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PC Gamer Chat Log Episode 57: Who is your favorite character from Fallout, season 1?
Zloth
Community Contributor
The bit about losing track of what you read is kinda new. I think it started about three years ago? The client they use has some sort of built-in browser for most pages. I don't know if they aren't updating it, or if they have special settings for other parts of their websites, or what - but it does not work well in the forums now.
Screenshots have had issues for a long time, too. If you try to look at the latest, it repeats them as you scroll down the list. Sometimes multiple times. A small bug, but you would think somebody would bother to fix it after, what? 15 years? Posting videos there is much more painful than it needs to be, too.
Screenshots have had issues for a long time, too. If you try to look at the latest, it repeats them as you scroll down the list. Sometimes multiple times. A small bug, but you would think somebody would bother to fix it after, what? 15 years? Posting videos there is much more painful than it needs to be, too.
Yup. I've taken almost every one.
I haven't installed a single one of them but I kind of like the idea of costing them a few dollars or cents here and there.
I haven't installed a single one of them but I kind of like the idea of costing them a few dollars or cents here and there.
Brian Boru
Moderator
From their battle royale game, they've made many billions from that.
They're losing money on the games store for a few years—maybe another 5?—to reap profit from it thereafter.
McStabStab
Community Contributor
Not only do I grab the free Epic games, I grab the free Twitch Prime games, free GOG games, free Origin games, and free Ubisoft games. Even if I already have them on another store, why not have them available on whatever service may be better in the future?
OsaX Nymloth
Community Contributor
Zloth
Community Contributor
I used to grab the free ones on GOG because having a game already that was part of a bundle would make the other games cheaper. They stopped doing that, though, so now I only get games I think maybe I'll possibly play - or at least will enjoy looking at in my games list to remind me of games gone by.
Per my post above that I never buy anything from Epic, that no longer applies. I purchased Voidtrain and am really enjoying it.
Perhaps I've had a moral lapse, but I really don't care that much about their exclusives. In most cases, that's actually a good thing for the indie developer to be able to ensure success for their game.
Perhaps I've had a moral lapse, but I really don't care that much about their exclusives. In most cases, that's actually a good thing for the indie developer to be able to ensure success for their game.
Brian Boru
Moderator
Hmm, I don't get the hate on their exclusives ???
Let's see who else has exclusives:
Steam;
Microsoft;
Sony;
EA;
BigFish;
I think GOG has too, but not sure;
Ubisoft?
Next question: how many of those—and I assume more—only take 12% of game sale revenue?
Anyway, there are way too many pots calling this kettle black. Did some influencer get a bunch of kids riled up, or how did it all start?
Kaamos_Llama
Moderator
I'd be interested to hear actual reasoning too.
I was annoyed when Epic started putting out exclusives, mainly because I like having all my games under one launcher and I already had a ton of games on Steam. I liked the Metro series for example and it sucked I would have to get Metro Exodus on a different launcher. I also kind of like achievements and Epic still doesn't have them. For the same reasons, I didnt use Origin, Uplay, or even GOG if I could help it.
Now that GOG Galaxy exists and works really well the only thing stopping me is achievements. Only reason I can see to hate on Epic is because your flying the flag of a different company, one who did exactly the same thing Epic has done 16 odd years ago instead of last year.
Aside from that Tim Sweeney doesnt come off well a lot of the time, and they went about the Apple lawsuit in a horrible way. Gabe Newell has more positive meme history, praise him and seems like a decent guy far as anyone can really tell.
So if we set aside whether we like or dislike each companies CEO as far as I can see you're left with Epic paying developers more money but having massively inferior infrastructure around their launcher?
I was annoyed when Epic started putting out exclusives, mainly because I like having all my games under one launcher and I already had a ton of games on Steam. I liked the Metro series for example and it sucked I would have to get Metro Exodus on a different launcher. I also kind of like achievements and Epic still doesn't have them. For the same reasons, I didnt use Origin, Uplay, or even GOG if I could help it.
Now that GOG Galaxy exists and works really well the only thing stopping me is achievements. Only reason I can see to hate on Epic is because your flying the flag of a different company, one who did exactly the same thing Epic has done 16 odd years ago instead of last year.
Aside from that Tim Sweeney doesnt come off well a lot of the time, and they went about the Apple lawsuit in a horrible way. Gabe Newell has more positive meme history, praise him and seems like a decent guy far as anyone can really tell.
So if we set aside whether we like or dislike each companies CEO as far as I can see you're left with Epic paying developers more money but having massively inferior infrastructure around their launcher?
Zloth
Community Contributor
For me, it comes from watching the console wars. Some new game comes out but, because a console company paid to make it exclusive, people with the wrong console don't get to play it (and PCs were often considered a 'competing console' - sometimes even by Microsoft). Worse yet, people were making buying decisions based on exclusives. Which console was actually best started to matter less. What does it matter which console has better stats for the dollar if the games you want to play can only be found on one of them? Some people were even buying multiple consoles just so they could get at another company's exclusives! (And it's coming back, too. Want to play Final Fantasy 7 remake? You either wait or you pay Sony for their console.)
Now there's big, important difference for the stores: they're free. You don't have to cough up $500 to download Epic's store! The comparison phenomenon is still there, though. What does it matter who's store is better when there's only one choice? So why would Epic bother making their store better if you're forced to go there, anyway?
Let's take it out of gaming and put it in the grocery store. Say a grocery store works out a deal with all the milk producers in the area so it becomes the only place to buy milk. If you want milk, you either go to that store or you pack up the car and drive 40 miles to get it. This brings plenty of folks into the store, which now has greater profits - but they don't invest those profits into make the store better. In fact, they divert funds so they can get exclusives on the soda/pop/Coke/fizzy drinks. Then alcohol. Then bottled water. The store itself becomes pretty terrible, but everyone goes there because its the only place that has any drinks! Other stores in the area close, and the grocery store drops its exclusives because there's no longer any competition to worry about.
Companies using their own stores to sell their own games doesn't bother me so much. Presumably, the game wouldn't get made at all otherwise. There's a back door there where a store can get exclusives simply by buying the entire developer, but that door is supposed to be watched under the heading of "vertical monopolies." (It can be a problem in grocery stores, too. Have you seen those store brands?)
GOG does have a few exclusives, I think, but those are really old games. They "paid" for them by making it possible for them to run on modern PCs. It's much the same thing as stores selling games they make themselves: the game wouldn't exist in a playable form otherwise.
Steam has a ton of exclusives not because they paid for them, but because they were the only serious online store around for a long time. That's sad, but I can't blame them for it. If they were paying for them, threatening to pull the game off their store if the game was also sold on GOG/Epic, or something like that then that would be another matter. In fact, Steam seems to be pro-competitive! If you buy on GOG or Epic, you can still use all of Steam's forums and guides. You can even buy a game key on Humble and use all of Steam's updating features.
Now there's big, important difference for the stores: they're free. You don't have to cough up $500 to download Epic's store! The comparison phenomenon is still there, though. What does it matter who's store is better when there's only one choice? So why would Epic bother making their store better if you're forced to go there, anyway?
Let's take it out of gaming and put it in the grocery store. Say a grocery store works out a deal with all the milk producers in the area so it becomes the only place to buy milk. If you want milk, you either go to that store or you pack up the car and drive 40 miles to get it. This brings plenty of folks into the store, which now has greater profits - but they don't invest those profits into make the store better. In fact, they divert funds so they can get exclusives on the soda/pop/Coke/fizzy drinks. Then alcohol. Then bottled water. The store itself becomes pretty terrible, but everyone goes there because its the only place that has any drinks! Other stores in the area close, and the grocery store drops its exclusives because there's no longer any competition to worry about.
Companies using their own stores to sell their own games doesn't bother me so much. Presumably, the game wouldn't get made at all otherwise. There's a back door there where a store can get exclusives simply by buying the entire developer, but that door is supposed to be watched under the heading of "vertical monopolies." (It can be a problem in grocery stores, too. Have you seen those store brands?)
GOG does have a few exclusives, I think, but those are really old games. They "paid" for them by making it possible for them to run on modern PCs. It's much the same thing as stores selling games they make themselves: the game wouldn't exist in a playable form otherwise.
Steam has a ton of exclusives not because they paid for them, but because they were the only serious online store around for a long time. That's sad, but I can't blame them for it. If they were paying for them, threatening to pull the game off their store if the game was also sold on GOG/Epic, or something like that then that would be another matter. In fact, Steam seems to be pro-competitive! If you buy on GOG or Epic, you can still use all of Steam's forums and guides. You can even buy a game key on Humble and use all of Steam's updating features.
Kaamos_Llama
Moderator
I respect your opinion @Zloth but I don't agree with your reasoning as I've understood it here at least. Correct me if I've misunderstood anything..
From where I stand Valve was the OG Grocery store that made all the deals. Epic is throwing money around to fight a way into a market that already effectively was a monopoly.
I dont believe that Steam is going anywhere either, theyre arent the little guy that will be forced to close its doors because Epic bullied them out of the market. they are plenty capable of doing some bullying themself. For example by taking huge cuts of profit from developers for being a middleman, because there really wasnt another game in town for people to go to sell their game. I understand that theyve done great stuff with the Workshop and Greenlight in making it easier to get smaller games on the market. But they are still taking a huge wedge, and the risk is all on the developer. They had nothing to lose and everything to gain and it wasn't done entirely out of altruism.
Its also easy for Valve to appear magnanimous to competitors like GOG etc when they already have 90% of the market sown up. Its not worth the negative PR to grind the smaller guys into the dirt, I'm sure they are concious of that. I'm also not sure if it wouldnt be more work for them to limit access on their game specific forums to customers who owned the game on Steam.
Concerns on privacy and TenCent ownership are another matter I've seen that concerns people. Again I can see why some people would be bothered by for me its not an issue who owns shares in my PC game store.
I'm more concerned about Microsoft buying up developers and Gamepass. The way games are consumed through that model I feel might lead to an average lowering of quality in games the same way I feel Netflix has been causing for movies and TV. But that's for another time!
From where I stand Valve was the OG Grocery store that made all the deals. Epic is throwing money around to fight a way into a market that already effectively was a monopoly.
I dont believe that Steam is going anywhere either, theyre arent the little guy that will be forced to close its doors because Epic bullied them out of the market. they are plenty capable of doing some bullying themself. For example by taking huge cuts of profit from developers for being a middleman, because there really wasnt another game in town for people to go to sell their game. I understand that theyve done great stuff with the Workshop and Greenlight in making it easier to get smaller games on the market. But they are still taking a huge wedge, and the risk is all on the developer. They had nothing to lose and everything to gain and it wasn't done entirely out of altruism.
Its also easy for Valve to appear magnanimous to competitors like GOG etc when they already have 90% of the market sown up. Its not worth the negative PR to grind the smaller guys into the dirt, I'm sure they are concious of that. I'm also not sure if it wouldnt be more work for them to limit access on their game specific forums to customers who owned the game on Steam.
Concerns on privacy and TenCent ownership are another matter I've seen that concerns people. Again I can see why some people would be bothered by for me its not an issue who owns shares in my PC game store.
I'm more concerned about Microsoft buying up developers and Gamepass. The way games are consumed through that model I feel might lead to an average lowering of quality in games the same way I feel Netflix has been causing for movies and TV. But that's for another time!
Zloth
Community Contributor
Steam was the first store in town, so it got the exclusives that way. (And it caught hell for forcing everyone to buy its games there.) I'm not going to begrudge them that. They also pioneered so many things in that store: easy updates, forums, guides, screenshots, seasonal sales... the list goes on and on. Through all that, they never patented any of it (to my knowledge). There was no equivalent to Amazon's "one click buy" patent.
They could have easily put up all sorts of barriers to block competition. It would have generated a lot of bad will, but so what? Your only other choice was to go to the brick & mortar store, with its little PC Games section that only has games made in the last year, and then download/install your own patches and mods. And sales? They had sales sometimes - just before tossing the games into the dumpster to make space for a new game.
That exclusivity should only last a few years, though, IMHO. Steam has already gotten really lax about their features. It's well past time for them to have some serious competition.
But, as I said before, Epic is doing it in a terrible way. Sure, they won't be able to destroy Valve any time soon, but they will be able to do so over time. Are you planning on telling them that they can have exclusives until they get as large as Steam, then they can't? Or they can have them until they are twice Steam's size?
If they want to get people in the door by giving away games, that's fine, as long as they aren't dumping on the market to make it impossible for other stores to survive. If they want to have fewer features but give developers and/or customers better bargains, that's fine, too. GOG got going by doing a lot of work to make older games run on modern PCs, which was also fine. Or they could just make a better Steam - which doesn't strike me as being all that hard, given how lax Valve has been with their features. There are plenty of ways to do it that aren't "pay off the developers so consumers have no choice."
The crux of my point is that this exclusivity is not likely to lead to a better environment for us. When we start making our choice of which store to used based off of where the game can even be found, there's no reason for stores to give us better deals and/or better service.
They could have easily put up all sorts of barriers to block competition. It would have generated a lot of bad will, but so what? Your only other choice was to go to the brick & mortar store, with its little PC Games section that only has games made in the last year, and then download/install your own patches and mods. And sales? They had sales sometimes - just before tossing the games into the dumpster to make space for a new game.
That exclusivity should only last a few years, though, IMHO. Steam has already gotten really lax about their features. It's well past time for them to have some serious competition.
But, as I said before, Epic is doing it in a terrible way. Sure, they won't be able to destroy Valve any time soon, but they will be able to do so over time. Are you planning on telling them that they can have exclusives until they get as large as Steam, then they can't? Or they can have them until they are twice Steam's size?
If they want to get people in the door by giving away games, that's fine, as long as they aren't dumping on the market to make it impossible for other stores to survive. If they want to have fewer features but give developers and/or customers better bargains, that's fine, too. GOG got going by doing a lot of work to make older games run on modern PCs, which was also fine. Or they could just make a better Steam - which doesn't strike me as being all that hard, given how lax Valve has been with their features. There are plenty of ways to do it that aren't "pay off the developers so consumers have no choice."
The crux of my point is that this exclusivity is not likely to lead to a better environment for us. When we start making our choice of which store to used based off of where the game can even be found, there's no reason for stores to give us better deals and/or better service.
Kaamos_Llama
Moderator
I also disliked Steam when I first got Half Life 2! Why are they forcing me to install this DRM why can't I just have my game icon shortcuts in a folder on my desktop like I always had before?
Eventually Steam set the model for a large part of why PC gaming is where it is today. Sales have been amazing for gamers in general, smaller developers have had a platform digitally where they wouldn't have been able to have any sort of distribution if they needed to make discs boxes etc. I'm sure a lot more then I can think in the space of is due to Valve. Its also true someone else would have done it if Valve didn't, but they did it pretty well overall.
On the exclusives, there aren't many that have been permanently so AFAIK. I waited a year or whatever for Control, I couldn't wait for Metro Exodus, but they both ended up on other stores. I can't imagine a point when Epic bags everything as an exclusive and Steam has nothing. I would think if/when Epic gets around the same level of sales as Steam they'll probably stop throwing profits away bribing devs as there wont be a need. Fortnite money probably wont last forever. Either that or Valve will start to buy exclusives for themselves. That is if they haven't already tied down the entire PC gaming handheld market with Steam Deck in the same way they failed to create an exclusive PC-as-console market with Steam OS.
I think I hear you, I just don't agree with your prediction of where things are likely to go. Seems to me you mostly don't want Epic to be in charge of the market instead of Valve? I don't see it going that far. Impossible to know without that crystal ball.
Eventually Steam set the model for a large part of why PC gaming is where it is today. Sales have been amazing for gamers in general, smaller developers have had a platform digitally where they wouldn't have been able to have any sort of distribution if they needed to make discs boxes etc. I'm sure a lot more then I can think in the space of is due to Valve. Its also true someone else would have done it if Valve didn't, but they did it pretty well overall.
On the exclusives, there aren't many that have been permanently so AFAIK. I waited a year or whatever for Control, I couldn't wait for Metro Exodus, but they both ended up on other stores. I can't imagine a point when Epic bags everything as an exclusive and Steam has nothing. I would think if/when Epic gets around the same level of sales as Steam they'll probably stop throwing profits away bribing devs as there wont be a need. Fortnite money probably wont last forever. Either that or Valve will start to buy exclusives for themselves. That is if they haven't already tied down the entire PC gaming handheld market with Steam Deck in the same way they failed to create an exclusive PC-as-console market with Steam OS.
I think I hear you, I just don't agree with your prediction of where things are likely to go. Seems to me you mostly don't want Epic to be in charge of the market instead of Valve? I don't see it going that far. Impossible to know without that crystal ball.
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Brian Boru
Moderator
Check out the other Launchers:
Game Launchers—combine your Libraries
Many seem unaware you can combine many different retailers' Libraries into one Launcher—no more having to launch individual Launchers for each different retailer where you have games. I use either GOG Galaxy or Playnite… there are others like LaunchBox and Photon, which I haven't tested—if you...
forums.pcgamer.com
Re exclusives, they are part and parcel in every retail and B2B operation under Capitalism. You may as well howl at the moon as complain about them.
Want an Audi? You can't get it from the Ford or Toyota or BMW dealers, only from your local Mr Audi.
Want MS Office or Photoshop or Quickbooks? You know where you have to go.
Grocery store isn't a good analogy. No Game shop is buying up all the shooters in your area. It's more like their deals with say Coke—if you want to shop elsewhere, you get Pepsi, no big deal.
If a game shop has exclusives on 100 shooters, also no big deal—there are way more than 1,000 other shooters available elsewhere.
Steam is a great service, by far my favorite, but their stranglehold on the digital download market is a very bad thing for the games market. This has been proven over and over in so many business sectors ever since Capitalism became a thing. If you want to see how bad it can get when allowed to flourish unchecked, read about the British East India Company or the Robber Barons.
@JCgames the difference between the steam and epic "bribes" are that the epic giveaways are covered by epic who in return pay the devs.
99.9% of the giveaways on steam are done solely by the dev/publisher and has nothing to do with steam (obviously excluding using said storefront to claim the game)
If anyone was bribing you for claiming Titan Quest and Jagged Alliance it would be THQ Nordic.
99.9% of the giveaways on steam are done solely by the dev/publisher and has nothing to do with steam (obviously excluding using said storefront to claim the game)
If anyone was bribing you for claiming Titan Quest and Jagged Alliance it would be THQ Nordic.
It didn't read like a joke but that easily could be put down to Hanlon's razor,
It's simply silly and also somewhat pointless for any of us gamers to be against
any (trusted) client/store
It's just the way it is now, we use gog and steam for our larger backlog, epic and uplay when we want to play the games we can only get from their,
Is origin still a thing? whatever
While I'd love a single store/ client to host all our games that can also create it's own downfalls, like being a monopoly.
Words mean everything,
gaming also means something, no need to truly care if we were simply given the game for free
only appreciete we had the chance to do so
It's simply silly and also somewhat pointless for any of us gamers to be against
any (trusted) client/store
It's just the way it is now, we use gog and steam for our larger backlog, epic and uplay when we want to play the games we can only get from their,
Is origin still a thing? whatever
While I'd love a single store/ client to host all our games that can also create it's own downfalls, like being a monopoly.
Words mean everything,
gaming also means something, no need to truly care if we were simply given the game for free
only appreciete we had the chance to do so
Fun fact: Origin is still a thing, but UPlay has been replaced by Ubisoft Connect.
@Pifanjr I spent a few hours last night trying to purchase the last two Assassin's Creed Chronicles (India and Russia) from the ubi store, and after too much trial and error (and them losing the 20% off coupon they gave me) before simply resorting to fanatical and claiming it through Ubi Connect which took less than 2 minutes
People can complain about epic and steam, at least purchasing a single game from them is pretty simple.
People can complain about epic and steam, at least purchasing a single game from them is pretty simple.
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