mammut

mammut, 6 miesięcy temu

Why are paid exclusives worse, though? I’ve never understood that. I understand why we hate exclusives, but I’ve never heard anyone explain why paid exclusives are worse. Steam has tons of exclusives, some of which are exclusive because they targeted Steam APIs that are proprietary and the developers don’t have the resources or incentive to port the game to another platform. Why isn’t it bad to encourage developers to use proprietary APIs that make it difficult to port games to other platforms?

As a consumer, exclusives are shitty because they restrict where I can buy and play a game. This is true whether they’re paid exclusives, technical lock-in exclusives, lazy developer exclusives, etc. All types of exclusives suck. Is it worse that Borderlands 3 was exclusive for 6 months compared to Borderlands 2 being exclusive for ~7 years, just because one was paid? I can’t understand why the 6 month exclusivity period is worse for a consumer than the 7 year one.

mammut, 6 miesięcy temu (edited 6 miesięcy temu)

This is the same kinda shit that Valve / publishers pulled when Steam launched, though.

Half-Life and Counterstrike originally didn’t require Steam, and then one day Valve told everybody they’d need to start using Steam if they wanted to keep playing the games they’d already bought. That’s a Valve game, but it’s akin to Epic moving Rocket League to EGS (which also pissed people off).

For more general / non-Valve games, there was a time period where you’d pre-order a physical copy of game and honestly not know if it would require a launcher. Tons of games that launched in early days of Steam didn’t bother to tell consumers upfront that Steam was required, and consumers wouldn’t find out until the game hit the shelves and there was a little note on the back of the box, “Internet access and Steam account required.” In that case, non-Steam pre-orders weren’t even given an exception – every copy required Steam. That seems even worse than the Epic mess IMO. There, the publishers at least made an exception for people who thought they were ordering a Steam game. If you thought you were gonna get a real physical copy of game that didn’t require a launcher, and it ended up requiring Steam, the publisher just told you to either use Steam or pound sand.

I don’t like the behavior either, but pulling already announced / released games and forcing them onto a different launcher is standard practice when a new launcher comes out. It’s happened to paid and non-paid exclusives. It’s happened to EGS and Steam (and probably Origin or Uplay or others too). I don’t see any reason to be any more upset at publishers over the EGS debacle than the Steam one.

My take is that launcher exclusivity shouldn’t exist, because every single launcher has just pissed off / screwed over consumers when there is exclusivity / any requirement to use the launcher.

mammut, 6 miesięcy temu (edited 6 miesięcy temu)

Yes, in the long run it always is. That’s my point. EGS will probably be successful, and 15 years from now someone will bring up a story about how EGS really infuriated people “back in the day”, and everyone will say it’s irrelevant.

Nobody cares how the service got started. They only care where it goes. It doesn’t make a bit of difference how pissed off everyone is at Epic. It didn’t matter how pissed off everyone was at Steam in the early years. There’s a reason these companies start off by pissing everyone off: it works. There’s no long term downside, and, in the short term, it gets you users. Users don’t show up voluntarily on the early days, and they defend the service once it’s established.

As long as Epic lasts long enough for everyone to later forgive them for their anti-consumer beginning, they’ll be golden. It’s the market standard. The early days will always be viewed as irrelevant. “It was a different time,” people always say. “You can’t compare it to now.”

mammut, 6 miesięcy temu

I suspect the cost of giving away games is relatively minimal compared to their other operational costs.

Also, does any digital launcher store on PC make money besides Steam? Last I recall, CDPR was losing money on GOG too.

mammut, 6 miesięcy temu (edited 6 miesięcy temu)

That’s not necessarily a good example. He probably would’ve gotten arrested just for the modchip part, which does seem kinda ridiculous, but they were also (according to Bowser’s admission) more directly aiding piracy:

Bowser also admits he and TeamXecuter “created and supported ROM libraries” for its customers to use through websites like MaxConsole.com and rom-bank.com.

From arstechnica.com/…/hacker-will-pay-nintendo-4-5-mi…

mammut, 6 miesięcy temu

Yeah, I still remember that I completely lost access to my Steam account in the early days. I forgot the password, and the password reset feature didn’t work. I contacted support and they never responded. I eventually just gave up and lost the games in the account. I guess if I had waited long enough they probably would’ve fixed it, but, holy fuck, Steam was really shit in the early days.

To Valve’s credit, my understanding is that the support situation has improved marginally over the 20 years since my incident.

mammut, 6 miesięcy temu

Were all phones this way? I was thinking on Windows CE phones (like the iPAQ) you could just get paid via Paypal or similar and then send the customer an installer file / unlock key.

Was there a rule that you had to bill through the Telco?

mammut, 6 miesięcy temu (edited 6 miesięcy temu)

Ahh, you must be talking about dumb / feature phones, I guess? I remember a lot of people who had smartphones early on getting / sending emails on their Symbian devices or Windows Mobile devices. In around 2003 (years prior to the iPhone launch), Windows Mobile actually had something like a quarter of the smartphone market. So, in terms of smartphones, it was sizable. But, a lot of people didn’t have smartphones at the time, so that whole market was niche in a way. Most of the smartphone market at that time was Symbian, but Windows was big, and then there was also PalmOS.

I still kinda wish smartphones now had the option to work more like those old ones. They were much less locked down. It’s fine for the vendor to offer a store, but the early phones would just let me install apps any way I wanted. Hell, you could buy some PalmOS apps at physical retailers!

mammut, 8 miesięcy temu

This seems counter to Microsoft’s gaming accessibility push though, doesn’t it? Now if some niche manufacturer wants to make a controller designed for use by people with some rare mobility condition, the manufacturer will have to go through extra hoops to get this license bullshit out of the way.

Nice job, Microsoft. We all know the ticket to accessibility is more hurdles.

mammut, 9 miesięcy temu

Is there more to the thread? It’s just showing me the one message linked, and it doesn’t say anything there about reaching out to Epic / not hearing back.

mammut, 9 miesięcy temu

So we also don’t know if the developer had reached out to Epic besides this post? Isn’t it possible, then, that this is the first Epic has heard of this as well?

mammut, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

I don’t know if it’s because I don’t have an account on Twitter, but literally the only Tweet it shows me is the one linked, where she says that she hasn’t gotten royalties. It says this:

btw I’ve got no royalty payment for Hatoful Boyfriend from Epic since they acquired Mediatonic back in spring 2021. I don’t think the sales have been zero for two years?🤔

I noticed people in the comments saying that Epic didn’t respond to her, but I didn’t understand why people were saying that – from the only Tweet I can see, shown above, there’s nothing saying that she reached out to / didn’t get a response from Epic.

So, I asked here in this thread if there are more Tweets, thinking that there must be more but Twitter just doesn’t show them to me. Because otherwise it makes no sense to assume that she reached out to Epic / didn’t get a response, based just on the Tweet linked. So, I posted,

Is there more to the thread? It’s just showing me the one message linked, and it doesn’t say anything there about reaching out to Epic / not hearing back.

Then I got a reply, from you, that opened with “No.” I read that as you saying that aren’t any more Tweets, and so I asked why everyone was assuming she’d reached out to Epic / hadn’t gotten a response. Because that’s not a logical assumption to make based on the text contained in the single Tweet linked here.

Now you’re telling me there are more Tweets. I still cannot see them and do not know what they say, though, which is why I was asking in the first place.

(Edit: I see there is now an image of the thread in this post. That was not there when I asked the initial question about if there were most posts.)

mammut, 9 miesięcy temu

Everybody knows first party exclusives are evil!

mammut, 9 miesięcy temu

Maybe it was reverse psychology. Epic is trying to destroy the competition by giving them money. Then, paranoid gamers will refuse to use or support Godot, because there’s a connection to Epic.

mammut, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

I think Epic definitely fucked some things up, but I really think the takeaway is that, if anyone has any hope for competing, they are absolutely going to need exclusives. This has been studied in the economics literature. In order for a newcomer to compete, you need exclusives. The dominant platform will automatically get the big titles, and players aren’t going to switch platforms to get the same titles they could’ve gotten without switching.

How did Valve get gamers to switch from physical boxed games to Steam? Exclusives. There was actually a digital distribution platform that predated Steam (run by Stardock), and it was more feature complete than Steam when Steam came out. But it didn’t have any exclusives, so it died out in favor of the (at the time) more spartan Steam platform.

Love or hate exclusives, nobody ever gets anywhere in the marketplace without them.

mammut, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

There have been multiple games, mostly in the past now, that announced launching on certain platforms, including Steam, then had to backtrack and reveal that Epic bought their exclusivity and that gamers that were already expecting to get the game from one platform, now wouldn’t be able to.

Valve did a similar thing to this. I don’t know if you remember the original state of Half-Life and Counter Strike, but they originally didn’t require any launcher. Then, one release, Valve announced that the old version was going to be shutdown and they would require Steam for now on. People had already purchased the game and been playing it outside of Steam, so they were pretty pissed that all the sudden they needed this launcher / account to keep playing a game that didn’t require one out of the box. I was especially pissed, because I think I was the only one in my group of friends that realized that they had unilaterally removed the option to resell / give away your game, and that seemed like bullshit to me, because I occasionally gave my old games to my friends when I was tired of them. The boxed copies of Half-Life and CS allowed for resell/transfer of the game, but they forced everyone over to Steam with an update and the Steam terms removed the option to transfer the game to someone else. Plus, Steam was an absolute awful piece of software at the time, and that made everything worse.

I’m guessing this also happened to other games as well. There was a period there where people would pre-order a game assuming it would work as a traditional, standalone boxed game. But then they’d get the game and it would unexpectedly require Steam, and the buyers would be pissed. Nowadays you just assume a launcher will be required, but it came as a shock / infuriated / disappointed people back when it first started being a thing that PC games were tied to launchers / accounts (and people hated Steam / launchers). Lots of people felt duped.

Anyway, I’m of the opinion that it’s bad for software to ever require or be tied to any launcher, even worse if it’s a third party launcher. It makes the future of games access muddy (What if Steam shuts down? What if there’s a court injunction against Steam requiring it to cease operations? What if my country blocks access to Steam?) and also adds extra layers of insecurity (last time I looked, there was at least one security issue in Steam that remained unpatched since around 2012).

So, to me, switching from Steam to EGS just meant consumers were getting punched in the nuts by a different company. I’d be happy if they weren’t getting punched in the nuts at all.

mammut, 9 miesięcy temu

I’d say of the current players, GOG is among my favorites since they make the launcher component optional.

In general, I’ve just been disappointed that all the launchers have taken off. I get the convenience factor, but consumers also had some rights that were taken away with the move to launchers. Plus the fact that some of the launchers have terrible security practices, as I mentioned, and that makes it so even a game with great security has unnecessarily increased attack surfaces. And launchers also screw over people with limited internet access, which is admittedly fewer people throughout the world every day, but there are still military personnel, etc. that just cannot reasonably be expected to access the internet on the whim of a launcher.

I suspect we’ll see the same thing happen with Epic that happened with Steam, where people end up forgetting all about the early fucked up stuff and, in the end, just rolling with it. Some years down the line, people won’t even remember how much people were pissed off about the early days of Epic. As an example, any time I mention that I’m not a huge fan of Steam, based partly on remembering the forced move of existing / new games in the early days, people just shrug it off and act like it was fine for Valve to do that since, years later, we got the current, well liked iteration of Steam.

And that’s kinda how I feel about Epic. If Steam can ultimately get a pass for completely ruining the experience of a few games by forcing people to use it against their will in the early days, why shouldn’t Epic get a chance at a pass in the end too? Maybe it turns out to be great years down the line? The only reason we have the Steam that’s well liked today is because consumers put up with it in the early days. Would we be better off if Steam failed early on? If consumers had held their ground when they hated it and forced it to close down? I kinda doubt it. I hate launchers, but, if Valve didn’t make the dominant one, someone else would’ve, and I probably wouldn’t be any happier with it.

Maybe in 20 years EGS will be fucking amazing, and when you tell someone you don’t like it because of what they did with Metro, etc., they’ll look at you the way people look at me when I talk about Steam now, lol.

mammut, 9 miesięcy temu

Is there a reliable way to detect the presence of AI content in games? I’m guessing that if you submitted a game to Steam with some AI generated content mixed in, nobody would ever know, so a rule against it would be effectively pointless anyway.