Especially considering all the “You sold out to EPIC, I will never buy your game”.
Turns out, people don’t really care, once it comes down to it.
To me it sounds like a lot of people did hold out, though, which is what I find surprising. I’d have thought the majority of people would have bought it on Epic over the past year and there would just be a trickle on Steam but I was wrong.
I mean, I can only speak for me and the friend I usually play co-op with, and I suspect we’re a tiny minority, but we still haven’t picked it up as a result of that exclusivity. We were huge fans of the Sanctum games and probably would have bought this day 1 if it was on a store we were willing to do business with, but because of the Epic exclusive launch it just slid down the priority list to the bottom and got forgotten about. We’re playing other stuff now, so there’s just no hurry. Maybe once it’s out of EA and the price drops a bit we’ll get around to it.
It’s a buyers market and most of us, I think, have backlogs a mile high. The only reason to buy anything at anything close to full price is as a gesture of good will toward the developer to help them keep making the kinds of games I like. Anyone that’s taking Epic payoffs doesn’t need any help from me, better to support those that do.
On the flip side, not supporting up and coming stores (especially stores that provide a fairer breakdown of the revenue) means continuing consolidation of the market under a single store. A near monopoly.
Even now, stores like GoG don’t always get all the DLCs for the games they sell, showing that head to head competition with Steam without exclusives is pointless.
The notion that Epic needs my money to be competitive is hilarious.
I’m happy to support GOG when I can (in an ideal world, they’d be the only store I did business with) but yeah, this is something of a Catch-22 for them.
Yeah, sadly, I can’tsupport GoG. I won’t take the gamble that I will miss out on some DLC because the developer decided that it wasn’t worth it.
Well, maybe I can support them for some Good Old Games that aren’t being developed anymore, but even that is a bit of risk, looking at how old games like Titan Quest got new DLCs and updates.
It’s not just DLC that GOG users sometimes miss out on, but also patches and additional stuff, like sountracks (which I don’t really care about myself, but it’s the principle). Some games that have e.g. Mac and Linux versions on Steam don’t offer them on GOG, and sometimes GOG games support fewer languages than they do on other platforms.
See this list: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zjwUN1mtJdCkgtTDRB2IoFp7PP41fraY-oFNY00fEkI/edit#gid=0
Still, I continue to support GOG over Steam, in the hope that some day, all developers/publishers on GOG will actually give a damn.
That sucks and in principle, I want to support GOG. But, it really depends on whether I can be sure that I can get the complete game experience (like you, I don’t care about Sound tracks).
This is less of an issue for older games though.
I mean you see the contradiction in your position in going after someone for not supporting Epic, while also refusing to support GOG, right?
I will say that, in addition to buying stuff where the patch/DLC thing is unlikely to be an issue, GOG is also my preferred double-dip store. Any game I really love is worth having a DRM-free copy of, to my mind.
But the whole patch/DLC issue that @JoshoB nicely documents above is maddening.
The best bet is to stick with games that are “done”, or with games released by developers that have a track record of supporting GOG.
Even then, there’s weird stuff where I just don’t understand why some games are supported and others aren’t: for example, Sins of a Solar Empire and Offworld Trading Company lack the most recent DLCs, both published by Stardock. (But they do receive patches in which they reference the most recent DLCs!) But the games that are developed (not just published) by Stardock – like Ashes, Star Control: Origins, and GalCiv3 – are fully supported, and include all DLCs, usually from day 1. (And on GOG, Stardock doesn’t support the package deals/bundles they do on Steam, and the games are on sale less often, but we make do with what we have.)
I hasten to say that I didn’t create that Google document. ;-)
Nicely links to, then. :) Regardless, I appreciate you spreading it around, it’s damn useful.
Part of the GOG DLC/Patch issue is GOG self-inflicted. GOG wraps things in their own installer for those who wish to download the files directly rather than going through GOG Galaxy. That means there’s GOG QA involved, plus a host of other cases to test by both the developer / publisher and GOG.
For example, what if the user downloads the base game through GOG Galaxy then manually installs the DLC? What if the user installs the DLC but is missing a patch? What if… what if… “what if we don’t bother shipping this update on GOG? It’s less than 5% market share anyway.”
This adds a lot of time and expense to what is on Steam a simple process - you upload the files once they’re done. I think Steam can lead to a certain amount of laziness among developers - “We can always hotfix it!” - but bottom line is it puts the release management in the hands of the developer / publisher rather than the retailer - Steam or GOG in this case.
So far, every game sold on Epic has had all the DLCs and patches that came with the game. It’s not a long track record, but it is there.
The same can’t be said about GoG sadly. And sure, part of it is my fault. I won’t support a developer on GoG that I can’t trust will support the game on GoG, so it’s not worth it to release things on GoG. It’s a bit of a chicken and an Egg thing
But, with Epic, I have a bit of faith that some of the string that Epic attaches to games sold on Epic include feature parity with Steam when it comes to DLCs and the like. With all that money, I have no doubt that’s already part of it.
But as @JoshoB mentioned, the best thing to do is buy games from Developers that have an established reputation, or buy games that have been out so long that future DLCs/patches/expansions are unlikely. Which I do from GoG. It’s a shame about Sins or offworld though.
Now, you all me. My preference is that DLCs where completely store agnostic. All DLCs work with all versions of the game, regardless of where you play. Its one of the strongest reasons for me to stay on steam.
And the thing is, the DLC/ patching thing? That is your choice, and I respect that reason for not buying from GOG. It is a legitimate reason, and you are free to base buying on that.
All I ask is you show the same for @vinraith and his decision not to support Epic for other, equally valid, reasons without dropping the ‘if you don’t buy from Epic you are supporting consolidation to a Pc monopoly’ thing.
Said as someone who has been vocal about disliking the buying of exclusives, but also understands the business reasons for it.
Longer Kotaku feature on Ubisoft Toronto. Some of it recapping the bits that floated around on Twitter in the past week, some of it from their own sources or interviews.
But based on conversations with 12 current and former employees of Ubisoft Toronto, the studio’s problems appear to go beyond a few men like Béland and how they may have been dealt with in the past. Instead, the people we’ve interviewed described an overall workplace culture that undervalues women’s contributions, normalizes sexism and harassment, and makes excuses for the worst offenders while complaints about them go unheeded. “The way the studio—HR and management—disregards complaints just enables this behavior from men,” one told Kotaku .
Another problem with GOG that’s self-inflicted: they’re trying to predict the market. They reject devs when they think the quality isn’t up to par. Of course, the reality is that you can’t trust anyone to be a gatekeeper. Indie devs in particular get screwed. If the game ends up being a bestseller on Steam, GOG will accept them months later, but by that time, the game will barely sell, making it so that the tiny GOG marketshare is worth even less to a dev.
In addition, GOG pushes Indies to support their own achievement and multiplayer API, which just isn’t worth the effort – they should have just supported the steam API, but instead created their own thing.
All of this is exactly what happened to the Supraland dev, and keeps happening to many other Indies.
When partnerships go wrong.
MS may make a move
I hope they don’t mess up the Middle-Earth Shadow of Mordor series. I don’t play other WB games I can think of.
Oh, apparently they’re publishing Cyberpunk 2077 too. I’m sure that will be fine.