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SRo ,

Fuck epic!

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

Annapurna is Annapurna and is already “weird”. But noticing a lot more push for video games as film. And not just the nonsense of shit like Rampage and Borderlands but stuff like Remedy-verse and El Paso Elsewhere as well as Blumhouse getting involved as more of a publisher (?).

We are probably in for a bad time because… yeah. But I am optimistic. Because Remedy (heavily involved rather than just licensed) and Xalavier Nelson Jr and the like are REALLY good at taking advantage of the medium to tell their stories and… their stories are actually pretty okay as stories with a LOT of character work.

masterspace ,

Exciting announcement. Two of the best creative and narrative focused companies in gaming.

MarcomachtKuchen ,

That seems like a huge step for Anapurna too, doesn’t it?

masterspace , (edited )

Not really I don’t think … Anna Purna already publishes a lot of games and has published a lot of notable films in the past few years.

I feel like if anything it’s most notable because Anna Purna has deeper pockets than Remedy, more experience in film and television, and produce notably high quality creative and narrative work, meaning that they’re unlikely to screw up Remedy’s writing chops and can legitimately help them expand their mixed media ambitions.

Klanky ,
@Klanky@sopuli.xyz avatar

I am just now learning from your comment that Annapurna does film! I just know them from Kentucky Route Zero and The Outer Wilds. Crazy, I thought they were just a gaming company.

domi ,
@domi@lemmy.secnd.me avatar

Great to see that Epic didn’t snatch that one up.

I love Remedy and their games but their publisher choice is always atrocious.

masterspace , (edited )

We would never had an Alan Wake Remaster without Epic paying for it.

Dear PC gamers, please stop bitching about installing a second games launcher. If you wanted all games to only come out on a single launcher then you should have bought a console. Us console players are getting real sick of the endless bitching about Epic just because they tried to break Steam’s monopoly.

Noone is a fan of exclusives but Epic’s behaviour was explicitly to try and break Steam’s entrenched monopoly and they legitimately offer far more favourable terms for developers. They’ve also spent hundreds of millions of dollars to break other monopolies like Apple and Google’s. They are by no means the evil villains that PC Gamers make them out to be. The tactics they took with EGS were misguided but they’ve genuinely fought to level the playing field at the legislative level, they’re a full tier better than an EA or Ubisoft who only ever try and squeeze as much profit as possible at every turn.

domi ,
@domi@lemmy.secnd.me avatar

They should have spent those millions to fund development of a store that can actually compete with the competition and studios that produce games, which they then can sell on their own platform.

Instead they snatched up every new release on the way to Steam while still not being able to provide the basic necessities of a modern PC store front.

So why should I bother purchasing something from them? They have nothing to offer and actively make it harder for me to play games through their store with their anti-Steam Deck stance.

masterspace ,

I’m not saying you should, I’m saying it doesn’t make them villains or a bad company.

They made a mistake in their approach to the EGS, which they’ve pretty candidly talked about and admitted. But the end goal of EGS wasn’t just to make them more money, they offer every developer more money when they publish there. The underlying motivation for creating EGS in the first place was the recognition that Valve does not need to be taking a 30% cut of every game sale to provide the services they provide.

I’m happy that Remedy can afford to self publish and that Anna Purna is willing to finance the project without publishing it, but I don’t think Epic is a particularly bad publishing partner.

fartsparkles ,

Yet consumers get more value from Steam as a platform where that 30% cut has helped fund a powerful gaming platform, remote game streaming, driven developers to release builds for macOS and Linux and license users for all platforms with a single purchase, an open source handheld gaming device, an input library that enables practically any input device to be used and for controls to be remapped even if the game doesn’t support it, the best VR headsets and room-scale VR, popularising VR and making it mainstream, contributing to upstream to further gaming on Linux, enabling DirectX games to execute natively on Linux, several of the most popular multiplayer games on the internet, enticed PlayStation to release games on PC, putting indie developers on a level playing field with the biggest studios, enabling developers to release games mid development to help them self fund the game’s development, support the modding scene, and so much more.

Epic may charge developers less but that doesn’t offer me, a consumer, any extra value.

Instead their platform and its lack of investment and innovation make the purchases I have made in their store feel less valuable and cumbersome as their competition increase the value of their offerings.

I’m not saying they’re the bad guys but the argument that developers get more money doesn’t really matter if that 30% cut is felt justified to consumers.

And with the upcoming untethered VR offering from Valve on the horizon, which will no doubt be powered by open source with their improvements upstreamed, that 30% cut feels even more justified when Linux becomes fully capable of VR thanks to my purchases.

masterspace ,

I mean, I’ll give full Kudos to Valve for investing in Linux gaming, it wasn’t exactly a selfless maneuver, but it is still valuable and makes the world a better place.

And I’ll give them Kudos for contributing to VR, but they neither popularized it, nor make the best headsets, both of those titles go to Oculus. They do have the hands down best VR game ever made, but even that is not what popularized VR, Beat Saber is.

Ultimately, Valve has made billions and billions in profits on top of all that investment, and on top of paying all their employees $300k+ salaries + stock. I like a lot of what Steam offers, but it’s also objectively unquestionable that they could have offered all of what they offer for far less money, but their de facto monopoly means that everyone will buy from them no matter what.

Because, let’s be real, gamers aren’tt hating Epic for having to download mods through a third party mod site, they’re hating them for having to use a second launcher / store.

fartsparkles ,

They could have gone Unix and not contributed upstream like PlayStation did.

Oculus was a device. Valve built SteamVR literally for the Rift (I had the original developer model and using Steam was pretty much essential). Valve also ensured that SteamVR supported other devices too when they came to market, levelling the playing field and enabling consumers to pick and choose hardware without having to buy games across multiple different marketplaces.

Valve pay their employees what they’re worth and share their success with them rather than devaluing them and extracting value from them. That’s pretty good going. And given how much they do with so few, it says a lot about their culture and ethic.

I don’t know about other gamers but I dislike EGS because it’s simply an inferior product and I vote with my wallet. If they offer me more value than a competitor, I’ll gladly use them. I use GOG, itch.io, and Xbox GamePass so it’s not like I’m averse to other platforms. I just don’t see why, if a game is on EGS and Steam (and not on GamePass), what value is there to me as a consumer with going with EGS?

masterspace ,

Valve pay their employees what they’re worth and share their success with them rather than devaluing them and extracting value from them. That’s pretty good going. And given how much they do with so few, it says a lot about their culture and ethic.

Gabe Newell is a literal billionaire. Valve executive are not taking a hit to pay them fairly, Steam just prints so much money that they can pay them more than they have to. Rather than lowering prices for the rest of consumers they decided to pay their staff exorbitant salaries in addition to themselves. It’s better than just paying themselves, but it’s not noble or good on a broad scale, it’s them taking more societal resources than they need to provide a service.

I don’t know about other gamers but I dislike EGS because it’s simply an inferior product and I vote with my wallet. If they offer me more value than a competitor, I’ll gladly use them. I use GOG, itch.io, and Xbox GamePass so it’s not like I’m averse to other platforms. I just don’t see why, if a game is on EGS and Steam (and not on GamePass), what value is there to me as a consumer with going with EGS?

Again, not saying anyone should prefer EGS, but this thread started off because someone said Epic was a bad publisher, which is just based of their hate for EGS, not based on anything to do with their merits as a publishing partner.

domi ,
@domi@lemmy.secnd.me avatar

I’m not saying you should, I’m saying it doesn’t make them villains or a bad company.

But it does, paying third parties to not publish on your competitors platform is the oldest anti-competitive behaviour in the book.

It would have been completely fine if they started out with actually funding development of new games and only releasing them on their store.

I would have even given them some slack for their bad launcher since they were new to this.

Instead we are here, almost 6 years later. Their launcher is still trash, their exclusive deals were a complete money sink, EGS is still not profitable, they burned all bridges to Valve and are not one step closer to their claim that 30% is too much and they can do it with 8% 12%.

masterspace ,

But it does, paying third parties to not publish on your competitors platform is the oldest anti-competitive behaviour in the book.

It would have been completely fine if they started out with actually funding development of new games and only releasing them on their store.

I would argue that even restricting sales to your own store is anti-competitive tying. You’re avoiding competing on the merits of a store using exclusive licensing of a creative work.

Again, not a fan of the tactic, but they are trying to break an entrenched monopoly with a ton of network effects which is near impossible.

Instead we are here, almost 6 years later. Their launcher is still trash,

Their launcher is perfectly fine.

their exclusive deals were a complete money sink,

Not really. They weren’t as effective as they wanted them to be but they did ultimately gain a significant chunk of market share.

EGS is still not profitable,

No, they needed to gain more market share to break even.

they burned all bridges to Valve and are not one step closer to their claim that 30% is too much and they can do it with 8% 12%.

But they are. They’re not losing that much money, even with a tiny portion of market share. Valve having far more market share means they should be able to do it for an even smaller percentage than what epic is using, especially since Valve has 21 years of infrastructure to lean on.

domi ,
@domi@lemmy.secnd.me avatar

I would argue that even restricting sales to your own store is anti-competitive tying. You’re avoiding competing on the merits of a store using exclusive licensing of a creative work.

A creative work which you made yourself, which you can sell wherever you want.

Should you sell it everywhere so as many people can play it as possible? Sure. Do you have to? No.

Again, not a fan of the tactic, but they are trying to break an entrenched monopoly with a ton of network effects which is near impossible.

Let’s reverse the roles for a second: EGS is the big player and Steam is just getting started. EGS suddenly starts paying all publishers to only publish on their platform. Does that sound like competition to you? You don’t break a monopoly by using tools used by monopolies.

Their launcher is perfectly fine.

Fine? Yes. It does the bare minimum of being able to buy a game and start it. Does it do everything I expect a modern game launcher to do after existing for almost 6 years? Nope.

But they are. They’re not losing that much money, even with a tiny portion of market share. Valve having far more market share means they should be able to do it for an even smaller percentage than what epic is using, especially since Valve has 21 years of infrastructure to lean on.

They are “not losing much money” while providing a fraction of the services Steam does. They say 30% is too much, we can do it in 12% and yet they severely lack in social features, have no modding support, no VR support, no in-home streaming, no Remote Play Together, no Big Picture, no Family Sharing, a barely functioning Steamworks alternative, no Steam Deck support, no Linux support and absolutely zero open source contributions. That’s just the obvious stuff I can think of right now, every single menu you open in Steam you find a barebones menu in the EGS.

They don’t even need 21 years of infrastructure for most of these, they just need to fund development of it. Which they seem to be unwilling to do so.

masterspace ,

A creative work which you made yourself, which you can sell wherever you want.

Should you sell it everywhere so as many people can play it as possible? Sure. Do you have to? No.

We’re not talking about what you currently have to do, we’re talking about anti- competitive behaviour and what you should do.

If you set up your own shop to avoid paying a middle man for something you can do yourself fine. If you set up your own shop and then use your exclusive games to grow your shop into something bigger, then that’s anti-competitive tying. Your shop is not competing on its merits as a shop.

Let’s reverse the roles for a second: EGS is the big player and Steam is just getting started. EGS suddenly starts paying all publishers to only publish on their platform. Does that sound like competition to you? You don’t break a monopoly by using tools used by monopolies.

There is a fundamental difference between using anti-competitive behaviour to break a monopoly, and using it to entrench a monopoly. That’s like arguing that a bully using violence and someone standing up to a bully using violence is the same thing.

They don’t even need 21 years of infrastructure for most of these, they just need to fund development of it. Which they seem to be unwilling to do so.

Where do you think the funding for Valve’s system came from? 21 years of taking 30% of virtually every single PC game sale.

LainTrain ,

It makes their product shit

limitedduck ,

I can agree that challenging Steam is probably a good thing, but right now Steam just gives so much more value to Devs and publishers. Steam provides:

  • a review system
  • remote play
  • the workshop
  • discussion threads
  • cards and the points store

and that’s just what I can think of, not including the player specific stuff like library sharing.

Devs and publishers pay more, but get a community and ecosystem in return instead of just a platform.

masterspace ,

Yeah, but think about how much money Valve has taken, 30% of virtually every single PC game sale over the past 21 years.

I do understand that there’s more value provided, but that’s the thing with monopolies, they can still provide more value than upstarts because an upstart has to build everything they did, while having none of the market share that they had to do it with.

LainTrain ,

yawn

If it’s not on Steam or GoG I pirate. Console children should go touch grass or go to school so they understand something other than defending multi-billion dollar megacorps.

Coelacanth ,
@Coelacanth@feddit.nu avatar

God damn how I wish James McCaffrey was still with us.

Brunbrun6766 ,
@Brunbrun6766@lemmy.world avatar

Oooh, now it’s getting interesting

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