But surely Epic & UE4 supporting these technologies is a huge positive for VR vs. them going off to develop their own?
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Epic Games Store Exclusive "Tetris Effect" Requires SteamVR to run in VR mode
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But surely Epic & UE4 supporting these technologies is a huge positive for VR vs. them going off to develop their own?
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Man this is so wonderful to finally play. I had the PS4 version and played it on my tv. But finally getting to play it on the Vive is incredible. It's sooo cool and completely washes over you. Great to finally have this on PC.
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You done the right thing, its just going to be a frustrating night for Kreijooc arguing against some of these arguments.
Maybe not code contributions, but the OpenXR Working group chair is/was Nick Whiting from Epic. Several dev sessions I've watched have featured him as speaker.
I'm not gonna argue that this doesn't expose Epic's hypocrisy re: the 30% cut Valve takes. But given how many other ways they are playing catch-up to Steam in terms of store features, I would imagine writing their own implementation of OpenVR is pretty far down the list. I'm no fan of the way Epic is buying exclusives in the PC space but this is not a big deal IMO. I've downloaded plenty of games/demos from itch.io and elsewhere that use Oculus and/or SteamVR that aren't on their respective stores.
Edit: looked it up. Whiting is no longer chair as of earlier this year - it was passed to Brent Insko at Intel.
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Epic and Valve both are businesses in a free market within a legal system. If Valve offers SteamVR for free, then Epic (or any developer) is in their right to use it. If that creates a problem for Valve, they are free to start charging for it any day.
At the same time, Valve is in their right to charge 30% or anything they want to other companies. And Epic has the right to charge less and invest less on technologies and their client. And it's also right to buy exclusives as long as the legal system allows them to do so.
All that are business strategies, and all corporations do them because they expect to get some return. Valve too.
What I'm not going to do is to give all those business strategies a moral tag. Let every person buy or support whatever they like most, but not make it an ethical issue.
At the same time, Valve is in their right to charge 30% or anything they want to other companies. And Epic has the right to charge less and invest less on technologies and their client. And it's also right to buy exclusives as long as the legal system allows them to do so.
All that are business strategies, and all corporations do them because they expect to get some return. Valve too.
What I'm not going to do is to give all those business strategies a moral tag. Let every person buy or support whatever they like most, but not make it an ethical issue.
I'm not either. But I can look at how those strategies benefit me, and clearly one has better benefits than the other. Moreover, hypocrisy grinds my gears and one is far more guilty of it than the other, by orders of magnitude.
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I've not made this an ethical issue. This is strictly a business issue for me. This type of stuff hurts my industry.
I mean not really. SteamVR actually does not need to be run from steam at all. The only reason they are doing this is to not have to update steamvr manually in the game every time you want to play.
It won't. Tim specifically mentioned this would be on developers to implement.
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maybe, if it develops far enough. Consider OSVR - OpenXR is hardly the first attempt at an open sourced cross platform VR API. Epic never adopted support for OSVR into UE4, despite being a "contributing member" to OSVR. Precisely because OSVR never got any development put into it in any real capacity.
I didn't need any more reasons to avoid the EGS, but this certainly makes it even easier. Epic is full of shit and I'll have nothing to do with them.
This is hysterical but personally, I'm just glad that it also has Oculus SDK support. If it had to launch out to SteamVR for my Rift, I probably couldn't even get the game working. SteamVR loves to hit me with 301 and 306 error codes for everything.
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I didn't say SteamVR has to be run from Steam. I said SteamVR IS steam. Steam, the client, itself is a huge bundle of open and free technologies in one package. You install SteamVR, by installing Steam.
That's literally why OpenVR exists. It's SteamVR without Steam.
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Oculus has. Which, unsurprisingly, pissed a lot of people off.
It's rather PC gamers that are lucky that Valve is so relaxed about it, Valve trying to compete with Epic on their terms will be harmful for everyone involved except for Epic and a few devs that profit from Epics tactics.
I mean Oculus was actually funding the development of games, and helping build them so I don't think it really was.
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Having people outright lie and claim I hate the EGS because I'm racist against China, and watching the mods take no action, is even more shit.
Steamvr was designed and promoted as an open platform. Epic is not developing a competing vr technology. why wouldn't they use steamvr like everybody else (except the one rival, oculus) does?
This IS pretty weird and funny, but I don't buy that the 30% cut is the sole reason that Valve can fund OpenVR/SteamVR development.
This has been true more recently but they did pay for temp exclusivity on some games in the one year window after CV1 launched. Giant Cop comes to mind. Now that they've established a market they don't seem to be using that strategy anymore, thankfully. They really need to open up their store to other headsets though.
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Oculus approached the Serious Sam developers as they were wrapping up the Serious Sam VR trilogy to ask them for exclusive rights to distribution. Directly from Mario Kotlar:
One could argue that the non-funded Oculus Quest exclusives they buy also prevents them from coming to the similarly capable DayDream or Vive Focus, but I'm realistic and realize nobody picked up DayDream development at all.
Thats the case for most EGS exclusives. Devs, who were offered a deal and took it talked about it and devs who were offered a deal and rejected it also talked about it.
Epic is buying exclusivity for games that already were planned for Steam and other storefronts.
When the 1 year exclusivity is up, you can see at SteamDB since when the game was planned for Steam.
Yeah I agree with this. Valve could be some rrreeeeaaalll assholes if they wanted to be about this whole situation. Not buying up exclusives in some tit for tat nonsense and allowing this to be used is a positive far as I'm concerned.
Thanks for all the knowledge OP, been an informative thread.
I'd like more commentary on this as well. I mean, I guess it implies that this game was going to originally be on Steam before the exclusive deal, but if this is more about Epic moneyhatting and not so much about the game itself, that's perhaps a more important distinction to make.
Pointing out hypocrisies in how businesses operate is a function of a free market. "These businesses are operating under capitalism" is never a justification for not criticising them.
Especially given Epic's rhetoric as presented their marketing is that the purpose of EGS is to "advance the cause of all developers".
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No, SteamVR was designed to be the steam cross-platform API that everyone can use. OpenVR, which epic is not using, is promoted as their Open platform.
Epic claims to be a "contributing member" of OpenXR, but doesn't even roll OpenXR support into UE4. They have also yet to provide any actual code contributions to the project.
I mean they used to stop Revive, and actually stopped doing that entirely.
But Epic isn't the one making tetris effect.
Is there a quote for this? It seems to go against what's on the openxr website. But I realise it's not at a release version yet, so that's probably true for right now.
I thought the "features don't count" bit was clear enough. But yeah, you never know in this day and age.
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They stopped doing it entirely, because developers threatened to not support their API all together. At that time, the Vive had a very decisive sales advantage in the market, they couldn't risk their nacient API being left behind right out of the gate. The very logical argument put forth by not only developers, but oculus themselves prior to acquisition, was that early VR titles need to reach as many potential customers as possible because the market size literally didn't support exclusivity.
They dropped killing off Revive, because they literally could not afford to do so.
And, ironically, Revive (and thus Oculus cross-platform support) only existed because it used SteamVR (and then later OpenVR) as a backbone. Although, thankfully, they're moving to OpenXR in the near future.
A) I have laid blame at the developer's feet ITT
B) Epic is the one with the stipulation that you can't sell on steam in the first place. It's literally epic's policy that makes this even a thing.
I do agree, but I can also see how a focus on this can dangerously turn into something like corporate allegiance from consumers. I don't think consumers are able to remove ethics or morality from their purchasing choices, but it gets weird when ppl start ascribing corps as ppl (tho i suppose legally they are lmao....) and imo a lil unhealthy. not saying that's what's going on in this thread, just that an emphasis on calling things out begins to frame this consumer/corp relationship in an unrealistic way, like the corps are there to satisfy consumers personal desires rather than coax them into spending.
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https://www.gameinformer.com/2018/12/04/tim-sweeney-answers-questions-about-the-new-epic-games-store just look at the VR question. He does not care to support VR on the epic store.
You should re-read this thread because posters already gave you the answer. The costs of developing SteamVR is literally cost-free*!
(*as long as another company has to fund the development and you can take their software for free but also blame them for having costs because they fund developments. Additional exceptions may apply.)
Edit: woah... seeing Krejlooc getting banned while the obvious trolls keep trolling is kinda sad.
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