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EGS is flawed but Valve has had this coming since they decided that basically anything can be on Steam. You can ask for 30% when it's a private club, but now that any fool can make cheap trash, If "Cranky Steve's 4K Retina Burning Sex-A-Thon Powered By ClickTeam" can launch the same week as CD Projekt Red and appear alongside their game on the NEW THIS WEEK list, why the gently caress wouldn't you be looking for a post-Steam plan. Business and totally open platforms rarely go together, and in this case the big business of gaming only likes being around the indies that elevate the platform and make them look good. Sony, Nintendo, and now Epic take the position that Hyper Light Drifter and Undertale are okay, but we don't want to sell a $ 600 million dollar game next to your unholy sex fantasy game you built as a science project. People who are trying to make big money ultimately don't want anything to do with libertarian tards who think markets should take a neutral position on products. They want favoritism. They want curation. They want gatekeeping. And all you have to do is look at the world of YouTube/podcasting/etc and the people it's given a platform to in order to see why.
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Apr 10, 2019 19:12
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No Wave posted:I assume EGS will be more trashy than steam not less. EGS is basically an invite-only club at the moment. It'll likely be less trashy because developers see it as sacrificing a chunk of their audience to get better revenues and not share space with trash. Valve's approach a few months ago was that any piece of poo poo game was allowable unless Valve took the completely arbitrary step of declaring it "trolling". They're sort of lucky that was broken by the Rape Day guy who admitted his game had no place on Steam, rather than some 4chan white nationalist trying to exploit the situation and put an Immigrant Shooter Simulator on there to get attention. Because right now any platform that says "anyone can contribute a creation" has to look at what has been normalized lately and what kinds of people are going to want elevation from it.
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Apr 10, 2019 19:27
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Pirate Jet posted:Tim Sweeney is worth 7.1 billion dollars. Most of the poo poo Steam does was useful when it launched, but these days Discord would probably do a better job. I don’t believe hosting the shittiest forums this side of GameFAQs deserves a 30% of the industry cut. There’s reason to be against EGS, but it’s more like “it needs a shopping cart” or “there’s no two factor security” or even “offering a discount on engine licenses if you launch on their store should be grounds for an antitrust lawsuit” and not like “developers should appreciate this half finished controller support and mediocre social features.” Shumagorath posted:Tim Sweeney is a gigantic hypocrite. The guy ran around yelling the sky was falling when Microsoft started selling games on the Windows Store because he somehow thought it meant Windows would become a "closed platform". Never mind that Microsoft would essentially kill their OS by doing that; he tilted at this particular windmill for months while saying exactly nothing about iOS. Valve did this too, which is why they spent three years submitting fixes to WINE while the people who write the narratives for their games retired and Half-Life 3’s plot leaked with the names changed.
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Apr 10, 2019 23:24
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The REAL Goobusters posted:they literally tried and failed and have closed their game store lmao. So no they didn't do a better job They did give developers a bigger cut than even EGS did. That they failed with a potentially better economic structure is more a sign of how the entrenched players have an advantage. So far you do actually have to buy developers into exclusivity or be a giant publisher to get people to launch a non-Steam client for even a hot second. There's very real reasons for the bigger players in the industry to want people to use another launcher, but right now it's a battle of interests as a lot of consumers are insistent that 30% of the PC gaming industry's profits be redirected to a Seattle fatass. Discord had no killer app and didn't have money to throw around; at least EGS can say "everybody who plays Fortnite on PC has already installed this thing." Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Apr 11, 2019 |
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Apr 11, 2019 20:01
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CJacobs posted:Epic is basically bullying their way into that market and that just sucks for the game devs themselves, bigger cut or no. Game devs have some reservations but are generally pretty happy tbh. The whole effect of EGS if successful is a store that turns back the clock to before Greenlight, which is the point where Steam has become so uncontrollably useless as a store. Putting aside dumb experimental poo poo like Steam Movies, giving something like Grand Theft Auto equal weight on the store carousel with bullshit clickteam titles put together over the weekend was only going to piss big name developers off and they're the ones paying a huge share of that 30%. The market at the end of the day needs at least two games stores, because to maintain a store that CDPR, Ubi, Zenimax, etc consider being a part of means not displaying them alongside "inappropriate" games, but as the recent outcry for anime titty clickers has shown there is an audience for games targeting lonely hypersexed virgins and the people who make them want a place to be able to sell them. This is one of those things that feels like other mediums have been able to figure it out, since nobody expects porn movies to be sold at Target and there are stores that exist to specifically sell pornography. The only thing is that Valve's monopoly over PC gaming is the kind of retail dominance Walmart could only dream of.
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Apr 11, 2019 20:26
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Det_no posted:I wonder. But the reason it's stressful/terrifying was because Steam was the only place doing the thing that it did and you didn't have an alternative, not because Steam has titles from Ubisoft and 2K.
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Apr 12, 2019 04:47
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topside1246 posted:The general consensus I see on this thread is that EGS is bad and needs to learn how to actually compete (NOT signing a bunch of exclusivity deals). That's the general consensus of social media and gaming blogs, but as we've discussed competition to Steam in the past you've hopefully seen that a lot of players have tried to compete without exclusivity deals and it hasn't been very successful. Like even if you just built a client that was exactly Steam but with new logos and branding, people will probably pick the actual Steam. You'd need to find some way to detect games purchased on Steam and give them free copies on your platform just to make a dent with some people, and even that doesn't necessarily do it because Steam carries goodwill from the days when Valve made some of the greatest video games ever made (nothing they do today constitutes as this.) Basically, Xae posted:They are doing the right strategy. Force people to switch to play games and just deal with the temper tantrum until it is just accepted and no one cares.
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Apr 13, 2019 00:16
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The REAL Goobusters posted:This won’t last long once more games go on EGS and indie devs have the same issues they had with steam. No one will ever be happy because the companies with the most money will always have more visibility than some random indie game iOS Store is huge and Apple still does curation of highlighting good apps. Steam could do it, too; the difference is Apple hires humans to sift through the mess for money and that doesn't work when your company is "flatland". Valve's structure is incompatible with a wildly huge distribution platform. Epic may refuse to grow with the store, but we won't see it for a while at least because they're not allowing everybody onto the store. It's sort of like how Blockbuster Video, though a flawed distribution model that couldn't thrive financially against streaming services, still beats YouTube for finding quality content because Blockbuster didn't stock Lowtax's movies.
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Apr 13, 2019 20:08
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Cynic Jester posted:Ah, yes, they'll only accept already popular games, that sounds like it'll be great for all those indie developers they're fighting for and a great use of all the exposure indies get from being on EGS. You don't seem to realize that's the point, stores that allow indie games that get enough "gamer cred" or whatever are both fine and non-threatening to big publishers and still give indie makers room if they find some success. Look at the success of the Switch store, which allows stuff like Stardew and Undertale but does not include 100 Individually Listed Choose Your Own Adventure Storybooks and every Unity test game and "Blario In: World 1-1" title someone can slap together over the weekend. We've always known the openness of the PC kind of leads to a low signal to noise ratio on the software front. We've known this because we've seen the "600 Shareware Games On One CD-ROM" discs in the 90s and we saw how many of those were actually good. Steam is rapidly turning into the old games section of AOL, except now you pay upfront and refund later if you can. Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Apr 14, 2019 |
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Apr 14, 2019 19:08
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Schubalts posted:Digital storefronts won't run out of shelf space by putting 500 random Unity games up for sale. Consumer patience matters, though. Books were the cheapest medium available for a long time and look at the number of clubs and ways to curate that people have tried, because simply putting all of the books on a shelf and letting readers sift through it isn't a good long term strategy.
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Apr 15, 2019 08:52
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That's not buying a game, that's buying a developer. That's actually how Valve got anybody to notice them when they bought half the Quake II mod scene.
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May 1, 2019 23:01
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Cynic Jester posted:They're pulling Rocket League from Steam as soon as it launches on EGS according to a media press release they sent out. quote:We are continuing to sell Rocket League on Steam, and have not announced plans to stop selling the game there.
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May 1, 2019 23:24
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If Epic wanted to flip the narrative around, they ought to share their exclusive titles with GOG, if the developer chooses to and takes the tradeoffs (no DRM meaning your game is on torrent sites isntantly etc). Like I don't know how much collusion is actually legal but bringing down Steam is a noble goal. Arcsquad12 posted:They're pretty much preying on developers' fears of drowning in the sea of lovely Steam asset flips Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 18:29 on May 12, 2019 |
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May 12, 2019 18:26
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I know I’m replying to a post that’s two days old and six pages back, but I gotta do this...Pirate Jet posted:If I can put on my *sniff* pure ideology hat here, it’s most likely because the gaming community is an endless battle between neoliberalism and libertarian with an implicit refusal to ever recognize how similar those two standpoints are. So when Steam’s processes allow Hatred, or Rape Day, or that one right-wing Brazilian game about murdering homosexuals on the service, the neoliberals accuse Valve of being the problem when really all they’re doing is being perfect agents of capitalism. Anyway, my opinions on the latest EGS event is mostly the same as what you see around here. The man who announced the exclusivity deal deliberately provoked people who care (IMO far too deeply) about maintaining multiple game launchers. That trolls often tend to be chuds meant he got way more stick than he deserved. In a way, it reminds me of the Frenchies at Tale of Tales who made no secret of hating commercially successful games and felt they were saving the medium with their pretentious arthouse games that the French government stopped underwriting.
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Aug 7, 2019 11:04
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Phobophilia posted:Well Trump Wall Simulator is made by one shithead who doesn't have to pay rents because they live with their boomer parents, while Breitbart has to be subsidized by billionaire dark money What I was getting at is the end goal of the horrendous games on Steam isn’t so much about putting bread on the author’s table as it is about making a point. People criticize Steam because they won’t filter out monstrous agendas like iOS does.
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Aug 7, 2019 11:43
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Retail stores used to account for 25% of a game’s price, and they had to dedicate more floor space per game than Steam and CompUSA had to hire far more actual labor than Valve, who basically tries to keep it’s employee directory so small that nearly anyone who works there is something of an industry rockstar. Algorithms and hosting is cheap, live bodies are expensive. 30% shouldn’t be necessary for the operation they do, though overall the easiest way to describe the problem with Steam is that Steam is a good product but Valve is no longer the best company to run it. Valve isn’t going to change flatland, and Steam shouldn’t be run by a company that works that way. It should be spun off into it’s own business. I’ll fess to being a content elitist who thinks there’s too much indie bullshit on there and doing the same thing that Epic, Sony, Microsoft etc do in boosting the most commercially viable indie games is what the public really wants. Yes, indie games are pretty neat but imagine an ID@Xbox E3 sizzle reel that’s all buggy Minecraft clones and text based choose your own adventure novels.
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Aug 7, 2019 22:53
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graventy posted:Ohhhh nooooo, a free centrally located forum where game buyers can find answers to their questions and help from people suffering with the same bugs. The Steam forums have the same problems as 4chan, Reddit, early Twitch chat, QuakeWorld chat and basically anywhere else where there’s no rule enforcement and changing pseudonyms is free and easy. Det_no posted:they've fixed things like review bombings Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 23:05 on Aug 7, 2019 |
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Aug 7, 2019 22:57
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Taciturn Tactician posted:If you honestly think that "mixed" somehow looks worse to someone looking at a store page than "this developer has chosen to disable reviews" I don't know what to tell you. User reviews are meaningless to me personally because I’m a “gaming boomer” who listens to the same old folks that were reviewing games in the PS2 era, but a lot of the people I befriended online from 1998-2004 went into the industry and from watching them and other devs who are their Facebook friends shoot the poo poo about the industry, the tone I have picked up is that developers (or their bosses) are really concerned about user reviews. The ideal thing would be if they could disable all “Steam community” functions while still keeping their sales page on store.steampowered, using the service as a pure marketplace and avoiding the other functions. I may be misinterpreting these people, so I am not going to dive deep into this, it’s just the tone I’ve picked up. Community engagement is something studios often pay people to do now, and Valve basically creates a subreddit for your game whether you want one or not. nessin posted:As for user reviews, why is turning off user reviews an option that should be in the hands of the developer? If Valve were to do it we could have a conversation, but developers absolutely should not have the power to arbitrarily just remove the review feature. Because the Steam community stuff rarely benefits developers. It’s there to benefit Valve, because you get accustomed to expecting forums and a public screenshot/art image board fees, etc for each video game that you own and they hope you miss those features in other launchers. Apex Legends, Overwatch, etc doesn’t have any problem communicating with it’s players on it’s own terms. Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 01:06 on Aug 8, 2019 |
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Aug 8, 2019 00:59
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I’ll be straightforward: I care first and foremost about myself as a consumer, and the way Steam used to operate and the way Epic almost operates now is best for me. I just don’t care that much that some developers stressed themselves into their doctor’s office over whether their indie game gets on Steam. And to be honest, when every two-bit self published trash is collected in the market like Steam does then they can’t stress because being on Steam is totally meaningless anymore. That’s not to say that there shouldn’t be an indie storefront, but Valve shouldn’t have made Steam that storefront. An “only the good ones” policy is fine if itchio or some other site exists for every other thing. There’s porn games that exist only through Patreon, there’s a lot of ways to fund a video game. I don’t appreciate Epic taking games off of Steam, but I can’t complain with them treating indies as unworthy of standing with the industry titans aside from some proven successes. That’s what I as a consumer want.
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Aug 23, 2019 04:42
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..btt posted:It's great when people say this like it's not entirely subjective. Hades is on there and made exclusive because Supergiant has proven themselves in the other marketplace. Hyper Light Drifter is on there because it has sold so well and been so well received over many platforms. I don’t owe the indie game community my attention span for the thousands of indie games each year, just as Amazon doesn’t need to stock everyone’s Soundcloud album. The fact that itchio (and Soundcloud) exist is good enough to get projects out there and let the people who want to separate wheat from chaff do so. Meanwhile, this platform’s premiere game store (Steam) is loaded with more self published BS than the consoles that game store is competing with.
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Aug 23, 2019 09:22
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..btt posted:Two games that I don't care about at all and are just noise on any store to me. Movies by Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino maybe don’t matter to me but they still broke through the “art house” niche to be featured in the kind of multiplexes that show Star Wars in the room next door. Saying the independent projects that get the most interest from their audience like most are also the most likely to succeed in front of a wider audience isn’t new theory here. I don’t go to AMC 15 expecting to see student art projects.
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Aug 23, 2019 10:06
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Junkenstein posted:How many people actually browse Steam looking for something to buy vs reading about a game that sounds good on the forums, game sites, youtube whatever and typing it into the search bar? My experience with the Store browsing is that I installed Linux on my machine and wanted to see games that had native support (or at least a fully featured wrapper), and after putting that filter on I had hundreds of choose your own adventure games that all displayed different text over the same window. I get tag sorting exists but it’s unfortunate I risk losing Hatoful Boyfriend or something trying to lose carbon copy interactive fiction apps.
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Aug 23, 2019 12:06
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Pirate Jet posted:That’s it, your post ends there. EGS isn’t even on Linux. FYI: It actually does run under Lutris and you can buy stuff and play games, just like Origin. Epic-purchased “Easy Anti-Cheat” used by Fortnite (and Apex Legends) is incompatible with emulation, though, so most uses for it are sorta pointless. Last I looked Dauntless works, though character creation didn’t.
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Aug 24, 2019 04:34
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Ariza posted:Oh thank God. When I was doing IT work a few years ago, the way they were trying to ape app stores as a replacement to our agreed upon programs was a loving nightmare. TBH, having a hundred different parties on dozens of CDNs hosting stuff you need isn't great either. So many of the same people who poop on MS Store are the same people who poop on, say, GeForce Experience. But it'd be a much better onboarding experience if Nvidia drivers just downloaded and installed from MS store when needed for new OS installs.
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Oct 25, 2019 16:52
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I mean the exclusive thing rubs people the wrong way and I get that, but I do think it’s pretty cool that Epic buys a bunch of copies and developers get money before they’ve completed their game. It’s basically similar to the system of a book advance against royalties. Which if you don’t have a moneyed publisher in gaming is but a dream. I do wonder if the hatred for the exclusives went away if they pivoted hard to being browser based, allowed you to download the games you purchase from them over the web up to a certain size, and made the launcher application a glorified resume-ready downloader as offline games are concerned. In other words, if they let you add their single player games to any launcher you want. They’re not THAT far off technically from being able to do that. I get that the live service games will require the launcher for their cycle of patching. But it’s not Fortnite/Dauntless fans who are calling for the thing’s death.
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Dec 29, 2019 13:40
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Irony Be My Shield posted:The real issue is that it's a loss leading attempt to corner the market rather than a long term business model. Let’s not pretend that’s for any reason than Valve just doesn’t want to. The most insidious thing they’re doing is tying engine fees to the store. That’s potential antitrust right there. But saying “we’ll give you an advance for 500 copies right now” isn’t a bad thing just because Gabe says “meh, nah.” That’s just letting Gabe set the terms of business. It’s bad when huge AAA studios sign their games away for a year, it’s because they’re huge AAA studios and should have enough money to not be swayed by that sort of thing. Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Dec 29, 2019 |
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Dec 29, 2019 20:26
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