They released a new miner, mining cost went down.And remember how you insisted BTC could never go below $6400 or something due to mining costs or something?
They released a new miner, mining cost went down.And remember how you insisted BTC could never go below $6400 or something due to mining costs or something?
And you are "Developer"
Humble bundle widget (at least since 5 years ago) - takes 10% and takes cares of hosting, payment, everything, but publicity, awareness (which indeed Steam gives somewhat, so you should talk about that, not payment processing and hosting)
Itchio, Fastspring, BT did these for years since like 2008 (beside itcho) - around 10% same as above
If you want to justify the 30% which is huge (since it takes you another 10% from profits, more or less if you are not from US) so thats a lot in the end, for a hit and miss Visibility it gives you (you wont sell much without your own marketing/pr, but there is a 1% chance to get lucky). A balanced way would be 20%, but hey...and 10-15% for 1 mil + income or so. This is when not talking about companies having between 10k to 100k rabbid fanboys, that drive a release of a game quite well or beeing on codex good side))
I hope you are better at design or programming ))
And you are "Developer"
That steamspy interview makes it sound like they are catering their store to fix developers' concerns with Steam. Seems like a bad idea. Devs will sell on whatever platform makes them money, so Epic needs to focus on what the customers want. I didn't read anything in that interview that makes me want to purchase games on their platform.
Thanks for that info. Opt-in reviews sounds like a really, really bad idea. Either a store has product reviews, or it doesn't. But to have reviews only for some products?It sounds like not only they won't have forums because of "toxicity it brings", they won't even have reviews.
They have plans for that, from the Eurogamer interview, but...:
How will you handle user reviews / vote brigading?
Tim Sweeney: User reviews are still in development and the store will launch without this feature. When launched, it will be opt-in by developers. We're experimenting with other mechanisms to improve this further.
This whole Ipic store sounds like something thought out in a bubble.
Subnautica will be free on the Epic Store for a limited time
By Tyler Wilde 9 hours ago
Epic is launching its Steam competitor with a pretty good incentive to try it out.
After building a spectacularly large audience with Fornite, Epic is turning its game launcher into a Steam-like store—though one that offers developers a larger revenue share. The first games it's offering are now visible on the Epic Store .
First of all, Subnautica and Super Meat Boy, both great games, are going to be free for a limited time, starting later in December. Obviously, by creating an account, downloading Epic's launcher, and redeeming your free games, you become another person they can try to sell stuff to in the future. But also: free games. We recommend Subnautica big time, and it's normally $25, so it's an outstanding freebie if you enjoy singleplayer survival or alien squid encounters.
[.....]
Here's the Epic Store's full starting lineup:
- Ashen by A44 and Annapurna Interactive (now available)
- Darksiders III by Gunfire Games and THQ Nordic (available Dec 14)
- Hades by Supergiant Games (now available)
- Hello Neighbor: Hide and Seek by tinyBuild (now available)
- Genesis Alpha One by Radiation Blue and Team17 (coming soon)
- Journey by thatgamecompany and Annapurna Interactive (coming soon)
- Maneater by Tripwire Interactive (coming soon)
- Outer Wilds by Mobius Digital and Annapurna Interactive (coming soon)
- Rebel Galaxy Outlaw by Double Damage Games (coming soon)
- Satisfactory by Coffee Stain Studios (coming soon)
- Subnautica by Unknown Worlds (available for free from Dec 14 - Dec 27)
- Super Meat Boy by Team Meat (available for free from Dec 28 - Jan 10)
- World War Z by Saber Interactive (coming soon)
That's what I said: payment processing and hosting will cost you 10%. Marketing is extra. Steam charges 20% for built-in marketing, which gives you 85-90% of your sales.Compared to what? Like I said earlier, payment processing alone will cost you 10% with file hosting (pay and download). To get more than tumbleweed rolling into your store you need marketing.
And you are a "Developer"
Humble bundle widget (at least since 5 years ago) - takes 10% and takes cares of hosting, payment, everything, but publicity, awareness (which indeed Steam gives somewhat, so you should talk about that, not payment processing and hosting)
Itchio, Fastspring, BT did these for years since like 2008 (beside itcho) - around 10% same as above
I'm not trying to justify 30%. Given a choice I'd rather pay less. I'm merely pointing out that as long as Steam vastly outsells the competition, it will remain not just a digital store but the only way for indie developers to sell over 50k copies at a reasonable price.If you want to justify the 30% which is huge (since it takes you another 10% from profits, more or less if you are not from US) so thats a lot in the end, for a hit and miss Visibility it gives you (you wont sell much without your own marketing/pr, but there is a 1% chance to get lucky). A balanced way would be 20%, but hey...and 10-15% for 1 mil + income or so. This is when not talking about companies having between 10k to 100k rabbid fanboys, that drive a release of a game quite well or beeing on codex good side))
This isn't a new phenomenon, I wrote about this back in 2014 in fact (see the long Spoiler): https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...ing-dumping-ground.90469/page-66#post-3450901Noted games industry shill Rob Fahey weighs in on the horribly abusive, naive and outdated Web 2.0 practice of letting players discuss and rate games:
For quite a number of years, Valve has perceived one major challenge to the dominance of its Steam platform for digital distribution of PC games - namely the ambition of major publishers, who chafed against the firm's position of power from the outset.
Publishers had, somewhat naïvely, imagined the digital future as one in which retailers would be removed and they would assume command of both the significant profit share once taken by distributors and retailers, and perhaps more lucratively still of the customer relationship itself.
The replacement of a fragmented set of retailers large and small, all of whom could be leaned upon to some degree to a publisher's gain, with a single global retail platform big enough to simply ignore the demands -- or commercial tantrums -- of an individual publisher was a development which prompted more than a decade of wailing and gnashing of teeth. With that came occasional efforts to supplant Steam with publisher-owned services; the likes of EA's Origin opened the floodgates to publishers trying to find a way around Steam's iron grip on the market.
"After watching Steam grow so big and concentrate so much industry power in Valve's hands, they'll be wary before handing Epic enough support to do the same thing all over again"
That's the challenge to Steam which Valve has seen and acknowledged. It's responded to that challenge in ways that primarily appeal to publishers' financial sense - with one hand pointing out the sheer size of the Steam customer base which firms eschew by going to their own platforms, with the other trying to entice them back with sweeter deals on the platform's revenue share. Valve's recent price changes are well documented and discussed, and they're the most clear statement of its priorities imaginable; laser focused on enticing the industry's giants back onto the platform.
What makes Epic Games' new digital store interesting, to my mind, isn't the alternative it offers to those big publishers. It's got a slightly more enticing revenue share, but at present its user-base is, well, zero; granted, Fortnite is about as good a title to use as the foundation for a digital store as Half-Life 2 was all the way back when, but it'll still take Epic a very long time to match Valve's numbers.
Besides, publishers have been around this merry-go-around before; after watching Steam grow so big and concentrate so much industry power in Valve's hands, they'll be wary before handing Epic enough support to do the same thing all over again. (For the same reason, it doesn't matter that much how attractive Valve's revenue split becomes; the big publishers don't want the PC sector to be dominated by a monolithic retail player, no matter how generous its revenue sharing scheme looks.)
No, what makes Epic's store into such a major challenger to Steam is, rather, the fact that it's attacking from a different angle (well, multiple angles at once, as Christopher Dring pointed out earlier this week -- but this, I think, is the most important one). Sure, it'll put pressure on Valve's appeal to big publishers, but more importantly it aims to pull the rug out from underneath Steam's feet by directly appealing to the indie and mid-market developers who are the bread and butter of the PC games market.
That's reflected in the pricing structure, of course -- Epic's structure is clearly designed to be a better deal for small and mid-range developers -- but you can see it even more clearly in the commitments Epic is making about how its platform will deal with store pages, community infrastructure, news feed management and so on. The details aren't entirely nailed down, especially with regard to discovery and curation -- but Epic gives every impression of having listened carefully to years' worth of complaints and problems that Valve has, at best, been high-handed about.
The Epic Games Store launched last night with a telling focus on indies and smaller creators
To some extent that's a function of a cultural mismatch between Valve and the small or mid-sized developers to whom it ended up providing a vital platform; it's also to some degree a consequence of that blinkered focus on keeping the big boys happy, which has made Valve take the indies and mid-sized developers for granted. Those creators, after all, don't have the resources or audience required to strike out and build their own distribution platform; they need Steam's audience. They might complain a lot, and some of those complaints might be very legitimate, but where else would they go?
Well, now there is a 'where else' and Epic is making a very good fist of actually trying to build a service that will work for the indie and mid-size creators in a way that Steam has largely ceased to. To be entirely fair, this isn't just down to a lack of care and attention from Valve; many of the bad decisions made on Steam are the product of the era in which the service was created and it's monumentally harder to roll back those decisions now than it is to launch something new and make better decisions from the outset.
Steam is the product of an era in which Web 2.0 systems were new and exciting, so people thought that literally everything on the Internet could be improved by building community features into its very bones; those communities would in turn provide data which could be mined to make the service better, to make better recommendations and fine-tune the user experience. And if there was a problem within the community itself? Why, given the right algorithm, the data would have the answer to that too; that was the magic of Web 2.0.
"Valve could match Epic's revenue share tomorrow; but [not] the promise of a better place to do business, somewhere not open to the brigading, trolling and hate campaigns that have swept across Steam in recent years"
Put like that with the benefit of many years of hindsight, it all sounds impossibly naïve; how could we not have recognised how those community features would become vectors for abuse of many sorts, that bad-faith actors would figure out how to game the algorithms and twist them to their purposes, that building "community" into the most fundamental functioning of our online services would just make it nigh-on impossible to extricate those features when they turned bad?
This is the rock and hard place situation Valve has found itself in; Steam's community and the problems it has incubated isn't just a matter of forums and comment pages within Valve's control, but a network of infected tissue that spreads throughout the platform, its algorithms, its data, and out to other places beyond the firm's control where brigading, trolling and campaigns of abuse are coordinated. Weeding this out of the platform would be insanely hard work, not just technically but in terms of customer relations; it would make Valve itself into the target of all the bad actors who have spent the past few years targeting indie and mid-range developers on the platform, wrecking the livelihoods of many and the personal lives of quite a few.
Epic has the benefit of starting from a clean slate and being able to avoid those issues from day one. It's building a store in an era where the mistakes made by Web 2.0 approaches have become not only common knowledge within the industry but the topic of newspaper editorials and governmental investigations. More than that, though, it also actually seems to have been listening and to be prepared to take tough decisions which may sacrifice some commercial success in favour of a healthier, more positive ecosystem for creators. That's a big deal for many smaller developers, for whom the wrong word in the wrong place can turn Steam overnight into a vector for attacks on their livelihood and their person - a possibility of which many developers are all too aware, even if they haven't personally experienced it as yet.
Epic isn't making a big song and dance about this aspect of its attack on Steam's business, but it's telling that those decisions are being promoted up front alongside the indie-friendly revenue share. While I don't doubt that Valve's focus will remain on the big industry players for the time being, the reality is that Epic is triangulating on Steam's market in a way that goes far beyond finances.
Valve could, with some pain, match Epic's revenue share tomorrow; but the promise of a better place to do business, somewhere that's not open to the kind of brigading, trolling and hate campaigns that have swept across Steam in recent years... That could genuinely start to change the tide and entice away a whole strata of game creators that Valve has taken for granted for many years.
The indie and mid-range development scene are increasingly the industry's strongest bastion of diversity and demographic growth, which is vital to the future commercial health of gaming as a whole and the PC platform in particular; if Epic's platform becomes the go-to distribution option for those creators, Steam's operators may find themselves longing for the relative simplicity of negotiations with EA and Activision.
So this guy makes vague and unsupported allusions to harassment caused by gamers being allowed to discuss games, but for some reason he never mentions the actual, obvious, serious harassment that is endemic to the industry and a constant threat to everyone involved, namely SJW harassment. One might ask Fahey if he thinks that the CD Projekt community manager really should have been fired for using a Twitter hashtag that was judged to be insufficiently obsequious towards the transgender lobby (!), which consequently inspired an international harassment campaign resulting in the employee's termination, merely the latest in a string of such 'progressive' victories. By all accounts the answer would be something like: "Of course every game industry worker must live in constant terror of having their life and livelihood destroyed for crossing some arbitrary and ever shifting line of disrespect towards minorities - that's social justice, and you are clearly a Nazi that must be purged for even raising this issue. But gamers giving a game a bad review? Now that's harassment!"
God, what a disgusting shill.
Hey, there's a potential positive outcome. Didn't even think of that, god bless you ayy lmao.EPIC store is basically the safe space store for snowflake devs. I hope it leads to an self-purge from Steam and GOG.
Customers being able to discuss a product is not "web 2.0"Noted games industry shill Rob Fahey weighs in on the horribly abusive, naive and outdated Web 2.0 practice of letting players discuss and rate games:
For quite a number of years, Valve has perceived one major challenge to the dominance of its Steam platform for digital distribution of PC games - namely the ambition of major publishers, who chafed against the firm's position of power from the outset.
Publishers had, somewhat naïvely, imagined the digital future as one in which retailers would be removed and they would assume command of both the significant profit share once taken by distributors and retailers, and perhaps more lucratively still of the customer relationship itself.
The replacement of a fragmented set of retailers large and small, all of whom could be leaned upon to some degree to a publisher's gain, with a single global retail platform big enough to simply ignore the demands -- or commercial tantrums -- of an individual publisher was a development which prompted more than a decade of wailing and gnashing of teeth. With that came occasional efforts to supplant Steam with publisher-owned services; the likes of EA's Origin opened the floodgates to publishers trying to find a way around Steam's iron grip on the market.
"After watching Steam grow so big and concentrate so much industry power in Valve's hands, they'll be wary before handing Epic enough support to do the same thing all over again"
That's the challenge to Steam which Valve has seen and acknowledged. It's responded to that challenge in ways that primarily appeal to publishers' financial sense - with one hand pointing out the sheer size of the Steam customer base which firms eschew by going to their own platforms, with the other trying to entice them back with sweeter deals on the platform's revenue share. Valve's recent price changes are well documented and discussed, and they're the most clear statement of its priorities imaginable; laser focused on enticing the industry's giants back onto the platform.
What makes Epic Games' new digital store interesting, to my mind, isn't the alternative it offers to those big publishers. It's got a slightly more enticing revenue share, but at present its user-base is, well, zero; granted, Fortnite is about as good a title to use as the foundation for a digital store as Half-Life 2 was all the way back when, but it'll still take Epic a very long time to match Valve's numbers.
Besides, publishers have been around this merry-go-around before; after watching Steam grow so big and concentrate so much industry power in Valve's hands, they'll be wary before handing Epic enough support to do the same thing all over again. (For the same reason, it doesn't matter that much how attractive Valve's revenue split becomes; the big publishers don't want the PC sector to be dominated by a monolithic retail player, no matter how generous its revenue sharing scheme looks.)
No, what makes Epic's store into such a major challenger to Steam is, rather, the fact that it's attacking from a different angle (well, multiple angles at once, as Christopher Dring pointed out earlier this week -- but this, I think, is the most important one). Sure, it'll put pressure on Valve's appeal to big publishers, but more importantly it aims to pull the rug out from underneath Steam's feet by directly appealing to the indie and mid-market developers who are the bread and butter of the PC games market.
That's reflected in the pricing structure, of course -- Epic's structure is clearly designed to be a better deal for small and mid-range developers -- but you can see it even more clearly in the commitments Epic is making about how its platform will deal with store pages, community infrastructure, news feed management and so on. The details aren't entirely nailed down, especially with regard to discovery and curation -- but Epic gives every impression of having listened carefully to years' worth of complaints and problems that Valve has, at best, been high-handed about.
The Epic Games Store launched last night with a telling focus on indies and smaller creators
To some extent that's a function of a cultural mismatch between Valve and the small or mid-sized developers to whom it ended up providing a vital platform; it's also to some degree a consequence of that blinkered focus on keeping the big boys happy, which has made Valve take the indies and mid-sized developers for granted. Those creators, after all, don't have the resources or audience required to strike out and build their own distribution platform; they need Steam's audience. They might complain a lot, and some of those complaints might be very legitimate, but where else would they go?
Well, now there is a 'where else' and Epic is making a very good fist of actually trying to build a service that will work for the indie and mid-size creators in a way that Steam has largely ceased to. To be entirely fair, this isn't just down to a lack of care and attention from Valve; many of the bad decisions made on Steam are the product of the era in which the service was created and it's monumentally harder to roll back those decisions now than it is to launch something new and make better decisions from the outset.
Steam is the product of an era in which Web 2.0 systems were new and exciting, so people thought that literally everything on the Internet could be improved by building community features into its very bones; those communities would in turn provide data which could be mined to make the service better, to make better recommendations and fine-tune the user experience. And if there was a problem within the community itself? Why, given the right algorithm, the data would have the answer to that too; that was the magic of Web 2.0.
"Valve could match Epic's revenue share tomorrow; but [not] the promise of a better place to do business, somewhere not open to the brigading, trolling and hate campaigns that have swept across Steam in recent years"
Put like that with the benefit of many years of hindsight, it all sounds impossibly naïve; how could we not have recognised how those community features would become vectors for abuse of many sorts, that bad-faith actors would figure out how to game the algorithms and twist them to their purposes, that building "community" into the most fundamental functioning of our online services would just make it nigh-on impossible to extricate those features when they turned bad?
This is the rock and hard place situation Valve has found itself in; Steam's community and the problems it has incubated isn't just a matter of forums and comment pages within Valve's control, but a network of infected tissue that spreads throughout the platform, its algorithms, its data, and out to other places beyond the firm's control where brigading, trolling and campaigns of abuse are coordinated. Weeding this out of the platform would be insanely hard work, not just technically but in terms of customer relations; it would make Valve itself into the target of all the bad actors who have spent the past few years targeting indie and mid-range developers on the platform, wrecking the livelihoods of many and the personal lives of quite a few.
Epic has the benefit of starting from a clean slate and being able to avoid those issues from day one. It's building a store in an era where the mistakes made by Web 2.0 approaches have become not only common knowledge within the industry but the topic of newspaper editorials and governmental investigations. More than that, though, it also actually seems to have been listening and to be prepared to take tough decisions which may sacrifice some commercial success in favour of a healthier, more positive ecosystem for creators. That's a big deal for many smaller developers, for whom the wrong word in the wrong place can turn Steam overnight into a vector for attacks on their livelihood and their person - a possibility of which many developers are all too aware, even if they haven't personally experienced it as yet.
Epic isn't making a big song and dance about this aspect of its attack on Steam's business, but it's telling that those decisions are being promoted up front alongside the indie-friendly revenue share. While I don't doubt that Valve's focus will remain on the big industry players for the time being, the reality is that Epic is triangulating on Steam's market in a way that goes far beyond finances.
Valve could, with some pain, match Epic's revenue share tomorrow; but the promise of a better place to do business, somewhere that's not open to the kind of brigading, trolling and hate campaigns that have swept across Steam in recent years... That could genuinely start to change the tide and entice away a whole strata of game creators that Valve has taken for granted for many years.
The indie and mid-range development scene are increasingly the industry's strongest bastion of diversity and demographic growth, which is vital to the future commercial health of gaming as a whole and the PC platform in particular; if Epic's platform becomes the go-to distribution option for those creators, Steam's operators may find themselves longing for the relative simplicity of negotiations with EA and Activision.
So this guy makes vague and unsupported allusions to harassment caused by gamers being allowed to discuss games, but for some reason he never mentions the actual, obvious, serious harassment that is endemic to the industry and a constant threat to everyone involved, namely SJW harassment. One might ask Fahey if he thinks that the CD Projekt community manager really should have been fired for using a Twitter hashtag that was judged to be insufficiently obsequious towards the transgender lobby (!), which consequently inspired an international harassment campaign resulting in the employee's termination, merely the latest in a string of such 'progressive' victories. By all accounts the answer would be something like: "Of course every game industry worker must live in constant terror of having their life and livelihood destroyed for crossing some arbitrary and ever shifting line of disrespect towards minorities - that's social justice, and you are clearly a Nazi that must be purged for even raising this issue. But gamers giving a game a bad review? Now that's harassment!"
God, what a disgusting shill.
Customers being able to discuss a product is not "web 2.0"Noted games industry shill Rob Fahey weighs in on the horribly abusive, naive and outdated Web 2.0 practice of letting players discuss and rate games:
For quite a number of years, Valve has perceived one major challenge to the dominance of its Steam platform for digital distribution of PC games - namely the ambition of major publishers, who chafed against the firm's position of power from the outset.
Publishers had, somewhat naïvely, imagined the digital future as one in which retailers would be removed and they would assume command of both the significant profit share once taken by distributors and retailers, and perhaps more lucratively still of the customer relationship itself.
The replacement of a fragmented set of retailers large and small, all of whom could be leaned upon to some degree to a publisher's gain, with a single global retail platform big enough to simply ignore the demands -- or commercial tantrums -- of an individual publisher was a development which prompted more than a decade of wailing and gnashing of teeth. With that came occasional efforts to supplant Steam with publisher-owned services; the likes of EA's Origin opened the floodgates to publishers trying to find a way around Steam's iron grip on the market.
"After watching Steam grow so big and concentrate so much industry power in Valve's hands, they'll be wary before handing Epic enough support to do the same thing all over again"
That's the challenge to Steam which Valve has seen and acknowledged. It's responded to that challenge in ways that primarily appeal to publishers' financial sense - with one hand pointing out the sheer size of the Steam customer base which firms eschew by going to their own platforms, with the other trying to entice them back with sweeter deals on the platform's revenue share. Valve's recent price changes are well documented and discussed, and they're the most clear statement of its priorities imaginable; laser focused on enticing the industry's giants back onto the platform.
What makes Epic Games' new digital store interesting, to my mind, isn't the alternative it offers to those big publishers. It's got a slightly more enticing revenue share, but at present its user-base is, well, zero; granted, Fortnite is about as good a title to use as the foundation for a digital store as Half-Life 2 was all the way back when, but it'll still take Epic a very long time to match Valve's numbers.
Besides, publishers have been around this merry-go-around before; after watching Steam grow so big and concentrate so much industry power in Valve's hands, they'll be wary before handing Epic enough support to do the same thing all over again. (For the same reason, it doesn't matter that much how attractive Valve's revenue split becomes; the big publishers don't want the PC sector to be dominated by a monolithic retail player, no matter how generous its revenue sharing scheme looks.)
No, what makes Epic's store into such a major challenger to Steam is, rather, the fact that it's attacking from a different angle (well, multiple angles at once, as Christopher Dring pointed out earlier this week -- but this, I think, is the most important one). Sure, it'll put pressure on Valve's appeal to big publishers, but more importantly it aims to pull the rug out from underneath Steam's feet by directly appealing to the indie and mid-market developers who are the bread and butter of the PC games market.
That's reflected in the pricing structure, of course -- Epic's structure is clearly designed to be a better deal for small and mid-range developers -- but you can see it even more clearly in the commitments Epic is making about how its platform will deal with store pages, community infrastructure, news feed management and so on. The details aren't entirely nailed down, especially with regard to discovery and curation -- but Epic gives every impression of having listened carefully to years' worth of complaints and problems that Valve has, at best, been high-handed about.
The Epic Games Store launched last night with a telling focus on indies and smaller creators
To some extent that's a function of a cultural mismatch between Valve and the small or mid-sized developers to whom it ended up providing a vital platform; it's also to some degree a consequence of that blinkered focus on keeping the big boys happy, which has made Valve take the indies and mid-sized developers for granted. Those creators, after all, don't have the resources or audience required to strike out and build their own distribution platform; they need Steam's audience. They might complain a lot, and some of those complaints might be very legitimate, but where else would they go?
Well, now there is a 'where else' and Epic is making a very good fist of actually trying to build a service that will work for the indie and mid-size creators in a way that Steam has largely ceased to. To be entirely fair, this isn't just down to a lack of care and attention from Valve; many of the bad decisions made on Steam are the product of the era in which the service was created and it's monumentally harder to roll back those decisions now than it is to launch something new and make better decisions from the outset.
Steam is the product of an era in which Web 2.0 systems were new and exciting, so people thought that literally everything on the Internet could be improved by building community features into its very bones; those communities would in turn provide data which could be mined to make the service better, to make better recommendations and fine-tune the user experience. And if there was a problem within the community itself? Why, given the right algorithm, the data would have the answer to that too; that was the magic of Web 2.0.
"Valve could match Epic's revenue share tomorrow; but [not] the promise of a better place to do business, somewhere not open to the brigading, trolling and hate campaigns that have swept across Steam in recent years"
Put like that with the benefit of many years of hindsight, it all sounds impossibly naïve; how could we not have recognised how those community features would become vectors for abuse of many sorts, that bad-faith actors would figure out how to game the algorithms and twist them to their purposes, that building "community" into the most fundamental functioning of our online services would just make it nigh-on impossible to extricate those features when they turned bad?
This is the rock and hard place situation Valve has found itself in; Steam's community and the problems it has incubated isn't just a matter of forums and comment pages within Valve's control, but a network of infected tissue that spreads throughout the platform, its algorithms, its data, and out to other places beyond the firm's control where brigading, trolling and campaigns of abuse are coordinated. Weeding this out of the platform would be insanely hard work, not just technically but in terms of customer relations; it would make Valve itself into the target of all the bad actors who have spent the past few years targeting indie and mid-range developers on the platform, wrecking the livelihoods of many and the personal lives of quite a few.
Epic has the benefit of starting from a clean slate and being able to avoid those issues from day one. It's building a store in an era where the mistakes made by Web 2.0 approaches have become not only common knowledge within the industry but the topic of newspaper editorials and governmental investigations. More than that, though, it also actually seems to have been listening and to be prepared to take tough decisions which may sacrifice some commercial success in favour of a healthier, more positive ecosystem for creators. That's a big deal for many smaller developers, for whom the wrong word in the wrong place can turn Steam overnight into a vector for attacks on their livelihood and their person - a possibility of which many developers are all too aware, even if they haven't personally experienced it as yet.
Epic isn't making a big song and dance about this aspect of its attack on Steam's business, but it's telling that those decisions are being promoted up front alongside the indie-friendly revenue share. While I don't doubt that Valve's focus will remain on the big industry players for the time being, the reality is that Epic is triangulating on Steam's market in a way that goes far beyond finances.
Valve could, with some pain, match Epic's revenue share tomorrow; but the promise of a better place to do business, somewhere that's not open to the kind of brigading, trolling and hate campaigns that have swept across Steam in recent years... That could genuinely start to change the tide and entice away a whole strata of game creators that Valve has taken for granted for many years.
The indie and mid-range development scene are increasingly the industry's strongest bastion of diversity and demographic growth, which is vital to the future commercial health of gaming as a whole and the PC platform in particular; if Epic's platform becomes the go-to distribution option for those creators, Steam's operators may find themselves longing for the relative simplicity of negotiations with EA and Activision.
So this guy makes vague and unsupported allusions to harassment caused by gamers being allowed to discuss games, but for some reason he never mentions the actual, obvious, serious harassment that is endemic to the industry and a constant threat to everyone involved, namely SJW harassment. One might ask Fahey if he thinks that the CD Projekt community manager really should have been fired for using a Twitter hashtag that was judged to be insufficiently obsequious towards the transgender lobby (!), which consequently inspired an international harassment campaign resulting in the employee's termination, merely the latest in a string of such 'progressive' victories. By all accounts the answer would be something like: "Of course every game industry worker must live in constant terror of having their life and livelihood destroyed for crossing some arbitrary and ever shifting line of disrespect towards minorities - that's social justice, and you are clearly a Nazi that must be purged for even raising this issue. But gamers giving a game a bad review? Now that's harassment!"
God, what a disgusting shill.
no surprise that the chinese malware store won't allow its subjects to discuss the products they're buying
What in the actual fuck???What a load of shit. Like someone said above: Epic Store is the safe space for 'special' devs. Sadly, now Travis Baldree is hopping on the train with a one-year excloooooooooooooosive for Rebel Galaxy Outlaw. I love the phony reasons he proffers (other than the bag of cash he got for the deal) like 'IT HELPZ STREAMERS AND CONTENT CREATORS!' Fuck streamers. They are nothing more but e-panhandlers who couldn't get a real job. Epic Store has yet to prove it's better than Steam on refunds and in many other areas.
Never mind the fact that Epic is owned, in part, by Tencent.
And I never 'self-ejected' I merely stopped posting for a bit never making any silly goodbye posts because I just got busy in real life... I mean... I know it's hard for a guy who makes phone games for a living to understand that but it happens.