Quoting: johndoe

Quoting: Purple Library GuyYou are telling everyone how to act--in a nutshell, that none of us should criticize public figures in general or Tim Sweeney in particular. And in a rather pushy way, tending to approach the hot-under-the-collar, although you're not getting personal. This seems preachy. I don't know about anyone else here, but personally, it gets my back up some.

Maybe this is because I'm older than the most people here and think differently.
I for my part want EGS for Linux - you not?

Heh... the small scope yes/no question trap. To make people lose sight of the big picture.

What I (and most of us here I think) want in general as users/consumers is not being manipulated or straight out coerced. We are especially in love with freedom.

In that regard yes: having EGS on linux is part of what I want. It gives me more choice.

Though I hope I don't have to explain with another textwall how the additional choice power derived from having EGS on linux would be overwhelmingly overshadowed by the despicable anti consumer practices Epic is actuating with it. In the big picture it would still result in a net loss of freedom.

So in the unlikely event that this happens, I'll definitely boycott it.

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Quoting: johndoeAgain some people here are bashing against someone they DON'T KNOW.
Is Tim Sweeney someones uncle etc. here??? I don't think so.

Even his tweets might not be from himself.

People always tend (ME included) to interpret things into something that wasn't said.
I mean... when someone says his favourite color is PINK, it does not immediately mean he/she is gay.
It "might" be so, but you "really" don't know.

Yes, Tim Sweeney made "exclusive" deals with developers/publishers and what now? Did he force them to do it? NO. So, is he evil? No.

Saying bullshit about someone you don't know because it does't make you comfortable is a waste of time and leads only to another game client which will never be released for Linux - thank you.

Instead we should at least try to convince people to support us and not whinge around.

Man... he's a public person releasing public statements and running a company making very public disruptive actions that have very real impact on our hobby. Ofc we interpret and give a judgement on what he's saying. Especially against what he's actually doing.

He can complain as much as he wants about the suspicious, inquisitive, sometimes paranoid nature of the average linux user out there (it's part of that serie of tweets, but Liam left it out to not prompt an obvious flamefest I guess). We have a brain and we use it. Being part of a community that looks beyond press statements and vague tweet promises is a strength. Being resistant to manipulation and PR brainwashing is not a weakness.

Facts are that today he's making PC gaming worse. Now. It's visible and we feel it. He claims that it's a worth sacrifice for a better future. Fine. Which better future? For who? When? How? Apart from the jingle that "competition is always good" and "steam makes often more money than devs" (both very true statements yet small and incomplete fragments of today's gaming big picture) he has never provided a real, practical, concrete or even credible scenario of how this will benefit users. And actual developers. Some guarantees? Some facts? Today we only see how his cartel is benefiting big publishers and occasionally some known indie with a successful kickstarter campaign at their back (congrats to them, I understand. Good luck with the next kickstarter campaign though). The vast majority of unknown indie devs are barred out EGS "selected catalog" eden. While devs already with a publisher contract have already negotiated their compensation and have 0 power on those additional revenues EGS offers. And remember that big publishers have never been so profitable as they are today for their shareholders. Yet games are designed over micro transactions, gambling and it looks that in near future even non skip-able commercials rather than user experience. While actual devs are always expected to crunch. And sometimes get paid for it, sometimes not and sometimes they become redundant after release. It doesn't exactly make me positive that more moeny to publishers translates to happier devs and better games and better gaming services. So can he explain exactly how in practice his actions will compensate in the future all the damage they are doing now? Nobody see the future I know. But he as a CEO has a vision. He should be able to transmit it to us. I mean the non obvious part. The obvious one (more revenues for big pubs shareholders) it's pretty darn obvious.

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Quoting: GuestHe usually talks a sensible talk, but rarely walks a sensible walk.

Nah he just builds his lies by adding some dust of truth into the poisonous concoction. It's the basics of lying really. Yet it requires some innate talent to do it effectively.

In reality you do whatever it takes to reach your goal without caring about anything but your interests. Then however you can always tell a story where you do what you do for the greater good. The 2 thumb rules are ignoring certain hard to defend arguments (like exclusives not allowing actual competition, or publishers already doing record margins by extreme monetization practices at the expense of gamers and developers, or the real service quality of his launcher) and instead focusing on others that you can retell to support a story that makes you the hero (like the revenue split thing for indie developers, or the Steam supposedly being a monopoly, or competition is always good). By ignoring the arguments that are indefensible you don't legitimize them and you also reduce their visibility. Instead by focusing on the arguments that you can use in a positive narration you help those emerge as they are retweeted and cited in the press articles. As long as you drive the narration and don't allow indefensible facts to be part of it you can drive it wherever you want.

In real live interviews breaking this frame and forcing the real facts back into a story not build for them is what ballsy journalists do. And typically the interviewed either continues to ignore the facts, miserably fails to make them part of his story in a convincingly way or leaves with some excuse which is probably the smartest thing to do. But in the age of Twitter is all to easy to cultivate your story. Sweeney will never reply to tweets that he can't retell in a positive way. And by concentrating only on those we slowly lose sight of truth.

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Quoting: fagnerlnI like the idea of Tim talking about Linux, maybe we will receive a native port of Fortnite sometime

? Read his lines again. What he means is that if the Wine guys figure out how to run Fortnite on wine, he has no issues starting to sell it on linux too (with wine)

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QuoteDoes this mean ever game developer has an obligation to release their game on every store? No, it’s their creative work, and they have a right to choose how to distribute it. That includes the right to negotiate store terms and reject stores that don’t pay them adequately.

I certainly agree on this principle. But I still oppose with all my strength in my body and soul to exclusive deals. They do not bring good period. Had those publishers decided not to go on any store that offers them at least X for every copy sold I would accept with any reserve their choice. That's competition and it works.

When instead an external force takes money from other markets to bribe sellers into joining their cartel it's not competition, it brings nothing good to the market and the consumers. If I were the one running Steam I would never reduce my fees even if I could afford it simply because with epic exclusives nothing will change on my side. I could even give devs 100% of the sales, still exclusive deals would keep away publishers from my platform. And this doesn't even account all the damages to customers. If we were talking about financial products instead of videogames, having all bigger dealers joining together in a cartel would be forbidden by the law.

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https://store.steampowered.com/app/1118310/RetroArch/

Coincidence? ?

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Nope. It doesn't make sense to charge customers the charge backs because they don't have the ability to implement anti theft measures. The payment circuit does so it should absorb those.

I say that the buyer should be charged just and all the regular commissions because the buyer is the only one that is in a position to decide which payment service is better quality vs cost wise. In this case for instance, if service implements an authentication feature that is to clunky a buyer could decide to go with a more expensive payment circuit anyway, one that has for instance less secure payments but offsets the fraud costs with an insurance or something that leads to higher prices.

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Quoting: cprnClearly, you can. Showing ID in a physical world is nothing more but using a 2nd trusted factor. In cards world it's called a 3DSecure gateway - using 3rd party API (in this case the bank or card issuer's API) to 2nd factor the authentication between two endpoints (i.e. buyer's browser and seller's website). But banks dictate the cost of each 3DS request and it's not cheap so small publishers skim on it (as well as other risk management services). This is the reality of what's going on and the true cause of the issue. Cards are flawed. Extra security to mitigate responsibility for those flaws costs money. Publishers don't like to spend money so they don't buy it. They get burned with chargebacks.

I know that ad hoc solutions exists. But they are expensive to implement and not very practical too. My argument is that in the grand scheme of things, the system doesn't work simply because transaction costs are hidden to the card holder and passed to the seller instead. Now ofc nobody like to see the commission charged on them (I don't like them at least). Yet in this situation the card holder is the one with the power to chose one circuit over another, while the seller is the one that is only being damaged by restricting itself to accept only certain circuits or making the payment process more clunky than necessary. So for the natural mechanics of market competition to occur, you need rules that create the conditions for a mindful choice by the actor with the actual decision power: the buyer. But this today doesn't happen, and often the most convenient payment circuits from customer perspective are the less efficient. Which creates a situation where the worse actually thrives over the better.

That's why I say that removing fees from sellers and charging them to buyers is part of the solution to create the conditions for the market quickly fixing the issue. First payment circuits being responsible of absorbing the costs of fraud use would force them to find the best tech solution to limit that or get an insurance to edge the risks. All while keeping the service convenient and the costs as lowest as possible in order to remain competitive with other circuits, given that those costs are charged to the one that can actually chose between one or another, the customer.

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Quoting: cprnIt's so unfixable card associations invented insurance in form of chargebacks. It's as simple as that.

Chargebacks just charge sellers with the responsibility of identifying the buyer. Which makes also sense in the real world. You can ask for an ID card or something to identify the card holder. It's easy, fast, cheap.

But the evil is when lawmakers use real world common sense to regulate the digital one. Clearly you can't ask sellers to do something even large multi nationals have issues to do. Common sense is that the payment circuit identifies who is taking advantage of its credit service.

That and eliminating seller commissions would create the conditions to solve the issue in few years.

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Quoting: NanobangIf I understand how this all works (and that's a mighty big "IF") it seems to me that the core of the problem lies in the keys themselves.

It would seem that the fix for Dev/Pubs would be to either stop issuing keys or expect that they'll need to spend X dollars/euros/etc each year in determining whether a key is fraudulent or not and then rolling that into the asking price of the game.

If the devs want to sell games through their own site to individuals then they could sell actual digital downloads only---wouldn't that remove them from the key market entirely?

The first thing to note is that all this has a cost. With Steam keys Valve absorbs all of it. You go on your own and it's your costs.

The second thing to note is that... it won't solve the issue! It will just force you to handle it directly! Say you run your own site to sell your copies. How do you identify your copies? With a string? Then G2A will sell your key instead of a steam key. You link the copy to username and password. Then Username and password are sold. you link it to an email? Then a bot will create an email address and that will be sold (yeah, you can ban addresses that don't come from trusted providers, but then it's again it's more work for you and you risk to keep out buyers). Facebook accounts? These can be faked too.

The thing is that as long as payment circuits work as they do now, digital goods will always be exploitable for money laundry. So either you sell your copies only on stores that absorbs the costs and hassles of this issue by themselves (and ofc you give them the cut they want) or you save the cut but you have to dedicate resources to handle this. Avoiding humble bundles is for sure a first reasonable step to mitigate the issue (unfortunately for us).


The issue with G2A though is not its business. It's true that if they don't somebody else will. It's hypocritical to say the opposite. The issue is they don't contribute to fight it. The example in the tweet with that user selling like 200 keys in a day you don't need a multi million dollar AI algorithm to catch that. If you don't fight even these obvious abuses, you are partner in crime. You're not contributing to fight the issue, you're making it worse with the intent of profit from it.

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