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END ME SCOOB posted:I mean. Y'all know ZZT is free now and has a thriving community and tools, right. Of course, but it's not the same as having sharing tools built into a service that hosts and keeps everything up to date and makes it easy to share with others. Honestly it's not like I expect that ZZT would suddenly become super popular or something, just that it's part of Epic's history and it would be nice to see along with their other older games. I think the only one I ever actually bought by mail was Solar Winds. I wonder if I still have it somewhere.
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Mar 24, 2019 08:56
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I thought Cliffy B gave up making games.
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Mar 24, 2019 10:18
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Has anyone played Operencia? I'm in the mood for an old-school grid-based dungeon crawler, but I'm hesitant to pick it up at full price. Sure does look pretty.
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Apr 18, 2019 03:26
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Magitek posted:Has anyone played Operencia? I'm in the mood for an old-school grid-based dungeon crawler, but I'm hesitant to pick it up at full price. Sure does look pretty. I can only hope that it can fill the Grimrock 3 sized hole in my heart.
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Apr 18, 2019 05:18
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Magitek posted:Has anyone played Operencia? I'm in the mood for an old-school grid-based dungeon crawler, but I'm hesitant to pick it up at full price. Sure does look pretty. I tried it out via Microsoft's game pass thing and was unimpressed. It's very slick, visually, but neither story nor combat really engaged me and I just kind of stopped playing after a couple of hours. Combat is turn-based and much slower than Grimrock. You don't get to create your party members and while there's a decent amount of in-party banter, there were no actual dialog choices in the bits I played. YMMV and all that. For me, Zanki Zero scratched the itch a lot better.
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Apr 18, 2019 14:31
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So Epic have said that if Steam gives developers an 80% profit cut they will stop swallowing up exclusive deals. Now why am I not inclined to believe that.
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Apr 27, 2019 15:05
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Arcsquad12 posted:So Epic have said that if Steam gives developers an 80% profit cut they will stop swallowing up exclusive deals. It was 88% and it had to be for all developers with no catches and it had to be permanent. Also Tim said they would retreat from exclusive deals and even consider publishing their games like Fortnite on Steam. https://venturebeat.com/2019/04/25/ceo-tim-sweeney-epic-games-store-will-hastily-retreat-from-exclusives-if-valve-changes-revenue-model/ "If Steam committed to a permanent 88% revenue share for all developers and publishers without major strings attached, Epic would hastily organize a retreat from exclusives (while honoring our partner commitments) and consider putting our own games on Steam." -Tim Sweeney
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Apr 27, 2019 23:10
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It honestly reads like Tim Sweeney is intentionally trying to make a deal that sounds hostile to Steam so that when Steam declines he can use their refusal as a cassus belli to declare open war on steam. It's either that or they spent way more money than they anticipated buying up exclusivity rights and he's trying to extend an olive branch to save themelvset.
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Apr 27, 2019 23:28
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Arcsquad12 posted:It honestly reads like Tim Sweeney is intentionally trying to make a deal that sounds hostile to Steam so that when Steam declines he can use their refusal as a cassus belli to declare open war on steam. I feel like it helps distract people from the news about Epic's Fortnite money hose being built off crunch hours and destroying the health of their employees, as a nice bonus.
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Apr 27, 2019 23:37
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Arcsquad12 posted:It honestly reads like Tim Sweeney is intentionally trying to make a deal that sounds hostile to Steam so that when Steam declines he can use their refusal as a cassus belli to declare open war on steam. Sweeney knows the cut is unsustainable without degrading the experience in some ways. Like Steam absorbs the transaction fees because of the 30% cut, whereas transaction fees for anywhere outside of the US are passed on to the consumer in EGS. Another one of the reasons why EGS is anti consumer. Mischievous Mink posted:I feel like it helps distract people from the news about Epic's Fortnite money hose being built off crunch hours and destroying the health of their employees, as a nice bonus. Also that Fortnite has peeked and their updates are doing absolutely nothing to stop the bleeding
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Apr 27, 2019 23:48
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Cao Ni Ma posted:Sweeney knows the cut is unsustainable without degrading the experience in some ways. Is it, though? I rather doubt it. I mean, maybe it wouldn't support Valve as a game development company (who haven't released a traditional game since Portal 2 in 2011), but DOTA2 alone might be enough for that. Tim is saying this with the ultimate goal of making more money and most people recognize that, but let's not pretend that Steam hasn't been unimaginably profitable for years.
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Apr 28, 2019 15:44
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Cao Ni Ma posted:Sweeney knows the cut is unsustainable without degrading the experience in some ways*. Like Steam absorbs the transaction fees because of the 30% cut, whereas transaction fees for anywhere outside of the US are passed on to the consumer in EGS. Another one of the reasons why EGS is anti consumer. *Citation needed
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Apr 28, 2019 16:01
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A 12% cut isn’t much if you are counting processing fees (5% for a company that big) and the cost of maintaining servers to host and deliver content, in addition to an online storefront, cost of dealing with fraud, etc. The advantage of Steam is all the publisher needs to do is make, market, and maintain their game. Everything necessary to sell and deliver content is provided by Valve. You don’t even need your own forums anymore. I’d say this in and of itself is worth about 20%, considering how much work and resources it takes off your hands. Personally I find it absurd that Epic is talking like they’re trying to exact social justice or something - it’s a marketing ploy. It’s always a marketing ploy. If they are offering cash for exclusivity and only taking a 12% cut of revenue then Epic is losing money on these games, most likely. Buying the PC exclusivity for something like Metro is just idiotic when it’s also on every console.
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Apr 28, 2019 16:21
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It's predatory pricing, just on the developer's end rather than the consumer's end, in order to fill their store. I'll be shocked if that 12% figure doesn't start to trend higher over time, either directly or through surcharges. It's much like how a Sheetz or Wal-Mart might offer lower prices or sales initially upon opening to get people in the door before normalizing them later on. The problem is that you're unlikely to "win" against an established, large service like Steam this way. Predatory pricing is dependent on being able to do so much damage to your competitors that they're forced out of business or significantly weakened, which is easier with smaller competitors, but Steam is still very much the leader. In order to keep it up, they'll have to maintain that 12% for a very long time (like 5-10 years), which seems unlikely.
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Apr 28, 2019 16:58
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If your opponent has a war chest of infinite dollars, high margins, and constant consistent revenues, and is privately owned by a small amount of individuals (who are also mostly founders or early employees) there's an almost certainty that price competition is going to do nothing but starve yourself out of the market. Especially if all of those things do not apply to you and your business.
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Apr 28, 2019 17:15
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jokes posted:If your opponent has a war chest of infinite dollars, high margins, and constant consistent revenues, and is privately owned by a small amount of individuals (who are also mostly founders or early employees) there's an almost certainty that price competition is going to do nothing but starve yourself out of the market. Especially if all of those things do not apply to you and your business. Are you talking about Epic or Valve.
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Apr 28, 2019 17:50
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Kibayasu posted:Are you talking about Epic or Valve. epic is most definitely not owned by a small number of private individuals
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Apr 28, 2019 18:11
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The shareholders would absolutely drive the split up over time, no matter what.
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Apr 28, 2019 18:14
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tim sweeney doing whatever it takes to get people to stop talking about how bad they treat their employees at epic.
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Apr 28, 2019 18:23
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Epic's war chest is financed entirely by Fortnite and those investors looking for big returns on development gambles. And the Fortnite money might as well be blood money for how rough it is on the employees. If Fortnite goes under and Epic Game Store hasn't steadied it's foothold yet it will be on to my ground for a long time.
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Apr 28, 2019 19:20
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They're not even buying permanent exclusives so this is a stupid ploy Like Borderlands 3 isn't even exclusive for a full year, it's six months, who cares Tim. your gambit is dumb Tim
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Apr 28, 2019 20:04
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And yet both the publishers and indie game devs seem rather desperate for this to work.
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Apr 29, 2019 00:07
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Magitek posted:Is it, though? I rather doubt it. It is though as I am pretty sure Sweeny did tweet about it not long ago, also to reach that 12% they had to make the customer pay for surcharge if their currency is not supported in epic store, which might be whatever if your in the US or EU, but epic does not support Australia where games are already expensive to buy since there was no $60 compromise like in the US, or uniform price in the EU cause of all the difference in economic weight of EU states. Epic is trash its very anti consumer and the only country where it tries to hide it is the US since that is where most of the devs and publishers have offices
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Apr 29, 2019 01:40
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This Peter Coffin video is really on-point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOUA7lVfMHU People tend to lose sight of the fact that Epic isn't trying to "compete" with Steam. The goal of a company in a capitalist system is never to compete, it's to crush everybody else and literally be the only game in town. That's it, that's Epic's ultimate goal here, they're not the good guys and there's no such thing as "good competition". The market is bullshit, so is capitalism, so is Sweeney and so is GabeN. Kerning Chameleon posted:And yet both the publishers and indie game devs seem rather desperate for this to work. Well yeah, because it's More Money. Also not getting drowned out by the white noise of sex games.
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Apr 29, 2019 02:16
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King Vidiot posted:Well yeah, because it's More Money. Also not getting drowned out by the white noise of sex games. I mean more importantly, it’s guaranteed money, up front.
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Apr 29, 2019 02:29
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The REAL Goobusters posted:tim sweeney doing whatever it takes to get people to stop talking about how bad they treat their employees at epic. This this this
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Apr 29, 2019 02:30
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King Vidiot posted:This Peter Coffin video is really on-point: True, but hopefully stuff like this and Stadia and the continued scandals in the crowdfunding scene will finally wake people up to the fact that the "plucky indies" aren't your friends either, and would be just as bad as the big publishers if given half the chance.
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Apr 29, 2019 02:53
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Somewhat related, but there's a good twitter thread by a goondev, also reposted by the guy who did DUSK. https://twitter.com/gausswerks/status/1121776022532370432
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Apr 29, 2019 03:06
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Kerning Chameleon posted:And yet both the publishers and indie game devs seem rather desperate for this to work.
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Apr 29, 2019 05:31
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So Ubisoft's been touting Anno 1800 as their fastest selling Anno game. They claim it's sold four times as many copies as 2205 did during its first week, a figure sites like PCGamer are happy to repeat. The fact is, it's the easiest thing in the world to look at Steamcharts and see that the "four times" number could almost single-handedly have come from Steam. The last game's peak was 7,401, the current's is 25,214. Zero way of telling how many people bought it on EGS and Uplay. Now, you could argue that Ubisoft is cannily having its cake and eating it too by creating an artificial scarcity on the most popular storefront, taking Epic's exclusivity money and sales-guarantee, and continuing to sell it on their own platform, but it still doesn't prove EGS' long-term viability, I think.
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Apr 29, 2019 18:14
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Magitek posted:Is it, though? I rather doubt it. I mean, maybe it wouldn't support Valve as a game development company (who haven't released a traditional game since Portal 2 in 2011), but DOTA2 alone might be enough for that. I already mentioned how they pass on the transaction fees to the user instead of absorbing it like steam does
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Apr 29, 2019 18:26
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USrdUXH3iqg
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Apr 29, 2019 18:33
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Mordja posted:So Ubisoft's been touting Anno 1800 as their fastest selling Anno game. They claim it's sold four times as many copies as 2205 did during its first week, a figure sites like PCGamer are happy to repeat. The fact is, it's the easiest thing in the world to look at Steamcharts and see that the "four times" number could almost single-handedly have come from Steam. The last game's peak was 7,401, the current's is 25,214. Zero way of telling how many people bought it on EGS and Uplay. i mean comparing it to 2205 isn't really fair because 1800 is an actual game with real design whereas 2205 was a half hearted redux of 2070 (which had shitloads of problems to begin with) it's kind of like saying "well RE4 sold a lot better than RE3 and RE4 was on fewer systems so therefore the gamecube must be the One True Way!!" like no motherfucker it's because RE4 was a new game with cool thought and real elbow grease put into it, RE3 was one run of RE2 with a cooler tyrant. (yes i will die on this hill of nemmy being cooler than x in the originals, don't @ me)
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Apr 29, 2019 18:42
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Ubisoft blatantly exploiting the Epic store hype is my favourite part in all this right now - sell preorders on Steam (probably about 20% cut for their biggest games), announce pulling the game from Steam (leading to more preorders for the precious first-week-sales numbers), get Epic to pay for your "exclusive" (so you can sell the game on a different 3rd party store with free advertising, this time with a 12% cut), while the game is always available on Uplay (0% cut) which people have to use to play the game anyway. Well, my favourite part besides some indies and their promoters in the gaming "press" acting like Epic is doing this out of the goodness of their heart, in order to save the poor gaming industry from the clutches of greedy Steam. orcane fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Apr 29, 2019 |
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Apr 29, 2019 19:41
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orcane posted:Well, my favourite part besides indies and their promoters in the gaming "press" acting like Epic is doing this out of the goodness of their heart, in order to save the poor gaming industry from the clutches of greedy Steam. I honestly I think a ton of devs are looking at the money and not realized what else that 30% is getting them. Like Steamworks has a ton of features that are a bitch and half to implement on their own. And that is not even counting the store page features like reviews, forums (extremely useful for finding bugs/fixes), Steam Guides, people streaming the game, etc. I recently bought Dark Devotion cause this Steam Guide Things you should know about Dark Devotion layed out how the game worked and answered some questions I had while the forums/reviews helped the Developers fix a issue users were having with controllers. Contrast that with Epic Store and I have no loving clue whats going on with Hades.
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Apr 29, 2019 20:01
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BexGu posted:I honestly I think a ton of devs are looking at the money and not realized what else that 30% is getting them. Like Steamworks has a ton of features that are a bitch and half to implement on their own. And that is not even counting the store page features like reviews, forums (extremely useful for finding bugs/fixes), Steam Guides, people streaming the game, etc. I recently bought Dark Devotion cause this Steam Guide Things you should know about Dark Devotion layed out how the game worked and answered some questions I had while the forums/reviews helped the Developers fix a issue users were having with controllers. Contrast that with Epic Store and I have no loving clue whats going on with Hades. They should absolutely know what Steam gets them, they watched this a month ago where Valve details all sorts of behind-the-scenes stuff they do, like oh, say... effectively running their own internet so people can buy and download your games without issue while the regular internet is busy getting spiked with the Game of Thrones final season premier. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrvr02SiHY4 Also, I'm pretty convinced devs actually hate Steam forums and think not having them on EGS is a feature, not a bug.
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Apr 29, 2019 20:07
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Well it's cool that the exclusives are only timed, so the games can have a Steam page and use all of Steam's features in advance while exclusively selling their games on Epic for the time being  But I agree with you, even though I don't need/use a lot of the stuff Steam offers, it's there and some people will want and use it so it has value. And yeah, I guess some devs think "gently caress forums and reviews, entitled gamers just review bomb my game, pirate it and call each other names on the forums" which, I think, was even a point Epic made when they launched EGS. Obviously that's not all Steam is good for but if you've been following gaming blogs/websites for the past year or two it's certainly a thing that keeps popping up, with all games, indie or AAA. However, I think that if you go in expecting forums to be your enemy, you've already lost and shouldn't be surprised if this turn out to be true.
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Apr 29, 2019 20:14
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Except by taking this money you antagonize potential customers. Like how 4A went on about how they'll cancel porting Metro to PC if enough people don't buy Exodus there and gently caress you if you don't like denuvo - then they take a year long epic exclusivity. When it comes back to steam and is possibly review bombed, does 4A have any right to cry about customers they aggravated being mean to them?
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Apr 29, 2019 20:20
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lmao Epic started a big surprise sale yesterday, but it was too much of a surprise, to the point where they didn't even tell a bunch of the publishers selling through the storefront about it. A lot of them see this as an issue because during the sale you can spend like 15 bucks or more and get 10% off of more expensive games, which begins to devalue a lot of the big-name games that are up for pre-order without the publisher's own consent. Paradox has pulled VtMB2 from the Epic store until the sale is over.Destructoid posted:Another odd case comes with Supergiant's Hades. Originally listed at a sale price of $6.99, the developer quietly raised the price of the game to $24.99 and altered the sale price to be $14.99. While the increased price was something Supergiant always intended to do as it added content (the game launched in early access with the Epic Games Store last year), it originally pledged to inform buyers well in advance of any price hikes. With Epic surprising the world with this mega sale, Supergiant felt the need to increase the price at the last minute. The studio has since apologized, but this could have all been avoided if Epic was more transparent with the publishers and developers it is hosting. also there's still no shopping cart, so you have to buy poo poo one at a time, and a bunch of people are reporting that their accounts are being locked because the store suspects fraud due to so many purchases. Still no wishlists, and you still can't gift people games either. Good sale guys
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May 17, 2019 20:45
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Borderlands 3 pre-order has been pulled too and after Randy tweeted (now deleted) about how great it was Epic is earning people's trust with the sale.
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May 18, 2019 20:00
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