Epic Games Store - the console war comes to PC

This is very true. Valve is trying to get back the "open platform", as they call it, by trying to shift everything to Vulkan. If Stadia catches on at least partially, it will mean that all new AAA games will be written for Vulkan.

The decades of Windows games is kind of misleading, especially seeing how WINE is actually more compatible with old Windows stuff, than Windows itself. The usual issue is the performance disparities in AA and AAA, at around the time of release.

This seems like a meme, only it is not. Eventually the games that will need Proton will be the minority, and then it's basically game over for Windows in the home. They have no reason of existing outside work after gaming is taken.

 

If someday I can play all my old games on a free Valve OS then I'll be happy to partake. I'll just believe it when I see it.

 

Don't you have to attempt it first?

 

There's no Steam OS that runs everything, as far as I know. If that earthquake happened and I missed it then it would be pretty surprising. If I have to have Windows installed anyway to play lots of stuff why would I fuck around with anything else yet? The point is, if Valve succeed someday let me know.

 

You specifically mentioned old games. WINE runs old games better than Windows does. It even allows you to run true 16bit applications on a 64bit OS, which Windows doesn't allow at all.

Also almost 9,000 applications and games are rated as Gold or above for the most recent version of WINE.

 

It's all because of Epic Store!

 

Not about Epic Store or games at all, but still a relevant video to this discussion.

This dude analyzes why Netflix has become worse after competition entered the scene and the competition has, in the end, only been negative for the consumer.

Because the way these streaming services compete is by getting their own exclusive shows that you can only watch on them.
Which means instead of providing cool features for the customer so you're encouraged to go with service X over service Y, they try to force people to go with their service if they want to watch a certain show.

Sound familiar? Yeah, that's exactly the kind of "competition" Epic is going for. Snatch exclusives, force people to use Epic if they want to play that game, don't give a single fuck about providing a good customer experience.

If you still think Epic's approach is going to lead to any kind of positive development in the PC gaming market, this is a great example from a different industry that shows why this kind of competition only ends up screwing the customers.

 

"250,000 copies sold on the PC (240,000 of which were bought by EPIC)!!!"

 

I'm not going to sugarcoat it and pretend literally everything works, but there's been a huge accelerated level of progress over the last three years. DXVK has allowed to run recent game releases at a pace that wasn't even imaginable before. It's a lot more reasonable to imagine that there may be a time when most games will just run out of the box on day one than it was before.
For a long time after the release of directx10 during the vista era, wine was in a kind of limbo. Any game requiring dx10 was a can of worm to open.
But now, it's not just catching up with past dx releases but getting good enough to run games almost as soon as they're released.


There's still a lot of work to be done on wine before everything "just works" in a manner that doesn't require any user input, but the future looks brighter for linux than it did before.

Valve cares enough that they hired the main developer of DXVK.
They also hire driver developers.
They're serious about this.

However, forget about all the arguments I just spouted when it comes to the idea of linux becoming a mainstream OS. I believe it will be possible soon for linux to support most games easily out of the box in a seamless manner with steam's wine integration, but I don't believe it will have any impact on linux's marketshare. You guys are too obsessed with gaming to even realize that most people are, in fact, not gamers, much less pc gamers. Linux is already sufficient for most basic computing tasks, yet the average normie hasn't switched to it. You guys really believe being able to play AAA games, something only a subset of PC users do, is what is really missing to kill windows ? Humans are creatures of habit. They just don't change their habits unless there is a pressing need to. And linux is not a pressing need. Windows hasn't gotten bad enough to push the average to care.

A lot of people arguments against linux always focused on some niches ("but photoshop?" most people don't need photoshop. "But my triple AAA"..) but getting the niches in isn't what tilts the balance. Heck, linux owns some of the niches too (while Adobe shuns linux, in the world of vfx there's quite a decent amount of software packages ported to linux and graphists using linux) but it just doesn't matter. If you can't get the dude who just browses the web and prints some documents you can't get anything.
The niches, in fact, would follow quickly because there would be more interest in supporting a new commoditized, non monopolized platform.

 

"cartel", that's exactly cartel.

 

Bro... this right here is exactly the reason why believing that Linux will overtake Windows is extremely optimistic. As long as Windows works well enough for people, hardly anyone is going to bother with attempting to use Linux.

You can easily do this with DOSBox on Windows.

 

I think 250k is not an impressive number considering World War Z was an anticipated title, and the only way to play it is to purchase it via Epic Store. I mean, it's also a mp game so pirates won't access the mp part of it, pirating the game is totally useless.

 

From a consumer point of view it's obviously correct and exactly what is happening for a while with Origin, battlenet, Uplay eventually and now Epic.
In PC gaming it's not as bad and not comparable currently, since you don't have to pay subscription for each service, you can pay per unit and it's just one more icon on the desktop.
If one day industry move to an annual subscription model exclusively we will be as fucked as video streaming services.
But I believe that for now most games have better earning potential in the current model, so subscriptions will be optional.

The truth is most gamers don't need, or even want any service competing with Steam, it's close to perfect and it's convenient for us to keep adding to our massive game libraries we have there. It's simply impossible to create a service that gamers would choose over Steam currently.
But it's not close to perfect from a publishers point of view, when they are aware that with current technology and infrastructure, such service could easily operate at 2x smaller cut and still generate great profit.
So publishers can either accept this situation, or struggle against both Valve and gamers interest, with the only method that can work, just like video streaming services.
If everything was on Netflix no one would bother to use any other service, it's way more true with Steam which has no subscription, but users with massive already paid libraries.

So every publisher with brands strong enough to force most gamers to use a new service with exclusivity will be trying to do so.
As for Epic, the major win for them is that they can sell their own future games there without Steam cut and it makes Unreal Engine slightly more attractive, at 12% and so much smaller scale of operation I doubt third party games will bring mad profit.
So I don't believe they will ever start to stright up pay for exclusives, beyond attracting them with current modest advance deal, smaller profit cut and free Unreal Engine license. There is not enough profit potential here to justify that.
I also do believe that they would stop to bother investing in it further and put their own games on Steam, if it offered comparable cut. Sweeney never used word "altruistic", but simply stated that Epic pressuring Steam would be mutually beneficial for both Epic and others.

It creates minor inconvenience for the customers (another launcher) and I see neither side as morally superior, it's just bussiness. Valve use their position to gain mad profits and publishers seek a way to keep more of the pie they produce for themselves.
The only two things that could stop market fragmentation, or even revert it by releasing some of the current exclusives on Steam, would be either Steam giving up some of it's pie, or publishers would have to just accept Steam tax forever, for the convenience of the customers.
I predict, that neither will happen.

 

I agree 100%. But what I believe that Valve is doing with Proton is having a way to get a plug and play system. If you see this in the decade-long run, everything will most likely be Vulkan and cross-platform. And then Valve can also claim that they have the only platform with automatic compatibility with really old stuff.

It's quite obviously a long term strategy for them.

Also WINE is actually easier to use than DOSBOX.

 

Agreed. The streaming market has become the same as the cable industry they sought to rescue consumers from. And it's the exact same thing that's happening with these store exclusives.

 

They don't need to but I don't think they're against it either. Especially if that store offers something that isn't available on Steam. GOG offering DRM-Free games is enough to entice people to buy games on their store for example. Epic offers nothing at the moment for the consumer. In fact they're offering less than one of the most bare bones Stores on the market. Their main selling point could be lower prices since they only take 12% but that hasn't happened yet. Unless you count that very brief Metro discount that was only available in US. And since they don't offer free keys to the developers to be sold on third party store like Steam does, a lot of the games end up costing more.

 

The only reason it's so shitty now, is because governments don't regulate monopoly services any more. If government treated a platform like Netflix, like it does with the airwaves (meaning separating the actual content delivery network, from the content, and giving equal opportunity to all the interested parties in it), you would have two companies.

One would be Netflix-DataCenter, providing the backbone and the web service and apps etc, and then Netflix-Film, which would be one of the clients of the Netflix-DataCenter. You as an end user, pay one subscription. Disney, Netflix, HBO and whoever else, get paid depending on the views of their shows in the platform, minus the expenses for running Netflix-DataCenter.
The same would be great for gaming too, but it would mean splitting Valve.

 

Neither Netflix nor Valve are monopolies.

 

Having Vulkan(or OpenGL) never meant it's multiplatform or it'd be easy to make it that way. The bigger problem is various middleware technologies, which are always what developers miss when they say they're gonna port it to later to Linux. And almost everytime they're realising that other tools can't be easily ported over.

 

maybe we shouldn't regulate the internet like early 20th century technology

 

They effectively were until very recently. That misses the point, which was that this needs to be treated differently from a legal perspective. The end user should You pay one bill, and the content providers split it between them depending on usage.

 

You see, CDNs are not the internet. They only use the internet. The internet itself is heavily regulated, it is in fact the only way it can exist.

 

you're confusing market leader with monopoly

 

No, they weren't. You don't even know what a monopoly is, then. "Until very recently" Netflix was but a miniscule player in the film industry.

 

You know Netflix doesn't even operate their own servers, right? They use AWS.
You're arguing for regulating something that isn't even happening. A company is using a direct competitor's service(yes, amazon video still exists) to provide its product to the customer, and you want the government to step in... why?