3605

I think the Epic exclusive deal is pretty clearly a very very good deal for small - medium indies. Even if there is a publisher taking a cut, a guaranteed level of funding is hugely valuable for indies.

(To elaborate, I think there’s a smaller chance of the extremely rare “moneyhats for everyone scenario” as the Steam discovery algorithm/storefront can play a big part in getting a great indie game out to the masses, but it also means that in the much more likely scenario that a great indie game somehow never connects with the marketplace, doesn’t benefit from Steam’s discovery mechanisms, and makes fewer sales than hoped for, that this doesn’t take the developer down with it.)

Oh, and the best way to deal with the 3 obvious trolls on the pro-epic side of this argument is to ignore them. There’s plenty of reasonable people who like EGS here that you can talk with if you want to.

3606

Fixed that for you.

3607

Probably people could stop discussing it if other people could give any ground whatsoever on Epic being perfect and having done absolutely nothing wrong.

I think they have no idea how ridiculous it looks to play semantics games about Epic abandoning the PC market for a while. Just makes them look silly. Like an angry toddler digging in his heels and just refusing to concede anything. When you keep defending a lost, minor point like a dog with a bone because you cannot concede anything (even if you’re just demonstrably wrong about said minor point), people are just going to continue to make hay with it against you.

Sometimes it is okay to admit that yes, this thing happened years ago, and it may have been a bad thing for you, but things are different now. Where you end up looking ridiculous is utterly refusing to admit anything ever happened, even things that very clearly did happen.

I mean, responses like that just make the person look disingenuous or stupid, and lose pretty much all credibility.

3608

Epic’s not perfect. Who said they were?

My main point is that false information is being stated here as fact. Perhaps due to the exclusivity anger, fear of losing Steam, Fortnite ill-will, whatever - something has encouraged some people to peddle false or at least misconstrued information.

Epic didn’t abandon the PC market; abandon, by definition, means giving up on entirely. Even if they focused on console games for a duration, they continued to develop an award-winning PC gaming engine. Thus at best, one can say that many years ago Epic briefly focused their gaming development efforts on consoles.

Those that keep repeating their ill-will towards the Epic and the Epic Games Store are akin to the anti-Walmart crowd who not only refuse to shop at Walmart, but dedicate considerably energy shouting how much others should refuse to shop there, too. Although I don’t agree with aspects of Walmart’s business, and generally avoid that chain when I can, I think it’s silly to join the anti-Walmart, sign-holding, red-in-the-face crowd.

3609

Hey, I’ll take one for the team here to show that qt3 isn’t the typical Internet.

I started out early in this thread with two positions I thought would be unassailable:

  1. That my ‘launcher’ mind share was limited and therefore, Epic would need to do something to convince me that their storefront would offer me something worthwhile to snag a precious spot on my task bar.
  2. That for me to ‘trust’ EGS, they’d need to prove that they planned to stay engaged in the PC market long enough for me to risk a game library with them.

The long version is that I was being dumb. It’s a fucking icon on my taskbar, not some prize trophy space on my shelf. Even if I have concerns about them being around long-term, do I really give a shit if I pay $100 for a few games I wanted to play and wind up losing access to them a few years down the road? I’ve paid more for meals I knew would be likely to give me food poisoning.

The short version is that I’ll buy shit I really want on EGS and grow my library with them slowly over time.

There’s been some good points raised by both sides here, but there’s been far more douchbaggery on than is typical on qt3. Stop pissing on each other, for fucks sake. You’re all allowed to disagree, but there’s been so much intentional douchyness here that it makes me ashamed to call this place a favorite haunt.

Happy Easter.

3610

Really? I am not native speaker, does “abandon” always mean permanence, no other meaning possible? And even if it does, can you not concede that Nesrie and myself did not mean it in that “permanent” sense?

I finished Gears 4 today. Pretty fun game. I also played Gears 1 when it came out year after xbox on PC, even dealt with shitty GFWL for it. Shame I could never play Gears 2, 3 and Judgement because I didn’t have the console, because Epic deemed PC at that time unnecessary hassle.

Nobody here has claimed they didn’t develop their engine and licensed it to other developers who used it to make PC games.

And yes, this is a really dumb argument, particularly because Epic’s “temporary abandonment of releasing PC versions” is about the last, least important reason I would have for not supporting the Epic store.

3611

Of course it doesn’t. That’s the point I made - it’s just stupid to even try to claim that.

When a dad abandons their kid, then comes back into their life 15 years later, no one other than an idiot would say, “Well, you can’t say he abandoned you. He’s back now. It’s not abandonment unless he literally died and never came back.”

3612

Abandon does, however, mean completely depart. /grammar police

3613

That’s what I thought, hence me considering this a dumb argument about semantics.

Anyway, in more interesting news, it seems Julian Gollop got around 2.2 million USD for the exclusivity:

So yeah, eventhough it was shitty towards backers, I am not surprised at all they went for it. Now they’ll have to see if it will be worth it in the long run. I would guess 2K got around 15-20 million for Borderlands 3?

3614

Wow, $2m for a small indie title. You really can’t blame them for taking the money.

3615

It’s not free money though, it’s more like an advance. Phoenix Point appears to be a $40 game, so that’d mean Epic is guaranteeing about 60-65k sales. That doesn’t seem unreasonable; them selling fewer copies than that in the first year would certainly be considered a failure. So I think it’s a matter of minimally de-risking the project rather than finding a pot of gold.

(How strange… Phoenix Point was supposed to retail for $35. But somehow getting out from under they yoke of Steam caused the price the consumers pay to go up, not down.)

3616

The article doesn’t say anything about guaranteeing minimum sales, it appears to be a straight-up exclusivity deal which Epic already paid.

3617

The article is not a primary source, it’s some journalist paraphrasing a forum post.

The email sent out by Fig specifically calls it a “cash advance”. Advances are not free money, they’re always offset by sales.

3618

Yeah. It’s a pretty dumb approach to take; it’s meant to be. It’s another extreme designed to end discussion not contribute to it.

Of course by silly definitions like that, no one should ever say anything about Microsoft doing dumb things in PC gaming… because they gave us Windows and other tools to use. I don’t see anyone really running around giving Microsoft the crown of PC gaming saying they’ll somehow save it just by being. Their store is shit, and they have made multiple attempts to do things for PC gaming and abandoned those too. We should probably get a new OS and make a bunch of games exclusive to that, just to challenge the big player. There you go Linux.

3619

It’s not just the duration I’m nitpicking, it’s the intensity of the word “abandon.” I can understand the stance that Epic didn’t emphasize PC gaming for a duration, but saying they abandoned the platform entirely would indicate a total and “complete departure” (as Dan_Theman pointed out.) Epic didn’t bail on PC gaming from either a permanence, timing or a totality perspective, thus I feel it’s inaccurate to use the word “abandon”, but I do agree I’m likely nitpicking at this point.

Even if I’ve perceived some of Paul’s posts as unnecessarily acerbic and harsh, I accept that’s his right and choice; internet playgrounds are what they are. Even if I don’t like seeing “fuck you” bandied about here like it’s Reddit, I’m probably reading too much into it.

I don’t mean to be a troll or an asshole here. I understand my posts are not going to change anyone’s mind and vice versa. I really appreciated the tone of meeper’s post re: higher than typical levels of douchbaggery here and I don’t wish to further animosity on this topic. I accept that if someone wants to feel abandonment by Epic’s past behaviors, so be it … even if I disagree, it really doesn’t matter.

Happy Easter and happy gaming!

3620

It’s totally nitpicking. They said they weren’t making PC games anymore, all the articles were linked in the thread. By any reasonable definition they abandoned PC gaming. But that was 9 years ago, and they changed their minds. This wasn’t a personal insult, they didn’t say the N word, and they weren’t accused of rape. It’s a forgivable offense. Lets move on, shall we?

Sheesh.

3621

I don’t particularly like it either, but then I also don’t like insinuations that I am racist against chinese because I loathe their government. I mean I loathe my own government too, maybe I am self-racist as well.
That said I have told another poster “fuck you” about… once, in a decade plus that I am posting here, since I generally like the people here.

I don’t want to further any animosity either. Btw I consider myself a fan of Epic - first game I played by Tim Sweeney was Jill of the Jungle, so it’s been a while, and I love Unreal, UT and UT2004. I am disappointed in them right now because I inherently dislike third party exclusivity in PC space and that they felt it was the right idea to do while having barebones featureless service. But none of this is of course permanent. We’ll see what happens and I for one do hope it will eventually end up as Travis described up thread - all games on all services, Epic and Steam both competitive and customer/developer friendly.

3622

How many hundreds of Unreal powered games were supported by Epic and released on PC in that period?

3623

And how much music did Wal-mart sell after they yanked their music store? How involved is Sony in music, and they also yanked their store. Those two are not related.

3624

Epic employs hundreds of people to actively develop and support partners who license their engine on PC. How does that not count?