JBento

It's almost as if when you get all the money for a product that you'll never be responsible for upfront, you don't really care how well the product does. Crazy, I know.

I mean, the EGS has no pros. It does have a truckload of cons to make up for that, though.

HAHAHAHA, you must be new here. And by "here", I mean, "the world". When companies get higher profits they don't spread the newfound margins among the consumers (or the employees, for that matter), they just bump up the bonuses to executives.

Obsidian couldn't market cold water in the Sahara, news at 11, just after our special investigative report: "The Sun's Surface: It's Bloody Hot!"

Wouldn't it be "publicly OVERcutting"?

First, there's absolutely not a single piece of sci-fi that isn't political. Second, if there WERE such a thing, it most certainly would not be a work where the future is run by soulless megacorporations. Boyarsky is just trying his (not very good) best to not say something that will rile up the American corporate-asskissing right-wingers.

Obsidian has always sucked at marketing/advertising. This is nothing new. You'd think Private Division would do a decent job at it, but I guess that since they already got their money, whether the game succeeds or flops is inconsequential to them so they just no-assed it, too.

People complained about Origin because Origin is... well, I'd call it crap, but the EGS has lowered the bar for an online store so much that I'm going to stick to "not good".

CDPR ACTUALLY MAKES CP2077. Nobody's complaining about 1st-party exclusives, because, even though they're still bad from a consumer position, everybody understands that makers putting it only on their store is fair.

It's absolutely NOT an opinion. Epic lacks many features present in Steam while having no feature that Steam doesn't have*. The EGS is OBJECTIVELY worse than Steam. Also objectively, Tim Swindley is lying trash. *unless you count having your account banned for participating on their sale (which they somehow managed to screw up, leading to various games being removed from the store) as a "feature"

No it is a Epic exclusive, some say that it is also on the win shop, but don't you need win10 for that (it is pretty much just an xbox shop) They advertised on steam for hype, then took the money from Epic and made it exclusive. I have lost alot of respect from obsidian after this! People that care about pro consumer features and choice in where to buy, should not support this practice and the Epic shop (they want a monopoly market ala xbox) After 1 year apparently. Obsidian usually take a year after release to finish the game anyway so no harm done. Except of course, if you have access to the internet, where the game will have been spoilered to hell and back after a few months.

No, but you DID have to make sure that you never misplaced your manual or your codewheel or whatever ridiculous hell of a copyprotection method devs thought was a good idea to cram into their games. If anything, "using Steam to verify the game is legit" was an immense step down in the "hassle the legit consumers and literally nobody else" practice. And, as this can't be said enough, copyprotection is the most ridiculously useless crap to ever be coded - if your game is getting pirated, it's not EACH PIRATE breaking your precious DRM, it's like 10 guys all over the world who then make the files available to everyone, and there's literally nothing you can do that can beat any of those 10 guys.

PLAY GRIM DAWN!!!!!!!!

According to Snapshot Games, you're wrong. Their representative said they did a deal for minimum guaranteed sales (WITHOUT a lump sum, to boot).

Ok, this idea that the exclusives are due to a "better cut" needs to die, and I'm going to stab it now. The exclusives aren't due to a better cut. They're due to Epic either throwing a big bag of money at publishers right off the bat and/or promising a minimum number of sales after a certain time (or, possibly, both). Immediately, yes. But the reality is a bit more complicated than that. Epic Store is throwing a ton of money on top of these games, the longer plan is attracting more devs into the service and retaining them through better rev shares. To do that, they need more users. This is the short-term plan. Having worked in a major game store platform, I can say with certainty that they won't deal in minimum game sales. It's a lump sum kind of deal. They have the leverage to do that, and they will buy their way into relevance. Not with my money, though, at least until they keep on with the exclusivity bullcrap. Are you saying Epic isn't doing deals for minimum game sales, or am I misreading? Because if that's what you're saying, then you're categorically wrong, as Snapshot Games flat out said that was the deal, and that they got no lump sum.

Ok, this idea that the exclusives are due to a "better cut" needs to die, and I'm going to stab it now. The exclusives aren't due to a better cut. They're due to Epic either throwing a big bag of money at publishers right off the bat and/or promising a minimum number of sales after a certain time (or, possibly, both).

No, people who pre-order Anno 1800 on Steam are getting it on release day. It's actually a better deal than what I suggested earlier (which was giving people Steam keys that don't activate until a year after release). The Outer Worlds was in the top 3 most wishlisted games on Steam. Private Division could totally have demanded something like this from Epic and gotten it. It's some kind of compromise, but I'm not sure it's a great one from a customer standpoint. It's offshoring the developer's risk at the expense of the customer. In return for the game being available in a timely manner on their preferred platform, they assume all financial risk that the game sucks. It works GREAT for the developer. They get those sweet, sweet Epic store bribes without looking quite as ****y to the people who aren't a big fan of Epic AND they likely juice preorders all in exchange for the low, low price of making their customers buy something before the reviews are out unless they want to read the reviews first and then either buy on an inferior platform or wait a year. It gives you two lousy choices. AND they're going to have to outsource those reviews, because it's not like Epic lets you post reviews.

I think you mean Private Division - they're the TOW publishers. But you don't get a get out of jail fee card just because you didn't bother to check if what you were hitching your cart to was a calm ox or a raging bull. Nevertheless, feel free to be angry at Bethesda - the NV deal, the low-quality betas they try to pass off as finished games, the entire debaucle that is 76... You're not exactly begging for reasons, here.

I was under the impression that the 30% gets slashed depending not on how big you are, but on how much you sell - past a certain number of sales for a specific product, Steam lowers those 30%. Obviously, big players still have the advantage here, because titles by big players tend to sell better.

"Can't undercut Steam" is an actual, factual lie - I could get Grim Dawn for about 15-20% cheaper on the GD site than I can on Steam, for instance. So is "no exclusive content elsewhere" - different preorder bonuses from different places are rather more abundant that I'd like, for example (I'd like them to be zero, for the record). And yes, implementing stuff like forums and stuff costs money. In fact, I'd suggest that if someone is putting up and maintaining a forum for your product they should receive monetary compensation. Like, maybe by taking a cut off the money you make from said product. Can't think of anyone who does that, and I've been trying so hard there's Smoke (or something like it) coming from my ears.

Having exclusives does the precise opposite of forcing competition and innovation, except for competition on buying exclusives, which is nothing the consumer benefits from. Competition happens when several stores offer substitutable products. Then the consumer can pick one over the other because the overall package appeals to them the most. Whether that will translate into a benefit for the consumer still remains to be seen. It does not, and it will not. Steam is actually throwing money at new functionalities (they have a new game-event display thing or whatever it is coming out of closed Beta now - whether it's good is anyone's guess), meaning it was something they'd alreayd started long ago before the trashfire that is Epic. Hells, they're even nice enough to let the TOW and Metro pages stay up* instead of nixing them. If this exclusives thing starts catching, you can say goodbye to that, because no-one's going to spend money developing, testing, and adding features that people may or may not like to a product when they can just spend it making sure people have no choice using that product regardless of how crappy it is. *I hear the Metro devs are telling people who bought the game on Epic to go to the Steam forum to report bugs - I have the entire Metro seires on my ingore list because the games never interested me and I'm SURE AS HELL not touching the EGS to find out, does anyone know if this is true? I don't consider STEAM or any other distributor to be worth anywhere near what they are charging and I don't think I've ever used one of their 'features'. The friends list maybe, sometimes a post on steam forum. I mean, how hard is that to do ?. STEAM, please don't continue 'developing' your platform, there is already too much bloat autoloading into my game. If no distributor is worth what they are charging, why are all companies using them instead of doing the distribution themselves? You don't think that, say, Steam showing your game on the splash page or on the discovery queue during sales is a ridiculous amount of targeted publicity at *checks numbers* EIGHTY MILLION PEOPLE (holy crap)? On the user side, you've never checked reviews on a game before buying it? If you have a technical problem with a game, you never check the forums to see if anyone has encountered it before and if (and how) they've solved it? You've never bought more than one game/x-pac/DLC at a time (remember, Epic has no shopping cart, which is something i still lol at)? Edit: Do the devs of the games you play not post announcements or patch notes on the forums? Do you not read those?

Having exclusives does the precise opposite of forcing competition and innovation, except for competition on buying exclusives, which is nothing the consumer benefits from. Competition happens when several stores offer substitutable products. Then the consumer can pick one over the other because the overall package appeals to them the most. Whether that will translate into a benefit for the consumer still remains to be seen. It does not, and it will not. Steam is actually throwing money at new functionalities (they have a new game-event display thing or whatever it is coming out of closed Beta now - whether it's good is anyone's guess), meaning it was something they'd alreayd started long ago before the trashfire that is Epic. Hells, they're even nice enough to let the TOW and Metro pages stay up* instead of nixing them. If this exclusives thing starts catching, you can say goodbye to that, because no-one's going to spend money developing, testing, and adding features that people may or may not like to a product when they can just spend it making sure people have no choice using that product regardless of how crappy it is. *I hear the Metro devs are telling people who bought the game on Epic to go to the Steam forum to report bugs - I have the entire Metro seires on my ingore list because the games never interested me and I'm SURE AS HELL not touching the EGS to find out, does anyone know if this is true?

It does not, unless by "more competition" you mean "more games going exclusive." In fact, the SMART move by Valve would be to immediately tank any and all projects it has going to improve Steam and funnel that money into getting exclusives themselves. I mean, there's literally no feature Steam can implement to have me buy TOW with them before the exclusivity year is up, so why would they try? In fairness, Epic has stated that they intend - at some point - to stop buying exclusives and HAS put out a roadmap towards adding new features to try and draw closer to parity with Steam. Clearly it's light years behind at this point on both fronts, but it is at least saying the right things. I agree with you that the smart move for Valve would be to stop sitting on their hands, although I think a better approach would be to reduce the cut they take for hosting games on their store vs. what Epic does of outright buying exclusives. That's going to get expensive quick if both storefronts are running up the bidding. But if these moves by Epic do force Steam to innovate, reduce the amount of revenue they take from developers, etc. it could be a good thing in the long run. It's hypothetical at this point that it will be healthy in the long run, but it does have the potential. Light years is putting it mildly: it's a digital storefront WITHOUT SO MUCH AS A SHOPPING CART*, which is so absolutely ridiculous that if it came up in a work of fiction it would be called out. To be honest, I don't really care what Epic says, because I don't trust them anyway (and even if I did, everything the head of Epic says starts as insulting as goes up from there, so it's not like there's a stellar record there). When they start DOING, then we'll talk; unfortunately, all they've done so far is screw over consumers. There's no lower cut that Valve can take to change this: Epic is guaranteeing minimum sales, menaing what they're offering is guaranteed profit, which is something lower cuts don't do. And, again, this gives Steam no reason to innovate, because Epic isn't doing "look at this awesome feature we came up with," they're doing "haha, features are for suckers, it's our way or bust," and there's no feature that can change that. *The lack of shopping cart doesn't really affect me, but it's an example of how the EGS fails at even the most basic of functionalities. As someone who plays on two computers, though, the lack of cloud saves automatically means I'm not touching it, anyway.

It does not, unless by "more competition" you mean "more games going exclusive." In fact, the SMART move by Valve would be to immediately tank any and all projects it has going to improve Steam and funnel that money into getting exclusives themselves. I mean, there's literally no feature Steam can implement to have me buy TOW with them before the exclusivity year is up, so why would they try?