablo 4 in the first month. After how profitable Diablo Immortal was of course this was going to be the way Blizzard continued to go.
This is why I’m more and more playing Indie games. The game has to be made by someone who wanted to make a fun game, as anyone with a profit incentive is just going to make Candy Crush and for some reason people will pay for it.
The difficult steps in FTL are no joke. I was having no difficulty clearing on easy and was just trying to unlock all the ships. Once I did I switched to normal and had to restart 3 times before getting out of the first sector.
I’ve been taking part in the beta, as far as Steam is concerned me and my friends are a thrupple. Works pretty well, other family member’s games just show up in your library. Haven’t had any issues, Steam will tell you if your copy is in use by a family member and you either play something else or ask them to quit.
Travel (especially in older zones where you would be using portals) consists of:
Mount flying mount, point in the right direction, hit auto-run, wait.
Not really the most exciting game play experience when you’ve already flown over the area a dozen times before. Taxis are also just as bad. Other MMOs (Guldwars 2, FF14) have no problem with players teleporting directly to somewhere close to their destination. They already traveled their once, no need to force them to do it again.