…for fucks sakes. It was a manually typed quote, I didn’t use the quote feature. I made a fucking typo, that isn’t fucking weird.
…its as on-topic as this rant:
Or any of this:
If you didn’t want to address what I said you could have chosen to ignore it. You chose to respond, and I chose to respond to your response.
No, it’s really weird. If you’re choosing to attack a person’s quote, quote them accurately. It literally looks like you’re mocking a typo that way.
So, sure it was an accident (if it wasn’t I’d be reporting you for forum violations) but it’s still weird. Weird in the sense that it’s an extremely ironic time to make a typo.
As for the rest of it, I’m with LHoD. Exclusivity deals are about making money, it’s a business decision. Ranting about worker rights is completely irrelevant.
…it was a fucking typo. The only person I’m mocking is myself. I wasn’t “attacking that persons quote”, I was posting in disagreement. That’s what we do here. I intended to spell the word correctly but I didn’t. I had a lot of fucking words to type. Give me a break.
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. What would you be reporting me for? Making a spelling mistake? The typo was not in the quote box, it was outside the quote box. What was in the quote box was exactly what Left Hand of Dorkness typed. What was ironic about me adding an extra o? Is that misspelling somehow offensive in North America?
…okay. I’ve read enough to figure out how seriously to take your arguments. We’re good.
I actually have to explain? In North America those words mean different things. I assumed they did in NZ also, maybe I was mistaken.
When you are trying to attack someone’s choice words as you did, and misquote what you’re attacking, it’s like going into court holding up a crime scene photo to show how depraved the defendant is. But you accidentally show the jury a photo of a kitten playing with yarn. Your mistake undercuts everything you’re doing. Especially if you are basing your attack on the exact words being used. It’s an extremely ironic time for a typo, because you’re not even quoting the correct words.
…yes you have to explain. I’ve just looked up on dictionary.com and even the urban dictionary: are you assuming I was using definition number 3? Because I’ve never heard of that before and in no way fits the context of what I wrote. It was a typo. What was it you think I was trying to say? Be specific.
I didn’t “attack someones choice of words.” I expressed disagreement.
For fucks sakes. I didn’t “misquote.” It wasn’t intended as a direct quote. I did directly quote Left Hand of Dorkness and I did so in the quote box, as per the rules.
This right here? This analogy about a crime scene photo and a jury and a photo of a kitten? This right here is fucking weird. I made a typo, thats all.
Just a reminder: this is the post we are talking about.
I used quote marks quite liberally throughout the post. Its just what I do, sometimes I’m quoting someone, sometimes it for emphasis. Maybe its not “technically correct.” (See? I’ve done it again.) But I’m not writing a scholarly article here.
Apparently the hour it took me to research this, to track down an obscure twitter thread, to find quotes from CEO’s from 2017, typed on a laptop that doesn’t have a mouse plugged into it in between trying to finish an assignment and get invoices sent out to my clients, all to make a point about how shitty the games industry is was, is undercut because I accidentally typed an extra “o.”
Suuure. That makes sense. Thanks for the positive contribution to the discourse I guess.
Crowd funded game Outer Wilds sells out to epic. This happened before with a game called Phoenix Point.
These games were funded by the public under promises of having access to the games on steam or other stores, then Epic comes in at the last minute and bribes them to be an exclusive.
That’s even shittier than the normal tactic of just negotiating with publisher-funded studios. The crowdfunded devs are the biggest shits for taking the deal, but Epic are shits too for offering it.
“These partnerships have enabled us to make the game more accessible for everyone.”
I like how they can’t even come up with a plausible sounding reason why this is a good thing. Just “yes, taking it off the biggest gaming platform in the world, and a dozen other stores, and putting it on one and only one new startup storefront is making the game more accessible for everyone”
Disgusting.
The update says, does it not, that they will still make it available on the ‘platform of your choice’?
So Epic gave them a heap of dough for the rights to release it first. I’m sure the devs are going to be very happy with the extra financial security.
I still don’t get the outrage, even a little. It’s like being pissed off that you can’t walk in to a Ford dealership and buy a Tesla.
So as long as they make it available on the platform of your choice one day - even if that’s 10 years in the future - no big deal?
The short update is full of doublespeak. “Rest assured that we read all of your comments and our goal is to bring the game to your preferred platform as quickly as possible.” - So you guaranteed that your game would only show up on one platform for most likely a year, to guarantee that it would get to the platform of my choice as fast as possible? “Each of these partnerships has enabled us to make the game better and more accessible for everyone who will play it.” - removing 90% of the places on the internet that you could buy the game is in the name of improving accessibility?
Your analogy doesn’t work. Epic is not selling their own games. This is already done in the industry, and while people don’t like it, they generally accept that, for example, Battlefield and Apex are only available on Origin. But at least EA makes these games and can decide to put them on their own service. Bribing the creators of other games, that have nothing to do with EA, to only sell on their service is nothing like only being able to buy Fords at a Ford dealership.
Additionally, buying a digital copy of a game (really, an indefinitely digital license to a game) is not the same as buying a product. It’s not a one time transaction. It affects how you go about playing it too. Games can take advantage of features on steams that allows them to have achievements, integrate your friends list into the invite/party system, provide voice chat, matchmaking, server browsing, anti-cheat, cloud storage for saves and configuration, workshop mod support, and other features.
And games that choose not to take advantage of those still get the benefit of things like having your friends able to see what game you’re in so they can join you, discussion forums for each game, community reviews, managing screenshots and videos of games, and tying them to your profile, streaming the game to your friends, etc. Steam has a wide variety of features that Epic Game Store doesn’t have.
Also, steam is not mostly owned by a shady chinese company with suspicious business practices.
Additionally, since you’re buying an indefinitely digital license, you want to have confidence that your game will be accessible indefinitely and without arbitrary restrictions. Steam has a 15 year history of being reliable, user friendly, and generally serving the consumer’s interest. Epic games and Tencent have no such demonstration, and in general since their business policies are being a consumer-unfriendly pile of dicks, I would expect them not to be reliable. Valve has promised to make steam and games operable in the event that they ever shut down, EGS/tencent has not. Valve gives a shit about their customers and will probably be around in 10 years. EGS? Who knows? This bribing thing may not work out and they may shut the whole thing down.
Also, this isn’t epic vs steam. It’s epic vs every other games store. When a game only appears on epic, there’s no competition. Even if you’re just talking about steam, Valve allows you to buy steam keys in dozens of different places. Competing storefronts compete to sell steam keys at various discounts. Or even taking steam out of the picture, there are other storefronts like origin, uplay, gog, etc. Epic is not just excluding steam, but all of those too. Epic will be the the only place to get their games, and so they have no pressure to keep the price low, no competition.
So, if you’re a person that says “okay, I really believe in your idea. I’m going to crowdfund your game. Here, take my $40. Thank you for guaranteeing me a copy of a steam key when your game eventually is launched. Good luck” - and then the developer says “lol fuck you, I know you gave us the money we needed to make this game, but epic just gave us a shitload of money, so you’ll get your steam key a year late, or you can suck tencent’s dick and play it on the epic game store.” - you don’t get even a little bit of outrage?
A better analogy would be if your favorite band said they were getting back together and wanted to release a new album but didn’t want to deal with a record label. They want to go independent because F the man!
So you say, yeah, down with corporate greed, and back them. You give them a big chunk of cash and eagerly await the album release.
They do so, and publish themselves. So how do you get it? It’s only available on the iTunes Store. You get a coupon that lets you apply it to an iTunes account.
You hate Apple because they hosed you a few years back when you had some billing disputes with them, plus you don’t own an Apple computer or smart phone. I think you might feel some resentment there.
That is a much better analogy, especially if you couldn’t just keep the MP3 where you wanted, and had to always use iTunes to listen to the song - pretty much dead on.
There’s an amusing PCGamer article up where Ubi credits their (semi)exclusivity agreement with Epic for… driving customers to their own Uplay store.
So Epic paid them a multi-million dollar exclusivity agreement and then Uplay gets most of the orders anyway since people didn’t want to deal with Epic, thus giving Ubi 100% of the take on most copies sold. Way to play the system there, Ubisoft 
That’s kind of awesome. I hate the Ubi store based on the few times I’ve been there, but whatever. Folks choosing to punish Epic financially for their penny-ante bullshit system gaming is just how I’d like to see it go down.
Well for phoenix point it was a year of exclusivity. The outrage is that this was a product already paid for and financed on promises that they are no longer keeping.
For the people who are still annoyed that it’s going to be exclusive on Epic after the launch, you can currently pre-order Borderlands 3 on the Borderlands site.
but what does that mean DRM wise? If we still have to get an account on Epic to play, it’s no better.
I pre-ordered Borderlands 3 for my Xbox One on the Xbox store…
I just checked my receipt, and it does look like it’s going to be a download from the Epic Store. So, maybe still exclusive to Epic. At least this gets around my problem, which is that Epic stopped taking my card a couple months ago for some reason. Still works fine with 2k and Blizzard, though. Go figure.