Growing the PC market with a feature rich store is the same as coming in with a featureless store with bought exclusives after years of abandoning the plateform due to piracy.
A piracy problem that Valve solved.
Exactly the same.
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Metro Exodus for PC a timed exclusive for the Epic store (Steam preorders honoured, physical copy with Epic key). [READ staff post]
- Thread starter Theorry
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Growing the PC market with a feature rich store is the same as coming in with a featureless store with bought exclusives after years of abandoning the plateform due to piracy.
A piracy problem that Valve solved.
Exactly the same.
Review bombing is important because otherwise developers don't get the message and just go "well, guess people on PC don't want this!". However, in this case it seems like they didn't even get the message then so who knows any more.
I don't even like the name review bombing for this. What ever happened to just calling it "giving negative feedback".
Because Valve haven't done anything else since Dota2 except Artifact.
Proton doesn't exist
The Steam runtime doesn't exist
Universal controller support doesn't exist
Big Picture Mode doesn't exist
SteamOS doesn't exist
All their FOSS contributions like SDL2 don't exist
Their work in VR doesn't exist.
What even is your argument. Valve have done more for PC gaming than absolutely any other company.
I don't even like the name review bombing for this. What ever happened to just calling it "giving negative feedback".
Because Valve haven't done anything else since Dota2 except Artifact.
Proton doesn't exist
The Steam runtime doesn't exist
Universal controller support doesn't exist
Big Picture Mode doesn't exist
SteamOS doesn't exist
All their FOSS contributions like SDL2 don't exist
Their work in VR doesn't exist.
What even is your argument. Valve have done more for PC gaming than absolutely any other company.
This: https://www.dsogaming.com/news/4a-g...e-pc-the-next-metro-will-not-come-out-for-it/
is really something at least it's a new low in this whole affair, which i didn't really think was even possible at this point, the smart move was to just shut the fuck up and wait it out but of course they couldn't do that...
is really something at least it's a new low in this whole affair, which i didn't really think was even possible at this point, the smart move was to just shut the fuck up and wait it out but of course they couldn't do that...
Ideally for whom?
I'll continue to ascertain that the game both does exist and that I'll specifically refuse to play it due to publisher behavior, and I'll happily argue for that position with anyone.
Boo-fucking-hoo. Epic stopped development on the new UT, which of all their franchises is actually the closest to what HL is for Valve in this situation.
Sucks for their fans, but it's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.
Individual games are not even remotely as important as the basics of what it means to publish on PC, and what behavior is or is not acceptable in that regard.
Huh... They're not similar situations at all.
Valve's only recent game may be Artifact, but their existing multiplayer games are still under active development (DOTA 2, CS GO). Sure there was no sequel to HL2 Ep2 even though that ended in a cliffhanger, but there was no version of Ep3/HL3 available to the public that got canceled.
Meanwhile Epic, while it was in early access, Unreal Tournament was available to the public, but since Fortnite is a golden chicken, they just abandoned UT's development (then there's Paragon).
Still, this is unrelated to the topic about Epic bribing 3rd party publishers/developers for timed exclusivity.
So let me get this straight, they pull an anti-consumer move by locking the game behind one store for a time limited period, then they tell people "If you don't buy this game, the next one will not come out on PC"
Yeah, that's a no from me, will not be held hostage because two companies join together in greed and want to screw the consumer over.
I don't like epic store, it's not because I want steam to be the only competitor either, it's because I believe people should have the choice as to where to buy their products and any company that limits that choice is anti-consumer as far as I am concerned.
Not that I buy Apple products anyway but can you imagine if a company like Apple started only selling their phones at Apple stores? Or if Microsoft only let you purchase the Xbox directly from them?
Or you know...locked their games behind windows store on PC...because we all know how well that went down.
I believe that companies should not limit where their product is purchased but instead give people a reason to buy from their stores, that's a pro consumer approach, not the way Epic are doing it, that's a big red flag and huge reason to not buy from their store for me.
Will they listen though? Or will they just threaten consumers like 4A are doing here?
Yeah, that's a no from me, will not be held hostage because two companies join together in greed and want to screw the consumer over.
I don't like epic store, it's not because I want steam to be the only competitor either, it's because I believe people should have the choice as to where to buy their products and any company that limits that choice is anti-consumer as far as I am concerned.
Not that I buy Apple products anyway but can you imagine if a company like Apple started only selling their phones at Apple stores? Or if Microsoft only let you purchase the Xbox directly from them?
Or you know...locked their games behind windows store on PC...because we all know how well that went down.
I believe that companies should not limit where their product is purchased but instead give people a reason to buy from their stores, that's a pro consumer approach, not the way Epic are doing it, that's a big red flag and huge reason to not buy from their store for me.
Will they listen though? Or will they just threaten consumers like 4A are doing here?
If that dev post is legit, and that is a big 'if', someone should explain to this person that blackmailing the audience is going to backfire spectacularly.
This is another great point and I can speak from personal experience here.
About 5 months ago I opened an account for Fortnite, I played it a few times to see what all the hype was about and I didn't like it, fair enough some people do but me personally, I didn't.
So I uninstalled it and forgot about it, that was until I started getting email after email about how an individual was trying to access my account, I tried to find a way to close my account and it was damn near impossible, numerous people have complained about this as well.
Well to cut a long story short, after finally finding their email address and then emailing them for 3 months pretty much once every week and having numerous replies from them saying they were "passing it on to their account closure department" I finally got it shut down.
Now I can only speak for myself here but that's not a company I trust my personal details with.
Not to mention Epic are only back on PC because of Steam, if it wasn't for Steam, they would still be on Consoles & quietly not saying a thing about the 30% fee Sony & MS demand.
This happened to me too, my account was created to play Paragon, when fortnite exploded I got every fucking day mail about login attempts, had to wait 2 months from the support to get my account deleted.
C'mon guys. It's not that hard to read up. My post was CLEARLY part of a discussion about PC game releases. The guy's follow up response even is in that vein.
Valve has 2 service games getting updates and tournaments, epic has only one and has cancelled both UT and paragon.
Even then, they have The Lab, along with constant large updates for 2 service games. That's more than what Epic have done. We also know there are other games in the works, and there's in the valley of gods this year.
I don't get it. Threatening to just stop releasing your games on pc just feels like a bad move. So many games are released anymore that its easy to skip stuff. Decisions like this makes it even easier. Like, what?
Then again, I highly doubt this person speaks for the studio.
Then again, I highly doubt this person speaks for the studio.
Nah, it's more of a "if this Dev can say this, then it's setting a precedent for devs speaking up".
this is the quality of argument steam apologists have? pfft
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Tournament
the series they just finished killing?
Amusing example you brought up, for sure.
Hahaha
"Since July 2017, there have been no new updates. The bulk of the developer team has since transitioned to develop and maintain Fortnite Battle Royale.[11] Development of Unreal Tournament was confirmed to be halted indefinitely in December 2018, though the game will remain available in its current state to play.[12] "
so when i pointed out that the original post saying "Epic is only on PC because of Steam" is completely false, the response is BUT THEY CANCELLED A GAME!!!!!!
is that supposed to be some sort of smear against epic? that they stopped developing a game in open beta that never caught on and nobody played? you expect people to believe that Steam is the only reason Epic put out PC games ever even though they were a PC dev well before Steam even existed? Or how about Fortnite or Shadow Complex? Both of those games out recently. Neither were on Steam.
Gen 7 happened, Microsoft paid them to make Gears exclusive, then baited PC gamers with a port of 1 but not the sequels, on top of that lots of PR disasters, calling PC gamers pirates & telling them the money is on Consoles, then when Bulletstorm bombed on Consoles, they tried to blame it on PC piracy to their investors.
and then they put out games on PC afterwards anyways that weren't on steam
somehow you're trying to move the goalposts from your wrong assertion that steam is the only reason Epic has put games on PC to "Epic treats PC gamers bad"
and even that latter point is a hard sell
Nobody said Steam is the only reason why Epic put out PC games. They said Steam is the only reason Epic started focusing on it again, after mostly abandoning the platform in the mid 2000's and calling PC gamers out for being pirates in the process.
Steam significantly reduced piracy and made the PC market grow to what it is today, and now Epic want part of that pie. It really shouldn't be hard to understand that.
after Steam made the overall PC market much bigger, yes
you're almost getting to the point. almost there.
But Epic hasn't been using Steam to put out its games ever since they "came back." Plus the fact remains that by all accounts, piracy continued to be rampant on PC until games started getting massive and it became much, much harder to pirate a game than to just buy it.
Even if you're gonna go with the narrative that Steam singlehandedly killed piracy (which isn't something that's necessarily backed up by the numbers, but I guess if it feels true to you that's close enough), wouldn't the fact that Epic put out Shadow Complex Remastered and Fortnite and UT on its own launcher make it apparent that whatever "benefit" Steam gave to stopping piracy, Epic had no interest in it?
Like, your argument only makes sense in a sort of "STEAM KILLED PIRACY FOREVER AND ALL PC GAMING IS SAVED" fantasy.
Epic has straight up come out and said most of the people who downloaded and use the Epic Launcher don't have steam accounts. They're kids who downloaded it for Fortnite. You can't argue that Epic is piggybacking off of Steam making PC gaming bigger when Epic isn't necessarily targeting the people who have Steam accounts.
But let's say that Epic needs the new users Steam brought into PC gaming to be successful. And let's pretend it isn't stagnant consoles or PC gaming becoming more user-friendly that made PC gaming grow, but entirely Steam's existence. So what? Epic should just never dare to even threaten Steam's existence because otherwise how will Gaben afford his two thousandth knife?
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How do they know that? Are they violating GDPR here as well lol?
DING DING DING.
We've got a winner here. How PC gaming became more user friendly ? Because Steam being a "monopoly" meant a unified, pro-customer, betting on features, easy to use and free to use backend that is called Steamworks API and Steam launcher.
I'm guessing this would be on the publisher who decided on the price for each region. But the "sale" price in purely a marketing move. No other game on the Epic store, that is available on other stores, is cheaper than other stores as far as I can see. I'm looking at USD pricing.
I always wondered if this was based off the fact you can link your steam account to the epic account and this is what epic is tracking.
https://epicgames.helpshift.com/a/e...ount-friends-list-via-the-epic-games-launcher
I have an epic account and there is no way I'm linking my steam account to it.
I just want to highlight that another Tencent backed company, Riot, scan all running programs on your system and if they see anything with the title "Cheat Engine", League of Legends crashes. Even if it's just Chrome with a Cheat Engine related google search open.
It would not surprise me AT ALL if Epic were doing something similar, and scanning what other programs people are using. Sergey has even said that he wants the Epic store to provide more data tracking methods than what Steam allows developers to use.
Are you actually arguing that piracy is down due to file size? How does that even make sense
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9rBzKJxbOk
https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueofle.../lol_reads_your_browser_tabs_is_this_a_gross/
https://boards.na.leagueoflegends.c...g-cheat-engine-in-google-will-crash-your-game
It seems to do it by reading whatever the process title is, which is the same level of access Epic would need to determine if people have Steam or whatever open.
I really, really like that Itch includes a sandbox and hope other stores include one in the future to make this kind of data tracking harder.
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I mean, it should not come as a surprise that a guy obsessed with tracking even the most useless statistics wants to track even more statistics.
Also that's another plus for Steam (reviews). There's a guy I'm following that does reviews of games based on all the tracking the game does and what websites these games contact, it gets really frightening but sadly all his reviews are in German.
The faux outrage is because the fans of the developers and the game were waiting for the release until the pathetic move to force them to shitty Epic store?
Real what you saw and all.
That sounds like a great curator. I'd like to see something similar in English. Could I get a basic idea from this guy based on what he recommends and what he doesn't?
Honestly, the fact that the Epic store is partially run by a guy obsessed with tracking user data would be enough to turn me off of it even without all these exclusivity deals.
Don't forget their work on VR and development of new hardware for it as well.
Frankly to hell with Half-Life. I value everything else Valve is doing 10x that, probably even more. There are thousands of games releasing each year but there is only one company that is truly working to make PC gaming better overall, even if it's in self-interest.
I didn't! It was in my original reply. The guy then returned with a "well obviously I was just talking about the games".
Ahh, I guess the moving goalposts by that poster confused my vision! That must be it :).
Are you saying that EPIC is knowingly wasting money on turning games into exclusive for their store for no reason at all ?
I mean if the objective is neither to stop current Epic Launcher users to buy it on steam since they don't even have steam, nor turn Steam user into Epic store user.... why spend that money ? they just love those publisher so much they badly want to give them money but they just feel jealous sharing ?
I hope they keep working on making pc gaming better with software and features instead of first party games tbh. And I hope they "embrace" the inevitably of new launchers and use software to make it easier to use games from other launchers in Steam, with the features that Steam has to offer.