It'd be easier to tell you which ones they don't have a stake in nowadays tbh
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The Division 2 Is Ditching Steam For The Epic Games Store On PC [See Threadmarks]
- Thread starter Kenzodielocke
- Start date
It'd be easier to tell you which ones they don't have a stake in nowadays tbh
One of the few AAA that had me waiting in anticipation for 2019. But now? No thanks. I don't support Epic's business practices simple as that. And this comes at a time right when Ubi titles were going back to MORE steam integration (Achievements/Trading Cards).
Guess I'll wait to see if they ever do put it on Steam, but when they do, it had better come with a steep sale.
Guess I'll wait to see if they ever do put it on Steam, but when they do, it had better come with a steep sale.
Give it time and even competitors could have their grey market ! ^^;
Arguments that steam is a platform the way a sony playstation 4 or nintendo switch are aren't welcome at my lunch hour.
The moment when I start seeing Japanese devs switching to Epic's launcher is when I will officially be concerned.
The big one for me was Supergiant. Been a fan of all of their outings so far and the new game looks up my alley.
Platform or not, using money to expressly incentivize exclusivity of any kind is still moneyhatting, unless you're being deliberately obstinate so as to reduce the meaning specifically (and exclusively, heh) to the sole instance from which it became popular: console wars.
There's not a single grey market site on that screen. All of them are official resellers.
It has always been the case that some people are more deeply engaged with their hobby than others, and you'll certainly find more enthusiasts here than elsewhere. If gaming was just something I occasionally, randomly do in my free time (like hiking or watching a TV show) I likely wouldn't care about anything going on here.
Since it's decidedly not that, but rather my primary hobby (and partially my occupation) I'm far more involved with and concerned by what all of this might mean for the future quality of PC gaming in the long term. And actually also concerned about what rampant exclusivity agreements might mean for its beneficial marketplace freedom of choice (yes, I actually think that "competition" as engaged in here might not just not improve the competition I benefit from as a customer, but decrease it in the long term).
I can see and understand why other people might not care as much, but that won't prevent me from presenting the arguments that matter to me (and likely many other enthusiasts). I certanly don't think that qualifies as "posturing" -- rather, it's a difference in priorities.
I'd say I'm responding mostly to the nuanced arguments. Even if there's no hard evidence, I believe you when you say that the possibility money changed hands and that's why The Division 2 is not on Steam is enough to cancel out any enthusiasm you had for the game.
But I believe we can also agree that there's a lot of sour grapes 'the division is a bad game anyway' and 'here's a context-free png file lol!' that fits under the umbrella of 'avant-garde posturing' from which no nuance or real discussion can be gleaned, an increasingly distressing, high-volume phenomenon any time something isn't on Steam for whatever reason.
I totally understand that and I am not dismissing it but at the end of the day, I am in it for the games.
If Dark Souls 4 comes out and it says it is not coming out on Steam. I am going to buy it day 1 on whatever service they put it on. There has to be a game for everyone that they just go screw it I want it now because the most important thing here is the games.
This is why I don't get the Steam loyalty and the attitude of "No Steam, No sale". Maybe if Valve themselves were putting out more games of their own but I just don't know why someone would be more loyal to the platform than the games. It is not at all like consoles.
The reason some picture replies are posted at a high rate is because the same small set of (repetitive, and crucially, actually answered by the picture and multiple times in the thread) questions is asked at a high rate, often in one-off posts.
This isn't really accurate.
If I could sell a million copies at 30% margins or 800K at 12%, I take the 2nd one because profit is higher. Unit sales mean dick. So if Ubisoft expects to only sell effectively 600K (after the cut) on the Epic Store, then Epic needs to pay them the money they'll lose for effectively 100K (70% of a million on Steam is 700K) copies. But if the margins were equal, you gotta moneyhat every lost copy.
To say it another way, there's a built-in moneyhat of 18% per copy on the Epic Store. If Steam matched that, Epic couldn't afford to pay for the lost revenue.
They'd have to offer the ability to generate keys at no (or reduced) cost to do that. So far as I know, EGS doesn't offer the ability to sell EGS keys outside of EGS.
lol. Your lunch hour not withstanding, Steam and EGS are digital distribution platforms that in many respects operate similarly to the Switch and PS4. The fact that Switch and PS4 both operate exclusively on proprietary hardware is sort of beside the point. They all have a storefront they want you and I to patronize. It is in their interest to secure a variety of games, and exclusivity to those games, so that we are forced to patronize them if we want to play those games, and to further increase our exposure to the rest of their storefronts. When they do that, we call it moneyhatting. This isn't a stretch.
Honestly. "Not a platform in the same way." May as well say an octopus isn't an animal in the same way a tiger is.
In principle this is accurate, in practice it should be noted that (i) for large-scale games like The Division it's probably closer to 12% now and (ii) for smaller developers (so not Ubisoft) Steam provides a lot of features you'd need to set up and pay for hosting for if you were planning to offer them on the Epic store.
(Or you can just skip them instead, which brings us back to customer concerns)
To which I can only say 1) You're probably being trolled, don't rise to it and 2) Those image replies don't rise to the level of a nuanced argument. They just don't. They certainly don't represent more than one person's (probably warped and inaccurate) point of view and they just make it harder to talk about our priorities in a meaningful way.
Not planning to buy the game anyway cause I don't feel this is a game I want to invest my time in, but at least I ain't buying it not because where it is or it is not being sold. I understand people will hate on a game cause it is bad or the dev is lazy/crappy or the pub is a thief; but where it is being sold!? ha ha, I guess this is the new "gamer" trend for 2019 then. Anyway, I love these "gamer" outrage trend, very entertaining.
I will be playing my free What Remains of Edith Finch soon, and I will enjoy it not because it is from the Epic Store or not, but because it is a great game.
I will be playing my free What Remains of Edith Finch soon, and I will enjoy it not because it is from the Epic Store or not, but because it is a great game.
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It was 100% the point when the term was coined in 2000 and people didn't want to buy an XBox for Munch's Oddysee.
If anything, trying to fit the term to whatever the latest conspiracy theory is diminishes the impact of the inconvenience expressed when it first entered the lexicon.
You really have to explain to me how e.g. this image (which I made) presents a "warped and inaccurate" view -- or at least how it is more "warped and inaccurate" than if I typed up the same thing again in a new post. (Someone previously remarked that I missed a lot of developer-facing features that Steam has over the Epic store, and I guess that's true)
I'm not super excited about the Epic Launcher as they've mostly marketed its benefits for the developers.
Free games are cool, but I have enough games on my backlog, and I just like having my PC games on one platform.
One killer-app feature though, would be fully integrated suspend and resume play. That would make me change platforms.
Free games are cool, but I have enough games on my backlog, and I just like having my PC games on one platform.
One killer-app feature though, would be fully integrated suspend and resume play. That would make me change platforms.
Tbf except for marketplace/trading cards Uplay has all of the things you mentioned in this post including play time tracking. It also does loyalty discounts via uplay coins. It also has support for anti cheat like Battleeye as well as install folder relocation whereas in that picture it says uplay doesn't support anti cheat or folder relocation.
On a kind of unrelated note uplay is used as the main networking front end for all Ubisoft games and pretty much ends up being the defacto platform for inviting and communication with other players while in game for Ubi games because everyone who plays an ubi game owns the game on uplay while not everyone who plays an ubisoft game owns the game on steam.
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For me, not getting the features I am accustomed to is a larger inconvenience than spending $300 on a console (and it's, features, not cost, which are the reason I always wanted every game on PC in the first place).
Also, you now referring to "the latest conspiracy theory" seems awfully dismissive given that just a few posts up you said that "I believe you when you say that the possibility money changed hands" (and of course given the fact that we have confirmation it happened for other games).
It's got an unexplained money hat on it and uses the mad decade-old 'master race' cosmology, and seems to not find any customer positives from the epic store when even the google doc screenshot that pulled me into the thread could and it has a silly strawman at the bottom and...do I really have to dignify this?
Everyone is free to make their own spending choices, but frankly saying all that matters is the games is just telling corporations that they can fuck with you however they want, and you'll just accept it because you want the games.
It isn't like this on consoles because they're designed to strip away all power from their customers. It's significantly more difficult to combat bullshit practices like this when you have no alternative services or storefronts to choose from. The only choice you had as a consumer was before you bought the console. This is why exclusivity deals, paying for online play services, paying outrageous prices on licensed accessories (because perfectly fine old ones are no longer supported), and many more decisions are just tolerated, because there really isn't much you can do about it on closed-platforms.
Seriously though, is there a Steam stats/charts equivalent for the Epic launcher? Or do we have to wait on self reporting by the publishers?
If you genuinely think that that was essential to the original definition, I'm afraid to tell you that it is no longer 2000, and the meaning of the word may have undergone a subtle change. Your feelings on the appropriateness of the word are irrelevant. We all know what it means when someone says that EGS is moneyhatting publishers for third party exclusives.
Seriously. Let it go. You are the only one digging their heels in on the bizarre sanctity of "money hatting only applies to consoles."
I plead guilty to a strangely constructed sentence, but I'll repost it in its entirety with emphasis on the subject of my beliefs
"I believe you when you say that the possibility money changed hands and that's why The Division 2 is not on Steam is enough to cancel out any enthusiasm you had for the game."
"I believe [that poster] when [they] tell me [something] was enough to cancel their enthusiasm for the game"
I was asked to comment on the relative bias of useless .png replies. Report my posts if you have a problem with me participating in a discussion when I'm directly asked a question.
Yep. Consoles are shit PCs now too, and now they're trying to make the marketplace like consoles. Blergh.
True. Microsoft spent almost 10 years signing blank checks to get the Xbox off the ground as a comparison. We'll just have to see if this pays off for them or not.
Leaving a platform that has millions of users is not something you do on a whim, I imagine. As people like to point out, this is a business. You don't turn down all those potential sales, unless you expect to make it up (and more) elsewhere.
Wow. That's a surprising vote of confidence for the Epic Games Store from Ubisoft. Epic needs the backing of large AAA publishers for their store to succeed, and getting Ubisoft on board is a good start. I won't use the Epic launcher for anything except Fortnite until it becomes more feature-complete, though.
Actually, there is a money hat on it because we know that Epic paid for game exclusivity. (We admittedly don't know for sure whether this happened with Ubisoft in particular)
I find that amusing, sorry for my lack of sophistication.
It doesn't though? Unless you refer to "curation", which I consider a preference rather than a feature. (E.g. GoG "curation" meant that they initially rejected one of the best games of last year) To me it's a negative, but I just chose to omit it entirely. It is actually listed as a positive from the developer PoV ("Empty Shelves").
It's not a strawman, it was made after a great many exchanges which literally boil down to that (all of which are archived thanks to the power of the internet). Unless those were straw-people posting of course.
I mean, if they're willing to pay all major third party publishers and major indies who don't decide to make themselves exclusive to their OWN shop (an increasingly small pool), exclusivity fees may just mean that Epic to some extent will come to own the PC space. That's a sort of depressing thought.
I find it more depressing when I consider who (to a significant extent) owns Epic.