Only if you don’t buy the Season 1 Vault-Tec Access Pass for $49.99. Imagine not doing that and then not ever being able to get your Overpowered Armor at pass level 5. You would absolutely be ruining it for yourself by not investing into the seasonal passes.
Developers. UE5 is chalking up to be the defacto standard for modern titles that don’t have budgets large enough to make their own engine.
EGS, on the other hand, is still an abysmal failure beyond the lure of free (and increasingly shittier) games and a yearly 25% off discount coupon that people fall for.
I know Godot exists, and it’s preferable to supporting Epic, but it isn’t up to feature parity with UE5. Particularly, when it comes to asset streaming and open world games, Unreal has better support out of the box.
I would love for Godot to be the standard and first choice for every developer (including AAA), though.
I don’t think benchmarks are really needed to explain this. The whole game engine part is an unnecessary step.
To initialize a web browser component within UE5, you first need to initialize UE5 and then the web browser within it. Or, you could initialize a web browser directly, saving the memory and time needed to start up UE5.
They clearly have developers who know how to use CEF or whatever web view framework since they added it to Unreal Engine, so it’s not like they don’t know how to add it to a standalone application.
When I said “the whole game engine part”, I was referring to the usage of the engine at all. The whole engine obviously isn’t loaded, but there’s further abstractions and initialization code compared to using CEF or the Edge web view directly.
I’m simply saying that it’s a waste of resources to require loading or initializing any other part of Unreal Engine (including the component loading code!) when they’re only using it as web view.
I’m also not saying any other storefront is better. Steam is a bloated pig that half uses CEF and half uses Valve’s own proprietary GUI library, and the various other Electron-based publishers’ launchers suffer from different but equally stupid problems.
I’m not about to install EGS to prove something that can be deduced using common sense and critical thinking.
Abstractions are not free. The more of them you add, the more resources will be consumed by the application. Unreal Engine is an extra layer of abstraction sitting above some web view framework. Ergo, using the same web view framework without the Unreal Engine component abstraction would be cheaper.
The report comes from Cyber Daily, who also broke the news of last year’s confirmed hack attack on Insomniac Games. The site claims that new ransomware group Mogilevich are the culprits, as per the screencap of a darkweb posting above, and that the hackers are now trying to get Epic or another party to pay up for the return of...
Press F for all those people who decided to pay for shit on that platform because of the holiday 25% off voucher. Saved $15 in exchange for random unauthorized charges in the future.
While both of our claims are anecdotal, I’ve had it cause performance issues. It definitely isn’t the normal behavior for EGS and was probably a bug, but on my system it was sometimes sitting in the tray consuming 10 GB of system memory (and causing excessive swapping due to memory pressure).
There are valid reasons to bash Epic. I’ve written about some of them in another comment thread I made on Lemmy, but the overall problem I (and likely many others) have with them is a combination of their CEO’s hypocrisy and the company’s actions.
Even worse is that they do this while trying to paint themselves as the underdog against the Steam monopoly. It’s not only hypocritical, but also deceitful. A new monopoly is not a solution to an existing monopoly, but a solution to investments paying off.
Anyone that follows the homebrew and CFW scene knows that Xecuter repeatedly and unapologetically ripped off the GPL-licensed components in Atmosphere and its various bootloader stages. On top of violating the licenses of and stealing from the homebrew community, they also added console-bricking DRM to their CFW. They’re not heroes supporting the ideological cause of piracy; just shitbags trying to profit off of it.
Oh yeah, he was totally the fall guy and had his life ruined over it. He was made an example out of, while the rest and worst of them made bank and got away with it.
I do know what it is, and I don’t actually think Steam is one. They have a considerable market share, but they are by no means the only way to get games on PC, nor do they exercise their dominance in a way that stifles competition.
I’m pretty sure Tim Sweeny knows this as well, but he still calls it a “monopoly” whenever he has the chance.
The whole idea of digital licenses are stupid and risky. If you can find it on GOG, it’s preferable to get it there. The games are DRM-free, and you can directly download the installers and make an offline backup of them.
What if Steam went bankrupt, or start playing less nice?
Thankfully, there’s not too much reason to worry about this yet. Steam is a money-printing machine, and it’s not a public company or beholden to investors who demand increasing profitability every quarter. As long as Gabe Newell is still alive and doesn’t sell out by taking Valve public, things probably won’t change much.
As we all know, Roblox is garbage tier gameplay structured around psychological cues to get children to fill an endless pit with fake money bought with real money....
In my experience, it’s a threefold problem for large-scale games like RPGs or AAA titles.
Playing the game in short bursts isn’t meaningful enough to be enjoyable. While you could do it, it would either be under pressure, or you would have so little time to do anything that it feels like you’ve accomplished nothing.
To get around that, you have to schedule playing the game into your day or carve time around it. It’s often difficult to do so, and games are usually the lowest priority activity for working adults.
When you can’t schedule the game in, you take a break to play a different game with less commitment requirements. Then, after a couple of months have passed, you realize that you have forgotten where you were in the story and what goals you were trying to achieve. That’s super demotivating, and it’s usually just easier to play a new game than try to figure out where you left off.
When you consider that, it kind of makes sense why small games like Vampire Survivors or handheld gaming (where quick suspend is a thing) have taken off in recent years.
I don’t like Google (and they deserve an L), but Epic really shouldn’t be given a win either. Pardon my Australian, but Tim Sweeney is cunt with ulterior motives and dreams of buying his way into his own monopoly.
Absolutely, this is still much better than Google winning. Here’s to hoping it gives third-party app stores the power to be more than glorified APK downloaders.
buy exclusives or studio? most big publishers do that.
In the case of studios or intellectual property owned by a publisher, you can (unfortunately) expect that to be exclusive to the publisher. When games don’t have the funding to make it past development, taking publishing deals are a necessary evil that often come with similar provisions.
Epic has a habit with inserting itself in projects that don’t need its funding, however. They have a track record of finding indie games that were funded by Kickstarter and offer up a loan in exchange for timed exclusivity to their storefront—backers who already paid for GOG or Steam keys be damned. They even bought out Rocket League and delisted it from Steam, even though it was already published and had been on the platform for years.
I can’t criticize Epic for making their own properties exclusive, but I can absolutely criticize them for being anticompetitive and consumer-unfriendly. Their publishing deals aren’t made in good faith as an investment in the game or future profits, but as a means to remove the consumer’s choice and funnel prospective consumers into their own storefront.
give free games out? It’s consumer friendly.
This is the one thing I will give them credit for, actually. It is an excellent business model for creating growth and getting users invested in their ecosystem, and it doesn’t actually hurt the consumer.
drive Valve or other store front out of business? lol
That would be the goal of a monopoly, yes.
make EGS/EOS so good and free that no one wants to publish on Steam? lol, any advance in that 2 department Steam as platform will respond way before they take foot hold.
Sorry, I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at with this. Are you saying other storefronts/platforms on PC aren’t free, or that Epic Games Store currently does a better job?
Is run by a CEO who sees astroturfing as a legitimate form of speech, and not manipulative marketing. [Source]
Attempts to gain market share by subverting competitors rather than offering a better product. [Source p. 151]
I’m not saying Steam should be the only platform; competition benefits us as consumers. But Epic is shady, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest they aren’t doing what they are doing for the good of anybody but themselves. Any action they take needs to be looked at critically and analyzed for long-term consequences.
With their win against Google, it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that they create an Epic Mobile Games Store to siphon a large chunk of the massive and extremely profitable mobile gaming market. It’s better than Google having 100% of it, but you can be pretty sure that they would try everything in their power to pull the ladder up after they climb it.
Windows will do whatever frame rate the EDID reports the display as being capable of. It won’t do it by default, but it’s just a simple change in the settings application.
Macs support higher than 60 Hz displays these days, with some of the laptops even having a built-in one. They call it by some stupid marketing name, but it’s a 120 Hz display.
Linux requires more tinkering with modelines and is complicated by the fact that you might either be running X or Wayland, but it’s supported as well.
The best advice I can give you is to turn off the FPS counter. If the game feels like it’s stuttering, turn down the quality. If it feels fine during gameplay, don’t fuck with it, and under no circumstances should you enable an FPS counter or frame timing graph.
If you’re anything like me and you do enable the FPS counter or frame timing graphs, you’ll spend more time optimizing performance than actually enjoying the game…
Great pick. The X670 and E variants are insanely overpriced for what they provide. People don’t need PCIE 5 when there aren’t even any non-SSD components that use it.
I actually let my Ally go to get the Legion Go. I loved it but the sticks were angled to the left and the SD card reader wasn’t working. It’s nice to see though that they’re continuously doing support and improvements.
SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Unity (NYSE: U) (the “Company”), the world’s leading platform for creating and growing real-time 3D (RT3D) content, today announced that John Riccitiello will retire as President, Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and a member of the Company’s Board of Directors, effective immediately....
While I can understand the difficulty of trying to come up with competition to a pre-existing and dominant storefront, they went about it almost entirely the wrong way. They underestimated consumers’ aversion to change and overestimated the value their own launcher provided.
Everybody and their mother used Steam at the time, and it provided a whole lot more than just a storefront and icons to click. When Epic launched EGS, it offered absolutely none of that. Without any social aspects or significant consumer buy-in to their ecosystem, it had no staying power. People—myself included—would go to it to play a shiny new free game until it stopped being fun, then fuck right off back to Steam to play our other games with friends. If they had spent more time cooking up the EGS ecosystem into something more similar to XBL or PSN before trying to attract consumers en masse, they likely would’ve been pretty successful. They could’ve even just decided to partner up with (or buy) NexusMods and integrated a mod manager, and a lot of us would’ve had a good reason to prefer EGS over Steam for some games.
Instead of doing something to make their ecosystem more appealing, though, they used paid-for exclusives to make other ecosystems less appealing. It was an obvious attempt to herd consumers into their ecosystem, and it backfired spectacularly. Before that, most people were either indifferent or liked them as a company due to their legacy and/or Unreal Engine. These days, I see a lot of bitching about “timed exclusives”.
I summarily addressed the inertia issue already, when I mentioned that they underestimated consumer’s unwillingness to change.
The article is primarily aimed at startups, who don’t have the same amount of money to pour into software development, testing, and infrastructure.
Epic almost did exactly what the article suggested, but it notably did not improve anything over Steam. It didn’t even try for parity with Steam. In my opinion, as someone who plays PC games, that removed any chance of me even considering using it in any serious capacity.
I genuinely think they would’ve had a shot at being successful if they had tried to improve the state of PC gaming. Steam is massive, but it’s not without its pain points. The core of the client is ancient, and the fact that it heavily utilizes CEF makes it a bit of a resource hog. There’s a lot of bugs hidden in the nooks and crannies, and legacy cruft makes fixing some of these issues take a very long time.
Epic had the right approach to getting their foot in the door by giving away games for free and paying/bribing developers to release non-exclusive games on their platform. They just fucked up everything else.
Some things they could have done to help themselves:
Released a client that worked more consistently than Steam:
Steam Cloud is extremely opaque about errors.
Download times are inaccurate, particularly when dealing with IO.
Chat windows are pretty laggy and resource-intensive.
Built-in Nvidia GameStream protocol support.
GameStream has lower latency than Steam Link.
Integrated mods.
They wouldn’t get developer buy-in for a new ecosystem, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t just buy out an existing mod platform and integrate it.
Forums, chat, and social features.
Lacking these, they’re basically asking players to go to Steam whenever they need to find comminuty guides or discussions.
Achievements and matchmaking as a drop-in Steam API replacement.
An equivalent to Steam Input for remapping controller inputs on a per-game basis.
A CEO that knows when to stop talking.
The impression I get from him talking is that he thinks he’s the messiah of PC gaming. The impression I get from his actions is that he’s just like the rest of the publishers trying to grope our wallets at every opportunity. I doubt I’m the only one.
Bigots usually haven’t. It’s easier to spew hate when you’re not standing in front of someone who will happily knock your lights out for being an asshole.
Not a bot; just a bigot. If you scroll to the very bottom, a good 30% of the total comments are this guy digging a hole trying to prove it’s “woke” society that’s the problem and not him.
I respect them both as individuals, but internally, I believe they are both men who think they feel like women. I’m not even convinced they actually feel like women.
Clearly, you don’t respect them.
I have more trans friends than you probably have friends, and it’s never once crossed my mind to question their identity. Even if you’re not saying the quiet part out loud, you’re sure as shit thinking bigoted thoughts.
I mean, look— I don’t like holier-than-thou activists either, but you need to make a distinction between them, actual activists, and the groups they’re representing. The former is an extreme minority.
Instead of being distrustful of the movement and making yourself look like an ass by preemptively attacking, your energy is better spent not bothering. In the event you encounter a nutjob, go troll them or tell them to pound sand. I promise you, as long as you aren’t on (formerly Twitter) or Tumblr circa 2016, it’s not as common as you think.
The only thing left to fight for is the right to indoctrinate very young school children into gender ideology and show them, graphically, how to be gay.
Bethesda Is Charging $7 For A New Starfield Mission, And Players Are Upset (www.gamespot.com) angielski
"PSN isn't supported in my country. What do I do?" Arrowhead CEO: "I don't know" (lemmy.world) angielski
Apple will start allowing emulators on the iOS App Store (9to5mac.com) angielski
'The gold rush is over:' Slay the Spire and Darkest Dungeon devs say that big Game Pass and Epic exclusive deals have dried up for indie devs (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Epic Games reportedly hit by 189GB hack, including login and payment info (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
The report comes from Cyber Daily, who also broke the news of last year’s confirmed hack attack on Insomniac Games. The site claims that new ransomware group Mogilevich are the culprits, as per the screencap of a darkweb posting above, and that the hackers are now trying to get Epic or another party to pay up for the return of...
How can it be so bad? (startrek.website) angielski
Elex 3 May Have Been Canceled, Developer Piranha Bytes Possibly Closed Down (twistedvoxel.com) angielski
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/10831301...
What's up with Epic Games? angielski
I can’t seem to find that one comment explaining the issue with them…...
Activision Blizzard boss Bobby Kotick departs in just a few days (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
I banned my kid from Roblox.... what next?
As we all know, Roblox is garbage tier gameplay structured around psychological cues to get children to fill an endless pit with fake money bought with real money....
A message from your backlog (startrek.website) angielski
Google Loses Antitrust Case Brought by Epic Games (archive.ph) angielski
Original (pay-walled): wsj.com/…/google-loses-antitrust-case-brought-by-…
There's simply no going back (startrek.website) angielski
The ROG Ally is Still Getting Better (Updated Review) (youtu.be) angielski
I actually let my Ally go to get the Legion Go. I loved it but the sticks were angled to the left and the SD card reader wasn’t working. It’s nice to see though that they’re continuously doing support and improvements.
John Riccitiello is stepping down as CEO and president of Unity (investors.unity.com) angielski
SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Unity (NYSE: U) (the “Company”), the world’s leading platform for creating and growing real-time 3D (RT3D) content, today announced that John Riccitiello will retire as President, Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and a member of the Company’s Board of Directors, effective immediately....
Dusk Developer David Szymanski: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly (twitter.com) angielski
If I’m honest, I don’t disagree....
Factorio Friday Facts #377 - New new rails (factorio.com) angielski
Nexus Mods Fine With Bigots Leaving Over Removed Starfield ‘Pronoun’ Mod (kotaku.com) angielski