I don’t this is a discussion that can be had anymore. People have really dug into their positions on both ends, and it seems like only time will tell if any of the misgivings have an legs
Also, we will never get Half Life 3. Never.
KevinC
3157
What kind of weird caveat is this? Lol. Aside from Unreal, what engine advancements has Epic done in the past year or two?
Aside from Steam, which up until now was like 90% of PC gaming, what has Valve been doing for PC gaming? Okay.
Isn’t that pretty huge though?
She’s right. Nothing false, exaggerated or nonsensical about it. Epic very famously abandoned the PC market for 6 years. Here’s an article about it.
https://www.dsogaming.com/news/epic-games-on-why-it-favoured-consoles-over-pcs-in-the-past-and-the-current-battle-between-pc-vs-consoles/
It’s no secret that for a time, Epic Games was focused on console gaming. While its roots were in PC gaming, the company felt the need to focus on consoles for almost six years in order to survive. And according to Tim Sweeney, that was a wise decision as before Steam, PC game revenue started falling off a cliff.
As Tim Sweeney told Glixel:
“We built PC games for all of Epic’s history: Jazz Jackrabbit, Jill of the Jungle, Epic Pinball, and then Unreal. But before Steam, PC game revenue started falling off a cliff, right around the time BitTorrent and Napster came out. Piracy became really easy and accessible with broadband Internet. Our competitors who were shipping games were almost going out of business, because for every copy they sold there would be like 10 pirated copies. As a result, PC was not growing as a viable platform for the scale of game that we wanted to build. We wanted to build games like Gears of War.”
Sweeney claimed that due to PC piracy, Epic Games focused on consoles for that whole time frame, from 2006 to 2012.
How anyone can say that Epic has abandoned PC gaming when Unreal engine exists, is constantly pushed forward, and drives such a huge number of PC-released games is beyond me.
That’s not a new development.
If your criteria for ‘abandoning pc gaming’ is not shipping any games on PC for a few years, then Valve abandoned PC gaming too at various points.
Shadari
3162
Epic store doesn’t even sell Unreal Tournament. I mean what the hell? It’s seems to me they only care about making massive loads of money. They’re already swimming in that kind of money and they can’t be bothered to address the not-so-big-but-still-important-to-many-gamers issues. That’s the kind of company they are.
Why on Earth wouldn’t they put the UT series on their store? For crying out loud, it’s their series! They’re a huge part of PC-gaming history. And they’re still great games.
Huh, I didn’t remember him taking the dumb piracy line about it. We all knew it was because Intel’s integrated graphics and NVidia’s graphics card naming/driver idiocy prevented most “average” consumers from having PCs that could actually play anything. (The copy protection fiasco of the publishers sure didn’t help either, though.)
KevinC
3164
Here’s one thing I’d like to know. If Steam offers so little of value, why is Epic spending boatloads of cash in order to have games pulled from the platform in order to compete?
That is strange. Looks like they only sell the UT series on Steam. Maybe they have some kind of exclusivity agreement with Steam?
Where is someone saying that Steam is offering little of value? They offer tons of value. But that doesn’t mean someone else can’t offer something more to somebody - or apply pressure for Steam to improve in ways they otherwise would not.
Here’s the quick step back - of ALL digital game sales on PC, Steam gets close to 30%. Of all of them. (excepting outliers).
That’s… that’s a staggering amount of money, folks.
Whooo boy, thread is on fire today.
Everyone remember to be nice to one another. :)
Nesrie
3168
My criteria, since you didn’t ask, is what would have happened if everyone took Epic Games’ position when they decided that PC gaming wasn’t worth a hill of beans… We probably wouldn’t be having this discussion because they decided to fork it years ago.
Epic Games doesn’t get to start from scratch just because they want to. They’ve been in the market for a long time, and when times got tough, they walked. Now that someone else put in the work, they’re suddenly back and caring except they can’t even do that right. They have to earn trust. It’s not just given to them.
Again, this is not a David and Goliath scenario. This is a Goliath and Goliath scenario only one of the Goliath’s committed when it was hard, and the other one said screw it. Now they’re back saying screw it to the customers which isn’t even a new position for them, but hey we want in on it after everyone else put in the work.
They aren’t saying they have abandoned PC gaming. They’re saying that they did abandon it for many years in the past before returning to it (see article a few posts above). They created a lot of ill will in the PC community during those 6 years that still hasn’t hasn’t gone away. Gamers have long memories.
I don’t get this at all. Shipping games on PC isn’t a club. There’s not a secret knock. You do what you do based on current market conditions and needs to keep your employees paid and to run a business and to hopefully do the best job you can.
This is a weird, weird argument to me. They’ve been building technology that others build games on for a very long time, supporting those developers well, and doing a lot to foster PC gaming as a result. You might not see that, or maybe it doesn’t matter to you, but it’s objectively true.
You’re right. I just did a search on Unreal Tournament 3 (the latest one), and that wasn’t on GoG, but it was on Steam. But it looks like GoG has the early games in the series.
Sounds more like a weird grudge to me. You didn’t ship games on my platform of choice so I hate you forever?
I seriously look forward to my eventual exit from this business. Jeez.
KevinC
3174
Do you have Lunarstorm on ignore or something? :)
Probably just too many dang replies on the thread :P
