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So, free games are good, huh? I like free games.
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Dec 26, 2019 00:52
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Coolguye posted:you can check my question mark, i have posted links to this poo poo before and i'm reluctant to do it again when people are so incredibly sensitive about someone saying "you should understand that this has costs and i personally dislike these costs but i respect the logic behind you thinking it's ok" Unless I'm blind you've posted two links in this thread related to EGS. One is this youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53s13hXBX8w&t=103s and this other is a twitter thread showing the launcher looking at Steam info https://twitter.com/_s_t_r_e_l_o_k/status/1106341025109299200 only the account has been suspended so I can't actually check anything there
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Dec 26, 2019 01:05
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baka kaba posted:yeah but if Steam disappears even the king of games won't be spared, why not have caches of games all around the internet I have all my archives buried, so should the steampocalypse happen, Epic disappears and Gog ends up a faint memory, i can dig up a couple of hundred CDs and play on. You people place too much faith in t’internet.
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Dec 26, 2019 01:06
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dogstile posted:My problem is less "they're paying for exclusives" and more "they're playing for exclusion". Bigger example: Shenmue III. was announced for steam as one of the platforms on the kickstarter including being a key option in the survey. Fast forward to this last summer and the developers say it's going to be Epic store exclusive for a year. This pissed off a lot of people and there were denying refund requests until the backpedaled from so much backlash. You could still pick a steam key but you will not get it till at least November next year.
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Dec 26, 2019 01:47
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Len posted:Unless I'm blind you've posted two links in this thread related to EGS. One is this youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53s13hXBX8w&t=103s and this other is a twitter thread showing the launcher looking at Steam info https://twitter.com/_s_t_r_e_l_o_k/status/1106341025109299200 only the account has been suspended so I can't actually check anything there the youtube link is commentary on their privacy policy, which is public and easily auditable by anyone. if you really require specific excerpts, here you go: quote:We generally collect information in three ways: (1) you voluntarily provide information to us, such as by creating an account, making purchases, or signing up for email alerts, (2) we collect information automatically, such as through cookies or our games and other software, and (3) other parties, such as social networks, may provide information to us. you can compare this to steam's policy, which has no such other party allotment and very specifically spells out all data sources, as does gog's. the specifics in the privacy policy say that they can explicitly do it to do stuff like anti-cheat but also explicitly says it's including but not limited to, which departs even further from other privacy policies that will use stuff from social media but only SPECIFICALLY if you use things like facebook connect. again, please feel free to show this to anyone you trust, the ramifications of this privacy policy have a long history, including its flat incompatibility with the GDPR. the problematic clause that people complained about around this time last year is the following: quote:If you are located in the EU or the Epic entities located in the EU process your personal information in the EU, then you have the right to restrict or object to our processing of your personal information. The right to restrict processing arises only in limited circumstances, for example, if you think we are processing inaccurate information. In addition, if we are required to restrict processing but the requirement is temporary, we may not be permanently obligated to adhere to your request. and it's still there a year later. this is completely not ok and the GDPR says that stopping this data processing is a consumer right. even in the USA this is not something the consumer financial protection bureau likes at all (it's one of the big reasons you can file a complaint as noted on their website, and similar complaints about not stopping this kind of comprehensive data ingestion is on their docket right now if you care to review it) because it's a leading way that identities get stolen and scams get launched. these practices would be problematic under the best of circumstances but coupled with Epic's careless handling of everything and their stone-etched connections to entities that are known to use consumer data maliciously it's a real alarm bell, especially since this is all ostensibly legal and the data generated can be used pretty freely until it is deemed illegitimate. i could go on but i'm sure i've already triggered a bunch of people with the barest scrap of this stuff already, i merely elaborate because you asked for elaboration. the twitter link was video proof supporting another post that i quoted with technical specifics on what happened and a running commentary on the entire thing as it developed, including the associated steam response of saying it's not for that, that APIs exist to satisfy EGS's specific need, that Tim Sweeney himself called it a bad thing, and Steam launched a full investigation into the entire practice. this whole fiasco is so well documented even by EGS apologists that i really hope i don't need to call out line by lines, and checking my own question mark the associated post i quoted both goes to another thread where it's discussed in detail and the resetera link where all the technical data was unearthed is still functional, so i assume you simply didn't consider that because it wasn't a link in 'my' post. you can go back and check that stuff though, it's all there. it's unfortunate that that specific tweet is gone but there's plenty of other sources that are readily accessible from that post. Coolguye fucked around with this message at 02:15 on Dec 26, 2019 |
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Dec 26, 2019 02:12
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Coolguye posted:the youtube link is commentary on their privacy policy, which is public and easily auditable by anyone. if you really require specific excerpts, here you go: I asked because I genuinely wanted more details. But I didn't think by "check my question mark" you meant that I needed to go from there, to a different thread, to a resetra forum thread. I was kind of hoping to skip forums and get actual news articles about it as forums tend to be full of people who misread and/or misunderstand something and then parrot it forever. Like a game of telephone that leads to the fear a company is selling my information to the Chinese government
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Dec 26, 2019 02:21
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i mean the original source on the steam<->egs fiasco was literally reddit and resetera so if you wanted to go to the source that's it, we can link stuff like tomshardware and pcgamer and bleepingcomputer on the matter but they're all referencing what started there.
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Dec 26, 2019 02:27
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Sleeveless posted:Their cut they take for game sales is about half of what Steam charges, which isn't actually enough to even cover the costs of running the store front. That couldn't possibly be true, could it? Surely given it's a digital distribution network the cost needed to return a profit on each sale would be based on the volume of sales?
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Dec 26, 2019 02:51
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Hat Thoughts posted:what makes u think that their cut is unsustainable? U imagine Steam is making a minimal profit on their store-front? Even when Epic has less hooks designed 2 trap u in their ecosystem (workshop, marketplace, forums, badges, etc.)? How does something like Itch.IO exist when they're significantly more dev-friendly in their percentages? Obviously they're a smaller store-front but what...u imagine if they got bigger they'd instantly collapse? Or they're secretly bleeding tons & are cynically scheming? Don't reply to Guy Mann.
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Dec 26, 2019 02:53
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Your diluting my free games skimming.
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Dec 26, 2019 03:06
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Let the Christmas spirit in!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftEz-m0kEWA
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Dec 26, 2019 03:13
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Pararoid posted:That couldn't possibly be true, could it? Surely given it's a digital distribution network the cost needed to return a profit on each sale would be based on the volume of sales? kirbysuperstar posted:Don't reply to Guy Mann.
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Dec 26, 2019 04:10
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Hat Thoughts posted:what makes u think that their cut is unsustainable? U imagine Steam is making a minimal profit on their store-front? Even when Epic has less hooks designed 2 trap u in their ecosystem (workshop, marketplace, forums, badges, etc.)? How does something like Itch.IO exist when they're significantly more dev-friendly in their percentages? Obviously they're a smaller store-front but what...u imagine if they got bigger they'd instantly collapse? Or they're secretly bleeding tons & are cynically scheming? https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1091025939109199879?s=20 Tim Sweeney, head of Epic, says that 12% is such a slim margin that even doing something as fundamental as not charging the customer more for payment processing would make selling games unprofitable. When people trot out the long, long list of features that Steam has which the EGS lacks, that is why. Developing and maintaining those features is expensive. That is what the extra cut Valve takes is for. When EGS says they will stop having exclusives once Steam charges 12%, that's some bullshit because Epic knows that 12% simply will not cover the costs of running Steam.
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Dec 26, 2019 04:12
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What do you all think the final free epic game will be? Hopefully it's a larger title than most of the indie games we've seen. Unless it's Minesweeper, if it's minesweeper that'd be loving hilarious.
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Dec 26, 2019 04:43
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Donkringel posted:What do you all think the final free epic game will be? the most epic game of all fortnite
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Dec 26, 2019 04:52
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Stop crying about EGS exclusives. You literally NEED to have competition for Steam otherwise as time goes on and their monopoly continues to just do the bare minimum while carving out a chunk and then gouging prices in sales, publishers WILL stop bothering with PC gaming. Competition drives improvement, which overall will lead to more aggressive marketing and lower commission fees over time. It's not the ONLY reason EGS exists, but it's a reason why having one store that does everything is actually bad for the pastime, in the long run.
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Dec 26, 2019 04:53
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Fuzz posted:Stop crying about EGS exclusives. You literally NEED to have competition for Steam otherwise as time goes on and their monopoly continues to just do the bare minimum while carving out a chunk and then gouging prices in sales, publishers WILL stop bothering with PC gaming. Competition drives improvement, which overall will lead to more aggressive marketing and lower commission fees over time. It's not the ONLY reason EGS exists, but it's a reason why having one store that does everything is actually bad for the pastime, in the long run.  The image is misleading, I will absolutely cop to that, but it gets the point across. Steam has the clout that, if they wanted to, they could force companies to sign exclusives with them. They don't do this, and most games can be bought from steam, gog, itch, and the developer's website. People keep using Steam because it has a lot of useful features and has proven that it's likely to be around for quite a while longer. Yeah, Steam could be a lot better. But I would much rather Steam be dominant than have their position with EGS reversed. I happily use GOG and other platforms, but am not really interested in switching to a service that is demonstrably worse than Steam in every way which also uses lovely tactics to try and generate sales.
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Dec 26, 2019 05:25
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Dark_Swordmaster posted:I actually remembered this a few weeks back (it's been open source for, what, a decade?) and looked into it. There was a relatively recent release I believe. Neat game, released deep in the heart of the "literally build your own army" gimmick I think it's the only one that did it well enough to be remembered. It's been a while, yeah. Hell, I remember playing the demo(s) for it over and over and over as a kid and when I found out it was still around and worked on modern systems, I was so stoked to finally see the full game. What other games were there along those same lines? I loved the huge tech tree and build-your-own-tank thing and it would be amazing if there were a bunch of these I was totally unfamiliar with. aniviron posted:
I get your point, but man, this reads like some "fwd: re: re: re: socialism is bad because [strawman]" bullshit I'd see on my extended family's facebook wall. KillHour fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Dec 26, 2019 |
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Dec 26, 2019 05:34
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KillHour posted:I get your point, but man, this reads like some "fwd: re: re: re: socialism is bad because [strawman]" bullshit I'd see on my extended family's facebook wall. was it the part where they literally wrote "I know this image is misleading but I'm posting it anyway because it supports my beliefs"
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Dec 26, 2019 06:02
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flatluigi posted:was it the part where they literally wrote "I know this image is misleading but I'm posting it anyway because it supports my beliefs" No Facebook Republican would ever be that honest.
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Dec 26, 2019 06:06
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Donkringel posted:What do you all think the final free epic game will be? Hopefully it's a larger title than most of the indie games we've seen. Unless it's Minesweeper, if it's minesweeper that'd be loving hilarious. Unreal 1 Also Merry Christmas everybody
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Dec 26, 2019 06:12
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Generally the theory is that when there's more competition, it forces the competitors to try providing a better service to their customers. Origin and Epic have mainly done this by putting out free games, although only time will tell whether they'll do anything else big to encourage customer loyalty. Arguably, Epic paying lump sums to developers could be considered providing a better service for developers, their customers on the other side of the transaction, although much like the freebies, time will tell whether that creates any bigger effect. Over to the side, there's GoG that provides the better service of making sure that all of its games work properly and also gets de facto exclusives by hunting out games that the other stores will not bother with. Galaxy has a few issues, but they're really trying to provide a better service. In an ideal world, there'd be some kind of real government antitrust regulation to officially judge whether or not some attempt at getting an edge is too much or whether fostering more competition is worth the inconvenience to consumers, or whether it's noncompetitive, but for now it's a bunch of opinions.
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Dec 26, 2019 07:27
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aniviron posted:https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1091025939109199879?s=20 the cut is so they can make more money some of which is, yes, spent on inventing things like their 'trading marketplace' so that they can make even more money
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Dec 26, 2019 07:32
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plz do not operate out of imagined kindness from schlubby biz ppl working at their private tech company located in Bellevue, Washington. even if it does give u extra leverage to pounce on the obvious cynicism of schlubby biz ppl working at their private tech company located in Cary, North Carolina Instead, enjoy free games from Epic Software, or, if u feel uncomfortable with their EULA don't download the free games....or put fake info in & claim them without installing the launcher...u have so many options
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Dec 26, 2019 07:38
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Coolguye posted:they have also been caught on multiple occasions installing spyware on client machines for unknown and uncommented on purposes, most recently they were caught parsing the steam clientregistry.blob to import everything about you. their half-hearted explanation that they were trying to get friends list information for fortnite was met by steam's reps saying "hey there's an API for that exact purpose and it's existed for years, is actually secure, and you've never used them once we can audit that so we know that for sure" so either epic is so incompetent that they don't know how to search public API documents or they're lying through their teeth for some unknown reason. Part of their excuse was some complete nonsense about not wanting to rely on a 3rd party for that data, which of course is the dumbest loving thing in the world when the data they want is that very same 3rd party's data, who willingly offers it through their official API. Also something about being in a rush to implement Steam friend integration into Fortnite so extremely loving shady shortcuts were taken but obviously only properly addressed once they got caught. In short, either they're shady af or incompetent af. Or as a third option, they're projecting onto Valve thinking that they'd try to somehow cut off their access to the API just to be petty. Basically it all reminded me of when Sony stalled on crossplay by implying that it was other platforms that were potentially insecure and nebulously "dangerous" for kiddies. Also reminder that one of the masterminds of the Epic Store is the dude who ran Steam Spy, who was more than happy to interpolate useful data about the Steam store for poor beleaguered indie devs who couldn't get what they wanted directly from Valve. And then of course turned around and said that the Epic Store would not be publicly revealing that sort of information any time soon.
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Dec 26, 2019 07:55
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spaceblancmange posted:Wow a lot of posts in here there must have been a lot of free Christmas day games!
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Dec 26, 2019 08:27
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Fuzz posted:Stop crying about EGS exclusives. You literally NEED to have competition for Steam otherwise as time goes on and their monopoly continues to just do the bare minimum while carving out a chunk and then gouging prices in sales, publishers WILL stop bothering with PC gaming. Competition drives improvement, which overall will lead to more aggressive marketing and lower commission fees over time. It's not the ONLY reason EGS exists, but it's a reason why having one store that does everything is actually bad for the pastime, in the long run. i dunno who you're talking to exactly, epic is not competing with steam precisely because steam does a ton more and epic is entirely disinterested in reaching parity, let alone surpassing them. the spiderweb software creator, jeff vogel, has made multiple comments about how steam has made his job as a small indie developer a thousand times easier because all of the fiddly publishing bullshit that he doesn't want to deal with is just handled. he doesn't have to deal with international stuff, he doesn't have to deal with discoverability, he doesn't have to deal with creating a forum that people like using and makes sense, he doesn't have to deal with making user content/guides easy to share (which is huge with his very complicated games), he doesn't have to worry about updating and patching, he doesn't have to worry about cataloging, he barely even has to worry about OS cross-compatibility because of steam play. the avernum games are playable on a mac because of steam and that's straight from the source, a long time indie developer who ostensibly is exactly the sort of person EGS was supposed to enable and enrich. but steam has handled all of this for him while epic has not and will not and that is precisely why his catalog is on steam but not EGS. if he were to go to EGS he would suddenly have to care about all of this and he doesn't want to. tim sweeney's rattlings about competing with steam are a nonsense smokescreen and that is not arguable. he simply says that poo poo because he either knows or suspects that if he were honest about the actual niche EGS is filling: that is, the information business, people would react poorly. it's exactly like uPlay and Origin are not actually interested in competing with steam, they exist to give their massive parent companies fiefdoms over their own libraries and destinies. GoG is much more of a steam competitor than Epic simply because GoG is solving a lot of these hard marketplace problems that developers do not want to deal with because they have nothing to do with making games. as a canary test on the matter, you will in fact find Spiderweb's catalog on GoG in addition to Steam. e: to be clear once again, this is not to impugn anyone's decision to use EGS. if you want to use EGS fully understanding that you are purchasing games at least in part with your personally identifiable information then more power to you. it is a similar decision that we all made with buying email services from hotmail, gmail, yahoo, etc with our personally identifiable information rather than money. there's a lot to be said in how much that equalized opportunity and experience, because the poorest of the poor can still have email and use that service. there's a real argument to be made that we should be able to make that decision with our entertainment as well so nobody should have to choose between quality leisure and something else. but that's the size of this, let's not turn this into a plucky attempt to smite the domineering industry overlord through healthy market competition because that is flatly not the case at all. competition is not happening here. Coolguye fucked around with this message at 09:04 on Dec 26, 2019 |
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Dec 26, 2019 08:45
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In the end, the free game was the posts we made along the way.
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Dec 26, 2019 09:11
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mateo360 posted:Bigger example: Shenmue III. was announced for steam as one of the platforms on the kickstarter including being a key option in the survey. Fast forward to this last summer and the developers say it's going to be Epic store exclusive for a year. This pissed off a lot of people and there were denying refund requests until the backpedaled from so much backlash. You could still pick a steam key but you will not get it till at least November next year. an interesting aspect to this is that once refunds became available , epic was paying those out of pocket and the money for refund didn't come from the devs kickstarter earnings. obviously this was like a total scramble for goodwill, no questions asked, but if you're going to shoot for goodwill that's a reasonably effective way to do it
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Dec 26, 2019 09:22
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site posted:Unreal 1 I would love for it to be UT2K4 (Drag-drop version still works on win10, but a store version is helpful for getting people into it.)
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Dec 26, 2019 10:02
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~Coxy posted:I would love for it to be UT2K4 I no longer have a disc drive, so I’d love that as well *eyes Unreal Anthology DVD*
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Dec 26, 2019 10:20
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I'd love a proper Unreal/Unreal Tournament remaster. There's apparently Unreal Redux that's an indie project in the works, but not even an inkling of a release date. Facing Worlds/Hall of Giants, 
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Dec 26, 2019 10:51
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FFT posted:I'd love a proper Unreal/Unreal Tournament remaster. There's apparently Unreal Redux that's an indie project in the works, but not even an inkling of a release date. ~Coxy posted:I would love for it to be UT2K4 Mierenneuker posted:I no longer have a disc drive, so I’d love that as well *eyes Unreal Anthology DVD*
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Dec 26, 2019 11:14
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Somewhere in a pile of hard drives there's one with the complete discography of Unreal soundtracks up to at least UT2K4. Those first few on the OG Unreal always bring me back. Might have to look at what GoG has.
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Dec 26, 2019 11:21
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RBA Starblade posted:I tried Subnautica when it was free, learned I hate it as much as all the craftothons, and uninstalled it and Epic. I usually dislike crafting games, but loved Subnautica. Maybe because I played it about a year ago which is after it received a lot of patches/updates that improved it a shitload, and also because I scuba dive which maybe helps. The sea was a way more awesome environment than the usual terrain.
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Dec 26, 2019 11:59
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FFT posted:I'd love a proper Unreal/Unreal Tournament remaster. There's apparently Unreal Redux that's an indie project in the works, but not even an inkling of a release date. Epic were making a new UT themselves with proper mod support before Fortnite took off, it got abandoned pretty soon after.
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Dec 26, 2019 12:03
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njsykora posted:Epic were making a new UT themselves with proper mod support before Fortnite took off, it got abandoned pretty soon after.
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Dec 26, 2019 12:20
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I'm one of a very small number of people, proportionally, that actually played Fortnite before it was Fortnite [Battleground] It was just "build to defend against zombies" in a campaign style. I'd almost completely forgotten about it.
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Dec 26, 2019 14:44
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Jerry Cotton posted:In the end, the free game was the posts we made along the way. I want a refund
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Dec 26, 2019 15:37
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FFT posted:I'd love a proper Unreal/Unreal Tournament remaster. There's apparently Unreal Redux that's an indie project in the works, but not even an inkling of a release date. The new UT is free and good, though? Also I'm like 99% sure someone remade Facing Worlds for it (even though that map is kinda boring and I don't get why everyone loved it so much).
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Dec 26, 2019 15:42
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