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Epic Games Store - the console war comes to PC

Self-Ejected

unfairlight

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He also uses fallacious argumentation like comparing playing a video game that requires player input and output on the reaction, as well as a high frame rate and instant encoding (and don't forget Multiplayer!) as if it was totally the same experience and use-case as watching a movie or TV show that can be even 5 minutes behind and lag and nobody would notice.
You overestimate how much people care, and you have to realise that not every game is reliant on the lowest possible input latency. I really couldn't care less if I was playing a turn based RPG on streaming, and I doubt either would you.
On multiplayer, they claim to soften that by having both Stadia streaming and the game servers hosted on the same datacentre. That could work, and Google has those resources.
doesn't really have the games people want or a user base
Yeah, games that no one could ever care about like Cyberpunk 2077. All they need to do is provide instant access to the biggest titles.

Bringing up Onlive here is dumb, as that was years ago and not only has internet improved worldwide with 4G being basically everywhere, but so has video and audio encoding with VP9, AV1 and Opus.

As it is, you don't even know if "Stadia" will even still exist 5 years from now, let alone whether it's an "inevitability".
It doesn't really have to be Stadia specifically, it could be Microsoft's streaming service or even some other competitor that will come out later, but streaming is going to be big whether you like it or not.
 

DalekFlay

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Here are a couple of questions to consider:

1.) Can you buy a netflix movie or show?

2.) Why do movies and TV shows that let you own personal copies exist if streaming services exist?

Uh, yes, plenty of streaming exclusive shows and movies exist. There will only be more and more as Disney and Warner launch their services and the years go by. Stadia already announced one game exclusive, and they haven't even started yet.

Anyway, whatever. I'm arguing with people who just watched me rant against DRM gor pages of posts who think I'm somehow a Stadia shill. There's zero point to this, so I'm taking a break. The future is what it is, whether we want to admit it or not.
 

cosmicray

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436
1. Steam has optional DRM, called Steamworks. Many Steam games have it. Many do not. Games without it, like Victoria 2, run fine without Steam even installed.
2. See above. You do not need to use the Steam client unless a developer has specifically decided to make their game require it.
Yet you still need to install it via Valve's client. And you can't reinstall it on a different PC without Steam's client. Just copying it might not work.
4. With rare exceptions, you don't own a video game. Even if you happen to own a physical disk copy of it, you don't own the software on it, you merely have permission to use it. That's because of copyright.
5. Social networking is 100% optional on Steam.
You don't own the whole software, but you do own the disk. You own the game's copy to play it.
 
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Wyatt_Derp

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I think what Dalek has been saying has amounted to a tech version of a free will vs deterministic argument. Personally, I've given up on film and television, and am nearly there with games. The suck vs non-suck pie chart isn't looking too good from my view. But at the same time I know that the general population will consume whatever slop is put in front of them. It's availability, that's where the competition is - not content or quality, those battles were already fought (and more or less lost) long ago. There's a few large corporations deciding for everyone else what their menu is going to contain. The only choice that we have as consumers is to consume or not to consume, that is the question. You paid 12 bucks to see a new superhero movie and hated it? No one gives a shit, least of all the theater chain and film distributor who you just gave your money to. Your money IS your review. That's how it goes in a capitalist system. Your dollar is your voice, your vote, your influence. Bullshit talks, and money walks.

Back in the early days of Steam I hoped that gamers would reject it. They didn't. I hoped that the stupid comic book movie trend would finally end. It didn't. I hoped that rock and roll would make a strong and creative comeback. It didn't. Doesn't mean I don't want those things to happen. It's just hope vs expectation of reality. Trend forecasting has nothing to do with personal odds or bets. Being objective in these dark days is a trying experience, let alone making 'principled' purchasing decisions.
 

Mustawd

Guest
Your money IS your review. That's how it goes in a capitalist system

I think you mean the free market economy. Capitalism only describes the economic model where private citizens can own pieces of a company (aka Capital).
 

FeelTheRads

Arcane
Joined
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Messages
13,716
I'm not sure how I'm supposed to absorb that you "hate" something or consider it a "nightmare future" when almost all you do is communicate in slogans praising it's efficacy and inevitability while using superlatives to describe it.

That's because you're a retarded steamtard fanbot and if somebody doesn't praise steam as the coming of christ while shitting on everything else it shorts-out whatever the fuck you have for brains.

Can't understand how you can hate something that you think it's gonna an inevitability. Like the two are somehow related. This kind of stupidity really reaches new levels.
Do you think it's like with you and your retarded shilling of VR, then?
Guess what, not everyone is a retarded shill for shit tech. And also guess what, streaming and/or subscriptions have much more chance of being widely adopted than your shit VR.

But anyway, you can call me a Stadia/streaming/subscription shill, because I actually do want it to happen with the hope that it will kill off Steam. Or that Steam will follow suit to adapt. Just to taste the sweet Steamtards tears and then see them get on the boat and defending Steam as the best of the streaming services. Because that's what will happen if streaming happens. Sheeple will forever be sheeple.

Did you ever consider the reason people didn't want Steam was because it was user unfriendly?

Yes, that's the whole point. The convenience fags (the lowest common denominator) like to get fucked in the ass as long as it's "friendly and convenient". They're the ones that made steam into the success it is.
So, you finally admit you're fine with being forced to use a client as long as that client is "friendly". Congratulations on being a sheeple.

will write those people off

Did I miss something and western countries suddenly became an isolated communist block or something? Because no capitalist in their sane mind would refuse to gather as much customers as possible and instead reduce market growth to 0%, by staying in "comfy" countries of Western World and refuse acknowledge existence of other 99% percent of population. Not to mention according to MANY stories from people living in Europe and USA - there are many places with speed just as shitty as on Kazakhstan mountains, because monopolist providers too lazy and greedy to update their network. And Stadia or other shitservice isn't enough motivation for them to improve.

Yes, you missed something. Stuff like services available only in the USA and other select countries for example. Whether they're in their "sane mind" is another discussion, but actively avoiding a huge chunk of customers still happens. Or well, at least it happened a couple of years ago, not really up-to-date if Netflix got them off their asses lately.
 
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Wyatt_Derp

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Your money IS your review. That's how it goes in a capitalist system

I think you mean the free market economy. Capitalism only describes the economic model where private citizens can own pieces of a company (aka Capital).

Money is energy, no more no less. China isn't a capitalist system, but money is what makes it go around. Zimbabwe has some of the worst currency inflation in the world, yet money is what fuels it. Labor, production, everything, all human endeavors relate to the exchange of energy, and in our civilization we give our energy economic power in the form of little green paper and numbers on a pay screen.
 

normie

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Insert Title Here
Your money IS your review. That's how it goes in a capitalist system

I think you mean the free market economy. Capitalism only describes the economic model where private citizens can own pieces of a company (aka Capital).

Money is energy, no more no less. China isn't a capitalist system, but money is what makes it go around. Zimbabwe has some of the worst currency inflation in the world, yet money is what fuels it. Labor, production, everything, all human endeavors relate to the exchange of energy, and in our civilization we give our energy economic power in the form of little green paper and numbers on a pay screen.
wut

China is a capitalist system, it's just not part of the globohomogayplex
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
Another store entering...: https://venturebeat.com/2019/08/16/my-games-will-launch-global-game-store-in-q4/

With the standard 70/30 revenue split, huh. The Russian company behind Armored Warfare and Owlcat Games.

My.Games will launch global game store in Q4

The Russian challenger claims their store is about gamers, it has more features than Epic Games Store, they want to compete with features than exclusivity: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...-russian-games-store-taking-on-epic-and-steam

My.Games is keen to emphasise that these user features will help it compete with the likes of Steam and the Epic Games Store. The marketplace will have plenty of systems that today's PC players have come to expect -- chat, friends lists, achievements -- as well as some more advanced functions for core players.

For example, the platform's Lootdog service allows users to trade in-game items with each other for real money, while Donation Alerts is one of the tools it has devised to help players monetise their livestreams. Having already proved popular in Russia, Boenigk believes these will help engage PC owners in the West. After all, where there are local differences between various markets -- some regions will have a higher demand for the item trading than others -- "at the core we're still talking about gamers."

It's clear that user experience is a top priority for My.Games, and speaks to some of the controversy Epic has attracted with its own game store. Having launched back in December 2018, the Fortnite firm continues to come under fire for lacking some of the features Steam offers -- an issue Boenigk believes My.Games will avoid, although he notes not everything will be available at launch.

"My own opinion is it's very inconvenient for users when you need to install an additional launcher if you want to play specific games," says Kotelnikov. "In my perfect world, all the content is available on all the platforms, and platforms compete only on their services and the quality of their services, visibility, tools and so on. But of course we understand why Epic does this."

Boenigk admits the team was "torn" over the use of exclusives because "it's a valid business approach and a good strategy if you have the funds to do it." As a PC gamer himself, he notes that he already has multiple launchers so one more from Epic isn't a problem, but "having the freedom to choose where to play my games" is what's really important.

"It's a movement where we're seeing in that space we're moving towards the exclusivity and the fragmentation of the market," he says. "Whereas on consoles, we see they're doing the exact opposite, trying to bring players together with cross-platform play and things like that.

"[Exclusivity is] not the approach we have. The features of our platform, we want and hope that will be the value, for both the developers and the users. And then having all the great games there, perfect. If you want to play them on our site, great, here they are -- plus our cool features. You want to play them on Steam? We won't stop you."

About the 70/30 revenue split:

Yet My.Games is launching with the 70/30 ratio -- a system recently described as "outrageous" by Paradoix's Fredrik Wester and "quite frankly anachronistic" by Koch Media CEO Klemens Kundratitz.

"But lots of platforms still use that split -- it's still a standard," argues Rodion Kotelnikov, head of My.Games Store. "Steam uses it, the consoles use it. We need to start from something. We're not saying it's forever, it could be changed later, but we're just not announcing anything about that now."

Again, the team reiterates its position as a publisher, suggesting those who sign with My.Games will have the option of custom revenue splits. Grigoryan dubs 70/30 as the "starting point of the discussion."
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
Yet My.Games is launching with the 70/30 ratio -- a system recently described as "outrageous" by Paradoix's Fredrik Wester and "quite frankly anachronistic" by Koch Media CEO Klemens Kundratitz.
0d1a71fc48fde7bfe84b49fec4720e27.gif
 

Bruticis

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Stardock tried to do the whole store launcher for it's games with Impulse. That worked out so well they dumped it on Gamestop who dumped it completely.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
'It Wasn't Meant To Be This Lightning Rod': Valve Developer Looks Back At Company's Epic Store Exclusivity Comments

When Metro Exodus was made an Epic Store exclusive just two weeks before its launch, Valve added fuel to the fire by appending a note to the game’s Steam page that called the move “unfair to Steam customers.” A Valve developer has told Kotaku that it wasn’t expecting the vitriolic reaction that followed.

It’s as inevitable as weather: A developer announces that their game will be temporarily exclusive to the Epic Games Store, and a rage tsunami bursts down their doors. Recently, developers have even taken to preemptively begging that people call off the harassment mobs, to little avail. One of the first examples of this was when Metro Exodus made the move to Epic’s store, a decision made so late in the process that it already had a listing on the Steam store where Valve had already processed preorders for the game.

Speaking to Kotaku during a Valve event in Seattle last week, Steam business developer and designer Nathaniel Blue said the company did not intend to legitimize the outsized backlash to Metro Exodus’ Epic store exclusivity when it put a comment on that Steam page. The use of the word “unfair,” he said, was meant to reference the timing of the announcement rather than the entire concept of exclusivity.

“I don’t think that was our intent to upset people,” Blue said. “It wasn’t the intent of the message. It was more about the timing. The game was about to launch, and then it was [exclusive to the Epic store]. So that was the only goal of that. What came out of that was not what we expected. It wasn’t meant to be this lightning rod.”

Unfortunately, it nonetheless functioned as one. At the time, Valve said it felt that “the decision to remove the game is unfair to Steam customers, especially after a long pre-sale period.” This helped kick off a series of Steam review bombs and harassing messages to individual members of Exodus’ development team, including original Metro book series author Dmitry Glukhovsky, in the following days. The tactics people used on Exodus have since been repeatedly deployed against other developers who’ve taken their wares to Epic’s still-barebones store.

Faced with that information, Blue pointed out that Valve has since opted to keep quiet about subsequent Epic store exclusives.

“I don’t know that we’d go back in time and change it necessarily, but I can say that in the future we didn’t say anything,” he said. “In the future we didn’t continue to do that because our goal is not to upset the community or light anyone’s hair on fire. Our goal is to get developers close to customers, have a really valuable place for people to play games, and stay focused on that.”

It’s worth noting, too, that while many of the harassment tactics used against Epic store developers now transcend Steam and spill over onto Twitter, Reddit, Discord, and other platforms, Steam review bombs and irate Steam discussion threads remain part of the process—an arguably effective one at that. Borderlands 3 got review-bombed hard after its Epic exclusivity announcement, only for Valve’s recently deployed anti-review-bomb system to take multiple days to flag the reviews as “off-topic” and remove the results from Borderlands games’ scores on Steam. Valve has also done nothing about other games that have seen spikes in negative reviews in the wake of Epic store announcements. For example, Chivalry: Medieval Warfare’s main page is littered with reviews that mention Epic and are therefore, theoretically, off-topic. While not related to the Epic store, Steam review bombs and discussions proved especially effective recently in the case of Ion Fury, whose developer and publisher went back on a decision to remove homophobic language from the game after days of review-bombing over their initial decision.

Despite all this, Valve does not have any concrete plans for further disincentivizing review bombs that it’s willing to talk about at the moment.

“It’s hard to tell players what to do or not to do in that way,” said Steam designer Alden Kroll. “I think our approach has been to try and improve the tools so that when players use it in a way we’re not expecting, then we can handle that elegantly so that it’ll hopefully not be as disruptive. But the thing that we find is, players are gonna try to use the things they think will be the noisiest. If we change that in one place, then it’ll move to another place, possibly.”

That doesn’t mean there are no changes on the way, however.

“It’s a work in progress,” said Blue. “We’re going to constantly work on reviews, because we want them to represent where games are at and the status of games as best as possible. If it doesn’t, then we’re like, ‘There’s something wrong we can work on.’”
 

Junmarko

† Cristo è Re †
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It’s worth noting, too, that while many of the harassment tactics used against Epic store developers now transcend Steam and spill over onto Twitter, Reddit, Discord, and other platforms, Steam review bombs and irate Steam discussion threads remain part of the process—an arguably effective one at that.

Negative press = "Harassment tactics".

:hahyou:
 

Alienman

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Interesting to see them cucking for Epic, even threatening to do something about the reviews in favor of devs that abandon their store. Come on now Valve.
 

Wyatt_Derp

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Your money IS your review. That's how it goes in a capitalist system

I think you mean the free market economy. Capitalism only describes the economic model where private citizens can own pieces of a company (aka Capital).

Money is energy, no more no less. China isn't a capitalist system, but money is what makes it go around. Zimbabwe has some of the worst currency inflation in the world, yet money is what fuels it. Labor, production, everything, all human endeavors relate to the exchange of energy, and in our civilization we give our energy economic power in the form of little green paper and numbers on a pay screen.
wut

China is a capitalist system, it's just not part of the globohomogayplex

Don't tell them that. You might get a visit from Officer Sum Ting Wong.
 

fantadomat

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Edgy Vatnik Wumao
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I just came back from a week of swimming at Greek's beaches. Are the last 5 pages worth reading or are they the usual dicking around,anything worth reading about?
 
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