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Not every game has been cracked, though, so you can’t always remove the DRM.

My point, though, is more about what people want to buy. The games industry could’ve made digital games more resemble “real” ownership, where you could give the games to your kids, etc. Instead, we got games that aren’t legally transferable at all, and we decided that piracy groups should be instrumental to preservation. It just feels ridiculous. Would this system actually be any consumer’s top choice?

At least there’s hope that you can buy movies and shows physically so that can get something resembling proper ownership.

The PC games market is properly fucked. Ever since digital distribution took over, even if you buy a physical game, it’s just a fucking digital code (i.e. a rental).

I still think it was a bit stupid that consumers all jumped aboard the digital distribution train without demanding a less stupid system first.

I’m only interested in one-time purchases, so I just saw the $75 and decided it was too expensive. It’s also just a hurdle to get over. Right now, my Apple account doesn’t even have a payment method associated with it, because I generally just use free / FOSS apps.

I think it depends on what client devices you have. Last time I checked, some content (like HDR) won’t play on Apple TV via Jellyfin unless you spring for a relatively expensive paid client (like Infuse). The open source client won’t work.

You gotta look at the good and the bad for both Epic and Valve, though.

The bad that Valve did is largely in the past, but they really, really pissed people off when they forced Steam upon people back in the day. They took games that people had already bought, and were already playing, and then suddenly moved them behind a service that required an account, removed consumer rights that were present when the games were originally sold, and was (at the time) horribly unreliable and generally shitty. Consumers at the time wanted Steam to die off, similar to how they’re hoping for EGS to go away now. Would we have been better off if Steam had died off when it pissed off all those consumers?

Valve has of course done a lot of good since then, but Epic has done a lot of good in the past and presently as well. Their grants are quite generous, and Epic has generally been viewed as a force for good in the gaming industry for years (see old interviews with other industry figures like Carmack, notes from when Sweeney received his Lifetime Achievement Award at GDC 2017, etc.).

They’re both kinda assholes and good guys, IMO.

Maybe it was reverse psychology. Epic is trying to destroy the competition by giving them money. Then, paranoid gamers will refuse to use or support Godot, because there’s a connection to Epic.

I’d say of the current players, GOG is among my favorites since they make the launcher component optional.

In general, I’ve just been disappointed that all the launchers have taken off. I get the convenience factor, but consumers also had some rights that were taken away with the move to launchers. Plus the fact that some of the launchers have terrible security practices, as I mentioned, and that makes it so even a game with great security has unnecessarily increased attack surfaces. And launchers also screw over people with limited internet access, which is admittedly fewer people throughout the world every day, but there are still military personnel, etc. that just cannot reasonably be expected to access the internet on the whim of a launcher.

I suspect we’ll see the same thing happen with Epic that happened with Steam, where people end up forgetting all about the early fucked up stuff and, in the end, just rolling with it. Some years down the line, people won’t even remember how much people were pissed off about the early days of Epic. As an example, any time I mention that I’m not a huge fan of Steam, based partly on remembering the forced move of existing / new games in the early days, people just shrug it off and act like it was fine for Valve to do that since, years later, we got the current, well liked iteration of Steam.

And that’s kinda how I feel about Epic. If Steam can ultimately get a pass for completely ruining the experience of a few games by forcing people to use it against their will in the early days, why shouldn’t Epic get a chance at a pass in the end too? Maybe it turns out to be great years down the line? The only reason we have the Steam that’s well liked today is because consumers put up with it in the early days. Would we be better off if Steam failed early on? If consumers had held their ground when they hated it and forced it to close down? I kinda doubt it. I hate launchers, but, if Valve didn’t make the dominant one, someone else would’ve, and I probably wouldn’t be any happier with it.

Maybe in 20 years EGS will be fucking amazing, and when you tell someone you don’t like it because of what they did with Metro, etc., they’ll look at you the way people look at me when I talk about Steam now, lol.

There have been multiple games, mostly in the past now, that announced launching on certain platforms, including Steam, then had to backtrack and reveal that Epic bought their exclusivity and that gamers that were already expecting to get the game from one platform, now wouldn’t be able to.

Valve did a similar thing to this. I don’t know if you remember the original state of Half-Life and Counter Strike, but they originally didn’t require any launcher. Then, one release, Valve announced that the old version was going to be shutdown and they would require Steam for now on. People had already purchased the game and been playing it outside of Steam, so they were pretty pissed that all the sudden they needed this launcher / account to keep playing a game that didn’t require one out of the box. I was especially pissed, because I think I was the only one in my group of friends that realized that they had unilaterally removed the option to resell / give away your game, and that seemed like bullshit to me, because I occasionally gave my old games to my friends when I was tired of them. The boxed copies of Half-Life and CS allowed for resell/transfer of the game, but they forced everyone over to Steam with an update and the Steam terms removed the option to transfer the game to someone else. Plus, Steam was an absolute awful piece of software at the time, and that made everything worse.

I’m guessing this also happened to other games as well. There was a period there where people would pre-order a game assuming it would work as a traditional, standalone boxed game. But then they’d get the game and it would unexpectedly require Steam, and the buyers would be pissed. Nowadays you just assume a launcher will be required, but it came as a shock / infuriated / disappointed people back when it first started being a thing that PC games were tied to launchers / accounts (and people hated Steam / launchers). Lots of people felt duped.

Anyway, I’m of the opinion that it’s bad for software to ever require or be tied to any launcher, even worse if it’s a third party launcher. It makes the future of games access muddy (What if Steam shuts down? What if there’s a court injunction against Steam requiring it to cease operations? What if my country blocks access to Steam?) and also adds extra layers of insecurity (last time I looked, there was at least one security issue in Steam that remained unpatched since around 2012).

So, to me, switching from Steam to EGS just meant consumers were getting punched in the nuts by a different company. I’d be happy if they weren’t getting punched in the nuts at all.

I think Epic definitely fucked some things up, but I really think the takeaway is that, if anyone has any hope for competing, they are absolutely going to need exclusives. This has been studied in the economics literature. In order for a newcomer to compete, you need exclusives. The dominant platform will automatically get the big titles, and players aren’t going to switch platforms to get the same titles they could’ve gotten without switching.

How did Valve get gamers to switch from physical boxed games to Steam? Exclusives. There was actually a digital distribution platform that predated Steam (run by Stardock), and it was more feature complete than Steam when Steam came out. But it didn’t have any exclusives, so it died out in favor of the (at the time) more spartan Steam platform.

Love or hate exclusives, nobody ever gets anywhere in the marketplace without them.

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Is that why he left? In this interview he makes it sound like he just felt like making games. It seems like he wouldn’t have been at MS for 13 years if he hated it that much.

I think that must not be right. In this interview, he says that he went around showing Doom to everyone at MS, and he hints that he didn’t leave Microsoft until about 1996.

Lol. I left Reddit for Lemmy, and I continue to use Lemmy. I am very much the exception and not the norm, though.

I will be very, very surprised if Lemmy ends up growing more popular than Reddit at any time in the near future. As others have pointed out, Lemmy’s popularity has been decreasing and Reddit’s popularity has not substantially decreased. There’s still way more people and content on Reddit than there is on Lemmy, and I don’t think there’s any evidence there was any real mass exodus. Some people left, but it was basically a rounding error in the grand scheme of things. I would expect the same even if Microsoft, Tencent, Activision, or pretty much anyone else were to buy Steam. People may get irritated, and some people may even leave and never come back, but most people generally want to just continue using the services they’re used to.

One person being the majority shareholder doesn’t stop people from worrying, though. Epic is majority owned by its founder like Valve is, but everybody still points to the minority investors and says, “What about their influence?”

In any case, my point is more that just being private isn’t some kinda of magic bullet to forever avoiding outside influence. It’s possible that, eventually, the other 49% not controlled by Gabe have sold out to Tencent and they’re in the same position as a lot of other companies with outside investors holding just under the majority.

I agree. I’m surprised people are convinced that everyone would just leave a service they’ve been using for years once it starts to suck.

First of all, all your purchased games will only work on Steam, so you’re probably not going to just abandon it and give up access to all your previous purchases. And then you’re going to think to yourself, “Well, since I have to keep using Steam anyway, and since all my friends are here, I guess I’ll just keep buying games here anyway.”

Second of all, people, historically, just continue to use large services even when they go to shit / evidence that they’ve gone to shit comes to light. Hell, even when substantially better services show up, people don’t just suddenly switch.

That doesn’t guarantee much of anything, though, and private companies still have investors that can influence the direction of the company. E.g., a lot of people are wary of Tencent’s influence over Epic or Reddit even though both are private.

Is there a reliable way to detect the presence of AI content in games? I’m guessing that if you submitted a game to Steam with some AI generated content mixed in, nobody would ever know, so a rule against it would be effectively pointless anyway.