Everything I’ve heard lately about Chinese companies would certainly make me trust them. But I’m sure you’re more knowledgeable about these things as you said.
Being from China doesn’t give them super-crazy weird rights that some other company wouldn’t have. Minority ownership doesn’t grant you control - it doesn’t actually guarantee you ANYTHING except what you contractually agree to, and your rights on the board.
People have a distorted idea of what minority ownership grants a given party.
Especially when the company is FABULOUSLY WEALTHY and the controlling party is Tim Sweeney.
Epic Games is not a subsidiary of TenCent. TenCent is an outside investor.
In my experience minority shareholders try to gain board positions, with a lot less than 40% holdings.
Sure. Our minority investor has a board position. But they don’t have board control and their rights are severely restricted. They aren’t a majority.
Anyway, this is neither here nor there.
Our minority investor didn’t even know we had signed a deal with Epic until after the fact and certainly had no say in the matter. In fact they don’t even know the terms of the deal!
Wait a sec, so if someone is against third party exclusives in PC space and for games being sold everywhere, they are “steam stans”? Am I supposed to call you “epic shill” now?
LOL. This makes the case for a store without reviews even stronger.
Removing reviews outright because less than a thousand morons misuse the feature seems shortsighted. There should be better solutions available. One of them would be not doing blatantly anti-customer things…
I don’t care what a game developer does in ‘game B’ when I’m going to see reviews on ‘game A’. I want to know how good game A is and that’s it.
Obviously I agree. Hell in this case it even spills to other games published by Deep Silver.
But removing reviews outright ain’t it.
So for those of us not keeping up with the series from home, has public perception flipped on the Epic store now due to shenanigans like lack of reviews and exclusives or do we really care about those things?
In other words, is it worth starting to build a game inventory there at all or is this going to wash up in a couple of years?
I think Dauntless’ real problem is that Monster Hunter World exists.
More about Tencent, which owns 40% and has 2 out of 5 board seats in Epic. Anyone know how much Sweeney has?
Honestly, as much as I don’t like the effects of public ownership, I prefer it to private deals like these.
I don’t care too much about the lack of reviews, because if you want reviews, they can be found anywhere. YouTube, Amazon, etc. Places like that. I am however pissed off that they keep buying up exclusive rights for games that I’d like to buy and play on Steam. I don’t like it when Microsoft does it by snatching things from PlayStation like Tomb Raider, I don’t like it when PlayStation does it by keeping things off the Microsoft platform, like Street Fighter 5. Even if they’re temporary, timed exclusives, I don’t like having to wait a year.
Do I care enough to go into to revolt? No. But I do find it annoying, and these moves in no way encourage me to buy and play on their platform. I just wish they could figure out a way to compete with Steam without messing with customers.
As for other steam features I would miss, I think their game discussion forums are invaluable for me to find information about small games that live in obscurity. And I would hate for certain games to end up on places like the Epic store and not have any actual place for players to discuss issues strategies or anything else relating to these types of games.
I also enjoy reading walkthroughs and strategy guides for some particularly obscure strategy games and the like that are written up by DieHard fans that exist on Steam. But it doesn’t sound like Epic wants to cater to that particular audience anyway, so I don’t think I have to worry about them snatching up the next obscure little game that only three people will play.
I’m in the wait and see camp. Competition is good but the exclusives bullshit is something I hate about console manufacturers.
I do agree with you about the reviews, but with one caveat. Steam reviews can be looked at for the current version only. So any game that goes through extensive patching can be viewed through the review lens of its current form, and that means a more up-to-date review. That being said, there is a whole lot of chaff to sift through to get actual comments that matter.
For people who dislike the hassle factor of multiple stores, allow me to present Playnite:
I’ve just started looking at it, but so far it looks nice. @TurinTur - you were its champion. Any more thoughts?
My guess is that any game listed on steam that is a sequel, and will be out 12 months after the Epic store exclusivity ends, will probably be getting this treatment.
And customers are voicing their opinion in any way they can.
At the end of the day, Epic wants to make as much money as possible , grow its market share, and if possible hurt its competitors. (win-win-win) This isn’t something new, happens in every industry. It’s the exact reason Fortnite never appeared on the Google Play Store.
What will be interesting to see is, once these 12 month exclusives start to finally show up on Steam to buy, what prices they will be asking. No one is buying a full priced year old game.
Okay, now that is interesting.
Skeptical Skipper says, “bullshit.”