Oh this is cool, I have been wanting to try this for a while. Cheers!
Well, well, well.
Sweeney wasn’t happy that Microsoft was building a closed platform within Windows 10, and its attempts to force developers to distribute these apps through the Microsoft Store.
Forcing developers bad
Forcing customers good
(kudos to MS though, hopefully will keep walking the walk)
UWP apps were freed from the windows store years ago, technically. Nobody distributed them outside the windows store because the platform was (and still is) a failure, but the platform remained open.
Microsoft’s only potential point of leverage was the ease of converting Xbox One apps to UWP apps, and they never pushed it, either through lack of ambition or just plain incompetence, so that didn’t happen either. And that combined with the platform remaining open rendered UWP and the windows store largely irrelevant.
Well of course it’s different. One forces him and the other doesn’t… duh. heh.
UWP was an interesting misstep. It’s practically in maintenance mode at this point. If I were a betting man then I’d put money on Electron. With Microsoft ditching Edge in favor of Chrome if they “bake” a Chromium runtime into the OS then that allows for a shared runtime thus removing the current pain points of huge download size and RAM usage.
What problem does that solve for game developers? Why would they suddenly port over to Javascript as opposed to UWP’s C#/C++ and lose performance?
It’s cross-platform.
A bit off-topic, but this may point to where MS is going on this subject.
No email validation would help explain the countless password reset requests that I get from Epic. My email address is the very straightforward first.last at gmail and there’s a kid out west who keeps using it to sign up for stuff. I wonder if his parents know about that tattoo?
The sequel to Retro City Rampage, Shakedown Hawaii, is now an Epic Store exclusive launch on PC.
Race to the bottom has begun.
The windows store is now taking a 5% cut, if you get there directly from a web search. They take a 15% cut if you reach a title’s page from a MS property like browsing or searching in the store.
Edit: One notable complication is it doesn’t appear to apply to, umm, games. So, errr… nevermind?
Yeah, games open up a huge can of worms since you need to consider Play Anywhere games, the ability to buy Xbox-only games from the Windows Store (if you change default search filters), and so forth.
A developer for Trine 4 confirmed on Steam that Trine 4 will not become a stealth Epic store exclusive before release. It will be available on Steam (and possibly other stores) on release.
You can thank Epic for making this the dominant question for every new announced upcoming release through 2019. It’s the new Thanks Obama.
It doesn’t use the Unreal engine, so they have a lot more flexibility.
It’s not a question of flexibility but less incentive to make the change as the per unit engine royalties aren’t written off.
I expect the stream of exclusives to slow down as Epic have probably gone through a larger store announcement/establishing war chest and will be ramping down to a smaller ongoing budget.
Alternatively, they budgeted their war chest and are going to continue making tempting offers to Indie devs by studying Steam’s data to find the games with the most expressed user interest. Steamspy’s guy is useful for that.
Shouldn’t be too hard, since Steam allows you to see the most wishlisted games.
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?filter=popularwishlist
I am amused at whatever Valve did to Metro Exodus, as it doesn’t show up anywhere unless you specifically search for it.
It’s not completely clear, but from the wording of this statement, it seems there’s a bit more to the Ubisoft and Epic deal.
Sadly we have to announce [to] you that Ubisoft will not allow digital third party stores, such as Gamesplanet, to sell Division 2 after its release on March 15th 2019. After this date, the game will digitally only be available through Ubisoft’s Store and another exclusive digital store. This will also be true for all upcoming game content such as Season Pass, Extensions, etc.
Wow, that’s a huge win for Epic if if it’s true. The UBISoft catalog is no small thing.
EDIT: Ah, it’s only for The Division 2 (so far)