Xbob42

The final scene in the game will be the monkey putting on a hidden blade made out of banana wrappings and a sharp rock.

1 hour ago, SimpleG said:

 

Just an FYI,that article is bullshit. He had nothing in is Library other then Anthem.

 

https://www.twitch.tv/smokethrone/clip/AgitatedAttractiveTeaNotATK

 

So the article was accurate!

Wow, that looks like one generic, cheesy, poorly made piece of shit!

Day 1!

Polygon likes that it's "difficult?" Damn, it must be at least Kirby's Epic Yarn levels of challenging!

I've been telling you guys this store has NO features, it's basically a website in launcher form at this point. It's awful. It's not competition and not good for consumers.

ITT: Old men scared of multiplayer

I never even understand the complaints of Valve not making games as something that relates to a fucking storefront. Valve not making games has nothing to do with a storefront discussion, yet I see it in every topic about this subject. It's bizarre. "Well Valve should've made Half-Life 3!" Uhh, what? The fuck does that have to do with ANYTHING?

8 hours ago, Moa said:

Geralt really gets around

There's a lotta monsters what need to be murdered and a lotta women what need to be fucked.

2 hours ago, skillzdadirecta said:

Be warned

His ENTIRE library?!

That's DOZENS of dollars down the drain! Shit!

Also that's a lot less threatening when you can just make a new account and pay for EA access premiere or whatever and have the entire library back. 

I have had a match or two with randos that has had a few hiccups that run that bad, but never entire matches. There is a consistent input delay of what feels like a million years but I imagine is actually closer to maybe 150-200ms. I have been able to adjust to it for the most part, but a true wired connection would probably provide a much, much smoother experience. The guy talks about him being on a hardwired connection, but I'm pretty sure to do that with the Switch you need to use a USB thing which actually makes things worse, don't you? I recall that because of how it communicates or something like that, you end up at best maybe slightly better with optimal conditions, although it's been a while so I could be wrong or misremembering.

Speaking of AAA games on Steam for low prices, hope everyone's got Resident Evil 2 down for $46.79!

12 minutes ago, Paperclyp said:

Opening the floodgates and throwing their hands up saying they’re going to let every game through and not police them at all. Which is bad for both consumer and developer. That’s the biggest thing. 

I consider that a massive benefit. I don't need anyone telling me what games are OK or not for me to buy. Again, just about anything on the front page of Steam is going to be of either a fair level of quality or of general interest to a significant portion of people. So you'll see a mix of popular games, top selling games, trending games, games on sale, and... that's kind of about it.

The good games still sell just fine and get popular (as much as other stores, at least, sometimes good games fall through the cracks no matter what). The kind of bad games you'd want to "not be on the platform" are almost exclusively only available if you go digging for them, as they won't make it to the front page or to the top of any searches. The one sort-of exception to this is hentai games... but they show up from time to time because they're very popular. Just like how Dynasty Warriors will show up on the front page of PSN or XBL despite being a huge pile of shit. There's an audience for it.

The hand-wringing about "the floodgates" has yet to produce any evidence that I've found anywhere near compelling. The store is already massively curated -- except it's front-facing curation. You only see what's likely to be of some interest to you. Digital Homicide games ain't gonna show up in your feed unless you buy them. (Well, they won't at all anymore for anyone, but you get the idea.)

And I don't understand what people want Valve to do "for creators." Give them money? Give them a bunch of free advertising? Kill all the competition so the store is hyper-curated? That'd be amazing news... for 0.1% of developers.

I just cannot fathom how people demand curation. Again, who are we trusting to curate to an acceptable level? Most people barely even trust professional reviewers for fuck's sake, let alone some guy judging games based on screenshots, trailers or 10 minutes of gameplay.

And even then, we still see the occasional hit like this on the official Playstation Youtube channel, and I believe it was during their E3 press conference as well? I can't recall:

Anyway, the only sustainable part of Epic's efforts are the 88/12 part. Which is great, but the "supporting creators" thing is only going to last so long. Either the store will get enough games to where devs have the same exact issue, the store won't have enough games and thus they're NOT supporting a bunch of devs, or something to that effect. And they certainly can't keep buying exclusives in perpetuity, that's for damn sure. MS and Sony can barely afford that kind of spending habit on a handful of titles. Epic's in a slightly easier position because they're buying indie game exclusivity rather than AAA, but, again, even Sony and MS don't buy that many indie exclusives.

1 hour ago, HGLatinBoy said:

The real issue is that Valve has sat on their ass content with doing NOTHING to improve Steam on their own everything seems reactionary to the industry as a whole. They tried copying discord for whatever the dumb reason they have they have no content developers that are constantly updating the store and making it look modern. It still looks an updated version of steam 1.0

But --and this is important-- no other stores look any better. In fact, all of them look worse and perform worse and have less features. What is there to "react" to? Yeah they updated chat to be like Discord, but Discord wasn't even "competition" when that happened. They lowered their fees for certain devs in response to this, but that's got nothing to do with the storefront.

This all comes back to it not being competition because no one is doing anything better than Steam. There's no significantly better looking stores, there's no stores with equal functionality, let alone more, there's no stores with as much information about the games you're buying or the amount of user reviews or any of that stuff.

It's like everyone is yelling "This pizza SUCKS! It's not keeping up with the modern age!" and then they all just go to fucking Little Caesars and get a worse pizza with a dude jacking off in the corner and somehow everyone's supposed to be impressed. And the response is ALWAYS "Well they just launched!" as if they launched in a bubble, completely unaware of Steam's feature list that apparently hasn't been updated in 20 years. Origin launched a long time ago and it's still a big piece of shit, yet still one of the best alternative stores.

The sentiment that Valve hasn't done a tremendous job overhauling their own launcher is fairly accurate, tacking on other stores to that statement to prove a point does the exact opposite.

And while we're at it, what the fuck are people even looking for Valve to update here? Maybe it's just that most overhauls I've seen over the year have been ass, but I dunno, I think Steam's pretty functional and not really very ugly? What kind of design are we looking for? Giant banner images with minimalist info for a clean, sleek, modern look? What kind of features are we looking for?

I feel like everyone has this vague anti-Steam sentiment, but very little substance to their arguments or ideas. Just this feeling of "it needs to be updated more." Which, sure, I'm good with more features. Separating DLC and software from the list of games was a great move, the ability to throttle your downloads took way too long and was a hugely welcome addition, etc. But what, specifically, are we hoping they add now? Are we looking for them to innovate for innovation's sake, and then giving every store that pops up a pass despite being a piss-poor Steam clone that also, surprise surprise, hasn't innovated on jack shit?

Here, I'll even make you a little sort of scavenger hunt list, see how many items you can check off when using the Epic Games store:

- Add Ashen to your wish list.

- Tell me Ashen's genre and whether it's single-player, multi-player, co-op, etc, and whether or not it has controller support

- Add Rebel Galaxy Outlaw to your ignore list

- Make a thread in the Hades game forums

- Report to me the metacritic (or similar metric) score and general user reviews for Hello Neighbor Hide and Seek

- Join a Community group for Subnautica

- Go into your settings and throttle your download speeds

- Report Satisfactory for racism

- Set your friend list to invisible or offline

- Assign a friend to a group

- Give a friend a nickname

- Send a message to an offline friend

- Invite a friend to voice chat

- Enable a controller-friendly mode

- Tell me which of your friends own Darksiders 3

- Tell me the patch notes for Shadow Complex

- Tell me the languages (text and voice) Maneater is available in

- Perform a search to find Super Meat Boy forever

- Sort games by genre

- Change your store or library to be grid-based, tile-based or text-based

- Navigate to a game's install folder via your library

- Look at a friend's activity feed for screenshots, videos, reviews, etc

-Send me a gift copy of Hades

All this innovation, I can't handle it!

I feel like the pro-Steam nutjob around here, just yelling into the void every once in a while at the backlash Steam seems to get, but I'm totally open for something to come and kick its ass; but only if it's something that's actually going to kick its ass. Not just be a sad imitator buying exclusives with an unsustainable business model because they lucked out with a fucking Battle Royale. If my library's going to be fractured again and again, there better be some damn compelling reasons for it on my end, not just so some fucking indie dev can make a little more money.

56 minutes ago, Paperclyp said:

frankly kinda shitty about how they handle their storefront on a variety of levels

Liiiiiiike?

And, after that, what competing storefront addresses these issues in a significantly better way?

12 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

The split is larger but do you make more money when you put it out on a platform less people will buy it on?

Of course not, you have 150 million less pairs of game-buying eyes looking at it. But you do make more from Epic giving you a sweet bonus for going exclusive for a year.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd be happy to sell out if it meant I could be guaranteed some income as an indie, I don't really blame them, I just don't think I need sunshine blown up my ass about it.

Quote

 From our standpoint as customers,

 

1. a curated store with a more limited selection of quality games is a plus.

2. Having the ability for you to share your emails with us (optionally) so we can communicate directly with you is hopefully also a plus for you.

3. Competition for Steam is a plus.

4. And in the longer term, achieving Epic’s goals on the royalty front means more developers succeeding and surviving and making more good stuff. That’s a longer play, but we think it’s still meaningful.

1. Is it? Lack of consumer choice is good for the consumer? I guess there's definitely a selection of people who believe that. What happens when a great game you're looking forward to isn't "a good fit" for the store? Who determines quality? How? What metrics are used and how can I trust these gatekeepers? A limited selection does not mean all the games currently being made are no longer being made, so someone still has to play them to determine whether they're worthy. This is a Herculean task even when you've got the entire Steam userbase, how is a tiny team at Epic arbitrarily deciding what's good and what's not going to benefit me? Oh? They're just gonna choose the ones that look the best based on trailers or whatever? Great. Wonderful.

2. Fuck you.

3. Theoretically. If I see someone competing with Steam, I'll let you know. Buying a few exclusives and launching an inferior storefront is not competition. Stop using this fucking line.

4. Possibly. But if the difference between you surviving or not is an 18% bigger cut... well, you're really living on the razor's edge. But I get it, it's hard for indies, and 18% more still isn't anything to sneeze at, that's a significant number. This one is at least the most viable answer. On the other hand, if the market's too crowded, then this directly contradicts #1. Devs dying off is a good thing because us dumbasses won't have to figure out what the good games are and we'll have a more limited selection!

I do like the roundabout admission of them having zero power over the console market so "whatever none of this applies there, we just take it up the ass and that's that."

I fixed the Tweet.

5 hours ago, SFLUFAN said:

Seriously - who the hell buys AAA titles through Steam anymore?!?

I was about to say that I do on occasion, for games I'm not sure about, but even then if it turns out the game was good I'll typically refund it and get it via GMG afterwards, provided they have a sale. They usually do, those chunky 20-25% pre-launch discounts are great.

I may have heard from some dude who played it that it was allegedly surprisingly good. Played extremely smoothly, allegedly, not like those chunky E3 demos at 30 FPS. Even on allegedly max settings. Flight limitations are allegedly in place so you can't just hover above enemies and rain alleged hell down upon them.

Or so I heard. Allegedly.

11 minutes ago, mikechorney said:

I don't understand why people think that Steam is so good....

It's not necessarily a case of Steam being "so good" so much as it is easily the best available option by far, and has helped unify libraries, so I don't have to keep track of what games I own over 900 different services.

If you don't think Steam is "so good," then what should you think of stores that aren't even close to as good and why would you use them?

1 hour ago, Massdriver said:

Point taken on how they are fragmenting the market while Valve consolidated it. However, Valve has overcharged developers and their sales have become worse over time. The only mechanism that can correct this is competition. 

Valve has charged exactly the same as literally every other digital storefront. Were they seriously expected to cut into their revenue to be altruistic?

I'm not stating whether 70/30 was right or wrong, but I do know Steam hosting your game in perpetuity is not free. I imagine if your game is highly repayable but has a short tail while having a big enough download size, then it's not inconceivable that they could eventually lose money on certain games, granted that's a very specific hypothetical.

What I will say is that the only reason Epic did this was because of their insane luck with Fortnite, not because they wanted to show anyone "how it was done."

Let's not forget that Epic was more than happy to give people on their Unreal Market that same exact 70/30 split before they "somehow" decided it was bad. Obviously when you make big money you can make big moves, but none of this feels good or right to me as an actual consumer. Let's hope it makes things better for everyone regardless.

10 minutes ago, Massdriver said:

Considering the massive head start Steam has on every other store, I don't expect Epic to come out the gate with a product just as good as Steam. Let's be realistic. It could take a couple of years, but the reason it's worth watching is they are fucking rich. Their model is the exact model Valve used to build Steam, only they have even more cash to work with.

It's true that they're rich, but I don't think they're really doing what Valve did with Steam. Valve came in and took a market that was splintered all to hell with CD keys and individual installs and manual patching and slowly unified a fragmented market. Epic is doing the opposite.

And I do not think it's unreasonable to expect a new marketplace, especially one from a super rich company trying to be taken seriously, to have at least equal features to an old ass client like Steam. Not only does it not have feature parity, it's not even fucking CLOSE. You just get zero information from the Epic Game store, the store page is just randomly sized banner images with the title, the developer and the price. No user reviews or Metacritic scores, no forums, less details than other stores, etc. They didn't have to innovate or design any unknown or untested features, just match the basics. But people are using the Steam forums for Ashen to get troubleshooting... despite it not being out on Steam. High quality!

But I get what you're saying -- they'd obviously improve it over time. Or would they? My hesitation comes from the fact that most other storefronts are treated like iffy side projects or something. Like developers or publishers will build a store, realize it's pretty empty, and quickly lose interest. Origin, uPlay, etc. have not really improved much since launch. I think Origin finally added gifting back recently? Epic might stick with it if they gain some traction because I know they want a more permanent revenue stream (they're obviously aware they can't rely on Fortnite forever) but will they actually stick it out? We've seen how easily they drop projects that aren't as immediately profitable as Fortnite. (i.e. literally every other game they were working on, including the other "half" of Fortnite that they worked on for over half a decade.)

1 minute ago, Massdriver said:

It just opened. In the future, if Epic is semi successful, I believe we will see better sales on Steam. Eventually some of the competitive pressure should come to us.

But, again, how do you launch without feature parity? How is their fucking store UGLIER than Steam? I'm not even talking library here. So maybe in the nebulous future they'll... what? I don't put blind trust into people making storefronts, as none have impressed me yet. Especially not one owned by Tencent.

Some better sales would be fine, I guess. But I've already got GMG for that. I wouldn't complain about even steeper discounts, of course, but I don't know if we can really expect that. It'd be better than nothing, at the very least.

2 minutes ago, Massdriver said:

The publisher platforms will be featureless revenue grabbers. However, what Epic is doing is trying to compete with Steam. You cannot expect them to open up with every game in the Steam library. Valve is arguably not treating developers the way they should, and Steam is stagnating. So we got Discord, Epic, and GOG putting an effort forward. I believe Epic will be the one to create some real competition for Steam.

Name something the Epic store is doing to benefit us as customers. I don't give two fucks about developer revenue. How do I benefit from the Epic store? Aside from buying some exclusives, what can I log onto that store and get, feature-wise, price-wise, etc, that I couldn't get elsewhere? What is the hook? Because I have yet to see developers or publishers passing a single cent of those savings onto customers, and I really don't expect anyone outside of maybe an indie or two to actually do that, so I can't be bothered to give a fuck.

lol. I still laugh at the idea that just taking a few exclusives and launching your own half-assed store is anything nearing "competition."

If there were actual competition, any one of these lame ass stores would launch with, at the very least, feature parity with Steam, and, in a world with REAL competition, they'd be superior in multiple ways.

Instead, they all lack several features, somehow have worse designs despite being a decade and a half newer, and have paltry libraries.

So what exactly is competitive about this? None of these companies are actually trying to compete, they're just trying to save a few bucks by not paying Valve. Hence why most "exclusives" outside of Battle.net and I guess Origin tend to show up on Steam eventually. The benefit of getting 100% of the revenue is usually outweighed by having like 150 million less people to see your game, y'know?

The only people MAYBE benefiting from this are the developers and publishers trying to get a slightly bigger cut. Consumers? We get to spread our CC info to 10 different launchers with individual two-factor authentication systems and disparate refund policies, patching methods, install directories, friend lists, etc.

We as consumers have basically seen zero benefit from any of this, and all of the negatives. I think the only services with any sort of tangible benefits are those offering subscriptions like Game Pass or Origin Access, but what happens when we've got a subscription for every launcher to boot? Maybe that's when we'll start seeing real competition in the form of ONCE AGAIN unifying our fucking libraries.