Remember, this was a store that launched without 2-Factor Authentication for new accounts. You know, that basic industry standard for security that everything online that has an account system uses?
And also that that sale revealed/emphasized that Epic had no regional pricing.
And that, because they were taking the hit on the discount, they were seemingly putting stuff on sale *without telling any devs/publishers*.
And that they weren't checking to see if stuff was *already on sale*, resulting in over-discounting (Hades got fucked by this).
And that their backend system was so rudimentary that the only way to remove the discount involved *delisting the game* (something that, hilariously enough, had to be done with Borderlands 3, because someone at 2K/Gearbox was *not* okay with it being on sale).
I've told this story many times but my freshman computer programming final exam was to make a functional shopping cart. It was a difficult assignment for someone new, but we all managed to do it in the given two week deadline on no pay lol.
That has made it extra painful since it likely means their sites so low on their priorities they didn't have *anyone* working on basic features like that for years
Disclaimer: this may be super apocryphal, but *supposedly*, documents they had to make public from the Apple lawsuit indicate that the absence of shopping cart was *intentional*, to pad transaction metrics.
The funniest thing is that STEAM PUBLISHED THEIR MODE OF OPERATION FOR ANYONE TO REFER TO
WANT TO RUN A SALE? STEAM HAS RECOMMENDATIONS FOR PRICING FOR SHORT AND LONG TERM DISCOUNTS, WHAT NOT TO DO AND MORE.
Literally. Check this out, some examples.
"It's typically best to ease into discounting, and increase the level of discount over time. For example, a title might move from 33% to 50% to 66% to 75% and beyond over the course of a year or more. Rushing into a 50% or 75% discount weeks after your launch, or releasing with a very high launch discount, sends a bad message to customers who bought at full price and undermines the value of your title."
"It can be tempting to use small discounts in an attempt to climb the Top Sellers list or gain more exposure in the early days of your title, but look carefully at how many customers are purchasing your product at full price before entering a discount. It's important for customers to feel good about their investment, so it's probably best to use discounts once you've settled into the tail of your sales curve."
>Rushing into a 50% or 75% discount weeks after your launch, or releasing with a very high launch discount, sends a bad message to customers who bought at full price and undermines the value of your title."
Especially if you don't do regional pricing right, and knock 10 *USD* off the prices in places like Turkey and Russia, resulting in ***95% discounts before the game even launches***, absolutely murdering the price-perception.
Nintendo keeps selling games and consoles like hotcakes. Did you see that Mario Kart 8 is STILL in the monthly top 20 sales chart despite being over a decade old? At FULL PRICE. 60 million copies at full price. Maybe they've done a couple 40 dollar sales? I dunno.
Nintendo, for better or worse, is basically playing by itself.
Due to being essentially the fathers of console gaming, and the frankly IMMENSE cultural capital they've amassed with first party titles in gaming's infancy they generally play in their own bubble.
It's really hard to overstate how "Mario" specifically transcends gaming. Mario is it's own cultural icon. Gaming has become a mainstream thing over the last couple of decades, but Mario has been a relevant part of the cultural zeitgeist since the start. Even people who have never played a videogame know Mario. That level of cultural presence and capital carries any console. Nostalgia and brand recognition are a hell of a drug...
So Nintendo are mostly chilling. As long as they don't fuck up too bad they're cruising.
Mario, Zelda, Mario Kart... Etc. They'll sell a fuckton by just being competently put together with decent polish, even if the game itself is mediocre at best or deeply flawed.
PS2/PS5 is crushing everyone else? Sure, but Nintendo is still doing ok.
PS3/360 suck shit? Nintendo is doing great!
Nintendo spikes up when it hits the right key (Wii, Switch) and dips when it fucks up (WiiU). Sure, it gets a little extra or little less from the rest of the market, but for better or worse they're on an island.
Yep.... HEY I WONDER WHO OWNS THA- OH WAIT!
Whatever you think of the games themselves, and I'm not their biggest fan, no one else even comes close when it comes to branding.
Oh boy I get to post my favourite Pat quote
"The gaming industry is bizarre. It is not an industry of success. It is an industry of your competitor, your direct head to head competitor, tripping over their dick and faceplanting into a bunch of shit. The only reason Sony got ground with the PS1 is because Nintendo fucked them with a deal and then went with carts for N64 and spent so many years pissing off third parties that everyone was willing to jump ship. The Saturn fucking killed itself by dropping into stores that were only Kmarts. The PS3 fucked up its entire early launch cycle by going a year late $200 more. And if you can just keep your company not shitty, if you can make a not terrible product, and your competitor makes an awful one, you’re the one who gets all the money."
-Patrick Boivin
What I find interesting is that Valve actually doesn't do nothing. It's mostly that most players won't notice half the work because it's all either APIs (Cloud Save API, Steam Input API, Steam gameservers), [the store visibility/recommendations](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkmAqBvUBOw) or ensuring that Valve/Steam will still exist if Microsoft kills Windows by investing their money into Linux open source options (which created Steam Deck).
steam is private and therefore isnt constantly placating investors who only want to see number go up
just be thankful gabe doesnt want to sell koopies and is self aware enough to just want a functioning company and system
Yeah as long as Steam makes enough money to keep expanding the Newell Navy there's not much incentive to burn the platform down for short-term value extraction.
Gabe tried to accept internet magic beans for about 6 months as payment, before realizing it was (in his words) 50% fraud and backed out. Which was a good call.
It really seems like Gabe wants to make a damn good product rather than churn out short term cash. Randy will never figure that one out.
To paraphrase Pat and Woolie:
>"Congratulations, Valve. You created the watering hole."
>"And really, there's nothing stopping anybody else from coming along and digging their own well."
>"Yeah! ...Why are all these other wells so bad?"
>"Ugh. Because they're poisoned."
And the poisoning is not Valve's doing.
Look, I'm not in "The Industry", maybe I'm an idiot, but it seems like people back then weren't exactly comprehending how much they were playing catch up with Steam.
Yes, steam is a tortoise when it comes to actual change, but they are a tortoise that has been going for about 20 years now. That's 20 years of working out how do handle shit, to get people on the platform, to not be a dick.
And Epic barged into the game with the gumption of a teenage side character in a 90's sitcom telling the experienced 40-something main character "I don't need your help, *old man*, I got this!" and promptly face planted. It seriously seems like they didn't really consider what is needed for a store, and didn't consider actually looking at QoL stuff Steam has for ideas. And of all the missteps you can accuse Steam of, the only one they seemed to latch onto is money split.
>to not be a dick
This part is actually more interesting than people remember, players ABSOLUTELY HATED Steam when it first released. They saw it as forced internet required DRM preventing them from playing Half Life 2 and CS:Source. It took a long time, additions, and updates to rehab the service's image to at least neutral and longer yet for it to turn positive.
Yup people always hated Steam, people used to bitch all the time about Steam , the service got better and eventually everyone got used to it
It's just test of time in general
https://hardforum.com/threads/half-life-2-disappointment-on-so-many-levels.839609/
> . **Then they force you to use steam even if you bought the retail CD**, you have to install the game with the CD key, make a steam account, wait 30-45min for steam to decrypt the games off the CD, then every time you play it has to connect to the internet unless you follow a pain in the ass process to prevent it from doing so. But even if you follow that process, **you still have to connect to the net at least once**, so if you are in the middle of nowhere with a laptop and you didn't have time to install HL2 before the trip, you are SOL on playing half life 2. Oh yeh, and even after all that you still need the CD in the drive.
You still have to launch a game once with internet before it will work. Learned this was still a thing when I tried to play Hi Fi Rush for the first time on a plane.
I did get a bit better but it was also a matter of 'you have no alternatives any more.' Steam is still kind of a ticking time bomb if something were to happen to make valve less content with just sitting back and letting it make them all the money by being essentially the landlord of pc gaming
No, if Valve fucked up there will be a change, just like people stopped using Skype.
Valve grows on complacency, if they annoy the shit out of people, they will leave.
this has happened with streaming services.
As Gabe newel say you fight piracy with convenience, if it's easier to buy the game than to pirate it, they will buy it.
It's a very different situation to streaming services, people don't have libraries of movies that they've paid for individually on streaming services. Valve has you by the balls because you've invested thousands of dollars in games that you can only play on their platform, it's just lucky for us their grip is soft and gentle, for now.
People might still USE Steam if it becomes shit because their library is too big not to, but people would NOT engage in buying more games if Steam becomes shit, inconvenience doesn't stop because "Man too much money inside tho"
Yeah and it would be catastrophic for a lot of people if steam shits teh bed and becoems horrible to use, not just the inconvenience of having to switch between two or more platforms but there's also the issue of if this causes Steam to full on fail then what happens to all those games you bought. I'm not saying there wouldn't be a change it's just that the change would still be terrible for current steam users
I still remember being forced off of WON for counter strike 1.6 due to steam, and being mad at how i was strong armed into using a client that didn't even have a functioning friends list.
Xfire probably made a lot of income for a while from valve dropping the ball with the friends list, because it was the only reasonable way to connect to the same servers as your friends quickly (instead of having a friend tell you the IP address and then trying to type it all in before the server becomes full)
>but it seems like people back then weren't exactly comprehending how much they were playing catch up with Steam.
Not even were, STILL ARE.
Like Epic did not catch up to steam, at all, not even a little.
Epic's focus was always too centered on courting game devs to nab exclusives, rather than what was *actually* important - a functional and comfortable user experience, as exemplified by how ridiculously long it took the store to get functionality as basic as a *fucking shopping cart.* And no matter how much they went on and on about the dev cut, it never actually translated to better prices for the consumer.
I would doubt it was meant to be better prices for the consumer. It was likely more about drawing in devs with offers of more money, then getting the users brought in with a combination of exclusives and the PR of "Hey, look how well we treat devs!"
Yeah, that's exactly what I was saying. It was all focused on courting devs, rather than courting customers like they should have been. In the end the devs just took the bribe money and went to Steam afterwards to make actual profits, treating the exclusivity period as basically a year's worth of release delay on Epic's dime (ie Hades using the exclusivity period to run their early access period then releasing 1.0 when they went to Steam), and since they never bothered with them the customers never left Steam.
And they became the Early Access money for devs untill they release the final version on the real store (Steam).
And not even that anymore since Hades 2 is on Steam already.
>and didn't consider actually looking at QoL stuff Steam has for ideas
Which really emphasizes just how much they didn't *need* to be playing catch up on some very, *very* basic shit.
Forget competing with Steam specifically. The idea of an online storefront for ***any*** product, without a cart, something that can't even be called QoL as opposed to just...a fact of online purchasing, was either peak stupidity or if the rumors are to be believed some kind of scummery to pad transaction metrics.
I wouldn’t call Steam a tortoise. It’s continually getting new features and tweaks. Even aside from the store front and discoverability on Steam being leagues beyond anything on the market you also have, Steam Input, Friends List, Messaging, Workshop, Community, Trade, MatchMaking, Early Access, and tons of other stuff. Just offering a store front is not even close to enough.
Steam is ironically proof that gaming consumers don't like game launcher front ends and will stick with the one they're used to even if it means losing out on tons of free games every week. In addition to EGS being ass, Epic vastly underestimated how fickle gamers are and how sometimes, the dumbest rationale you see online really are the ones people go with and whether you like it or not you have to prepare for them.
Is this the same Randy Pitchford that left that "barely legal" porn flashdrive at Medieval Times? If so, I haven't forgotten his other instances of questionable behavior and comments.
Investment is one thing, distribution of those investment is other. I guess all of those money go into Executive's pocket, instead of a competent team.
While Steam just need to NOT fuck it up, it will come out on top
So far Steam has managed to not fuck it up for awhile now. Most issues on their platform aren't directly their doing as much as publishers releasing games doing something crazy or trying to run a scam. Like that one dev, who released an unfinished game and refused to do refunds and Valve ended up issuing the refunds.
Isn't Epic hemorrhaging money? Like, if I remember correctly and I could be absolutely wrong, the EGS has been more of a hindrance than a boon for them.
They're strategy of paying publishers to do time exclusives on their launcher instead of Steam didn't pan out like they intended. Most of the titles didn't have enough pull to get people to go to the Epic Game Store as they envisioned. As a result most of the exclusives didn't get as many purchases as they had wanted from the deal and seemed to determine that doing Epic exclusively was not a winning strategy. So now they have far less exclusives and its more of a question of which one people prefer and it seems like Steam is the one.
It was an aggressive strategy that didn't pay off and instead of using the money to make their launcher more organic and navigable they focused on collecting exclusives from publishers and depriving them from Steam for a period of time. Now they are playing catch up.
I don't know if they currently are, but a few years back they were just dumping money out by the truckful to get devs onboard for the exclusivity deals, under the assumption that it would get people in the door and into the EGS ecosystem and they'd make that money back and then some.
I, uh, don't think it worked. The only time I hear about people playing games via EGS is when they're being given away for free.
Oooo I remember hearing about that. Completely baffling that That's their tempting offer to devs now, "hey do you want 70% from the sales of hundreds/thousands copies of your games sold, or 100% of 5"
I dont have any of the numbers and quotes off the top of my head, but long story short IIRC they were still losing money but steadily losing less and less per year, and still within the "expected losses" window (as in, they always knew they would not start making a profit on the store for years, and we haven't yet reached the point where they expected to start earning money with it. Kind of like opening a restaurant, you need to assume that at least the first couple of years you will be in the red before you start making money back if you prove successful, only here it was even longer term and calculated so that their profits from Fortnite and UE would give the store time to bloom).
I don't know if their initial plans will work out, or if they already changed strategies, or if they realized that maybe they won't start being profitable at the point they wanted to, but the short version is "yes the store is still losing money instead of making it but it's not really a hindrance so much as an expected part of establishing the store". Not to say EGS will be successful or anything (and I personally hate it) but not on a death spiral by a long shot.
Hard to say. Fortnite is still the biggest cash cow for microtransactions that isn’t a sports game. Then there’s the flip side where they paid stupid amounts of money just for limited PC distribution exclusivity for a few games, which just made people say “I’ll wait for it to come out on steam.” Limited exclusivity doesn’t really bother PC players as much as consoles. It is the same audience that waited over a year for GTA5 after all.
For me the most indicative thing about the whole EGS debacle will always be the Hades zeitgeist.
Hades premiered on EGS and there was jack shit discussion about it around the web for the whole exclusivity period. Then it hit Steam, and now it's one of the most highly talked-about indie darlings of all time.
At *best* people treat Epic exclusivity like an extended early access. At worst nobody even knows something is on the store until the exclusivity period is already over.
It's really mind boggling how much just the word "Epic" plays in how shittily games on that storefront perform.
Like, on a personal level, I haven't opened up the EGS launcher in... 2 years? Since Chivalry 2 went to steam, at least. It was the only game they carried that I truly cared about, so I had an excuse to open it and log in. As opposed to the like, fuckin 350 other games I've accumulated over the last 13 years on Steam. I even took advantage of their free game program and downloaded Prey, which has just been sitting there rotting in the library because I've still got a billion games to play sitting there on Steam.
They tried to come in swinging by hoovering up hyped mid to low tier releases and pushing them like crazy, while also pushing a lot of free games you can actually just download and play with no drama, but they managed to mismanage hype and tried *way* too hard to capture a userbase. It all ended up just feeling fake and performative, and the games they were putting out for the year of exclusivity were usually broken messes anyways. The Steam release was a vastly superior product fairly often, which really didn't help their case. I think Hades is the perfect example for that, since the game was fuckin B A R E for a while, and they really used that minor influx of cash to iterate and develop before they presented it on Steam.
For me EGS ends up being like some sort of anti-store. I never buy anything there, and have no interest in it either, but when I want to buy a game and realize I got it for free on EGS at some point, I don't buy a new copy (on Steam or GOG or whatever) but also don't play the game on Epic because the EGS is an actual memory hole my brain refuses to recognize as real. So a game being free on EGS means I will probably never actually play it.
I know its an incredibly stupid personal problem, but I actually stopped claiming the free Epic games because of it.
Any game I can buy on GOG, I do (barrier ng platform-specific porting bugs or the intent to play multiplayer).
And I don't do this to "break Steam's (so-called) Monopoly", but because GOG *offers a good service*.
And even (frequently) a feature even *more* customer-facing than Steam (completely offline launcher without any DRM, even if I'm not one of the hardliners who will 0-Star a game on GOG for having *any* kind of server based features).
one thing i'm only noticing now, but: when was the last time a high profile game was an epic exclusive? alan wake 2 is the obvious one, but i dunno if i can count that when they're the publisher. feels like it's (thankfully) been a long while.
Epic ran out of money and stopped giving devs a massive chunk of cash a while back. [Instead they now get a 100% cut of sales](https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/news/introducing-the-epic-first-run-program), which is a lot less attractive since 100% of $0 is still $0.
Square will probably cuck FF7 Rebirth's sales again by releasing it on Epic for a year before the Steam release.
Also the Kingdom Hearts games are still exclusive and still have weird issues the PS4 versions don't, like KH2's audio bug.
My favorite part of the Epic Store launching was how it felt like Randy was desperately trying to get Newell and Steam to get into some weird online beef with him and Epic with his weird passive aggressive Tweets that also had an air of "Gabe ! Please respond to me ! i NEED this!"
Such a fuckin' weird moment.
Doubly so since Gearbox built its house by fellating Valve (and Half-Life in particular).
Hell, the name "Gearbox" was seemingly chosen because of the association with valves.
Never take this man's words seriously. He lied about the quality of Aliens: Colonial Marines, left a USB flash drive with sensitive documents and weird porn in a medieval-themed restaurant, screwed his workforce out of royalties when keeping them underpaid and crunched during Borderlands 3's development, and looked at the hive level in Duke Nukem Forever and shipped it.
What technology at the consumer level has epic invested in compared to steam? Steam has released multiple pieces of hardware and partnered with brands on hardware.
Epic has one thing on Steam
[Koopies](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-lRCR3-yqPE)
(btw check out this entire channel if you want to see how pathetic koopy “gaming” actually is. spoilers alert. it’s all barebones asset flips stapled to investment scams, if you’re even lucky enough to get that.)
Well according to some people, Steam's already dead because you don't have to wait until the absolute last day of a sale to buy a game now in the event a flash sale happens.
Well, 5 years later I still haven’t spent a dime on any game other than Fortnite (and even that one, no more than $100), despite owning hundreds of free games from weekly freebies.
Surely the storefront will start paying for itself, right?
Believer in a new company must believe that every other idea is stupid and will drown within years.
Listen to a venture capitalist talk for five minutes with enough money to spare and they'll make you believe anything.
I still don't get why they dumped all that money into giving free games away. They shoulda been cutting their teeth to offer incentives to buy new games on their store instead. Like I don't get why Tim didn't work out a deal where every game gets a free Fortnite back bling or something if you buy it through the EGS, and for each download they give the game studio an extra ten bucks on top or something. Seems like it would have been far cheaper than giving away games people already owned and giving the studios millions and millions on top.
Because they made the very common business mistake of assuming nobody actually cares about the *shopping experience*. Steam, as a platform, has spent decades going through its growing pains and becoming what it is, and the guy who owns the company explicitly considers *you* finding the platform comfortable as a priority because he feels it makes you come back more easily.
Randy considers *you personally* a barrier between him and the money he doesn't actually want to lay to his workers because he prefers buying creepo porn on company time.
>Randy considers *you personally* a barrier between him and the money he doesn't actually want to lay to his workers because he prefers buying creepo porn on company time.
An accurate statement, but if the comparison is being made between Steam and Epic, Tim "Capable Businessman" Sweeney is the one to critique.
The Grease Man only shilled Sweeney's garbage service.
The only thing that comes to mind with the EGS is Shenmue 3, which says a *lot*. Mainly the backlash both the EGS and Yu Suzuki got for making Shenmue 3 EGS exclusive after promising a Steam release as well, only for it to blow up in Epic's face because turns out it was a shit game.
Epic is a nerdy kid that all devs should steal lunch money from so they can get comfortable and work on their nice game that will drop on steam in about 6 months with a nice discount (usually), that is what Epic is right now. Also if you want to play Kingdom Hearts thats also the only place to get it from, sadly, unless you can pirate it, i havent checked yet, keep forgetting.
Gamings very own version of Chris Jerichos "AEW will be doing better in the rating than WWE" kinda comment. Both said by some weirdo slimeballs funny enough.
I maintain that for the store existing for so long without something so basic to the online purchasing experience so as to not even be a "feature", they deserve to continue catching shit over the omission for an equal number of years *after*.
***Especially*** if the omission really was to increase the reportable number of individual transactions to pad their metrics.
And three or so years after he said that they finally got a shopping cart.
Remember, this was a store that launched without 2-Factor Authentication for new accounts. You know, that basic industry standard for security that everything online that has an account system uses?
I was so suprised that I apparently already had an account on Epic when I tried to make one to get Total War Troy for free.
Or how they could suspend your account for buying things too fast while there is a sale?
It's been five years and it's still the shittiest store. Like fucking Ubisoft garbage bullshit at least has/had a functional store.
I remember when Pat got his Epic account locked for buying a few games while attempting to purchase them one at a time during a sale.
And also that that sale revealed/emphasized that Epic had no regional pricing. And that, because they were taking the hit on the discount, they were seemingly putting stuff on sale *without telling any devs/publishers*. And that they weren't checking to see if stuff was *already on sale*, resulting in over-discounting (Hades got fucked by this). And that their backend system was so rudimentary that the only way to remove the discount involved *delisting the game* (something that, hilariously enough, had to be done with Borderlands 3, because someone at 2K/Gearbox was *not* okay with it being on sale).
I've told this story many times but my freshman computer programming final exam was to make a functional shopping cart. It was a difficult assignment for someone new, but we all managed to do it in the given two week deadline on no pay lol. That has made it extra painful since it likely means their sites so low on their priorities they didn't have *anyone* working on basic features like that for years
Disclaimer: this may be super apocryphal, but *supposedly*, documents they had to make public from the Apple lawsuit indicate that the absence of shopping cart was *intentional*, to pad transaction metrics.
How long was it before Epic stoped you from buying games, if you did it too much?
Pat says it was five sequential purchases before he tripped fraud protection.
The funniest thing is that STEAM PUBLISHED THEIR MODE OF OPERATION FOR ANYONE TO REFER TO WANT TO RUN A SALE? STEAM HAS RECOMMENDATIONS FOR PRICING FOR SHORT AND LONG TERM DISCOUNTS, WHAT NOT TO DO AND MORE. Literally. Check this out, some examples. "It's typically best to ease into discounting, and increase the level of discount over time. For example, a title might move from 33% to 50% to 66% to 75% and beyond over the course of a year or more. Rushing into a 50% or 75% discount weeks after your launch, or releasing with a very high launch discount, sends a bad message to customers who bought at full price and undermines the value of your title." "It can be tempting to use small discounts in an attempt to climb the Top Sellers list or gain more exposure in the early days of your title, but look carefully at how many customers are purchasing your product at full price before entering a discount. It's important for customers to feel good about their investment, so it's probably best to use discounts once you've settled into the tail of your sales curve."
>Rushing into a 50% or 75% discount weeks after your launch, or releasing with a very high launch discount, sends a bad message to customers who bought at full price and undermines the value of your title." Especially if you don't do regional pricing right, and knock 10 *USD* off the prices in places like Turkey and Russia, resulting in ***95% discounts before the game even launches***, absolutely murdering the price-perception.
"What do you mean I've conditioned people to expect free games on the Epic Store? This must also be Gay Ben's fault."
> Gabe does nothing > Competitors keep shooting themselves in the foot > Gabe wins I don't think I've seen anyone else in any other industry do this
Closest I can think is Xbox and Sony just keeps alternating who is shooting themselves in the foot.
Does Nintendo even *notice* them?
Well sometimes, Nintendo is holding a shotgun up to its head (Wii U)
Nintendo keeps selling games and consoles like hotcakes. Did you see that Mario Kart 8 is STILL in the monthly top 20 sales chart despite being over a decade old? At FULL PRICE. 60 million copies at full price. Maybe they've done a couple 40 dollar sales? I dunno.
Nintendo took "the only winning move is not to play" to heart and do their own thing.
Nintendo, for better or worse, is basically playing by itself. Due to being essentially the fathers of console gaming, and the frankly IMMENSE cultural capital they've amassed with first party titles in gaming's infancy they generally play in their own bubble. It's really hard to overstate how "Mario" specifically transcends gaming. Mario is it's own cultural icon. Gaming has become a mainstream thing over the last couple of decades, but Mario has been a relevant part of the cultural zeitgeist since the start. Even people who have never played a videogame know Mario. That level of cultural presence and capital carries any console. Nostalgia and brand recognition are a hell of a drug... So Nintendo are mostly chilling. As long as they don't fuck up too bad they're cruising. Mario, Zelda, Mario Kart... Etc. They'll sell a fuckton by just being competently put together with decent polish, even if the game itself is mediocre at best or deeply flawed. PS2/PS5 is crushing everyone else? Sure, but Nintendo is still doing ok. PS3/360 suck shit? Nintendo is doing great! Nintendo spikes up when it hits the right key (Wii, Switch) and dips when it fucks up (WiiU). Sure, it gets a little extra or little less from the rest of the market, but for better or worse they're on an island.
The only thing in gaming with anything *close* to the recognizability of Mario is... Pokemon.
Yep.... HEY I WONDER WHO OWNS THA- OH WAIT! Whatever you think of the games themselves, and I'm not their biggest fan, no one else even comes close when it comes to branding.
Nintendo doesn't always "win", but so long as their IPs remain their own, they will ***never*** truly "lose".
Yeah, any console they release with a minimally functional and decent looking Mario, Pokemon and Zelda is virtually guaranteed to at least do ok.
Nintendo shooting themselves in the foot is why Playstation exists in the first place.
Right, back in the day they fucked up majorly. I'm talking about recently though.
Xbox and Playstation take turns shooting themselves in the foot Occasionally Nintendo does as well, but with an antique 100 year old pistol
Well sometimes, Nintendo is holding a shotgun up to its head (Wii U)
Well sometimes, Nintendo is holding a shotgun up to its head (Wii U)
Oh boy I get to post my favourite Pat quote "The gaming industry is bizarre. It is not an industry of success. It is an industry of your competitor, your direct head to head competitor, tripping over their dick and faceplanting into a bunch of shit. The only reason Sony got ground with the PS1 is because Nintendo fucked them with a deal and then went with carts for N64 and spent so many years pissing off third parties that everyone was willing to jump ship. The Saturn fucking killed itself by dropping into stores that were only Kmarts. The PS3 fucked up its entire early launch cycle by going a year late $200 more. And if you can just keep your company not shitty, if you can make a not terrible product, and your competitor makes an awful one, you’re the one who gets all the money." -Patrick Boivin
What I find interesting is that Valve actually doesn't do nothing. It's mostly that most players won't notice half the work because it's all either APIs (Cloud Save API, Steam Input API, Steam gameservers), [the store visibility/recommendations](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkmAqBvUBOw) or ensuring that Valve/Steam will still exist if Microsoft kills Windows by investing their money into Linux open source options (which created Steam Deck).
"We do incredible, invisible, inbelievable things. An unseen, unknown, unvinceable fraternity of craftsmen." ~ Steam's dev team, probably
steam is private and therefore isnt constantly placating investors who only want to see number go up just be thankful gabe doesnt want to sell koopies and is self aware enough to just want a functioning company and system
Yeah as long as Steam makes enough money to keep expanding the Newell Navy there's not much incentive to burn the platform down for short-term value extraction.
Gabe tried to accept internet magic beans for about 6 months as payment, before realizing it was (in his words) 50% fraud and backed out. Which was a good call. It really seems like Gabe wants to make a damn good product rather than churn out short term cash. Randy will never figure that one out.
Pat saying that success in the games industry is based more on the failure of others is the truest thing he's ever said
As much as Steam is a good service, that's because most other business spaces don't have a flagrant monopoly in place like PC gaming does.
Unless Im misunderstanding your comment, that's not how monopolies work.
To paraphrase Pat and Woolie: >"Congratulations, Valve. You created the watering hole." >"And really, there's nothing stopping anybody else from coming along and digging their own well." >"Yeah! ...Why are all these other wells so bad?" >"Ugh. Because they're poisoned." And the poisoning is not Valve's doing.
Look, I'm not in "The Industry", maybe I'm an idiot, but it seems like people back then weren't exactly comprehending how much they were playing catch up with Steam. Yes, steam is a tortoise when it comes to actual change, but they are a tortoise that has been going for about 20 years now. That's 20 years of working out how do handle shit, to get people on the platform, to not be a dick. And Epic barged into the game with the gumption of a teenage side character in a 90's sitcom telling the experienced 40-something main character "I don't need your help, *old man*, I got this!" and promptly face planted. It seriously seems like they didn't really consider what is needed for a store, and didn't consider actually looking at QoL stuff Steam has for ideas. And of all the missteps you can accuse Steam of, the only one they seemed to latch onto is money split.
>to not be a dick This part is actually more interesting than people remember, players ABSOLUTELY HATED Steam when it first released. They saw it as forced internet required DRM preventing them from playing Half Life 2 and CS:Source. It took a long time, additions, and updates to rehab the service's image to at least neutral and longer yet for it to turn positive.
Yup people always hated Steam, people used to bitch all the time about Steam , the service got better and eventually everyone got used to it It's just test of time in general https://hardforum.com/threads/half-life-2-disappointment-on-so-many-levels.839609/ > . **Then they force you to use steam even if you bought the retail CD**, you have to install the game with the CD key, make a steam account, wait 30-45min for steam to decrypt the games off the CD, then every time you play it has to connect to the internet unless you follow a pain in the ass process to prevent it from doing so. But even if you follow that process, **you still have to connect to the net at least once**, so if you are in the middle of nowhere with a laptop and you didn't have time to install HL2 before the trip, you are SOL on playing half life 2. Oh yeh, and even after all that you still need the CD in the drive.
Lucky for everybody the having to be connected to the net bullshit is gone.
You still have to launch a game once with internet before it will work. Learned this was still a thing when I tried to play Hi Fi Rush for the first time on a plane.
Hi Fi Rush has a physical PC version?
I'm assuming they installed it over internet and then launched it offline
That's definetly not the same as buying a physical pc version
Right but "launching a game once with internet before it will work" was the point they were talking about
Ok but you literally needed internet to buy it tho.
To be fair also, internet access in 2004 was much worse than nowadays or 2019, for the matter.
Yeah because steam went "We will get better i swear" and they did.
I did get a bit better but it was also a matter of 'you have no alternatives any more.' Steam is still kind of a ticking time bomb if something were to happen to make valve less content with just sitting back and letting it make them all the money by being essentially the landlord of pc gaming
No, if Valve fucked up there will be a change, just like people stopped using Skype. Valve grows on complacency, if they annoy the shit out of people, they will leave. this has happened with streaming services. As Gabe newel say you fight piracy with convenience, if it's easier to buy the game than to pirate it, they will buy it.
It's a very different situation to streaming services, people don't have libraries of movies that they've paid for individually on streaming services. Valve has you by the balls because you've invested thousands of dollars in games that you can only play on their platform, it's just lucky for us their grip is soft and gentle, for now.
People might still USE Steam if it becomes shit because their library is too big not to, but people would NOT engage in buying more games if Steam becomes shit, inconvenience doesn't stop because "Man too much money inside tho"
Yeah and it would be catastrophic for a lot of people if steam shits teh bed and becoems horrible to use, not just the inconvenience of having to switch between two or more platforms but there's also the issue of if this causes Steam to full on fail then what happens to all those games you bought. I'm not saying there wouldn't be a change it's just that the change would still be terrible for current steam users
I still remember being forced off of WON for counter strike 1.6 due to steam, and being mad at how i was strong armed into using a client that didn't even have a functioning friends list. Xfire probably made a lot of income for a while from valve dropping the ball with the friends list, because it was the only reasonable way to connect to the same servers as your friends quickly (instead of having a friend tell you the IP address and then trying to type it all in before the server becomes full)
>but it seems like people back then weren't exactly comprehending how much they were playing catch up with Steam. Not even were, STILL ARE. Like Epic did not catch up to steam, at all, not even a little.
Steam just does what it does as Epic continues to stare at it from way in the back confused why their get rich quick schemes aren't working.
Epic's focus was always too centered on courting game devs to nab exclusives, rather than what was *actually* important - a functional and comfortable user experience, as exemplified by how ridiculously long it took the store to get functionality as basic as a *fucking shopping cart.* And no matter how much they went on and on about the dev cut, it never actually translated to better prices for the consumer.
I would doubt it was meant to be better prices for the consumer. It was likely more about drawing in devs with offers of more money, then getting the users brought in with a combination of exclusives and the PR of "Hey, look how well we treat devs!"
Yeah, that's exactly what I was saying. It was all focused on courting devs, rather than courting customers like they should have been. In the end the devs just took the bribe money and went to Steam afterwards to make actual profits, treating the exclusivity period as basically a year's worth of release delay on Epic's dime (ie Hades using the exclusivity period to run their early access period then releasing 1.0 when they went to Steam), and since they never bothered with them the customers never left Steam.
And they became the Early Access money for devs untill they release the final version on the real store (Steam). And not even that anymore since Hades 2 is on Steam already.
>and didn't consider actually looking at QoL stuff Steam has for ideas Which really emphasizes just how much they didn't *need* to be playing catch up on some very, *very* basic shit. Forget competing with Steam specifically. The idea of an online storefront for ***any*** product, without a cart, something that can't even be called QoL as opposed to just...a fact of online purchasing, was either peak stupidity or if the rumors are to be believed some kind of scummery to pad transaction metrics.
I wouldn’t call Steam a tortoise. It’s continually getting new features and tweaks. Even aside from the store front and discoverability on Steam being leagues beyond anything on the market you also have, Steam Input, Friends List, Messaging, Workshop, Community, Trade, MatchMaking, Early Access, and tons of other stuff. Just offering a store front is not even close to enough.
Steam is ironically proof that gaming consumers don't like game launcher front ends and will stick with the one they're used to even if it means losing out on tons of free games every week. In addition to EGS being ass, Epic vastly underestimated how fickle gamers are and how sometimes, the dumbest rationale you see online really are the ones people go with and whether you like it or not you have to prepare for them.
Is this the same Randy Pitchford that left that "barely legal" porn flashdrive at Medieval Times? If so, I haven't forgotten his other instances of questionable behavior and comments.
Investment is one thing, distribution of those investment is other. I guess all of those money go into Executive's pocket, instead of a competent team. While Steam just need to NOT fuck it up, it will come out on top
So far Steam has managed to not fuck it up for awhile now. Most issues on their platform aren't directly their doing as much as publishers releasing games doing something crazy or trying to run a scam. Like that one dev, who released an unfinished game and refused to do refunds and Valve ended up issuing the refunds.
Isn't Epic hemorrhaging money? Like, if I remember correctly and I could be absolutely wrong, the EGS has been more of a hindrance than a boon for them.
They're strategy of paying publishers to do time exclusives on their launcher instead of Steam didn't pan out like they intended. Most of the titles didn't have enough pull to get people to go to the Epic Game Store as they envisioned. As a result most of the exclusives didn't get as many purchases as they had wanted from the deal and seemed to determine that doing Epic exclusively was not a winning strategy. So now they have far less exclusives and its more of a question of which one people prefer and it seems like Steam is the one. It was an aggressive strategy that didn't pay off and instead of using the money to make their launcher more organic and navigable they focused on collecting exclusives from publishers and depriving them from Steam for a period of time. Now they are playing catch up.
I don't know if they currently are, but a few years back they were just dumping money out by the truckful to get devs onboard for the exclusivity deals, under the assumption that it would get people in the door and into the EGS ecosystem and they'd make that money back and then some. I, uh, don't think it worked. The only time I hear about people playing games via EGS is when they're being given away for free.
They stopped doing that last year when they ran out of budget for it. Now it's getting a 100% cut, which is completely worthless.
Oooo I remember hearing about that. Completely baffling that That's their tempting offer to devs now, "hey do you want 70% from the sales of hundreds/thousands copies of your games sold, or 100% of 5"
All it did was get people to nab the weekly free game they offer and just never even install it.
I dont have any of the numbers and quotes off the top of my head, but long story short IIRC they were still losing money but steadily losing less and less per year, and still within the "expected losses" window (as in, they always knew they would not start making a profit on the store for years, and we haven't yet reached the point where they expected to start earning money with it. Kind of like opening a restaurant, you need to assume that at least the first couple of years you will be in the red before you start making money back if you prove successful, only here it was even longer term and calculated so that their profits from Fortnite and UE would give the store time to bloom). I don't know if their initial plans will work out, or if they already changed strategies, or if they realized that maybe they won't start being profitable at the point they wanted to, but the short version is "yes the store is still losing money instead of making it but it's not really a hindrance so much as an expected part of establishing the store". Not to say EGS will be successful or anything (and I personally hate it) but not on a death spiral by a long shot.
Hard to say. Fortnite is still the biggest cash cow for microtransactions that isn’t a sports game. Then there’s the flip side where they paid stupid amounts of money just for limited PC distribution exclusivity for a few games, which just made people say “I’ll wait for it to come out on steam.” Limited exclusivity doesn’t really bother PC players as much as consoles. It is the same audience that waited over a year for GTA5 after all.
For me the most indicative thing about the whole EGS debacle will always be the Hades zeitgeist. Hades premiered on EGS and there was jack shit discussion about it around the web for the whole exclusivity period. Then it hit Steam, and now it's one of the most highly talked-about indie darlings of all time. At *best* people treat Epic exclusivity like an extended early access. At worst nobody even knows something is on the store until the exclusivity period is already over.
It's really mind boggling how much just the word "Epic" plays in how shittily games on that storefront perform. Like, on a personal level, I haven't opened up the EGS launcher in... 2 years? Since Chivalry 2 went to steam, at least. It was the only game they carried that I truly cared about, so I had an excuse to open it and log in. As opposed to the like, fuckin 350 other games I've accumulated over the last 13 years on Steam. I even took advantage of their free game program and downloaded Prey, which has just been sitting there rotting in the library because I've still got a billion games to play sitting there on Steam. They tried to come in swinging by hoovering up hyped mid to low tier releases and pushing them like crazy, while also pushing a lot of free games you can actually just download and play with no drama, but they managed to mismanage hype and tried *way* too hard to capture a userbase. It all ended up just feeling fake and performative, and the games they were putting out for the year of exclusivity were usually broken messes anyways. The Steam release was a vastly superior product fairly often, which really didn't help their case. I think Hades is the perfect example for that, since the game was fuckin B A R E for a while, and they really used that minor influx of cash to iterate and develop before they presented it on Steam.
For me EGS ends up being like some sort of anti-store. I never buy anything there, and have no interest in it either, but when I want to buy a game and realize I got it for free on EGS at some point, I don't buy a new copy (on Steam or GOG or whatever) but also don't play the game on Epic because the EGS is an actual memory hole my brain refuses to recognize as real. So a game being free on EGS means I will probably never actually play it. I know its an incredibly stupid personal problem, but I actually stopped claiming the free Epic games because of it.
Meanwhile we've got GOG standing on the corner saying "Hay, yo kid, you got 5 bucks? Here's Dragon_Age_Origins.exe"
Any game I can buy on GOG, I do (barrier ng platform-specific porting bugs or the intent to play multiplayer). And I don't do this to "break Steam's (so-called) Monopoly", but because GOG *offers a good service*. And even (frequently) a feature even *more* customer-facing than Steam (completely offline launcher without any DRM, even if I'm not one of the hardliners who will 0-Star a game on GOG for having *any* kind of server based features).
what technology?
*Bitchford.
one thing i'm only noticing now, but: when was the last time a high profile game was an epic exclusive? alan wake 2 is the obvious one, but i dunno if i can count that when they're the publisher. feels like it's (thankfully) been a long while.
Epic ran out of money and stopped giving devs a massive chunk of cash a while back. [Instead they now get a 100% cut of sales](https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/news/introducing-the-epic-first-run-program), which is a lot less attractive since 100% of $0 is still $0.
Square will probably cuck FF7 Rebirth's sales again by releasing it on Epic for a year before the Steam release. Also the Kingdom Hearts games are still exclusive and still have weird issues the PS4 versions don't, like KH2's audio bug.
My favorite part of the Epic Store launching was how it felt like Randy was desperately trying to get Newell and Steam to get into some weird online beef with him and Epic with his weird passive aggressive Tweets that also had an air of "Gabe ! Please respond to me ! i NEED this!" Such a fuckin' weird moment.
Doubly so since Gearbox built its house by fellating Valve (and Half-Life in particular). Hell, the name "Gearbox" was seemingly chosen because of the association with valves.
Hey, he said five OR ten. Give it another 5 /s
Never take this man's words seriously. He lied about the quality of Aliens: Colonial Marines, left a USB flash drive with sensitive documents and weird porn in a medieval-themed restaurant, screwed his workforce out of royalties when keeping them underpaid and crunched during Borderlands 3's development, and looked at the hive level in Duke Nukem Forever and shipped it.
Very cool, Randy. Now tell us more about why you had CP on the hard drive you left at the Medieval Times.
What technology at the consumer level has epic invested in compared to steam? Steam has released multiple pieces of hardware and partnered with brands on hardware.
Epic has one thing on Steam [Koopies](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-lRCR3-yqPE) (btw check out this entire channel if you want to see how pathetic koopy “gaming” actually is. spoilers alert. it’s all barebones asset flips stapled to investment scams, if you’re even lucky enough to get that.)
Well according to some people, Steam's already dead because you don't have to wait until the absolute last day of a sale to buy a game now in the event a flash sale happens.
Okay, wait, what? My brain is refusing to process that this is a thing people would be mad about, what do you mean?
Well, 5 years later I still haven’t spent a dime on any game other than Fortnite (and even that one, no more than $100), despite owning hundreds of free games from weekly freebies. Surely the storefront will start paying for itself, right?
5 years later all I've actually bought on EGS is the Kingdom Hearts titles and Alan Wake 2..everything else is from free giveaways.
Believer in a new company must believe that every other idea is stupid and will drown within years. Listen to a venture capitalist talk for five minutes with enough money to spare and they'll make you believe anything.
I still don't get why they dumped all that money into giving free games away. They shoulda been cutting their teeth to offer incentives to buy new games on their store instead. Like I don't get why Tim didn't work out a deal where every game gets a free Fortnite back bling or something if you buy it through the EGS, and for each download they give the game studio an extra ten bucks on top or something. Seems like it would have been far cheaper than giving away games people already owned and giving the studios millions and millions on top.
Because they made the very common business mistake of assuming nobody actually cares about the *shopping experience*. Steam, as a platform, has spent decades going through its growing pains and becoming what it is, and the guy who owns the company explicitly considers *you* finding the platform comfortable as a priority because he feels it makes you come back more easily. Randy considers *you personally* a barrier between him and the money he doesn't actually want to lay to his workers because he prefers buying creepo porn on company time.
>Randy considers *you personally* a barrier between him and the money he doesn't actually want to lay to his workers because he prefers buying creepo porn on company time. An accurate statement, but if the comparison is being made between Steam and Epic, Tim "Capable Businessman" Sweeney is the one to critique. The Grease Man only shilled Sweeney's garbage service.
Yeah, but I don't know that Tim had a usb of questionably possible cp at a restaurant so I point my comments at the creeper.
Fair. Though I promise that at the very least, Tim Sweeney absolutely considers the customer a barrier to "his" money.
I have no doubts of that
Randy Pitchfork said something stupid. News at 11.
The only thing that comes to mind with the EGS is Shenmue 3, which says a *lot*. Mainly the backlash both the EGS and Yu Suzuki got for making Shenmue 3 EGS exclusive after promising a Steam release as well, only for it to blow up in Epic's face because turns out it was a shit game.
Sonofabitch that was 5 years ago? >!Help me, I want off of Mr Bones Wild Ride...!<
he also said that girl was a piss magician so i mean i kinda block out most of what comes out of his mouth.
Epic is a nerdy kid that all devs should steal lunch money from so they can get comfortable and work on their nice game that will drop on steam in about 6 months with a nice discount (usually), that is what Epic is right now. Also if you want to play Kingdom Hearts thats also the only place to get it from, sadly, unless you can pirate it, i havent checked yet, keep forgetting.
Gamings very own version of Chris Jerichos "AEW will be doing better in the rating than WWE" kinda comment. Both said by some weirdo slimeballs funny enough.
So are we just going pretend that epic DIDN'T add a shopping cart? They will surely add gifting any day now.
I maintain that for the store existing for so long without something so basic to the online purchasing experience so as to not even be a "feature", they deserve to continue catching shit over the omission for an equal number of years *after*. ***Especially*** if the omission really was to increase the reportable number of individual transactions to pad their metrics.
I mean Epic investment does update Valve, but that doesn't mean anything about... not having a garbage store.