Epic Games Store - the console war comes to PC

[Unkillable Cat]

I have over 15k games on Steam on ignore now (which is apparently roughly half of the entire Steam catalogue.) I'd imagine I'm probably in the top .1% — if not even higher — of most games viewed by users on Steam.
From going through all those games I've realized one thing: Most games are awful. I'm not skipping over your game from a lack of exposure, I'm skipping it because something about it sucks. There is no algorithm in the world that can fix most games being complete shit.
This especially applies to games that possibly don't actually suck but I'm tired of seeing rehashes of. 2D "souls-like", metroidvanias, etc., There's so god damn many of them and they all look bland as hell.

Just in case anyone was thinking this was an unexpected development, solely because of Steam and its environment, allow me to give a little perspective.

The top three 8-bit home computers of the 1980s (the Commodore 64, the Sinclair Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC, in that order) had limited lifespans. The Spectrum was the oldest with 12 years of official support, the C-64 managed 11 years and the Amstrad only 8 years. And yet they have 15000+ titles released for them. Each. The Spectrum alone has 27000+ entries. And this during an era where was no digital distribution, no internet and I think only the C-64 supported modems and such.

And yet the song remains the same: 95% of the games on these systems are awful. There's about a few dozen games on each of these systems that rank as "must-play", twice that number of "good, entertaining games", twice that number of "fairly good games" and finally there's thousands of crap games not even worth mentioning except for nostalgia's sake, at best.

On the consoles the story is a little better because some form of curation takes place there, but ultimately the end result is the same though the numbers may differ a bit.

 

[deuxhero]

Unkillable Cat
I have yet to hear of a single great or even good Spectrum exclusive that came out during its official lifespan (and that caveat is only because of that Castlevania fangame). All the good games I hear of on it have better versions on other systems.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I have yet to hear of a single great or even good Spectrum exclusive that came out during its official lifespan (and that caveat is only because of that Castlevania fangame). All the good games I hear of on it have better versions on other systems.

Neither have I to be honest, though I have hope that at least one such game exists. I do know of a couple of games where the Spectrum version is the best one, odd as it may sound.

 

[deuxhero]

Unkillable Cat
What are the games best on Spectrum?

 

[MuscleSpark]

Steam does nothing to earn their 30%.

 

[someone else]

Is there a thread about Epic's free games giveaways?
Currently it is Surviving Mars and 2 dlcs.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

That's the kind of statement I'd expect from a person licking the boots of a publisher.
Which describes Schreier perfectly.

I actually loathe the term "consumer". I'll always refer to myself as a customer.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

That's the kind of statement I'd expect from a person licking the boots of a publisher.
Which describes Schreier perfectly.

I actually loathe the term "consumer". I'll always refer to myself as a customer.

It was a deflection, something you'd expect from an employee working PR at EA.

 

[Alienman]

I prefer myself connoisseur.

 

[Junmarko]

Timestamped at Sweeney's response.

"I'm looking forward to Tencent hearing about this and then Sweeney's whole statement being redacted".

Lol.

 

[Mojobeard]

Tencent owns 5% of Activision Blizzard. But apparently their 40% ownership of Epic doesn't mean anything. And pigs fly.

 

[Ismaul]

I prefer myself connoisseur.

I prefer myself too.

 

[passerby]

Tencent owns 5% of Activision Blizzard. But apparently their 40% ownership of Epic doesn't mean anything. And pigs fly.

It's not about company shares it's about a potential of loosing a growing market, since they were constantly being threatened with ban on this market.
This is a decision purely by Activision Blizzard leadership and they sold these 5% to Tencent only so they would lobby for them in the Chinese government in the first place, they sure didn't need these money at any point to grow their bussiness.

Unless you represent a majority shareholder all you can do, is to camplain on the board meeting, or to sell the shares.
Which Epic wouldn't mind at this point, since they don't need money anymore and don't have much more shares to sell without loosing control, so dropping share price would only be an opportunity to buy some shares back.

When any of these companies bend over to Chinese, it's because of the Chinese growing market, Tencents 40% share ownership is actually a bigger leverage for negotiations with the Chinese goverment, since market ban would be damaging to a major Chinese corp at this point.

 

[Alienman]

I prefer myself connoisseur.

I prefer myself too.

My inner Yoda came half way out.

 

[Dexter]

while Valve made $27.000 profit from selling all those copies and taking their cut (30%) while they have very little overhead on listing and providing services for that specific game.

Where do people get this notion of Valve spending almost nothing on Steam? Staff, servers, R&D is not free. I know it is hard for Epic to grasp that, since they literally only provide a server and a basic storefront, but I think there is much more work on Valve's part.

How much do you realistically think it costs Valve to specifically list J_C 's game on their store and provide people that have purchased it with the ability to download it? Do you think it's more or less than Megaupload hosting it for free or imgur or whatever hosting a bunch of Screenshots from it?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

while Valve made $27.000 profit from selling all those copies and taking their cut (30%) while they have very little overhead on listing and providing services for that specific game.

Where do people get this notion of Valve spending almost nothing on Steam? Staff, servers, R&D is not free. I know it is hard for Epic to grasp that, since they literally only provide a server and a basic storefront, but I think there is much more work on Valve's part.

How much do you realistically think it costs Valve to specifically list J_C 's game on their store and provide people that have purchased it with the ability to download it? Do you think it's more or less than Megaupload hosting it for free or imgur or whatever hosting a bunch of Screenshots from it?

You'd have to factor in the cost of Steam building up their massive user base and infrastructure for 16 years so that he can enjoy his game being accessible to such a massive audience.

 

[Dexter]

You'd have to factor in the cost of Steam building up their massive user base and infrastructure for 16 years so that he can enjoy his game being accessible to such a massive audience.

You don't, none of that has absolutely any relevance whatsoever on what it effectively costs Steam to list a random game made by J_C and facilitate a few people downloading it. The cost is a fix amount that doesn't really change based on how long the service has been operating or how massive the audience is.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

You'd have to factor in the cost of Steam building up their massive user base and infrastructure for 16 years so that he can enjoy his game being accessible to such a massive audience.

You don't, none of that has absolutely any relevance whatsoever on what it effectively costs Steam to list a random game made by J_C and facilitate a few people downloading it. The cost is a fix amount that doesn't really change based on how long the service has been operating or how massive the audience is.

So we should just ignore the massive amount of money invested and risk Valve took in creating Steam?
That's the same retarded communist argument people use for saying employers create nothing of value.

 

[Dexter]

So we should just ignore the massive amount of money invested and risk Valve took in creating Steam?
That's the same retarded communist argument people use for saying employers create nothing of value.

These are factual statements that don't depend on or have anything to do with the popularity of Steam or your emotional appeal to "MUH GOMMUNISM!"

while they have very little overhead on listing and providing services for that specific game.

You don't, none of that has absolutely any relevance whatsoever on what it effectively costs Steam to list a random game made by J_C and facilitate a few people downloading it. The cost is a fix amount that doesn't really change based on how long the service has been operating or how massive the audience is.

None of what you're arguing changes or has anything to do with how much it effectively costs Steam to list J_C's game. It's a few database entries that he himself fills out and someone at Valve might go over once to see if he uploaded something naughty as a Screenshot before pressing the Live button, also the hosting cost of a few screenshots and a Trailer with very low traffic and the download of a few MB each time someone wants to play it. I'd be very surprised if the cost of listing his game was even measurable for Valve, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was somewhere around the price of a coffee or lower over the lifetime of such a game (and I might be overstating that based on it not being entirely automated and there being a person involved wasting a minute or two at one point or another). The fact that they already have a far-reaching worldwide infrastructure in place just makes the actual cost lower than it would be on say itch.io or his own website.

What you're talking about is whether it's worth for J_C to agree to Steam's terms of taking 30% off the Sale price anyway, knowing the costs for them are that low given their wide reach to a large worldwide audience, which is an entirely different question than "what it costs them" to host it or what their overhead is.

 

[passerby]

So we should just ignore the massive amount of money invested and risk Valve took in creating Steam?
That's the same retarded communist argument people use for saying employers create nothing of value.

The initial investment and risk involved in creating Steam was like two orders of magnitude smaller than with Epic.
After it's introduction it always grew organically, financed from current profits, to serve demands as they arised, to receive guaranteed returns.

 

[Dexter]

The initial investment and risk involved in creating Steam was like two orders of magnitude smaller than with Epic.
After it's introduction it always grew organically, financed from current profits, to serve demands as they arised, to receive guaranteed returns.

We were doing so well, and then someone has to go ahead and say something even dumber than "YOUR ARGUMENT IS GOMMUNISM!". The initial investment and risk involved in developing something that doesn't exist is always orders of magnitude larger than coming in after something is a proven concept as a competitor and doing a #MeToo while trying to copy any good features (although to Epic's benefit, they really didn't copy that much yet since they don't really HAVE any noteworthy features and "shopping cart" turned into a running joke).

We've talked about this a lot of pages ago, but Valve didn't even want to develop Steam to begin with, they mainly needed something to facilitate Autoupdates and hassle-free Patching of one of their popular Online franchises (Counter Strike), as well as an Anti-Cheating solution and went around asking Tech companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Real and whatnot asking if they have or could provide a solution, finding out to their detriment that nobody was doing anything like they needed so they decided to do it themselves, probably not knowing if it'll be a success or be adopted at all or if they're wasting their time and (at that time limited) money. They came up with selling games over it afterwards and they didn't even sell any third party software for the first 3 years of the platform's lifespan after its release:

Spoiler

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.

None of this has to do with the cost of hosting/featuring a small RPG Maker game on their platform though, since they would have done all of that without the existence of J_C's or Vault Dweller's games anyway, and let's just say neither of their games have the kind of profile that would influence any change or addition to their feature-set or initiate any kind of large investment or expansion, since Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto V, Assassin's Creed, DOTA 2, PUBG or even Destiny 2 or Warframe they ain't.

 

[passerby]

The initial investment and risk involved in developing something that doesn't exist is always orders of magnitude larger than coming in after something is a proven concept as a competitor.

Pure bullshit, the more developed the industry is, the higher is economic barrier to entry, it's basic economics.

The only situation where copypasta service can easily crush the original, is when someone makes copypasta of new proven idea that is in early stages of growth, with order of magnitue higher budget and literally steal the market from before the nose of the original creators.

 

[Dexter]

The initial investment and risk involved in creating Steam was like two orders of magnitude smaller than with Epic.

The only situation where copypasta service can easily crush the original

These are not, at all, the same statements. The initial investment and risk involved in creating something (and as we've established Steam wasn't even supposed to be an Online Store initially, which is what made it actually big) has nothing to do with whether a "copypasta service" can "crush the original".

 

[J_C]

while Valve made $27.000 profit from selling all those copies and taking their cut (30%) while they have very little overhead on listing and providing services for that specific game.

Where do people get this notion of Valve spending almost nothing on Steam? Staff, servers, R&D is not free. I know it is hard for Epic to grasp that, since they literally only provide a server and a basic storefront, but I think there is much more work on Valve's part.

How much do you realistically think it costs Valve to specifically list J_C 's game on their store and provide people that have purchased it with the ability to download it? Do you think it's more or less than Megaupload hosting it for free or imgur or whatever hosting a bunch of Screenshots from it?

First, did you really feel the need to tag me in every fucking post of yours? And three times in ever post?
Second, if you really think that Valve only offers a server and a storepage for users, than I don't know if I can convince you of the adventages of Steam.

 

[Junmarko]