This is pretty much my thought. It’s an enjoyable movie, but I’ve always been of the opinion that “enjoyable” and “good” aren’t the same thing.

There are good movies and music that I don’t enjoy, and they’re are movies and music I enjoy that aren’t good.

I suspect the cost of giving away games is relatively minimal compared to their other operational costs.

Also, does any digital launcher store on PC make money besides Steam? Last I recall, CDPR was losing money on GOG too.

Ahh, you must be talking about dumb / feature phones, I guess? I remember a lot of people who had smartphones early on getting / sending emails on their Symbian devices or Windows Mobile devices. In around 2003 (years prior to the iPhone launch), Windows Mobile actually had something like a quarter of the smartphone market. So, in terms of smartphones, it was sizable. But, a lot of people didn’t have smartphones at the time, so that whole market was niche in a way. Most of the smartphone market at that time was Symbian, but Windows was big, and then there was also PalmOS.

I still kinda wish smartphones now had the option to work more like those old ones. They were much less locked down. It’s fine for the vendor to offer a store, but the early phones would just let me install apps any way I wanted. Hell, you could buy some PalmOS apps at physical retailers!

Were all phones this way? I was thinking on Windows CE phones (like the iPAQ) you could just get paid via Paypal or similar and then send the customer an installer file / unlock key.

Was there a rule that you had to bill through the Telco?

Yeah, I still remember that I completely lost access to my Steam account in the early days. I forgot the password, and the password reset feature didn’t work. I contacted support and they never responded. I eventually just gave up and lost the games in the account. I guess if I had waited long enough they probably would’ve fixed it, but, holy fuck, Steam was really shit in the early days.

To Valve’s credit, my understanding is that the support situation has improved marginally over the 20 years since my incident.

That’s not necessarily a good example. He probably would’ve gotten arrested just for the modchip part, which does seem kinda ridiculous, but they were also (according to Bowser’s admission) more directly aiding piracy:

Bowser also admits he and TeamXecuter “created and supported ROM libraries” for its customers to use through websites like MaxConsole.com and rom-bank.com.

From https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/11/hacker-will-pay-nintendo-4-5-million-in-team-xecuter-plea-bargain/

What companies have they ruined? I know they’ve bought up a lot of stuff, but I’m struggling to think of anything just got outright ruined after the purchase. Most of the stuff I can think of has been fine since they bought it.

Which companies are you thinking of?

Most people seem to be at least aware of this fact, but they seem to be okay with it because it’s (at least not publicly known to be) paid exclusivity on Steam.

I always thought this was the strangest viewpoint. As a consumer, I’m inconvenienced by exclusivity exactly the same whether someone was paid or not. I’m really surprised that any consumer would care whether it’s paid. In my mind, if a consumer goes to their local store specifically to buy Product Y, and they find that the store doesn’t stock Product Y, they’re disappointed / upset no matter the reason it’s not stocked at that store. But apparently there are consumers out there who would withhold their opinion until they went home, did some research, and established whether the manufacturer of Product Y was paid to exclusively sell the product at another store. Only at that point would they be upset. If they learned that Product Y simply wasn’t stocked because the manufacturer refused to stock it in their local store, these consumers (apparently) remain happy that the system “works as intended.”

Also, most/all of the launchers encourage exclusivity by encouraging developers to make their games rely on a proprietary API. This encourages technical lock-in, and it’s basically a fee (in terms of development hours required) the developer needs to pay to launch the product on additional platforms. Consumers are apparently okay with this too, and I also find this strange.

Anyway, my opinion is that consumer view on launchers is wrong, obviously. Nearly all of them have features about them that encourage exclusivity, and they’re pretty much all bad for that reason.

Aren’t they releasing their own games on their platform already?

It does feel crazy, but there are a surprising number of remasters that are only 5-6 years newer than the original. Bioshock 2 was remastered around 6 years after it came out. Arkham City was remastered 5 years after it came out. Darksiders was remastered about 5 years after it first came out.

I’m assuming this Fortnite release is probably on an updated engine (compared to the original) and maybe has updated models or something? In that sense I guess it’s just another remaster that’s only about 6 years newer than the original.

There’s a saying in the digital stores market, “To really stand out and succeed, you need to sell the exact same items as the next guy.”

Exclusivity is bullshit. I had to wait ~7 years (IIRC) before I could play Borderlands 2, because it was Steam exclusive. I refuse to spend money on any game that’s not available on at least two launchers. (Or, ideally, doesn’t require a launcher at all.)

Why the fuck didn’t the launchers just have a standard API so that every game is available on every launcher? That would have been best for consumers, as it would’ve made exclusivity impossible for every launcher. Instead we have this awful system where it feels like 90% of games are exclusive either because of greed or laziness.

This seems counter to Microsoft’s gaming accessibility push though, doesn’t it? Now if some niche manufacturer wants to make a controller designed for use by people with some rare mobility condition, the manufacturer will have to go through extra hoops to get this license bullshit out of the way.

Nice job, Microsoft. We all know the ticket to accessibility is more hurdles.

I honestly don’t understand the goal. It’s widely reported that X’s user numbers and revenue are way down. Elon has been greeted in public with angry chants of, “Bring back Twitter”. And the Reddit CEO has seen all of this and said. “Yeah, that’s the ticket to success.”

That’s been my issue. Many of the subs I followed on Reddit have been “recreated” on Lemmy, but there’s essentially no one posting in them on Lemmy. Even high-effort posts, like a helpful guide, will get 1 or 2 comments compared to dozens or hundreds on Reddit. Many posts get no obvious community interaction at all.

I feel like most countries have a history of building cars that are deathtraps, depending on which years you’re talking about…

You gotta look at the good and the bad for both Epic and Valve, though.

The bad that Valve did is largely in the past, but they really, really pissed people off when they forced Steam upon people back in the day. They took games that people had already bought, and were already playing, and then suddenly moved them behind a service that required an account, removed consumer rights that were present when the games were originally sold, and was (at the time) horribly unreliable and generally shitty. Consumers at the time wanted Steam to die off, similar to how they’re hoping for EGS to go away now. Would we have been better off if Steam had died off when it pissed off all those consumers?

Valve has of course done a lot of good since then, but Epic has done a lot of good in the past and presently as well. Their grants are quite generous, and Epic has generally been viewed as a force for good in the gaming industry for years (see old interviews with other industry figures like Carmack, notes from when Sweeney received his Lifetime Achievement Award at GDC 2017, etc.).

They’re both kinda assholes and good guys, IMO.

Maybe it was reverse psychology. Epic is trying to destroy the competition by giving them money. Then, paranoid gamers will refuse to use or support Godot, because there’s a connection to Epic.

I’d say of the current players, GOG is among my favorites since they make the launcher component optional.

In general, I’ve just been disappointed that all the launchers have taken off. I get the convenience factor, but consumers also had some rights that were taken away with the move to launchers. Plus the fact that some of the launchers have terrible security practices, as I mentioned, and that makes it so even a game with great security has unnecessarily increased attack surfaces. And launchers also screw over people with limited internet access, which is admittedly fewer people throughout the world every day, but there are still military personnel, etc. that just cannot reasonably be expected to access the internet on the whim of a launcher.

I suspect we’ll see the same thing happen with Epic that happened with Steam, where people end up forgetting all about the early fucked up stuff and, in the end, just rolling with it. Some years down the line, people won’t even remember how much people were pissed off about the early days of Epic. As an example, any time I mention that I’m not a huge fan of Steam, based partly on remembering the forced move of existing / new games in the early days, people just shrug it off and act like it was fine for Valve to do that since, years later, we got the current, well liked iteration of Steam.

And that’s kinda how I feel about Epic. If Steam can ultimately get a pass for completely ruining the experience of a few games by forcing people to use it against their will in the early days, why shouldn’t Epic get a chance at a pass in the end too? Maybe it turns out to be great years down the line? The only reason we have the Steam that’s well liked today is because consumers put up with it in the early days. Would we be better off if Steam failed early on? If consumers had held their ground when they hated it and forced it to close down? I kinda doubt it. I hate launchers, but, if Valve didn’t make the dominant one, someone else would’ve, and I probably wouldn’t be any happier with it.

Maybe in 20 years EGS will be fucking amazing, and when you tell someone you don’t like it because of what they did with Metro, etc., they’ll look at you the way people look at me when I talk about Steam now, lol.

There have been multiple games, mostly in the past now, that announced launching on certain platforms, including Steam, then had to backtrack and reveal that Epic bought their exclusivity and that gamers that were already expecting to get the game from one platform, now wouldn’t be able to.

Valve did a similar thing to this. I don’t know if you remember the original state of Half-Life and Counter Strike, but they originally didn’t require any launcher. Then, one release, Valve announced that the old version was going to be shutdown and they would require Steam for now on. People had already purchased the game and been playing it outside of Steam, so they were pretty pissed that all the sudden they needed this launcher / account to keep playing a game that didn’t require one out of the box. I was especially pissed, because I think I was the only one in my group of friends that realized that they had unilaterally removed the option to resell / give away your game, and that seemed like bullshit to me, because I occasionally gave my old games to my friends when I was tired of them. The boxed copies of Half-Life and CS allowed for resell/transfer of the game, but they forced everyone over to Steam with an update and the Steam terms removed the option to transfer the game to someone else. Plus, Steam was an absolute awful piece of software at the time, and that made everything worse.

I’m guessing this also happened to other games as well. There was a period there where people would pre-order a game assuming it would work as a traditional, standalone boxed game. But then they’d get the game and it would unexpectedly require Steam, and the buyers would be pissed. Nowadays you just assume a launcher will be required, but it came as a shock / infuriated / disappointed people back when it first started being a thing that PC games were tied to launchers / accounts (and people hated Steam / launchers). Lots of people felt duped.

Anyway, I’m of the opinion that it’s bad for software to ever require or be tied to any launcher, even worse if it’s a third party launcher. It makes the future of games access muddy (What if Steam shuts down? What if there’s a court injunction against Steam requiring it to cease operations? What if my country blocks access to Steam?) and also adds extra layers of insecurity (last time I looked, there was at least one security issue in Steam that remained unpatched since around 2012).

So, to me, switching from Steam to EGS just meant consumers were getting punched in the nuts by a different company. I’d be happy if they weren’t getting punched in the nuts at all.