5898

I have never tried that.

Like I said, I stopped drinking soda. I just love eating food too much, that I feel adding soda to the mix would just result in my very early death.

How do you soda drinkers do it? Is it moderate consumption and exercise?

5899

It’s how I imagine cigarette smokers feel about smoking, just an unhealthy habit. I drink a lot less than I used to though, except when we get close to Go-Live dates or other stressors.

5900

You mean with no sugar? Because Pepsi Max is my jam. I just can’t stand drinking sugar sodas at all now (20+ years after quitting).

5901

A nuanced perspective from a developer on the choice of store.

Schade admits that there were conversations with Epic about Everspace 2, but Rockfish never seriously considered pursuing exclusivity. As much as anything else, Everspace was a game built in tune with its community, and that community really took off on Early Access. Steam is very much the series’ home, and the source of more than 50% of the game’s revenue to date. At this point in time, Schade says, the Epic Games Store simply doesn’t have the tools that Rockfish needs to build its sequel, and to build an even larger community around that sequel.
[…]
“Without Epic, Rockfish and Everspace wouldn’t exist, but it’s the same with Steam. Without Steam, we wouldn’t exist… In our case, it doesn’t make sense. We need Early Access, the full feature set, the forums, the constant updating, the whole infrastructure. Valve has the best platform, by far, to roll out a game as an independent developer. It’s by far the best tools and the best communities. This is exactly what we need.”

Schade acknowledges that, for smaller developers, exclusivity can be both valuable and vital, but the decision to stick to its original plan is already paying off. After Gamescom: Opening Night Live, Valve promoted a handful of games from the line-up on Steam’s homepage. Everspace 2 was among them, and at the time of writing, it had been added to more than 20,000 wishlists – five times more than Everspace in the same time period.

Wait, what?

Valve has the best platform

He’s probably just talking about the launch icon, I’m sure.

5902

The free game right now is Conarium.

Seems worth a try.

5903
5904

Weird thread but ok. *

(* i.e why does this belong here rather than, say the Xbox game pass or twitch prime threads?)

5905

Grabbed it. Thanks.
I must be really out of touch these days, since until just now, I’d never even heard of Conarium.

It’s odd because I was a fan of Zoetrope Interactive, the developer, and their two previous games, Darkness Within: In Pursuit Of Loath Nolder (2007) and Darkness Within: The Dark Lineage (2009), both of which I paid full price for boxed editions years ago.

Just three guys on the team, and yet they produced quality games, The Dark Lineage being created on their proprietary engine. For Conarium, however, it appears they switched to the Unreal 4 engine. Which kind of saddens me, since their own CPAGE engine ran really well (at least for me it did), and evoked some really creepy ambience. I’m always sad when a unique game engine stops being used, even if it’s for the better.

Anyway, yeah the trailer looks great, and I have no doubt that it will satisfy me in some ways, even if, like their other games, it may not be top-tier.

Then again, ten years have passed since Dark Lineage, so my nostalgia may be getting the better of me. Looking forward to giving it a go. These guys are great at atmosphere.


5906

The name Zoetrope is familiar, but I haven’t played those 2 games you mentioned. The titles are intriguing. Thanks for mentioning them. I’ll read up on them and maybe check whether they are on GoG.

5907

This is an interesting read:

5908

I want more digging into those numbers. Console folks are counted in those numbers. We don’t know what the PC/console split is. I’d want to know what the PC percentage is, how it compares to other titles?

5909

Ian Boudreau ‏ @ iboudreau Sep 14
The moral of the story is that the online/social/Reddit narrative of players abandoning games because of “ethics” concerns over Epic is BS

I guess it’s all just down to you and me, @lordkosc

5910

Console folks are explicitly not counted in the Borderlands number. 240k concurrents at launch is respectable but not insanely high. (The comparison to Borderlands 2 is a bit disingenuous, it’s a very different market to 7 years ago). For some recent comparisons of AAA games with established fan bases, Sekiro had 130k launch concurrents on Steam. Monster Hunter World had 350k. But it launched six months after the console versions, so the PC player base was artificially low.

Anyway, that’s high enough that it would be hard to spin as an epic store failure, not high enough to support the tweeter’s narrative about epic actively creating success for the exclusives. But that already appeared to be the case based on the data we had from elsewhere.

The Dauntless numbers are useless pap. I find it impossible to believe the 10M could be across all platforms. They moved from some garbage custom launcher to one with an established player base and launched on consoles. Just tripling the player base would be a pathetic failure on all platforms.

But the tweets don’t even bother specifying whether this is total players or MAUs.

5911

The tweeter goes on about how pro-consumer Epic is and how everything who says otherwise is objectively false, but I read through his thread and he only talked about Epic’s support for developers? I think from the split alone it’s clear that Epic is good to work with for developers, but very little they’ve done with EGS seems pro-consumer to me. In my opinion, restricting consumer choice via exclusives on a feature-poor platform is not pro-consumer, although I completely understand the business logic.

5912

R1fdEt3

5913

So @KevinC, how do you feel about Epic’s Cloud Saves? :-P

5914

Closed up the poll I had going, I’ll do another at the start of the new year.

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5915

Haha, their cloud saves sure aren’t consumer friendly!

Pours out a 40 for his lost Fl4k.

5916

Yeah, his argument for “pro-consumer” seemed to be “they added some exclusives people want to play”

5917

Yeah he’s arguing foot traffic somehow means pro-consumer. It’s not the same thing at all, but no one really argued that people wouldn’t buy these games. That’s the whole foot traffic part that comes with exclusives, so long as people want what you have. When, if, they stop the exclusive garbage, then we’ll see.