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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pronouns, gender, genitals, etc. in player-character customization are just yet another option for someone to tailor their gameplay to whatever experience they want.
The only identity politics comes from the people politicizing it.
I give about a year until Unreal does the same, except that they’ll at least have the good graces to waive the fee if games are sold on Epic Contractually Timed Exclusive Games Store.
Looking forward to Godot finally getting the love and recognition it deserves after this, at least.