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Penny Arcade - Comic - Here Comes A New Challenger
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Here Comes A New Challenger
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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I don't get it.
...I'm not reading all half a mile of that, and I'd rather not know what the hell a "fuckepic" is, either.
Edit: Haha! I read it as "fuke pic," not "fuck epic."
*Mentions anti-consumer like 3 paragraphs later.*
TL;DR version. Epic Game Store has thrown a lot of money at devs and publishers to go exclusive to the Epic Game Store. Many of these games had previously been available for pre-order on Steam and were pulled from Steam weeks before launch. Some were even crowdfunded games that had specifically promised steam keys upon completion.
Many PC gamers are unhappy as the EGS has significantly fewer features and functionality than Steam. But, Epic is throwing the money around and is considered the more dev friendly environment right now. And it doesn't help that provocateurs like Jason Schreier are throwing fuel on the fire with his comments to escalate the consumer vs dev argument.
So, gamers want the choice to buy the game on the platform of their preference, EGS wants to build an exclusive library to compete with Steam, and Devs and Publishers want the money that Epic is throwing around right now. Honestly, there should be a more civil resolution to the impasse, but this is 2019.
Right, I've heard that. And thank you.
My question is -- how does a store devoted to selling video games somehow prevent the sale of video games, as the comic asserts? I mean, if I know game X is on Epic, can't I just wander over to Epic and buy it?
In other words, is there an actual reason to read this as something other than knee-jerk junior high Console Warz bullshit?
Because a lot of people refuse to buy games on the Epic store. Some of it is for legitimate reasons, as outlined elsewhere. Some of it is just...
That too.
I'm assuming its a reference to the customers that a dev or publisher alienates when they go Epic exclusive. I'm only speaking for myself here, but I have no plans on purchasing any of the Epic exclusive games from the EGS. I'm not going to throw a public rant about it or demand that anyone else follow suit. I will just quietly make my purchased decisions based on my own preferences. When some of these games eventually come to the Steam store, I may check some of them out.
Likely.
I haven't tried to buy anything myself on Epic's store yet, but reports from those that have tried seemed to indicate it lacked basic functionality, such as a shopping cart for pending purchases, and that the entire experience was pretty godawful.
Which you'd think that someone trying to compete with Steam would at least make their system as functional as Steam as a baseline, but they seemed to be banking on just being different and securing as many exclusives as possible.
Edit: Oh, and their launcher includes spyware, which I believe they've admitted to, and refuse to remove.
3DS: 0963-0539-4405
I personally do not care. I own other games on the Epic Games Store, and I'm very happy that they gave me Subnautica for free, because I was long on the fence about that game on Steam, and getting it for free ensured that I played an extremely excellent video game. So for me personally, I've got nothing against the EGS. But I guess other members of my friend group do, and so as to not split the party, the decision was made to wait for the Steam release. Even though I don't personally care.
Never split the party. If I learned one thing from Stranger Things, that's what I learned.
Most of those kickstarters promoting Steam keys were launched before EGS was even around. Steam was the only place for them by default.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/08/why-one-pc-developer-turned-down-the-security-of-epics-exclusivity-offer/
One thing was the developer claimed that Epic said they'd only put the game up on their store if it was exclusive, i.e. he couldn't have it on both Epic and Steam.
It's mostly hyperbole for the sake of the comic, but it is worth noting that customers in some regions can't buy stuff on Epic, so an exclusivity agreement is basically "you are not allowed to buy this game" to them.
Mainly I think it's just a joke that Steam has a far, far, astronomically far larger customer base than Epic, so signing an exclusivity agreement is basically saying "we're willing to trade sales/don't think our game will sell well, give us the cash up front instead."
They have several times now taken games that were going to release on Steam, paid the devs off enough so they would become Epic Exclusives (thus making them unavailable on Steam), and in a lot of those cases the backers who supported those games are now getting a copy of the game on Epic instead of Steam. Steam as a platform is much better than Epic right now and Epic has made no effort to implement even some of the basic functionality of Steam. So they're actively taking games away from Steam to be on their lesser quality platform by just throwing money at the devs rather than making their storefront actually nice to use. Most of the Epic Store exclusives are only 1 year deals so after that those games will be on Steam. But of course the hype on those games dies off shortly after launch so the damage is already done to their sales. Begging the question, was that payoff from Epic worth receiving less sales than if they just went with Steam.
Not really surprising to see why there's hate for Epic. There is no reason for this "exclusivity" and there's only cons with no pros for buying a game on the Epic Store instead of Steam. Some developers who took Epic's offer up have also fanned the fires by angrily firing tweets and other social responses back about gamers being "entitled" because the devs want more money and think they're going to get it from going with a worse platform because Epic paid them a wad of cash to do so, totally missing the point why people don't like Epic and blaming the consumers rather than Epic or themselves for their decisions. Gamers can act entitled no doubt, but this is not one of those times. Some devs even threw around not making PC versions of the upcoming sequels or whatever IIRC since gamers were boycotting the game, even further fanning the fires (Metro Exodus, but they may have changed their stance).
That sale fiasco shows that they aren't dev friendly, either. Early on the had an unannounced sale that devs didn't get a chance to opt in or out of, they just discounted everything. They paid devs the same cut they'd get if the game was full price but...
Marketing is a fuzzy thing, but the theory that a lot of game sales run on is that if you discount a new product too soon (before launch sales start to dry up), that is perceived as the correct price - you don't get hold outs in that sale, you mostly get people who were likely to pay full price. You anger those who did pay full, but more importantly holdouts are likely to wait for a deeper discount than they would have.
Marketing is a weird thing and a lot of it's theories don't have any data or testing behind them, but companies still believe in their ideas. Messing with prices without notice shit all over their plans, and companies believed that the have lost long term sales as a result.
I'm currently not making purchases on the Epic game store, but it's not because I hate Epic or want to stick it to them. It's because their platform isn't mature enough for me to have confidence in. I was pretty much the same way with Steam until they eventually got their shit together.
I figure that I'm going to wait until Epic have at least their first huge data breach, which feels inevitable at this point. Security is always the lowest priority for a storefront, until it's the highest.
Suddenly Awesome Groceries decides to open a store. It's owned by an eccentric billionaire who has tons of cash to throw around, so he starts by buying all the apples and bananas in the county and selling them in his store. The store is run down and doesn't have any carts, but it's the only place to buy apples or bananas.
This is not healthy competition for meatS. This is the opposite of competition. Stepping out of this really dumb analogy....Epic doesn't seem interested in competing, i e putting out a superior product to drive both Steam and Epic into a bidding war of features and deals as they both get better to try and compete. They are spending all their Fortnite money (probably taking a loss for now) to try to *kill* steam so they are all that's left and they can sit on their laurels like Steam does.
Someone get some burn heal for Epic Store.
Then I have good news!
As far as I know Epic has not released hard sales numbers on the vast majority of their "exclusives", so we only have their word that they sold well, which I'm inclined to disbelieve considering how disingenuous Sweeney and his goons have been in the past.
Y'know, plus Tencent owns 48.3% of their balls. That's what amounts to the worst parts of EA and Activision with Chinese Business Ethics (or lack thereof I should say) thrown in the mix, having a 48.3% say in how Epic runs things. And considering where Tencent leadership falls on the dividing line of "Supports the human rights abusing regime" and "operates under proper ethical guidlines", I wouldn't trust Tencent or anything it caresses with it's corrupting touch any more than I'd trust a half starved saltwater crocodile to safely ferry me across a river.
There are many areas where Steam is deficient (almost always due to trying to automate or crowdsource a problem away) which Epic could have hit Valve hard on.. but they didn't. Epic released a storefront that was missing features that have basically become standard in the space. They haven't offered solutions over Steam's bad customer support, provided better moderated forums (or any forums), or even come up with a viable alternative to Steam's terrible curation (EGS has the old Steam problem of being impossible to get onto the service; with Valve you had to know people in the industry, with Epic you have to be willing to play ball with their exclusives; no "simshipping".) These seem like easy avenues of attack, but weren't even touched by Epic.
What Epic has done is throw money at things like crazy. Sometimes these are good; the free EGS games are great (dev gets paid, their games reach a wider audience and consumers get free games), giving devs a bigger split is good (Though for games with publishers I doubt much of that extra money is making it to the devs), and funding projects that would have had difficulties or otherwise wouldn't have been released on PC (Walking Dead, Journey) are good uses of that money I support. I have doubts on how long that all will last; eventually Epic plans on making money with the EGS, so they can't keep that all up forever. But for the time being, that all gets a thumbs up from me.
Now, on the other hand, snagging titles off Steam days before they're set to come out, or the myriad of timed exclusives? In addition to reducing customer choice, it's not something Valve can really compete with unless people want them to start dumping money to make games Steam exclusive. (But even then, games are often already Steam exclusive just out of convenience, with no deal being struck with Valve, so they aren't even incentivized to do that.).
Nothing Epic is doing is really pushing Valve; there's no essential feature that makes someone want to go with the EGS over Steam; just exclusives. And like I said, you can only really compete with exclusives with exclusives of your own. Right now Valve doesn't even have to pay for its exclusives.
Really? That's weird... I read more than that over my morning toast. Suck at math, though.
The Epic store sounds like it just sucks between shitty interface, bad security, and the business deals.
As for this comic, here's a less racy link: https://medium.com/@info_68117/why-i-turned-down-exclusivity-deal-from-the-epic-store-developer-of-darq-7ee834ed0ac7
While I think that might be true (at least in a short time frame - long term you could probably take market share from Steam simply by having a better store), what I dislike is that they just accepted they couldn't win with a better store and didn't even try, relying entirely on exclusives to force customers to switch to a much worse experience. If Epic was at least trying to be comparable to Steam I think there'd be a lot less hate over exclusives.
How to have all your games in one place:
1. Get superior operating system
2. Get Lutris
"Fuck X" groups are universally wrong and worth mocking.
Except they also have 15 years of knowing how those feature work, exactly, down to the individual characters in the code to make them work.
All they have to do is copycat the competition. A shopping cart doesn't take over a YEAR to program. That is just stupid levels of cheapskate. Actually, literally retarded levels of being cheap.
Saying "Epic just CAN'T compete on features with Steam" is like complaining that Toyota made a car without A/C, seatbelts, power steering, a radio or blinkers not being able to compete with a Ford that DOES have all those features because "Ford's been making cars longer."
Instead of achieving market dominance through innovation and pushing the medium forward, Epic would rather just enforce stagnation and beat Steam over the head with a big dumb club until they take it's throne.
Also, I can totally see how a shopping cart would take forever when it's based out of a launcher that was never designed to be a true storefront. Programming is always harder and stupider than people think. It certainly doesn't justify dropping slurs over the lack of the feature.
The right sort of competing is the sort that gets people on your platform. Which is exclusives, especially when trying to compete with an entrenched monopoly people have already poured money into.
Like you're all having a laugh if you genuinely believe all a company needs to do to unseat Steam is provide some magical launcher with so many fancy features that it over-rides Steam and it's store/app launch ads being the splash screen for where you launch most your games from.
Epic isn't just a new kid on the block with a fancy 1 year old toy that they've been steadily showing off and putting money hats on. They got lucky with Fortnite, and are happy to invest that money in other things to make themselves more prominent, but ignoring the past year or two, they have an exhaustive laundry list of things they've done that have never sat well with the gaming community, and some of us remember that sort of thing more than the last flash-in-the-pan scandal that was blasted on Twitter for a week before disappearing into the ether.
That's why Epic still gets the flak it deserves and the cautionary tale. All of those old gaffs add up, and it leaves me and a number of others with zero faith in what they're doing now.
Steam: TheArcadeBear
Steam is not a monopoly because you can choose to buy its products other places. Epic is a monopoly because you can't. Exclusives are the opposite of breaking monopolies.
Monopolies are defined by market share, not by individual products.
By this absolutely asinine description an independent film studio is a monopoly in the film industry.
I don't really know the official legal definition of a monopoly, but I very strongly suspect that neither Steam nor Epic count as monopolies in any way. I used the term because you used it, and a lot of people are using it to defend Epic as if Epic is somehow breaking up a monopoly.
But in common parlance, the way most people define a monopoly is, "do I have a choice of where to buy a product?" Healthy competition is when you can look at two competing distributors of a product and pick the one you like best. Steam, despite its dominance in the gaming world, allows you that choice. You can buy on GoG. You can often buy from the developer. You can buy for a console, though that's a hairy issue. The point is, Steam doesn't force you to buy from them. Steam is just way bigger than every other distributor, so people act like it's the only one that exists.
But if you want to buy an Epic exclusive, which Epic has made clear is the *only* way they want most games, you don't have a choice. You can't pick from the retailer you think offers the best value. You can only buy from Epic. So I have no idea how people are saying Epic is offering a choice over Steam when they are literally taking away choice. Individual products do matter because that's what people want to buy. Market share would only be the most important if someone went game shopping just looking for "a video game". Video games aren't like brands of peanut butter: "oh, I don't want to buy Jif but I can buy a different brand". Being told you can ONLY buy a certain game from Epic, but hey, at least there's other games you can buy, is like being told one company owns ALL the peanut butter, but hey, you can still buy hazelnut butter from another company!
Epic is allowed to do what they can do because anti monopoly laws are very specific and toothless, and would not define Epic or Steam as monopolies. And really, Epic isn't a monopoly. But it's a whole lot more like one than Steam is like one.
EDIT: I really don't know where you're going with the independent film studio thing. Epic doesn't make the games in question. They sell them.