Epic Games Store Is A Great Thing For The Whole Industry, Cities: Skylines Publisher Says

@gargar:

@gargar said:

"@fround: Why lie?"

He's not lying.

Epic has continuously delayed promised features from their Trello roadmap.

Epic originally had cloud saves, a shopping cart, optional forums, optional reviews, and achievements done by April 2019.

Epic Games delayed it once already, and tried to bury that delay announcement in a news story about World War Z:

https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/news/epic-games-store-update

"We also have a delay to announce. A month ago we published the Epic Games store roadmap to share our release plans for new store features. We’ve shifted features targeted for April to May and June as development efforts have focused on supporting online features required for new game launches."

June has come and gone. Yet those features are still nowhere to be seen.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/bvh9x8/epic_games_misses_roadmap_goals_for_the_second/

Why should consumers continue to spend money on a storefront based on promises that weren't fulfilled?

It's like pre-ordering a game based on features that aren't in a game, but are planned to be. And we all know how that turns out.

@gargar: im not.

@Kh1ndjal:

@Kh1ndjal said:

"1. I do understand why people are saying they are boycotting tencent's investments, and they have every right to do that. but it seems they are just saying it and not following through. I will concede that the source of tencent money may be immoral, i just don't see what it has to do with this discussion."

This was because your assumption in your original post was based on people boycotting Tencent merely on the fact that they are a large financial supporter of Epic Games and other gaming corporations.

Here is your post:

"all the people calling the epic games store "Tencent-Epic Marketplace", as if being being owned Tencent is going to destroy everything, need to be reminded about how Riot games has been owned by Tencent since forever, and judging by the success of league of legends (for its devs and its players), i don't think anyone has anything to worry about."

My point was that people have other reasons to be boycotting Tencent outside of the properties they've invested in. My point confers with your original post.

@Kh1ndjal said:

"2. Blizzard is not being punished by its customers. it's being punished for its bad game design and bad business decisions (and frankly, shitty public relations). Yes, blizzard is going down, no it's not because of boycotts. if there had been a boycott it would have happened at the time of merger and not a decade later. bad products will fail and that's self-inflicted, not a punishment from consumers."

I literally linked 2 articles that correlated the drop of Activsion-Blizzard stocks from 2015-2018, and why it fell again by 10% as recently as May 2019, to it's user base.

I also linked 2 articles about creatives in seniors positions leaving their positions at Blizzard due to low morale after the negative user reaction from Diablo Immortal.

Based on your post, customers can't boycott Blizzard based on bad game design, bad business, and bad PR.

"Blizzard is not being punished by its customers. it's being punished for its bad game design and bad business decisions (and frankly, shitty public relations)."

When the vast majority of boycotts in the video game are based on bad game design, bad business, or bad PR.

People are boycotting Diablo Immortal because of its game design. It's a re-skinned free-to-play mobile-only game, that was unveiled during BlizzCon 2018. A convention where you had to pay at least $200 USD to get in, where the audience are mostly gaming enthusiasts who play on PC or consoles.

The Blizzard response was the infamous "Don't you guys have phones?". Here is the incident if you're not familiar with it:

https://kotaku.com/blizzard-says-it-wasnt-expecting-fans-to-be-this-angry-1830204721

A case of bad PR. Which was another reason users boycotted Blizzard.

A large portion of users didn't boycott a merger because no one knew what the outcome of the merger was. Most users won't boycott a merger because it was too early to tell if it would have a negative or positive effect.

It takes time to see the full influence of a merger, especially given Blizzard's development time. That's why we're seeing tangible declines from Blizzard right now.

There are numerous accounts of Blizzard performing less-than-expected due to consumers lowering their investing in Blizzard products and marketing.

Your argument in trying to disassociate consumer disinterest from bad game design, bad business, and bad PR from Blizzard is adopting a strawman tactic that has no merit.

It's consumers that deem whether a game's design is bad or not. And they react with not engaging with that product, or reward it buy purchasing it and praising it.

Blizzard doesn't intentionally set out to make a game with bad game design. Developers don't get the final judgment on whether a game has good or bad game design. Consumers do.

@Kh1ndjal said:

"3. if consumers are treated unfairly, that could be case against epic taken to the courts by gamers or by the FTC (which is a consumer protection agency). If publishers are making more money without harming consumers, then no one really has anything to complain about."

If you think that the FTC can litigate merely on something being unfair, then you don't have a great understand of how the FTC works.

The FTC only enforces laws, they don't enforce fairness.

Now, some legislation was created to try to create and maintain fairness. But the FTC cannot take something to court based solely on the fact that it's unfair. The FTC only brings something to court when it's illegal.

Companies can harm consumers and/or markets are much as they want, as long as their tactics are legal.

For example, take the net neutrality issue that the FCC overturned a few years ago in the United States.

The FCC allows Internet service providers to throttle different kinds of Internet traffic with prejudice, as long as the ISPs make that kind of service known to the consumers.

Are consumers getting a bad deal? Yes.

Did the company let you know about the bad deal beforehand? Yes.

Does that make it illegal? No.

The FCC will only forward cases to the FTC when consumers are being mislead or misadvertised.

The FTC only handles cases of legality, not fairness.

From your original post, Epic Games can be as "evil" or as "ruthless" as they want to be. But what they're doing is completely legal.

Epic Games are wealthy enough to have a dedicated legal department to finely look over every move Epic makes before Epic makes them. Epic has too much net-worth to try to do something blatantly illegal.

But are Epic Games doing something blatantly shady? Of course.

@Kh1ndjal said:

""And why would publishers re-invest?" This is your worst argument. Valve is a private company sitting on billions of dollars whose co-founder is one of the richest men in the world (whose wealth can't be estimated easily because valve is a private company). Valve is the epitome of not re-investing. If this argument can be levied against anyone, it's valve, which reaps billions in profit from their market position (as a storefront with a handful of in-house games) without having to re-invest."

Your argument that Valve being a non-publicly traded company with a CEO with a net-worth in the billions equates to Valve not re-investing in their properties makes no logical sense.

You know what else is a non-publicly traded company with a CEO with a net-worth of billions of dollars? Epic Games.

There are numerous non-publicly traded companies with CEOs in the billions-worth, and those companies re-invest back into their ventures.

Where does it show that if a company is a private company with a wealthy CEO equates to the company not re-investing based on that fact?

Your statement also shows that you're not following Valve closely at all, or that you're selectively ignoring what they do.

Valve still has development teams working on games as far back as Half-Life 1, their first game from 1998. Valve continuously updates HL1 and their other old games:

https://www.techspot.com/news/70088-valve-patching-half-life-nearly-20-years-after.html

Valve also continuously adds free content to Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Dota 2.

Valve has invested millions of dollars into Linux support via Proton. Proton makes Windows-only games without Linux support run natively in Linux.

In fact, Unbuntu (a popular Linux distribution) recently announced that it's dropping support for 32-bit. Yet Valve has pledged that Steam will support 32-bit Linux until at least the year 2025:

https://www.ghacks.net/2019/07/01/steam-and-ubuntu-support-until-2025-and-20-04-lts/

Valve is also investing in providing multiplayer support for Proton. Bringing native multiplayer to Linux for Windows-only game is a massive undertaking:

https://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Proton-4.2-6-Steam-Play

Valve is the biggest corporation that continues to re-invest into Linux, something that Epic Games has abandoned. The Epic Games Launcher/Store app doesn't run on Linux, and Tim Sweeney said they won't support Linux:

https://www.engadget.com/2019/02/19/linux-gaming-steam-valve-epic-games-store/

And none of this work is proprietary or exclusive. Linux is a open-source platform that anybody can freely use without charge.

Valve is also on the forefront of VR development, and continues to re-invest heavily into VR, something they took at risk on at a stage of its infancy with the HTC Vive.

After the HTC Vive, Valve has released another headset with the best price-to-performance ratio:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3405558/valve-index-vr-review.html

Here is an e-mail response from Gabe Newell on what he thinks about exclusives in the VR market:

https://www.altchar.com/games-news/599892/gabe-newell-responds-to-epics-exclusives

Quote from Gabe Newell's e-mail response:

"We don't think exclusives are a good idea for customers or developers.

There's a separate issue which is risk. On any given project, you need to think about how much risk to take on. There are a lot of different forms of risk - financial risk, design risk, schedule risk, organizational risk, IP risk, etc... A lot of the interesting VR work is being done by new developers. That's a triple-risk whammy - a new developer creating new mechanics on a new platform. We're in a much better position to absorb financial risk than a new VR developer, so we are happy to offset that giving developers development funds (essentially pre-paid Steam revenue). However, there are not strings attached to those funds. They can develop for the Rift of PlayStation VR or whatever the developer thinks are the right target VR systems. Our hope is that by providing that funding that developers will be less likely to take on deals that require them to be exclusive.

Make sense?"

Just because you don't pay attention to, or use the things that Valve re-invests in, doesn't mean that Valve isn't re-investing in those things.

@Kh1ndjal said:

"I agree with much of what you're saying; epic has used shady tactics to secure exclusives, and i will reiterate that gamers have every right to not use the epic store. I just don't think that in the long run gamers will be harmed, or that they can walk the walk."

It's too early to tell what the outcome of boycotting the Epic Games Store will look like.

But here is a recent example of gamers following-through with a boycott, and it having far-reaching effects.

When Star Wars: Battlefront 2 came out, and gamers found that they could only unlock their favorite characters through agonizingly long grinds from random loot boxes, there was a major boycott.

The boycott was severe enough that it resulted in Battlefront 2 not meeting sales expectations:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2018/01/30/ea-star-wars-battlefront-2-misses-sales-expectations/

The massive negative reaction from loot boxes in Battlefront 2 caused legislators worldwide to examine the nature of loot boxes.

This resulted in new government laws that regulated loot boxes and their nature:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/8/18536806/game-studios-banned-loot-boxes-minors-bill-hawley-josh-blizzard-ea

Even Epic Games' own Fortnite had to re-evaluate their loot boxes to avoid litigation. Now the odds of their loot boxes must be made known beforehand:

https://kotaku.com/loot-boxes-are-changing-in-fortnite-save-the-world-1832082152

This boycott from gamers is only a little bit over a year old. But it took about a year to actually see its outcome.

So yes, gamers can successfully boycott something with far-reaching results.

It's too early to tell how it will pan out for the Epic Games Store exclusivity boycotts. So it can't be dismissed as a failure or confirmed as a success yet.

@bigbluebustn: Another rare sensible guy on the net. Im liking all ur comments.

@RikiGuitarist: Ok, seems like you have hard time reading. I'll make it simple so even you can understand

Physical: HIGH SPLIT! sometimes even 60 for store and 40 for developer and publisher. fun days.

Digital: (steam) 30 for Valve. 70 for publisher/developer.

Digital: (Epic) 12 for Epic 88 for publisher/developer. Unreal engine free.

Westner states: Steam 30/70 was good compare to physical 60/40

Westener states: Epic 12/88 is good compare to Steam 30/70

Westener states: Steam is now the most expensive way to publish something and Epic is the cheaper. Just like ONCE Steam was cheap and physical was more expensive.

If you don't understand than goodbye.