Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by randylahey | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

randylahey

Can you elaborate?

View on HN

"Microsoft wants to monopolise games development on PC. We must fight it" by Tim Sweeney in 2016

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/04/microsoft...

3 years later ends up buying out indie games and puts them behind exclusivity on the Epic Store

On Linux gaming "The real enemy of Linux are these trolls who try to overrun social media channels to make claims in bad faith and attempt to harass developers into compliance. They’re scaring lots of good game developers away." https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/115052159963387494...

About dev cuts:

In January "This is the only practicable way to operate a 12% fee store in developing countries." https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/109102593910919987...

5 months later: “If Valve commits to a permanent 88% revenue share, we’ll stop making new exclusive deals” https://www.dsogaming.com/news/tim-sweeney-if-valve-commits-...

etc.

Tim Sweeney is an interesting person, like a weathervane

The Epic store thing would be analogous if Epic made Windows, which they don't - there isn't a contradiction in Sweeney's position here whatever one might think of the merits of the Epic store.

This is really disingenuous. You're removing context, cherry picking and inserting your own context to create a false narrative. Why?

It's popular to hate Sweeney and Epic within the gaming community at the moment.

Because they've done a very shitty thing.

Have exclusives on their store, or something else?

Could you elaborate? I've seen a lot of arguments along those lines, but none were willing to actually explain what it is exactly they're doing that is wrong.

For some reason Valve seems to have a lot of very rabid fans on Reddit, from many many years. Valve gets a free pass for showing annoying ads on every Steam update while being a paid service and also for their forced 30% cut and essentially being a monopoly. All the while barely improving the product for years while making billions from the cash cow.

When I saw Epic was jumping into the fray I figured there'd be vicious backlash and handwringing from the community for minor things and wasn't surprised at all.

Valve advertises games on a platform that sells games and only does it when you start Steam. 30% is standard. They're a de-facto monopoly because they basically invented the market and no one has managed to do better, they have not engaged in anti-competitive practices and in fact allow people to sell Steam keys for their game on other storefronts without paying Valve at all.

Valve has gotten lazy and incompetent from their rent seeking on the Steam monopoly. I will try to list some of the reasons.

The service goes down for 15-30 minutes every single Tuesday during peak hours. Can you imagine if your internet, TV, or cellphone did this?

There is also an absurd amount of unplanned downtime as well https://twitter.com/steamstatus there's a major outage every 2 months on average where you cannot even open Steam. The trading system is down A LOT. I don't know of any website like steamstatus that logs it, but it seems like it is down every other week. I also can't seem to trade more than 15 items at a time or the page will just hang, and this system is at least 6 years old already.

Before EA released Origin, there were no refunds on Steam.

I've emailed Valve exploits and they don't respond, not a single reply after years when 10 years ago they would have at least replied maybe 2-3 months later. They took HALF A YEAR to even acknowledge my exploit on hackerone.com and did not even fix it yet.

Their password system is also a huge sign of incompetence. They use RSA encryption on your plaintext password instead of just hashing the password. If someone hacked Valve, they will have your plaintext password. And if you're going to argue that someone can middleman an https server, I'm going to tell you the attacker could just serve up javascript to make the user send the plaintext password.

They also killed 3rd party servers in TF2 by putting them in a button at the bottom of the screen. It is similar to Apple putting all 3rd party apps in a link at the bottom of the app store. They also killed 3rd party servers in CS:GO by banning servers that were giving people default items and then being too lazy to ban servers that gave people items from their online store.

30% is standard? Why is it a standard and why can't it be lowered to 12% if Epic Games can do it? Why does Valve get to use the same standard as brick and mortar retailers when digital stores are way cheaper to maintain and more profitable because of forced online DRM and no reselling?

This is about all I care to ramble off right now, but there's more.

It is time for Valve to get a rude awakening from their comfortable monopoly. The Epic store is a good thing that will result in better service for consumers. And the only price you pay is to install another launcher that costs you nothing.

> And the only price you pay is to install another launcher that costs you nothing

Yeah, no. I'm not going to install another launcher that wastes RAM, bandwidth etc. and begs for my attention. Having games spread across multiple launchers is horrible UX too.

The Steam monopoly is a good thing for customers. What's bad is that it's private property and run for profit rather than to be useful.

It's not as bad as console exclusivity where you have to go out and buy another console for $400.

I'd take the annoyance if I know that the middleman isn't taking 30% of what I am paying the dev and the dev is getting 88%.

> Yeah, no. I'm not going to install another launcher that wastes RAM, bandwidth etc. and begs for my attention. Having games spread across multiple launchers is horrible UX too.

Funny you mention this. Right now on my computer, Steam is using up over 450 mb ram while the Epic game store uses up 10 mb. Both of them being minimized.

https://imgur.com/a/wZBnGZ1

> Having games spread across multiple launchers is horrible UX too. The Steam monopoly is a good thing for customers. What's bad is that it's private property and run for profit rather than to be useful.

Yeah and so is having software being spread across multiple OSes "horrible UX" too, so you are basically suggesting that the Windows monopoly is a good thing for customers in that same vein.

We don't live in lala-land where things like this get made as non-profit. The only solution is competition.

Valve is so lazy and incompetent they invented a service to enable internet multiplay of local coop only games.

Epic is doing what? Handing out sacks of cash to buy a catalog? Which is going to end the first mover advantage and make your game buried at the bottom of a big App Store list.

After making Fortnite, a clone of different game, popular with LOL’s business model?

How inventive.

30% to a company doing things for you? Or Epic who is charging you less but building a catalog of competitors for you as well, and backtracking constantly on promises.

Oh and Epic is partially owned by a Chinese company. Since everyone is suddenly patriotic about that shit.

Valve was not the first to invent "internet multiplay of local coop only games), Gamespy predates it by like 6 years.

Valve was not the first to invent digital distribution either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_distribution_of_video_...

> Epic is doing what?

Reducing the cut from 30% to 12% is huge, offering a world class engine that used to cost millions to license free to anyone to use with 5% royalty is also huge accomplishment.

If Fortnite is a clone of Dayz, then Half-Life is a clone of Quake. Since HL, all the successful games Valve "made" were made by developers they bought out with the exception of Artifact which was a complete flop and Dota Underlords which is also failing.

Are you really going to complain about Fornite's "LOL" business model when Dota 2, CS:GO, and TF2 also uses the "LOL" business model AND has gambling loot boxes on top of that? Yes I would say Fortnite is much more inventive than making clones like Artifact and Underlords that flopped hard.

> 30% to a company doing things for you? Or Epic who is charging you less but building a catalog of competitors for you as well

I am not a publisher, so a bigger catalog will only benefit me.

And if you think Valve doesn't want a large "catalog of competitors" as much as Epic, then I have a bridge to sell you.

China owns less than half of Epic.

> while being a paid service

Steam is not a paid service.

I do think they should lower their 30% cut, though that is the industry standard.

They take a 30% cut of every game and make billions. They are not a free service like, say, Discord is. They should not be showing popup ads.

People are up in arms about Windows 10 showing ads in the Start menu, but somehow Valve showing them in a popup which you have to actually close is okay.

On top of this, as I recall everyone hated steam when it came, that you had to have it running to launch Counter-Strike through steam. I know I found it very annoying. Now Steam is home to most people and they are angry over the next change.

Like the guy in the sibling comment defending 30% cut for a digital service like Steam, it is Stockholm syndrome, or just human nature :)

Indeed, I was one of those who hated the idea of Steam when it came out. However they won me over by just not being anywhere near the evil I predicted they would be. In the process, they basically saved PC gaming from almost certain doom, helped create the indie explosion, and made buying games so easy and cheap that many people have not even played a third or more of their library. Then they went and made Linux a viable gaming platform for free. Then they helped create a VR system and opened it to everyone unlike their competitor.

I like Valve too, its a really smart company in a world of stupid, but the Steam client is a really lazy thing, it has not improved much in many years, it is not worth a 30% cut to me.

The 30% pays for the infrastructure, more than the client. Besides, the client has added controller support (even for games that don't support controllers), big picture mode, family sharing, streaming, and just recently online emulation of local co-op.

To put that in perspective: Epic still does not have a shopping cart.

It was and still is very poorly optimized with terrible UI.

You can disable the ads in the steam client by going into Setting > Interface > Uncheck "Notify me about additions or changes to my games, new releases, and upcoming releases."

https://i.imgur.com/Gh9V45t.png

Valve needs serious competition. But I hate epic for trying to buy its way into competition by taking exclusives which were sold on steam initially. Instead of trying to actually be better than valve.

Unfortunately there's no competing against monopolies because of the network effect and the chicken and egg problem. A better product won't solve much, exclusives are almost the only option.

Why exclusives are bad?

There's no way they could have gotten any traction simply by competing on quality of features. Not only does Steam has a decade-long headstart, but people aren't going to willingly split their library over multiple clients unless forced.

Epic couldn't have realistically broken in without forcing people to use their client.

Well I dislike them for entering into exclusivity agreements in the first place - something Valve doesn't do.

Even more I dislike them for entering into exclusivity agreements involving kickstarted projects that promised delivery on other platforms. Sure the developers are worse than Epic in this case, because they are the ones breaking the promises but still. It is kind of like sleeping with a married person - sure the person cheating is doing something worse than you, but you are still knowingly enabling it and contributing to something hurtful.

I don't like Valve having a de facto monopoly and buy on GoG where possible or the Humble store, but I prefer a de facto monopoly on selling a product than a de jure one.

The short version is pretty simple. Epic has been paying developers a whole shit-ton of money for an exclusive release on their storefront and launcher, and a lot of PC gamers do not like exclusive releases or having additional launchers.

That's not such a big deal though, the real problem is that they did this with games that were in development for years with Kickstarter-style backing that had up until that point explicitly targeted other storefronts. To many this seems like a betrayal by the developer and Epic's behavior is making the market worse.

It's a bit more nuanced than that. It seems to me that most PC gamers have no problems with exclusive PC releases as long as they are exclusive to Steam. It's when they are exclusive to other DRM-ed platforms that they start to make a fuss, a self-centered hypocritical view.

Now as a pure GOG game buyer, used to having to wait decades to get games that were released on Steam on release day, I can't say I'm not finding some satisfaction out of all the Epic exclusivity outrage but, feelings aside, I'd prefer that there was no exclusivity whatsoever.

I personally couldn't give two shits about which installer I'd have to use in order to play the game I supported on kickstarter and I don't get why other people care.

If the developer gets more money from Epic, that means that they now have more resources to make a decent game, which actually benefits me as a consumer.

Also, if the game is good, I'd prefer more money to make its way to the developer rather than storefront and Epic has a better deal.

From all above it seems to me that Epic Store is overall doing a good thing and I'd prefer it to Steam if I had a choice.

> I don't get why other people care

Because other people are not you and have different things they want. I know that must be difficult to accept, but it is true.

Nah, it's 99% handwaving and bandwagoning, like you're doing.

You could say that he's a troll, attempting to overrun social media channels while making claims in bad faith.

Those last two quotes sound consistent to me. If Valve could operate on a 12% cut without exclusives, that would prove him was wrong that it's impossible, thus he would change his position if they did so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com