Yeah, waiting on Hades 1’s full release was easy since it was EGS exclusive for the entire early access phase. This one’s gonna be harder to dodge until it’s done.
FighterZ is an actually good fighting game in the style of MvC or Street Fighter though, not the same 3d drivel with copy paste movesets and terrible game balance usually associated with anime tie-ins.
List’s not exhaustive yet. There’s absolutely room for 1-3 pre Z gokus. There’s also no way it won’t have GT Goku, Super Saiyan 4, and all the various Vegito/Gogetas.
Their plan for when Fortnite stopped pulling in money was for their Epic Games Store (that they propped up by paying devs lump sums just to not launch their games on Steam) to actually make Steam levels of money because surely exclusives and freebies will make people spend money on their store. Turns out there’s a lot of people that will never spend a dime on EGS, either because they won’t install it or only use it for the free games.
So all that Fortnite money they used to pay devs to not release their games on Steam ended up being a failed investment, and they’ve had to change their incentives from “we’ll give you a huge lump sum that’s about equal to what you’d have made with a successful Steam launch” to “well we’ll give you a better revenue split if you launch exclusively on our store that guarantees you get 10% of sales volume compared to Steam”. Turns out 60% of 1m sales is better than 80% of 100k sales.
Personally I’m hoping 1030 isn’t even a Deck. Putting the Deck internals in a set-top box with better cooling and lots of I/O would make an amazing competitor to PS5/XSX and a straight upgrade to XSS, and they could price it a lot cheaper than the Deck because they wouldn’t need to put a screen or battery in (and they could make it even cheaper by selling it without a controller since it works with Xbox/PS/Nintendo ones already).
Steam Machines failed the first time, but now that the Deck has gotten a lot of people comfortable with (a vastly improved) SteamOS there’s no reason to think they’d fail again, especially if Valve themselves were putting out the flagship “standard” unit that companies like ASUS could iterate on.
There’s no such thing as a “Linux PC” though. A PC is a PC. Your PC can run Starfield with proton, or it can run it by installing windows, or it can run it by putting it in a windows VM.
Even if a game can only run on Windows and Xbox (say one of those GAAS shits that has invasive anti cheat), that’s not an exclusive either. It runs on more than one platform. There’s a developer endorsed way to buy the product on more than one platform. Exclusive means one platform - you can’t buy and play the game unless you own one specific device.
People would have to buy and refund this one to bomb it, versus overwatch which was f2p. It’ll probably settle at “mixed” or “mostly positive” until blizzard does something to try to squeeze more purchases out of the playerbase again.