Epic Games Store - the console war comes to PC

[Dexter]

CS was a free mod to HL first, not their game until they bought it.
And bought is exactly what Epic did to Obsidian's game. Fair is fair, right? Balance in all things.

The main reason behind Steam originally (it's 2002 Beta and 2003 release) wasn't to lock away CS behind a Digital Distribution platform or store or even necessarily a DRM system (the controversy around that mainly came later with the release of Half Life 2, which was a SinglePlayer game not working without an Internet connection and made them develop "Offline Mode"). In fact Valve didn't even think of using it as a Digital Distribution platform/storefront until the end of 2005. Before Valve developed Steam, CS already used WON as a platform, and they didn't have an Auto-patching system and competent Anti-cheat tool, and huge problems that resulted from that, with everyone having to check if they had the newest version and then having to manually patch to be able to play on the right servers: https://www.ausgamers.com/features/read/3037280

Doug: Well you have to remember that it was built as an auto-updating system for Counter-strike. That was the genesis of Steam was, we had this thing called Counter-strike which had come to us from the mod community and at the time, Quake 2 I think was the leading FPS online game with about eight thousand concurrent users. Counter-strike goes out, it goes to eight, 12, 20, 30 thousand concurrent users and at that time that seemed like just this astronomical number of people.

And they were all playing different versions. We’d release an update and we’d break the game for 48 hours and we’d see the concurrent users go from 30,000 down to zero and then we’d sit there anxiously for a week to see if it would come back. And it did and we were like “okay, enough with this inertia”. It was slowing down our releases, because we didn’t want to put out a release and break the game until we had enough that it was worth breaking it for.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/the-last-of-the-independents-

Q:When developing Steam, did you make a conscious decision to look at what Microsoft was developing with Live and try to match that?

Doug Lombardi:You know, we went around to Yahoo, Microsoft...Who else was around at that time? Probably Real Networks and anybody who seemed like a likely candidate to build something like Steam.

We basically had our feature list that we wanted. We wanted auto-updating, we wanted better anti-piracy, better anti-cheat, and selling the games over the wire was something we came up with later. But we had like real world problems because Counter-Strike was getting huge and we would release these updates that would knock the 70 - 80 thousand simultaneous players right down to zero and it would take 48 - 72 hours for it to come back up and that was like this huge anxiety roller coaster that we would take every two or three months.

It also limited our ability to put those updates up because of that. It was like..."Well, if we're going to turn the lights off for 48 hours in the player community, the update needs to be worthy of that." So, you had to bundle up the things you were going to put up in the update or you're going to pull it out because you didn't want to take the roller coaster ride. So that was really the impetus to why we did [Steam].

We went around to everybody and said "Are you guys doing anything like this? We need this for our games, and therefore other people are going to need it someday soon." And everyone was like: "Blah, blah, blah...That's a million miles in the future." So we said "We need it now" and everyone said "Well, we can't help you."

So we just went off and started doing it. Once we pick something we just start going after it and we're not really too concerned with what other people are doing because that's just an easy way to get distracted.

Also, Epic didn't buy Obsidian - Microsoft did. And note that even Microsoft didn't lock "The Outer Worlds" to the Windows Store, or even their console as an "Exclusive" even though they could have well done that. It's Epic Games that's throwing around bribes for it to release only on their shit platform first.

 

[Black]

CS was a free mod to HL first, not their game until they bought it.
And bought is exactly what Epic did to Obsidian's game. Fair is fair, right? Balance in all things.

The main reason behind Steam wasn't to lock away CS behind a Digital Distribution platform or store or even a DRM system, in fact Valve didn't use it as a Digital Distribution platform/storefront until the end of 2005. Before Valve developed Steam CS already used WON, and they didn't have an Auto-patching system and huge problems with that with everyone having to check if they had the newest version and then having to manually patch to be able to play on the right servers: https://www.ausgamers.com/features/read/3037280

Doug: Well you have to remember that it was built as an auto-updating system for Counter-strike. That was the genesis of Steam was, we had this thing called Counter-strike which had come to us from the mod community and at the time, Quake 2 I think was the leading FPS online game with about eight thousand concurrent users. Counter-strike goes out, it goes to eight, 12, 20, 30 thousand concurrent users and at that time that seemed like just this astronomical number of people.

And they were all playing different versions. We’d release an update and we’d break the game for 48 hours and we’d see the concurrent users go from 30,000 down to zero and then we’d sit there anxiously for a week to see if it would come back. And it did and we were like “okay, enough with this inertia”. It was slowing down our releases, because we didn’t want to put out a release and break the game until we had enough that it was worth breaking it for.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/the-last-of-the-independents-

Q:When developing Steam, did you make a conscious decision to look at what Microsoft was developing with Live and try to match that?

Doug Lombardi:You know, we went around to Yahoo, Microsoft...Who else was around at that time? Probably Real Networks and anybody who seemed like a likely candidate to build something like Steam.

We basically had our feature list that we wanted. We wanted auto-updating, we wanted better anti-piracy, better anti-cheat, and selling the games over the wire was something we came up with later. But we had like real world problems because Counter-Strike was getting huge and we would release these updates that would knock the 70 - 80 thousand simultaneous players right down to zero and it would take 48 - 72 hours for it to come back up and that was like this huge anxiety roller coaster that we would take every two or three months.

It also limited our ability to put those updates up because of that. It was like..."Well, if we're going to turn the lights off for 48 hours in the player community, the update needs to be worthy of that." So, you had to bundle up the things you were going to put up in the update or you're going to pull it out because you didn't want to take the roller coaster ride. So that was really the impetus to why we did [Steam].

We went around to everybody and said "Are you guys doing anything like this? We need this for our games, and therefore other people are going to need it someday soon." And everyone was like: "Blah, blah, blah...That's a million miles in the future." So we said "We need it now" and everyone said "Well, we can't help you."

So we just went off and started doing it. Once we pick something we just start going after it and we're not really too concerned with what other people are doing because that's just an easy way to get distracted.

WON had its share of problems but manually patching wasn't one of them. You're talking about early 2000s PC gaming, back when people still knew how to operate PCs without a program doing everything for them. Suddenly being told that you have to get this completely new (and broken) program to play a game wasn't really well received and the fact that Steam used to gobble memory like crazy made it pretty much impossible for many people, me included, to play the fucking game, even after we paid for it.

Valve shut down the last of its WON servers on July 31, 2004. All online portions of Valve's games were transferred to their own Steam system. The announcement disappointed some of the long-time Half-Life and Counter-Strike players who had become accustomed to the older versions of those games still being hosted on the WON servers. For example, WON servers hosted version 1.5 of Counter-Strike, while Valve's Steam system required users to update to the newer version 1.6.

But people have forgiven and forgotten, too many years they've been best buddies with a corporation and Steam became synonymous with PC gaming.

 

[Grauken]

We can't all hold a grudge for old shit that doesn't matter anymore, we have all new grudges now

 

[Black]

We can't all hold a grudge for old shit that doesn't matter anymore

Wrong.

 

[Mustawd]

CS was a free mod to HL first, not their game until they bought it.
And bought is exactly what Epic did to Obsidian's game. Fair is fair, right? Balance in all things.

The main reason behind Steam wasn't to lock away CS behind a Digital Distribution platform or store or even a DRM system, in fact Valve didn't use it as a Digital Distribution platform/storefront until the end of 2005. Before Valve developed Steam CS already used WON, and they didn't have an Auto-patching system and huge problems with that with everyone having to check if they had the newest version and then having to manually patch to be able to play on the right servers: https://www.ausgamers.com/features/read/3037280

Doug: Well you have to remember that it was built as an auto-updating system for Counter-strike. That was the genesis of Steam was, we had this thing called Counter-strike which had come to us from the mod community and at the time, Quake 2 I think was the leading FPS online game with about eight thousand concurrent users. Counter-strike goes out, it goes to eight, 12, 20, 30 thousand concurrent users and at that time that seemed like just this astronomical number of people.

And they were all playing different versions. We’d release an update and we’d break the game for 48 hours and we’d see the concurrent users go from 30,000 down to zero and then we’d sit there anxiously for a week to see if it would come back. And it did and we were like “okay, enough with this inertia”. It was slowing down our releases, because we didn’t want to put out a release and break the game until we had enough that it was worth breaking it for.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/the-last-of-the-independents-

Q:When developing Steam, did you make a conscious decision to look at what Microsoft was developing with Live and try to match that?

Doug Lombardi:You know, we went around to Yahoo, Microsoft...Who else was around at that time? Probably Real Networks and anybody who seemed like a likely candidate to build something like Steam.

We basically had our feature list that we wanted. We wanted auto-updating, we wanted better anti-piracy, better anti-cheat, and selling the games over the wire was something we came up with later. But we had like real world problems because Counter-Strike was getting huge and we would release these updates that would knock the 70 - 80 thousand simultaneous players right down to zero and it would take 48 - 72 hours for it to come back up and that was like this huge anxiety roller coaster that we would take every two or three months.

It also limited our ability to put those updates up because of that. It was like..."Well, if we're going to turn the lights off for 48 hours in the player community, the update needs to be worthy of that." So, you had to bundle up the things you were going to put up in the update or you're going to pull it out because you didn't want to take the roller coaster ride. So that was really the impetus to why we did [Steam].

We went around to everybody and said "Are you guys doing anything like this? We need this for our games, and therefore other people are going to need it someday soon." And everyone was like: "Blah, blah, blah...That's a million miles in the future." So we said "We need it now" and everyone said "Well, we can't help you."

So we just went off and started doing it. Once we pick something we just start going after it and we're not really too concerned with what other people are doing because that's just an easy way to get distracted.

WON had its share of problems but manually patching wasn't one of them. You're talking about early 2000s PC gaming, back when people still knew how to operate PCs without a program doing everything for them. Suddenly being told that you have to get this completely new (and broken) program to play a game wasn't really well received and the fact that Steam used to gobble memory like crazy made it pretty much impossible for many people, me included, to play the fucking game, even after we paid for it.

Valve shut down the last of its WON servers on July 31, 2004. All online portions of Valve's games were transferred to their own Steam system. The announcement disappointed some of the long-time Half-Life and Counter-Strike players who had become accustomed to the older versions of those games still being hosted on the WON servers. For example, WON servers hosted version 1.5 of Counter-Strike, while Valve's Steam system required users to update to the newer version 1.6.

But people have forgiven and forgotten, too many years they've been best buddies with a corporation and Steam became synonymous with PC gaming.

If you want to hold a grudge, then hold a grudge against online stores in general.

I’ve said this before, but I completely lost interest in PC gaming after Steam launched. I was anti Steam for close to a decade before I made my steam account.

One of the biggest reasons why I’m pro Steam now is that they check 8/10 boxes as a place to buy from and keep a library of games.

What is Epic though? What are they doing different? What are they bringing to the table? Absolutely nothing new besides exclusives. And beyond that they are not even as good as Steam in features. Finally, all my library is on Steam.


When the Epic store was announced I just shrugged because why should I even care about another store?

But now after all these exclusives it’s obvious to me that not only are they nit oroviong positive competition to Steam, but they’re also causing harm to consumers.

For you anti Steam ppl, what exact bahavior are you expecting from Steam as a result of Epuc’s practices? How do you counter exclusives? You either ignore it or offer your own exclusives.

How is that good for the consumer? If you were just honest and say “I dislike steam so fuck them and their users” I’d respect that. Instead we’re running logical circles trying to justify retarded and anti-consumer behavior. For what? For me to pirate games again? Christ, that’s stupid.

 

[Black]

Stop hitting me with "what about Epic" because I couldn't care less. I'm never going to use it but I'm not gonna act like they're bad guys and steam is the good guys.

But riddle me this- if you can't hold a grudge for that long, how can you hope to hold bethesda accountable for their crimes when the time comes?

 

[Urthor]

Not up for these newfangled game stores with all their fancy schmancey

My heart is yours uplay I'll never abandon you. Press a button launch a game, actually has all the features, doesn't try to sell me HyperDimension Neptunia every time I launch it. Bless your socks

 

[karoliner]

If they won't acept porn games then what is the purpose of their existence?

 

[Trithne]

If they won't acept porn games then what is the purpose of their existence?

Developer welfare. The Epic store exists to keep developers in business. Selling games to actual shudder gamers is a side effect.

 

[J_C]

Having a competitor is great for the consumer in the long run

Like how will this be great for us?
Better prices? Good luck with that, we have already seen that devs don't decrease their prices despite the lower cut Epic asks for.
Better services? The Epic store is a joke feature wise, and even with their roadmap, they can be on par with Steam at max. There is nothing there, which makes it an improvement over Steam.

The only thing we get is the lack of choices when buying a new game.

 

[Reinhardt]

I hope progressive twatter crowd will shame Sweeney into accepting and funding rpgmaker gay furry games. Imagine opening Epic launcher and all you see is exclusive butts and dicks.

 

[GrainWetski]

What people who never liked how slow Grennlight was and don't like Steam Direct want from Valve, to be a publisher? The middle ground? In will be like Greenlight again. There are curators, reviews or, I don't know, fucking internet to decide what game you want to play.

It's just the usual retards that want to decide what games grown men buy and play. Some games are too "problematic" and should be burned because 30 year old men are actually 5 year old children that need to be protected by their internet parents. The market should decide, not 40 year old gamejournos. Of course, that means their friends don't automatically become millionaires just because they released a 10 minute walking simulator on Steam.

Hatred wouldn't even exist if these people got their wish. As mediocre of a game as it is, it still deserves to exist and be sold. Didn't Epic try to stop it from being sold because it used Unreal or some bullshit like that? I might be remembering wrong, but I feel like that happened after the gaywhorenos went after game.

 

[Mazisky]

Having a competitor is great for the consumer in the long run

Like how will this be great for us?
Better prices? Good luck with that, we have already seen that devs don't decrease their prices despite the lower cut Epic asks for.
Better services? The Epic store is a joke feature wise, and even with their roadmap, they can be on par with Steam at max. There is nothing there, which makes it an improvement over Steam.

The only thing we get is the lack of choices when buying a new game.

As i said, you need to wait in the long run and give Epic time to grow.

Also keep in mind my friend that you won't sell more copies of your game by being the "bro" of those butthurts in this forum, but you are still paying a higher fee due to Steam.

You call others dumb, but it's not smart either losing money only to get some virtual, useless "brofist" by a bunch of nerds.

 

[Reinhardt]

Posting on codex alone would bar him from Epic money forever so who cares.

 

[GrainWetski]

For you anti Steam ppl, what exact bahavior are you expecting from Steam as a result of Epuc’s practices? How do you counter exclusives? You either ignore it or offer your own exclusives.

I'm not one of them, but they should be porting console exclusives to PC. Don't need to make exclusive to Steam or anything, just keep them away from Epic's store.

Games like Persona 5 and Bloodborne are already collecting dust as is the fate of console exclusives. Get in touch with Atlus and Sony with bags of cash and an offer to port the games. Sony and SEGA/Atlus literally make money from doing nothing and Valve gets TONS of good will. This is of course what Epic should've been doing from the start, but they've chosen another hill to die or live on.

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

Having a competitor is great for the consumer in the long run

Like how will this be great for us?
Better prices? Good luck with that, we have already seen that devs don't decrease their prices despite the lower cut Epic asks for.
Better services? The Epic store is a joke feature wise, and even with their roadmap, they can be on par with Steam at max. There is nothing there, which makes it an improvement over Steam.

The only thing we get is the lack of choices when buying a new game.

As i said, you need to wait in the long run and give Epic time to grow.

Also keep in mind my friend that you won't sell more copies of your game by being the "bro" of those butthurts in this forum, but you are still paying a higher fee due to Steam.

You call others dumb, but it's not smart either losing money only to get some virtual, useless "brofist" by a bunch of nerds.

-It's good for the consumers
-How?
-Well actually it's great for the devs

 

[Mazisky]

If Valve pays for Sony exclusives it will crush Epic in a couple of seconds. But Sony is so greed that they must pay a TON of money for this to happen.

And if it will happen, we already got a benefit as customers for Epic to exist.

 

[Plaguecrafter]

If Valve pays for Sony exclusives it will crush Epic in a couple of seconds. But Sony is so greed that they must pay a TON of money for this to happen.

And if it will happen, we already got a benefit as customers for Epic to exist.

Seeing how a lot of people bought Nintendo Switch just to play Breath of the Wild, it is highly unlikely Sony would let Valve sell their exclusives. At least I don't really see it happening in the near future.

 

[Mazisky]

If Valve pays for Sony exclusives it will crush Epic in a couple of seconds. But Sony is so greed that they must pay a TON of money for this to happen.

And if it will happen, we already got a benefit as customers for Epic to exist.

Seeing how a lot of people bought Nintendo Switch just to play Breath of the Wild, it is highly unlikely Sony would let Valve sell their exclusives. At least I don't really see it happening in the near future.

Not when they are fresh exclusives, sure. But many of those games are old now and Sony won't sell many ps4 anymore cause of them, while a PC version would be a huge success.

 

[Turjan]

The only thing we get is the lack of choices when buying a new game.

This. I probably buy no more than 10% of my "Steam games" on Steam. There's lots of choice when it comes to where you buy those games from.

 

[GrainWetski]

The only thing we get is the lack of choices when buying a new game.

This. I probably buy no more than 10% of my "Steam games" on Steam. There's lots of choice when it comes to where you buy those games from.

But Steam is a monopoly and you can only buy games from the monopolistic Steam.

These retards probably don't even realize Valve gets nothing if you buy from sites selling Steam keys. It's also cheaper 99% of the time. Good thing we have Epic putting a stop to that.

 

[gerey]

P5 and Bloodborne as Epic exclusives

I don't think Bloodborne is ever going to be ported to any system that isn't owned by Sony, sadly. Both the development of Bloodborne and Demon's Souls was financed by Sony.

 

[Black Angel]

I love the Epic store, all those idiots beta-testing those games so that they're are mostly bugfree when I buy them on Steam or GOG, it's great

But how can they report bugs without a forum?

Indeed. People keep saying that Epictards are going to betatest these games coming out on Epic for one year, but how the fuck will they do that when there's no forum? You know, 'cause pointing out bugs and glitches to the devs through an easily accessible forum, and even warning people with a 'Not Recommended' review because of shit launch state that will highly likely changed once all the issues are ironed out are 'toxic' features.

 

[Mazisky]

I love the Epic store, all those idiots beta-testing those games so that they're are mostly bugfree when I buy them on Steam or GOG, it's great

But how can they report bugs without a forum?

Indeed. People keep saying that Epictards are going to betatest these games coming out on Epic for one year, but how the fuck will they do that when there's no forum? You know, 'cause pointing out bugs and glitches to the devs through an easily accessible forum, and even warning people with a 'Not Recommended' review because of shit launch state that will highly likely changed once all the issues are ironed out are 'toxic' features.

If you are unable to open reddit or look for some feedback around the internet, you deserve all the shit anyway.

 

[Black Angel]

I love the Epic store, all those idiots beta-testing those games so that they're are mostly bugfree when I buy them on Steam or GOG, it's great

But how can they report bugs without a forum?

Indeed. People keep saying that Epictards are going to betatest these games coming out on Epic for one year, but how the fuck will they do that when there's no forum? You know, 'cause pointing out bugs and glitches to the devs through an easily accessible forum, and even warning people with a 'Not Recommended' review because of shit launch state that will highly likely changed once all the issues are ironed out are 'toxic' features.

If you are unable to open reddit or look for some feedback around the internet, you deserve all the shit anyway.

Anyway, petition to create a newtag that reads Epictard™/Epicfag™ and tag everyone who keep defending Epic's scummy practice ITT.