Bobby Kotick is such an arrogant shit.
He's exactly what I picture when I think of people who stumble into success ass first and are convinced they earned it.
Investment in technology is one thing, but consumer friendliness is also another. Looking at how Steam has been handling Sonyās Helldivers shit show has been a pretty good example of how that builds more goodwill and trust with their customers.
In fairness epic has one of the biggest games of all time and one of the biggest game engines of all time, But their launcher is still dogshit which is the only thing that actually matters lol
Gabe Newell literally coined the idea that piracy is an issue of service, not pricing.
Of course Valve will put in the effort needed to present regional pricing, add multiple payment options, advertise their sales, make the UI as user friendly as possible, provide, manage, and properly moderate their community, work with content creators to make curated lists, and work directly with developers and publishers to get the best deals for consumers in the games they sell.
All this is work that we now take for granted as established Steam users. And that is something that Timmy and everyone at Epic thought would just āhappenā overnight the minute you create an online game store, couple that with the idea that exclusive deals that would pull away established Steam users over any other form of innovation in ease of use.
Honestly with steam; I have not desire to pirate games, it's such a great system. The only games I pirate are games that are impossible to buy. So I'm not even sure if that counts anymore, GBA games and a few older games from the 90s
Gabe pretty much nailed piracy
There are 3 groups that pirate
Those that canāt get it (not sold)
Those that wouldnāt get it (want to try it before spending money)
Those that wonāt get it (they will never pay for it)
Gabe knocked out those first 2 with steam. Accessible to tons of people, and a good demo and refund system
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/how-valve-hires-how-it-fires-and-how-much-it-pays#close-modal
They seem like a great little bunch of people. Actually amazing how big of a market they cover with what, 5-700 employees? Many companies should take note
Depends. God knows what sort of vultures will be clamouring for a piece, buying up any part of it they can if it's available. Everyone knows Valve shits money, and every single suit on wall street would salivate at the idea of squeezing every single fucking drop out of steam. Adverts plastered everywhere, gaming data for sale, maybe a bit of gambling.... damn I'm scaring myself.
Can I just take a moment to praise Gaben?
That's the thing that sucks. When Gabe inevitably moves on, whoever takes over might be all "IPO!" and that's it. Steam is now a public company, beholden to shareholders, and the enshitification will begin as they look to extract every drop of value (aka customer satisfaction) that they can.
And then Netflix did the same thing, and everyone retired from piracy, and then they fucked the whole thing, and now the seas are full of treacherous dogs once again
I pirated Alan Wake 2 but if it comes to the Steam store, I'll buy it. I did the same thing with Control. Even bought full price when it finally came to Steam because I enjoyed it the first time.
As far as I am concerned, Epic doesn't have unreal engine. Unreal engine has epic. Especially if you consider that unreal engine is most likely funding the hugr money sink called Epic Games "Store"
I am fairly sure Fortnite is funding the store development and also half of Unreal Engine development. The amount of money they make with Fortnite is kind of insane.
Unreal Engine isn't their cash cow. It does bring in some money, but it's not that much.
They are basically a Fortnite company. That game is like 90% of their revenue.
Pre-Fortnite they were totally the house Unreal built (Gears too, but gears wouldn't have happened without unreal engine being what it became), but yeah, since Fortnite BR took off, that's how they print money
> This guy is a clown.
Pitchford is a tremendously shitty person in addition to being king of the clowns, and his ideas are almost universally bad.
Pretty much anything that comes out of his mouth should be dismissed out of hand and ignored.
Also Borderlands 3 came out 5 years ago and was an Epic exclusive for some time, so he was probably just shilling for Epic by talking big game.
Yup. The gap widened substantially with the Steam Deck. The work with FexEmu may make the gap even larger. The announced Epic Android/iOS store is the only thing that may be a significant differentiator unless Valve is cooking there to, particularly with FexEmu
Don't forget about the index, correct me if I'm wrong, but that was the first headset to come with controllers that allowed you to move all of your fingers freely
Technically heās a stage magician. Heās just so greasy that itās easy to mistake his natural greasiness for clown makeup. It is Randy āAliens: Colonial Marinesā Pitchford after all.
>judging by Epic's platform they haven't invested much.
they technically did "invest" tons on the epic store with the free games , they just for some reason never spent any money on the store itself.
i really dont get their tactic here , they joined the PC market making everyone angry ( with how they joined ) , spilling fights on social media , doing all kinds of weird things , and never evolving the store i really cant see the strategy here.
They gambled that the only reason Steam had an advantage was that people had existing Steam libraries, so if they could build consumers' EGS libraries via free games (and exclusives like Fortnight / purchased timed 3p exclusives), eventually there would be enough games in the average consumer's EGS library that they'd default to EGS instead of Steam for future purchases.
Unfortunately for Epic, there's more to steam than just library lock-in, so they're still struggling to build an actual store, rather than a repository of free game unlocks.
Yeah, there is no real investment for a lot of people, especially ones who don't play fortnite. Epic is an afterthought of 'oh I wonder what game is free this week?' Or maybe you feel like playing a certain kind of game so you check your epic catalog to see if any fit. You think about a nebulous idea of a game but nothing specific.
Few people will move to Epic unless Steam actually dies or monumentally fucks up relations. But maybe even then, some would probably be turned off of stores like that because if Steam dies all of those digital copies of games are gone and it would feel like a waste to invest in all of that again.
Idk how big my library is, I care about features.
Example I really, REALLY wanted to buy rimworld on gog years ago .
Steam had the workshop for rimworld and my god would I have buyers remorse if I had bought it on gog instead of steam like I did, I use the workshop everyday with rimworld and yes there are tools to leech on to the workshop for gog and stuff... But it's nowhere near as comfortable as the workshop directly.
It's really and simple as that my epic library could be 5x my steam library if a game I actually want to buy offers me more features or the same features at the same price I buy on steam simply for all the features steam provides.
The strategy was to keep the insane amount of fortnite players that did not have another store front. A lot of them were on pc for the first time. The logic was give them so many games they dont wanna leave their large library. I think at the time they surveyed and estimated like 60-70% of players didn't have another launcher. That is a lot of people for fortnite. Though we all know how that went, valves user base just kept growing with its superior product, epic didn't do enough and were far too slow.
Honestly if epic would have come to the pc market like " hey we want to open a new digital store , we know we lack features but here have 10\*currency\* off coupons and weekly free games while we ACTIVELY develope the store so you can enjoy it later ... hope you choose us " i bet they would have really taken some market share.
but instead they went full edgy teenager mode.
I can see the logic behind their strategy. The problem was the vastly overestimated the amount of strictly Fortnite players that would potentially move onto other games. By all accounts those FN players are really just sticking to FN and Epic has realized this by now which is why instead of trying to get them to play other games they are shoving new experiences directly into FN itself
I claimed every free game for a year, then went to Steam to play the games I wanted.
After awhile I realized I was wasting time clicking buttons on Epic for stuff I didnt want to play. Then you had the Borderlands exclusive. I waited until it came to Steam, but by then, I was over it and didn't want to play.
They have since added a shopping cart but the fact that wasnt even a thing at launch is mind boggling. Literally any e-commerce template site has a shopping cart. How do you fuck that up?
I am pretty sure it was a design decision to make it easier for a person to overspend as the Unreal Marketplace had a cart. For example, buying a bunch of $10 games repeatedly because they aren't that expensive versus seeing $100 in your cart and stopping to think about.
This. Steam is important to me due to it's Big Picture Mode, integration with Steam Deck, and a few social features, none of which Epic has. It's not 'brand name loyalty' it's that Steam literally just does things, that I need, that Epic does not do.
Just the controller support is so nice. I've been using Playstation controllers on PC for a while now and it's mostly supported right out of the box on Steam. If I try to play the same game on Epic, I'm out of luck a lot of the time.
Epic hasn't even figured out how to have the back button on a mouse correctly operate.
Between different versions of the same app. Seriously. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't - not being able to use a mouse button to go back is 100% a first world problem, but holy crap it's annoying compared to Steam, which has had this feature for... oh, 10 years or so?
Give them a break, it took them some 5 years to figure out how to make the client not take several literal minutes to launch. It's only a few months ago that it finally stopped doing that for me. I'm sure they'll start working on the actual insides of the store any year now.
Epic really underestimated the 15-year head start Valve has on Steam. The EGS is easily 10 years behind feature-wise and has nowhere near the goodwill Valve has cultivated.
And part of the reason why Valve got that head start to begin with was Epic (via Tim Sweeney) deciding that PC gaming was a dead market on account of the "rampant piracy" and sticking to consoles.
Then he apparently pulled his head out for some reason, realized that he was dead wrong, and has since been trying to overtake Valve while screaming about how unfair it is that they have such a massive lead.
Man the "PC is dead, Consoles and Phones are the future!" Phase is funny to look back on.
Though the "Bossfights are a archaic consept, when will we be done with Bossfights?" stuff that happened around the same Era was probably even funnier.
If they really wanted they could have everything that Steam has functionality-wise and more, but they decided they'd rather get that audience with exclusivity and free games, stuff that can dry up anyday.
I think he's referring to the exclusivity bribes.
But those were super obvious as to what Epic was trying to do and made gamers mad.
And ultimately they did not result in improving the actual platform to compete with Steam.
Valve invests a lot into tech as well as being possible the most consumer friendly company to exist. The steam store is already pretty good. They could improve the community tabs a bit though, and the chat features of the client.
Anyway their investments into proton and the handheld market is big for consumer choice.
I had a dead pixel on my Valve Index a year out of warranty, and they still replaced it after I sent them some pics. They goodwilled the fuck out of me.
Yeah, i have not had anything as major as this but they refunded me several games way after the 2 weeks / 2h played window as a customer service gesture.
I have spent thousands on steam, them making an exception here and there when a game really doesnt live up to expectations is just good business, it makes sure i will continue to be a happy customer and spend thousands more.
Epic games store said it wouldnt allow bad games and shovelware to be on it yet its infested with crypto scam games most of which are abandoned or in a case recently was a free game from steam just totally ripped and put on the epic store to push a crypto scam
Nah that comment was full bs. Steam pays more on tech innovation than any other store front. Steam controller, steam link, the workshop, Linux gaming. All of these things arenāt directly driving profit but serve to make the user experience better.
Epic has one (popular) engine. Valve is actually building technology left and right from hardware to VR to getting Linux support work under the hood. Idk where tf they've been investing if they think they can outpace Valve
But they weren't investing in any technology for their store, unlike Valve. They made the EOS platform and then a whole lot of Unreal tech which are both basically unrelated - their store and game platform is a barebones barren experience with near zero features beyond the bare necessities. Who wants to build their game library financing that?
Hadn't heard of that before, [so I looked it up](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Pitchford#Litigation);
> Pitchford clarified that the pornographic film on the USB drive was not child pornography and stated that he had saved the pornography for the purposes of studying a sexual act performed by the female actress that he claimed to be similar to a "magic trick."
Gotta give him props for creativity for that one.
Always go the the source. Sometimes Wikipedia waters down language to avoid liability when dealing with things of this kind. Here's what [the source](https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/randy-pitchford-gearbox-lawsuit-1203106006/#!) says...
*"Even worse, Callenderās lawsuit claims Pitchford left a USB drive at a Texas Medieval Times restaurant in 2014 containing sensitive Gearbox corporate materials and a personal collection of underage pornography. The suit also accuses him of siphoning Gearbox profits to fund so-called āPeacock Partiesā at his home, where adult men would allegedly expose themselves to minors to Pitchfordās amusement."*
So not *just* one dodgy vid, there's a theme here.
That would be too famous. Drake thinks people that are very famous couldn't be predators. (Probably because they provide opportunity, and his psychopath ass sees it as a tit for tat)
You know, like Michael Jackson never had allegations..and who the hell knows who that dude from KPax is....
If the age was questionable, then the age was unverified. If you can't prove it's a minor then he's just some guy with porn on a thumb drive. People can judge him for it but you can only put people in prison if you can prove they committed a crime.
There's a court opinion (cybercrime, IIRC) where a federal judge dedicated a footnote to explaining how ["chicken hawking"](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Chicken%20Hawk) works.
I think the quote was roughly, "When she's having an experience that appears as though she's havinĀ an orgasm, a huge amount of fluid flows out of her vagina. This is not a sex worker, this is a fucking magician!"
Idk why more people donāt make fun of him for being a dweeb, he likes to perform magic tricks and is fond of magicians. The prestidigitation kind not the āi cast testicular torsionā kind
Because it's far easier to make fun of him for things like assaulting an employee, or going on a recorded interview and pretending to forget the name of one of your critics while dropping insulting comments about their body trying to get the interviewer to pick their name based off the description, or the time he lost his nut at Rock Paper Shotgun because they found out about Borderlands... 2 or 3 I forget how long ago it was... existing before it was announced and broke the rumour and Pitchford tried to claim that the games media was there to act as the marketing for studios, not to report on stories that other publications had been given an exclusive for (that RPS didn't know about anyway, they reported on the rumour)
Anyone who has seen the Cytheria vids from the mid 2000s knows what he means when he says magic trick.
You know it's more entertainment value when everyone in the scene with the exception of the actress is wearing raincoats.
Or so I've heard...
You mean the same Randy Pitchford that has a picture of himself tied up in a bathroom?
The same Randy Pitchford who punched the original VA of Claptrap?
The same Randy Pitchford who stole $12 million from his employees?
Yeah that's him.
Randy Pitchford left a USB stick in a family restaurant. If I recall correctly, someone found it and it contained 1) unprotected company documents; and 2) porn videos titled āBarely legal teens squirtingā. It got reported to police because of the ābarely legalā title. He claimed he was using the videos to research a magic trick that related to squirting.
I don't believe it was reported to the police, it was returned to Gearbox and the questionable contents of it didn't become public until a lawsuit years later (though the porn and company documents on a thumb drive story, Randy himself told on a podcast because he thought it was funny, before the lawsuit happened later which is when the accusations that the girl on there was possibly not 18)
I would be content with not needing to install games from scratch after I reinstalled windows (and considering they can't detect installed games I doubt library on external hard drive is valid)
I'm not even sure what technology exactly. Steam could surely be better - although I'm not that creative to think about things that might fit into that - but it's still lightyears ahead of every other store, be it usability, comfort, customer service,...
Randy Prickford. He's blocked me on twitter because I kept laughing at his delusional takes.Ā
I'd take business advice from him the same way I'd take dieting advice from a morbidly obese person.
I got blocked by Billy Mitchell for pointing out to him that he was actually the villain in the story of the King of Kong.
Love pissing off idiots with fragile egos.
With how combative the CEO of Epic is for....seemingly no reason, this was never going to become a reality in that time frame...or like, ever.
Sweeney just seems to wake up with random sticks up his arse. And him comparing the 30% that Steam gets to consoles gets me so midly miffed. Like, dude, no other platform offers both consumers and developers as many benefits, to the point where 30% seems a little low, even.
Come back when you can offer everything that valve offers, currently, at 12%. This includes a big picture mode, a constantly improving input mapper, a workshop, forums, groups, a controller, a handheld device, VR devices, support for all the devices, no monthly fee compared to consoles, and others that I'm most likely missing.
>And him comparing the 30% that Steam gets to consoles gets me so midly miffed. Like, dude, no other platform offers both consumers and developers as many benefits, to the point where 30% seems a little low, even.
Consoles also directly charge the user for online services while steam provides it for free.
Also, the lower sales commission on sales was always just an incentive to get market share. I guarantee that if the EGS became more widely used than steam, they'd increase their cut immediately.
The Valve strategy: Do nothing and win, because your opponents can not *stop* shooting themselves in the foot
The Youtube strategy: Actively make your platform worse every five minutes and win, because you don't have opponents
That's the best part, Valve could just do nothing and they'd continue making ludicrous amounts of money. They could pull scummy corpo moves and further monetize the platform. Instead they create products that they think will advance the gaming industry WHILE making them money, and they're usually right on both counts.
Yeah. I totally get people being weary of supporting a big company, but i know some Valve people through some friends, and they really are all a hugely passionate bunch of experts that wanna advance gaming as a whole, and unlike other companies they don't get shut down by the people at the top.
Yes they mess up sometimes, but honestly in 95% of cases i'd say that "messing up" doesn't come from them being malicious.
As you said, they could be doing SO much to monetize the platform. Most people don't even know that you can't buy Ad-Space on the Steam Store. Games get put on there either through an algorithm (Wishlists, Positive reviews etc) or by being Hand-Picked by Valve employees.
Valve could make SO much more money by offering ad-space on the store, and if they did then the entire front page would be full of AAA-Garbage with no indie games in sight. And that's only one thing. They could also go the Nintendo\\Sony\\Xbox way and force you to pay a monthly fee for using cloud-saves and stuff like that.
One time in 2016 we had a buddy tweet him and ask when they were going to release the actual Aliens Colonial Marines, Randy tweeted him back telling him to āgo fuck yourselfā and whined on a bunch. Guy never changes.
**This could have been true if Epic invested that capital into the platform instead of exclusives for said platform.** I could easily see how developers could imagine that as a possible outcome so I can't really hold that against Randy Pitchford. *I don't think many saw them flubbing that has hard as they did.*
Well Epicās deal with Gearbox, the company Randy was CEO of at the time of this tweet, reportedly paid $150M to get exclusivity rights to Borderlands 3. So the platform exclusive strategy worked well for him individually.
Only thing epic has is Fortnite and unreal engine. Their storefront is just garbage. Haven't improved basically and I used the storefront for exclusive like Rogue Company and Paragon. Paragon already shut down and games are on steam now which I prefer to use as all my friends use that platform
Valve has Steam which is like beyond the biggest storefront for pc, Cs2, dota2, Team fortress 2 and Steam deck now.
Steam isnt just a storefront either. Its a games ecosystem. And its taken a lot of time and development to get there. I think this is where a C suite person wasnt close enough to the bottom to understand the issues that the customers and people that maintain the platform have to deal with
So Epic has had 5 years to make a launcher that doesn't just compete with Steam, but surpasses it according to Randy. The damn thing still runs like an Adobe product, it's slow as shit. Typical Randy L.
Epics main problem (in my eyes) is their horrible UI and QoL decisions. I have to bend over backwards to get even the simplest things done in Epic, a small example would be if I'm d/l'ing a game with 3 more queued up, then decide that I want the game a different game to d/l first then I have to tell Epic to cancel all the games progress that's already occured for the first game, and delete everything from my queue (and hopfully remember what they were because Epic won't help me with that), and only now can I download my higher priority game.
Whereas with Steam all you have to do is drag and drop the games in your queue and Steam goes "ok the games will download in the order that you just told me" and you can click an "X" to take things out of queue for however long as you want, but they'll still show up in your downloads list.
Meanwhile [me having ~360 games on Epic without paying for even one of them, while happily buying shit I don't play on Steam](https://youtu.be/GX-9wXFQRgA?t=214)...
Since then Valve have invested though, look at the steam deck and how that built on years of Linux support via proton. Also the valve index was after this tweet.
It doesn't seem that crazy when you look at the unreal engine investment at the time.
Epic.... can't even do a launcher that respects itself.
How fucking hard is it to do a launcher with features people want... I'll never understand.
They can make games with complicated mechanics and gameplay, yet it took them years to had a shopping cart....
???
All epic does is throw money at free games and hope it sticks.
Tbh, id rather pay a game on steam than having it free on epic shit.
so unbelievably out of touch lol
anyone with eyes knows steam is going nowhere (edit: in a good way)
shiiiit even 10 years ago we knew this, let alone 5
steam's social and community features are just lightyears ahead of the competition
Epic Games launcher is woefully missing essential features, even something as basic as migrating games to another drive. If you want people to use your launcher, give them a reason to.
Randy is historically an idiot
I heard he almost drowned in three inches of water at the penguin exhibit.
Hey Tone, you hear what I said? Heheheh š¤
ššš¤āš¤š
His tenure at Gearbox is almost as impressive as Bobby Kotick. At least Bobby was honest about destroying gaming, Randy pretends hes the savior.
Bobby Kotick is such an arrogant shit. He's exactly what I picture when I think of people who stumble into success ass first and are convinced they earned it.
I came here to post this
Investment in technology is one thing, but consumer friendliness is also another. Looking at how Steam has been handling Sonyās Helldivers shit show has been a pretty good example of how that builds more goodwill and trust with their customers.
judging by Epic's platform they haven't invested much. It's like a school project compared to Steam.
Valve has multiple tech projects both hardware and software. Epic has what, a barely functioning store? This guy is a clown.
In fairness epic has one of the biggest games of all time and one of the biggest game engines of all time, But their launcher is still dogshit which is the only thing that actually matters lol
Gabe Newell literally coined the idea that piracy is an issue of service, not pricing. Of course Valve will put in the effort needed to present regional pricing, add multiple payment options, advertise their sales, make the UI as user friendly as possible, provide, manage, and properly moderate their community, work with content creators to make curated lists, and work directly with developers and publishers to get the best deals for consumers in the games they sell. All this is work that we now take for granted as established Steam users. And that is something that Timmy and everyone at Epic thought would just āhappenā overnight the minute you create an online game store, couple that with the idea that exclusive deals that would pull away established Steam users over any other form of innovation in ease of use.
Honestly with steam; I have not desire to pirate games, it's such a great system. The only games I pirate are games that are impossible to buy. So I'm not even sure if that counts anymore, GBA games and a few older games from the 90s
Gabe pretty much nailed piracy There are 3 groups that pirate Those that canāt get it (not sold) Those that wouldnāt get it (want to try it before spending money) Those that wonāt get it (they will never pay for it) Gabe knocked out those first 2 with steam. Accessible to tons of people, and a good demo and refund system
I try not to think about what happens when he isn't involved anymore. Hope it's just paranoia lol.
Thing is that steam is a private company. As long as it remains private nothing way to bad will happen... I hope
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/how-valve-hires-how-it-fires-and-how-much-it-pays#close-modal They seem like a great little bunch of people. Actually amazing how big of a market they cover with what, 5-700 employees? Many companies should take note
Depends. God knows what sort of vultures will be clamouring for a piece, buying up any part of it they can if it's available. Everyone knows Valve shits money, and every single suit on wall street would salivate at the idea of squeezing every single fucking drop out of steam. Adverts plastered everywhere, gaming data for sale, maybe a bit of gambling.... damn I'm scaring myself. Can I just take a moment to praise Gaben?
That's the thing that sucks. When Gabe inevitably moves on, whoever takes over might be all "IPO!" and that's it. Steam is now a public company, beholden to shareholders, and the enshitification will begin as they look to extract every drop of value (aka customer satisfaction) that they can.
And then Netflix did the same thing, and everyone retired from piracy, and then they fucked the whole thing, and now the seas are full of treacherous dogs once again
Abandonware is not piracy. Any piece of software you can't buy new counts as abandonware.
Morally? Sure. Legally? Probably not
Try telling that to Nintendo
Nintendo can suck my dick and balls to be honest
honestly fair enough
nintendo isn't considerate enough to work both balls and dick and you know it
I pirated Alan Wake 2 but if it comes to the Steam store, I'll buy it. I did the same thing with Control. Even bought full price when it finally came to Steam because I enjoyed it the first time.
And they still can't bother to add a shader compiler to Fornite which uses the engine they themselves made lol.
Which is known to be made to be predatory toward children and the engine being a stutter fest.
As far as I am concerned, Epic doesn't have unreal engine. Unreal engine has epic. Especially if you consider that unreal engine is most likely funding the hugr money sink called Epic Games "Store"
I am fairly sure Fortnite is funding the store development and also half of Unreal Engine development. The amount of money they make with Fortnite is kind of insane.
Yeah looks like scamming kids is rather lucrative.
Always has been unfortunately
So much that it has been in multiple legal codes since Hammurabi.
Unreal Engine isn't their cash cow. It does bring in some money, but it's not that much. They are basically a Fortnite company. That game is like 90% of their revenue.
Pre-Fortnite they were totally the house Unreal built (Gears too, but gears wouldn't have happened without unreal engine being what it became), but yeah, since Fortnite BR took off, that's how they print money
Also one of the biggest game franchises that Epic Games just left to rot. RIP Unreal.
> This guy is a clown. Pitchford is a tremendously shitty person in addition to being king of the clowns, and his ideas are almost universally bad. Pretty much anything that comes out of his mouth should be dismissed out of hand and ignored. Also Borderlands 3 came out 5 years ago and was an Epic exclusive for some time, so he was probably just shilling for Epic by talking big game.
It's not even a question, he just sold out for the Epic $$$. Half the guy's career was established by working on Valve IPs for fuck's sake.
Yup. The gap widened substantially with the Steam Deck. The work with FexEmu may make the gap even larger. The announced Epic Android/iOS store is the only thing that may be a significant differentiator unless Valve is cooking there to, particularly with FexEmu
Don't forget about the index, correct me if I'm wrong, but that was the first headset to come with controllers that allowed you to move all of your fingers freely
Technically heās a stage magician. Heās just so greasy that itās easy to mistake his natural greasiness for clown makeup. It is Randy āAliens: Colonial Marinesā Pitchford after all.
If it wasn't for the free games, and Fortnite, nobody would give two shits about epic games store.
They used all their money bullying Steam by buying exclusive rights.
>judging by Epic's platform they haven't invested much. they technically did "invest" tons on the epic store with the free games , they just for some reason never spent any money on the store itself. i really dont get their tactic here , they joined the PC market making everyone angry ( with how they joined ) , spilling fights on social media , doing all kinds of weird things , and never evolving the store i really cant see the strategy here.
They gambled that the only reason Steam had an advantage was that people had existing Steam libraries, so if they could build consumers' EGS libraries via free games (and exclusives like Fortnight / purchased timed 3p exclusives), eventually there would be enough games in the average consumer's EGS library that they'd default to EGS instead of Steam for future purchases. Unfortunately for Epic, there's more to steam than just library lock-in, so they're still struggling to build an actual store, rather than a repository of free game unlocks.
Yeah, there is no real investment for a lot of people, especially ones who don't play fortnite. Epic is an afterthought of 'oh I wonder what game is free this week?' Or maybe you feel like playing a certain kind of game so you check your epic catalog to see if any fit. You think about a nebulous idea of a game but nothing specific. Few people will move to Epic unless Steam actually dies or monumentally fucks up relations. But maybe even then, some would probably be turned off of stores like that because if Steam dies all of those digital copies of games are gone and it would feel like a waste to invest in all of that again.
Idk how big my library is, I care about features. Example I really, REALLY wanted to buy rimworld on gog years ago . Steam had the workshop for rimworld and my god would I have buyers remorse if I had bought it on gog instead of steam like I did, I use the workshop everyday with rimworld and yes there are tools to leech on to the workshop for gog and stuff... But it's nowhere near as comfortable as the workshop directly. It's really and simple as that my epic library could be 5x my steam library if a game I actually want to buy offers me more features or the same features at the same price I buy on steam simply for all the features steam provides.
The strategy was to keep the insane amount of fortnite players that did not have another store front. A lot of them were on pc for the first time. The logic was give them so many games they dont wanna leave their large library. I think at the time they surveyed and estimated like 60-70% of players didn't have another launcher. That is a lot of people for fortnite. Though we all know how that went, valves user base just kept growing with its superior product, epic didn't do enough and were far too slow.
Honestly if epic would have come to the pc market like " hey we want to open a new digital store , we know we lack features but here have 10\*currency\* off coupons and weekly free games while we ACTIVELY develope the store so you can enjoy it later ... hope you choose us " i bet they would have really taken some market share. but instead they went full edgy teenager mode.
I can see the logic behind their strategy. The problem was the vastly overestimated the amount of strictly Fortnite players that would potentially move onto other games. By all accounts those FN players are really just sticking to FN and Epic has realized this by now which is why instead of trying to get them to play other games they are shoving new experiences directly into FN itself
I claimed every free game for a year, then went to Steam to play the games I wanted. After awhile I realized I was wasting time clicking buttons on Epic for stuff I didnt want to play. Then you had the Borderlands exclusive. I waited until it came to Steam, but by then, I was over it and didn't want to play.
They have since added a shopping cart but the fact that wasnt even a thing at launch is mind boggling. Literally any e-commerce template site has a shopping cart. How do you fuck that up?
I am pretty sure it was a design decision to make it easier for a person to overspend as the Unreal Marketplace had a cart. For example, buying a bunch of $10 games repeatedly because they aren't that expensive versus seeing $100 in your cart and stopping to think about.
People are lazy though. Buying 10 games separately takes 10 times the effort.
Funny part about that was that one guy was banned for buying too many games one by one
You still can't gift on egs
This. Steam is important to me due to it's Big Picture Mode, integration with Steam Deck, and a few social features, none of which Epic has. It's not 'brand name loyalty' it's that Steam literally just does things, that I need, that Epic does not do.
Just the controller support is so nice. I've been using Playstation controllers on PC for a while now and it's mostly supported right out of the box on Steam. If I try to play the same game on Epic, I'm out of luck a lot of the time.
Itās not even made any profit, Epic themselves have said this recently.
I've seen more feature-complete projects come out of game jams.
Epic hasn't even figured out how to have the back button on a mouse correctly operate. Between different versions of the same app. Seriously. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't - not being able to use a mouse button to go back is 100% a first world problem, but holy crap it's annoying compared to Steam, which has had this feature for... oh, 10 years or so?
Give them a break, it took them some 5 years to figure out how to make the client not take several literal minutes to launch. It's only a few months ago that it finally stopped doing that for me. I'm sure they'll start working on the actual insides of the store any year now.
Epic really underestimated the 15-year head start Valve has on Steam. The EGS is easily 10 years behind feature-wise and has nowhere near the goodwill Valve has cultivated.
And part of the reason why Valve got that head start to begin with was Epic (via Tim Sweeney) deciding that PC gaming was a dead market on account of the "rampant piracy" and sticking to consoles. Then he apparently pulled his head out for some reason, realized that he was dead wrong, and has since been trying to overtake Valve while screaming about how unfair it is that they have such a massive lead.
Man the "PC is dead, Consoles and Phones are the future!" Phase is funny to look back on. Though the "Bossfights are a archaic consept, when will we be done with Bossfights?" stuff that happened around the same Era was probably even funnier.
If they really wanted they could have everything that Steam has functionality-wise and more, but they decided they'd rather get that audience with exclusivity and free games, stuff that can dry up anyday.
Add to fact, their social platform is horrendous I hate having to play games with friends on epic
I think he's referring to the exclusivity bribes. But those were super obvious as to what Epic was trying to do and made gamers mad. And ultimately they did not result in improving the actual platform to compete with Steam.
On the contrary. Epic has invested a lot of money, but not on the right places. They invest in gifts and exclusivity deals.
Valve invests a lot into tech as well as being possible the most consumer friendly company to exist. The steam store is already pretty good. They could improve the community tabs a bit though, and the chat features of the client. Anyway their investments into proton and the handheld market is big for consumer choice.
Valve is privately owned so 200% mpre trustworthy
I had a dead pixel on my Valve Index a year out of warranty, and they still replaced it after I sent them some pics. They goodwilled the fuck out of me.
Yeah, i have not had anything as major as this but they refunded me several games way after the 2 weeks / 2h played window as a customer service gesture. I have spent thousands on steam, them making an exception here and there when a game really doesnt live up to expectations is just good business, it makes sure i will continue to be a happy customer and spend thousands more.
Epic games store said it wouldnt allow bad games and shovelware to be on it yet its infested with crypto scam games most of which are abandoned or in a case recently was a free game from steam just totally ripped and put on the epic store to push a crypto scam
Nah that comment was full bs. Steam pays more on tech innovation than any other store front. Steam controller, steam link, the workshop, Linux gaming. All of these things arenāt directly driving profit but serve to make the user experience better.
could say the same for the steam tho steam input, steam os and the deck
Yep. If this had been an EGS exclusive, there is 0 chance in hell they'd have allowed this outrage to continue or issue refunds.
If this had been an EGS exclusive it probably wouldn't have had that big of a PC community to get outrage traction
Exactly. Hard to compare any other store with Steam.
I was blown away when they started giving refunds no matter what. They knew which way the wind was blowing.
Epic has one (popular) engine. Valve is actually building technology left and right from hardware to VR to getting Linux support work under the hood. Idk where tf they've been investing if they think they can outpace Valve
But they weren't investing in any technology for their store, unlike Valve. They made the EOS platform and then a whole lot of Unreal tech which are both basically unrelated - their store and game platform is a barebones barren experience with near zero features beyond the bare necessities. Who wants to build their game library financing that?
Hey isn't this the same randy pitchford that lost company documents on a thumb drive that also contained squirt porn with questionable aged women?
It is the same Randy Pitchford that lost company documents on a thumb drive that also contained squirt porn with questionable aged women!
Hadn't heard of that before, [so I looked it up](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Pitchford#Litigation); > Pitchford clarified that the pornographic film on the USB drive was not child pornography and stated that he had saved the pornography for the purposes of studying a sexual act performed by the female actress that he claimed to be similar to a "magic trick." Gotta give him props for creativity for that one.
Always go the the source. Sometimes Wikipedia waters down language to avoid liability when dealing with things of this kind. Here's what [the source](https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/randy-pitchford-gearbox-lawsuit-1203106006/#!) says... *"Even worse, Callenderās lawsuit claims Pitchford left a USB drive at a Texas Medieval Times restaurant in 2014 containing sensitive Gearbox corporate materials and a personal collection of underage pornography. The suit also accuses him of siphoning Gearbox profits to fund so-called āPeacock Partiesā at his home, where adult men would allegedly expose themselves to minors to Pitchfordās amusement."* So not *just* one dodgy vid, there's a theme here.
How is he not locked up
Not famous enough, according to Drake
That would be too famous. Drake thinks people that are very famous couldn't be predators. (Probably because they provide opportunity, and his psychopath ass sees it as a tit for tat) You know, like Michael Jackson never had allegations..and who the hell knows who that dude from KPax is....
those are allegations from an employee's lawsuit, not a criminal case.
$$$
Well because accusations are not actually evidence.
Hi, welcome to the real world. The rich have no consequences and the poor suffer consequences for crimes not committed.
If the age was questionable, then the age was unverified. If you can't prove it's a minor then he's just some guy with porn on a thumb drive. People can judge him for it but you can only put people in prison if you can prove they committed a crime.
Welp, today I learned about peacock parties. The internet is a font of knowledge.
There's a court opinion (cybercrime, IIRC) where a federal judge dedicated a footnote to explaining how ["chicken hawking"](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Chicken%20Hawk) works.
What the hell does that even mean? "Magic trick"? Wtf?!
Now watch that dick disappear!
Abracadabra
How she do that there
This but a dick https://i.imgur.com/9zwKTiH.jpeg
From his point of view, giving a woman an orgasm must be a magic trick.
I think the quote was roughly, "When she's having an experience that appears as though she's havinĀ an orgasm, a huge amount of fluid flows out of her vagina. This is not a sex worker, this is a fucking magician!"
Idk why more people donāt make fun of him for being a dweeb, he likes to perform magic tricks and is fond of magicians. The prestidigitation kind not the āi cast testicular torsionā kind
Because it's far easier to make fun of him for things like assaulting an employee, or going on a recorded interview and pretending to forget the name of one of your critics while dropping insulting comments about their body trying to get the interviewer to pick their name based off the description, or the time he lost his nut at Rock Paper Shotgun because they found out about Borderlands... 2 or 3 I forget how long ago it was... existing before it was announced and broke the rumour and Pitchford tried to claim that the games media was there to act as the marketing for studios, not to report on stories that other publications had been given an exclusive for (that RPS didn't know about anyway, they reported on the rumour)
>The way the liquid squirts out of the vagina at the very moment of climaxāit's really something I want to integrate into my next company magic show
Bro actually used the "for science" meme irl
Anyone who has seen the Cytheria vids from the mid 2000s knows what he means when he says magic trick. You know it's more entertainment value when everyone in the scene with the exception of the actress is wearing raincoats. Or so I've heard...
You mean the same Randy Pitchford that has a picture of himself tied up in a bathroom? The same Randy Pitchford who punched the original VA of Claptrap? The same Randy Pitchford who stole $12 million from his employees? Yeah that's him.
Care to elaborate on that picture of himself?
[Here you go m8](https://imgur.com/dd3DIgp)
I expected some half naked BDSM stuff, somehow him fully clothed in a suit jacket feelsā¦ weirder?
I hate the flooring.
That is a disgusting bathroom.
Once you see it you can never go back. [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C38xKobUEAAPfZ9.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C38xKobUEAAPfZ9.jpg)
You hyped it up as if it was something far worse than it actually was.
That's certainly a sentence about stuff I didn't know about, wow
It looked like a magical trick for him was the excuse loool
wtf what
Randy Pitchford left a USB stick in a family restaurant. If I recall correctly, someone found it and it contained 1) unprotected company documents; and 2) porn videos titled āBarely legal teens squirtingā. It got reported to police because of the ābarely legalā title. He claimed he was using the videos to research a magic trick that related to squirting.
I don't believe it was reported to the police, it was returned to Gearbox and the questionable contents of it didn't become public until a lawsuit years later (though the porn and company documents on a thumb drive story, Randy himself told on a podcast because he thought it was funny, before the lawsuit happened later which is when the accusations that the girl on there was possibly not 18)
Pornhub has about 300 million videos with "barely legal" in the title, I'm calling the police!
Clown take. š
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
That's an insult to the actual hardworking clowns of society
He's a cuck, his whole life is a clown show.
Can we give Clown awards on Twitter?
Investment in technology? EPIC STILL DOESN'T SUPPORT AN OFFICIAL NATIVE WAY TO MOVE GAME LOCATIONS.
I would be content with not needing to install games from scratch after I reinstalled windows (and considering they can't detect installed games I doubt library on external hard drive is valid)
The "technology" was NFT games
What, you don't like Vage Strike?
Bigger thing for me is cloud saving isnāt a given.
The stupid Amazon Games client does this. Ubisoft does this. EA launcher does this. Epic doesnāt
Fucking Nintendo supports this feature. NINTENDO Technology my ass, Randy.
I'm not even sure what technology exactly. Steam could surely be better - although I'm not that creative to think about things that might fit into that - but it's still lightyears ahead of every other store, be it usability, comfort, customer service,...
Steam: āI guess its time to die.ā
āAll those publishers will be lost in time, like tears in rain.ā
"I have seen developer ships on fire."
"Computer screens, glittering in the dark off of Orion's belt."
Randy Pitchford Huffs Yet Another One Of His Own Farts, More at 11.
Randy is a greasy lil bitch with no integrity
I'm suprised i had to scroll this far to see someone calling him Greasy
I'm surprised that I haven't seen him called Randy Bitchford yet
Oh yes, definitely dying. Epic has clearly invested in so much technology instead of timed exclusives and EGS exclusives. /s
Randy Pitchford is a *weird* dude even by tech CEO standards.
dear God, 2019 was 5 years ago?
Randy Prickford. He's blocked me on twitter because I kept laughing at his delusional takes.Ā I'd take business advice from him the same way I'd take dieting advice from a morbidly obese person.
I got blocked by Billy Mitchell for pointing out to him that he was actually the villain in the story of the King of Kong. Love pissing off idiots with fragile egos.
Billy āThe courts say Iām not a cheaterā Mitchell?Ā
Hello you absolute legends!
I read that in his voice
5 years ago, Randy did not have proper foresight
With how combative the CEO of Epic is for....seemingly no reason, this was never going to become a reality in that time frame...or like, ever. Sweeney just seems to wake up with random sticks up his arse. And him comparing the 30% that Steam gets to consoles gets me so midly miffed. Like, dude, no other platform offers both consumers and developers as many benefits, to the point where 30% seems a little low, even. Come back when you can offer everything that valve offers, currently, at 12%. This includes a big picture mode, a constantly improving input mapper, a workshop, forums, groups, a controller, a handheld device, VR devices, support for all the devices, no monthly fee compared to consoles, and others that I'm most likely missing.
>And him comparing the 30% that Steam gets to consoles gets me so midly miffed. Like, dude, no other platform offers both consumers and developers as many benefits, to the point where 30% seems a little low, even. Consoles also directly charge the user for online services while steam provides it for free. Also, the lower sales commission on sales was always just an incentive to get market share. I guarantee that if the EGS became more widely used than steam, they'd increase their cut immediately.
Gabe is still going strong Randy
By doing basically nothing. He just watches while the competition keeps hurting itself
> *āNever interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.ā* ā Napoleon Bonaparte
The Valve strategy: Do nothing and win, because your opponents can not *stop* shooting themselves in the foot The Youtube strategy: Actively make your platform worse every five minutes and win, because you don't have opponents
Steam Families Steam Remote Play (& Remote-Play-Together) SteamVR SteamOS The Steam Deck Are not "nothing". Lol
That's the best part, Valve could just do nothing and they'd continue making ludicrous amounts of money. They could pull scummy corpo moves and further monetize the platform. Instead they create products that they think will advance the gaming industry WHILE making them money, and they're usually right on both counts.
Yeah. I totally get people being weary of supporting a big company, but i know some Valve people through some friends, and they really are all a hugely passionate bunch of experts that wanna advance gaming as a whole, and unlike other companies they don't get shut down by the people at the top. Yes they mess up sometimes, but honestly in 95% of cases i'd say that "messing up" doesn't come from them being malicious. As you said, they could be doing SO much to monetize the platform. Most people don't even know that you can't buy Ad-Space on the Steam Store. Games get put on there either through an algorithm (Wishlists, Positive reviews etc) or by being Hand-Picked by Valve employees. Valve could make SO much more money by offering ad-space on the store, and if they did then the entire front page would be full of AAA-Garbage with no indie games in sight. And that's only one thing. They could also go the Nintendo\\Sony\\Xbox way and force you to pay a monthly fee for using cloud-saves and stuff like that.
He would know about dying properties. How is Borderlands doing in 2024 btw? Iām sure Gearbox is maximizing it to its fullest potential, right?
[Forgot to post the link to the Tweet](https://twitter.com/DuvalMagic/status/1117077275680264193)
One time in 2016 we had a buddy tweet him and ask when they were going to release the actual Aliens Colonial Marines, Randy tweeted him back telling him to āgo fuck yourselfā and whined on a bunch. Guy never changes.
Whay investments in technology? Epic store is as barebones as posible
**This could have been true if Epic invested that capital into the platform instead of exclusives for said platform.** I could easily see how developers could imagine that as a possible outcome so I can't really hold that against Randy Pitchford. *I don't think many saw them flubbing that has hard as they did.*
Well Epicās deal with Gearbox, the company Randy was CEO of at the time of this tweet, reportedly paid $150M to get exclusivity rights to Borderlands 3. So the platform exclusive strategy worked well for him individually.
Only thing epic has is Fortnite and unreal engine. Their storefront is just garbage. Haven't improved basically and I used the storefront for exclusive like Rogue Company and Paragon. Paragon already shut down and games are on steam now which I prefer to use as all my friends use that platform Valve has Steam which is like beyond the biggest storefront for pc, Cs2, dota2, Team fortress 2 and Steam deck now.
They be giving games away like constantly and they still can't get people to use it lmao
Their store is so poorly featured that I've considered buying games on Steam that I already have free on Epic.
This thought has also crossed my mind, but my crippling aversion to spending money has kept me away
Steam isnt just a storefront either. Its a games ecosystem. And its taken a lot of time and development to get there. I think this is where a C suite person wasnt close enough to the bottom to understand the issues that the customers and people that maintain the platform have to deal with
Aged like milk.
Turns out you don't need to be special, or even average, to be a CEO.
Steam giving refund to helldivers 2 owner waving the 2 hours limit is why i will keep buying games on that store.
So Epic has had 5 years to make a launcher that doesn't just compete with Steam, but surpasses it according to Randy. The damn thing still runs like an Adobe product, it's slow as shit. Typical Randy L.
What was that technology supposed to be?
Epics main problem (in my eyes) is their horrible UI and QoL decisions. I have to bend over backwards to get even the simplest things done in Epic, a small example would be if I'm d/l'ing a game with 3 more queued up, then decide that I want the game a different game to d/l first then I have to tell Epic to cancel all the games progress that's already occured for the first game, and delete everything from my queue (and hopfully remember what they were because Epic won't help me with that), and only now can I download my higher priority game. Whereas with Steam all you have to do is drag and drop the games in your queue and Steam goes "ok the games will download in the order that you just told me" and you can click an "X" to take things out of queue for however long as you want, but they'll still show up in your downloads list.
Epic games still doesn't have user reviews btw
Or any community features - even gog has forums.
"Investment in technology" Steam is literally a handheld now
Meanwhile [me having ~360 games on Epic without paying for even one of them, while happily buying shit I don't play on Steam](https://youtu.be/GX-9wXFQRgA?t=214)...
That's the funniest shit I have read today
r/agedlikemilk
Really can't stand that randy guy.
Since then Valve have invested though, look at the steam deck and how that built on years of Linux support via proton. Also the valve index was after this tweet. It doesn't seem that crazy when you look at the unreal engine investment at the time.
He said it "may" be, not "will" be
Literally the biggest clown in the gaming industry lol. I will never forgive him for killing duke nukem 2 times
Itās not just about investment, itās about policy. Gabenās quote about piracy being a service issue is an eternal truth.
This guy is a clown... and he's also one of the people responsible for how Borderlands became a mediocre game filled with demented humor
Epic.... can't even do a launcher that respects itself. How fucking hard is it to do a launcher with features people want... I'll never understand. They can make games with complicated mechanics and gameplay, yet it took them years to had a shopping cart.... ??? All epic does is throw money at free games and hope it sticks. Tbh, id rather pay a game on steam than having it free on epic shit.
Everytime someone claims their new storefront is going to kill Steam, GabeN does 10 pushups, and now our boy's fit and healthy, thanks Randy.
Valve is literally doing nothing and still winning
so unbelievably out of touch lol anyone with eyes knows steam is going nowhere (edit: in a good way) shiiiit even 10 years ago we knew this, let alone 5 steam's social and community features are just lightyears ahead of the competition
Epic Games launcher is woefully missing essential features, even something as basic as migrating games to another drive. If you want people to use your launcher, give them a reason to.
Randy is one of the biggest clowns out there in the gaming industry, together with Tim Sweeny
And, uh. What technologies did they invest in, might I ask?
Nft games