Quoting: scaineI thought this left EA last year! When are they actually going to finalise its content??

In the next months in their plans. So, realistically, I'd say Q4 this year. :) Regardless, this should be the last experimental major. It will be updated until it basically becomes 1.0.

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The generalist video effort had a meaning in the context of a SteamOs based living room ecosystem. But as living room remained solid domain of console lords, it makes sense to scrap it entirely.

Not to mention that according to analysts the competition in the video streaming market is going to be super ugly later this year, with no restraint of anti consumer practices. Unless you are already a big player there its better to opt out entirely since it's pretty obvious that in the end it will be the pirate bay to emerge victorious there (which actually sucks since Netflix has been so convenient until now).

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Quoting: MohandevirUnfortunately, on PC, game boycotts will only damage the industry. Just look at Deep Silver's answer. Instead of understanding that exclusives are a bad concept, they throw back the pressure on the customer's shoulders.

That's a common misconception. As long as a market is profitable someone will invest in it because there will be return of investment. PC gaming is in no way in peril (not until Gabe goes mad and follows Sweeney on the exclusive deals route at least)

Metro is in no way a small IP or an unknown one. If it had released on Steam it would have generated tons of revenues. These are not words from a revenue desperate indie that is starving and risking default. Deep Silver simply choose to be greedy and put Epic money above their customers. What the hell they expected out of from this? That they could shit on people heads and people would applaud them?

These outings "if you don't buy then we don't come on PC" are just vents coming out of bad managers. Which mentally sane person in this industry thinks that your can raise sales by blackmailing your potential customer? Those are the words of frustrated management that knows it took a healthy IP and ruined it for short term greed but doesn't want to admit its errors so it blames others (the consumers). It's nothing new, that's a common trait among powerful people (and I'm not playing anti elite populist here, it just happens that I have a passion for history from middle age to modern era in general, it's how human societies go... these are the kind of people that usually get in power :) )

So really. They don't want to sell nest Metro on PC because the shit they made? Who fucking cares. These are the golden ages of PC gaming. If they don't sell on PC then it's them deliberately choosing to lose money. And if THQ shareholders don't push to fire the guy who wrote that bullshit and start to mend the relationship with their customers but instead choose to go full kamikatze... bye bye! We won't miss them. Some another publisher will make sure that any gap they leave will be filled with new awesome IPs.

In all this story really we consumers are the strong side. We may lose a game or two true, but we simply cannot lose the war, unless as I said before Gabe goes nuts and Valve and Epic agree to make a monopoly cartel. Who I'm really sorry for are the devs that genuinely worked with passion on Metro games and now see their legacy ruined by people who has 0 interest in gaming but only think on make quick money. These are the sole helpless victims in all this affair. More so since it looks like Deep Silver decide to play dirty by using them as meat shields in their total war vs the whole PC gaming world. :(

Edit:
Ok looking at the last minute link of Nevertheless it seems that Deep Silver did not in fact played this dirty and is not using 4A games devs as meat shields. Nice to see that. Now I don't think they can just trash their exclusivity contract with Epic without paying a gazillion penalty so they won't just U-turn on this one. Let's hope they learnt something from this and don't further damage their own business. If publishers stop signing exclusive deals with Epic out of consumer rage backlash fear, Epic will be forced to abandon its monopolistic aims and switch to a healthy competitive strategy. To the satisfaction of everyone (except Epic itself I guess).

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Quoting: crt0megaAh, yes. The guy who complained that installing Linux would be like moving to Canada has opened his own Canada :D.

It's more like a North Corea.

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Quoting: stretch611I think I read somewhere that the Epic Store has no forums... If this is true, where do you think users are going to turn to for help? Most likely, steam forums. And they will go there because most gamers already have an account there. (One of the better aspects of steam is that with your steam id you do not need to create a login on every developer's individual site.)

You mention one aspect of a wider strategy employed by Sweeney. Ofc we here focus on PC only, but we better not forget that Epic is moving is similar fashion on Android where they circumvent Google store (but really, any other store out there) and instead distribute their own apk for fortnite (maybe he plans to turn that in a store too).

That is called leeching. Sweeney is filling his mouth with words like open platforms and freedom of choice but that that isn't really what free mean. Free platforms come to be when companies that make billions reinvest that money in features that improve the ecosystem for everybody not just people that pass through their store. Whilst for freedom of choice one should not even explain why it is the antithesis of exclusives. If he was serious about freedom he would run a store with he same philosophy as Steam and instead challenge Valve (or google if he dares) to open even more their ecosystems.

He knows all to well that users will go on Steam forums to get help as he know that they will go to Google for any issue they have with their apk (be them original or cracked). In fact he counts on that. His philosophy is to exploit open platforms to take everything and give nothing in return. But when it comes to walled gardens like Apple and iStore he's diligently paying his 30% fee without complaining or lamenting exploitation. Had he been even a little consistent with what he says, he would not had landed on that platform at all.

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Honestly, from Valve, why even bother? They won't change business model just because of Epic. They know that it doesn't work in the long run. Gabe might just sit quietly and wait The Pirate Bay to do its job.

Which is a shame because a healthy competitor that forces Valve to raise the quality of its ecosystem is very much needed.

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Quoting: Whitewolfe80would you have as many concerns about what epic was doing if Epics store was on linux as a native app and Metro had been confirmed as coming to linux

Exclusives are always bad. And if you don't pay the price right on the spot, you certainly will down the line.

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Competition is good... for the side that has the power of choice. This is a 3 way relationship. There are markets, there are devs and there are consumers. Steam took competition the consumer friendly way: by investing their share of the cake in better features for the ecosystem and luring customers with these perks. Epic took the opposite way and decided to take away power from consumers and give it to developers instead so these can reap the benefits in term of lower fees. In their fantasies we get the short end of the stick and stay quiet: we pay the same price as before but we say goodbye to chat, forums, workshop, reviews, cloud and so on. But these is what their plans really are: fantasies. When Steam was born the competition was already skewed on consumer choice and there was already a single monopolist player in the on line game market: piracy. Back then devs were very stubborn in ruining their games with awful and broken DRMs with the only practical result that the few people still willing to buy games were actually convinced to play the cracked versions instead because these had less hassles and were more reliable (no always on line or shit like that). So all that Steam had to do to convince people that a game purchased from them was better value for the money than a pirated one was to actually make the purchased game better than the pirated one. And this is how Steam client and its features came to be and and how the golden ages of piracy came to an end. With really nobody complaining. Now Epic thinks it can change the rules of the game and take away the choice from the consumers. If history can still teach us anything, Epic will soon discover the hard way that at the end of the road they have taken waiting for them there is not Valve nor Steam: there is a black galleon flying a Jolly Roger.

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This reminds me of when my employer decided to save a few bucks and ditched Google services for Microsoft ones and spam started to clog my mail box. The cosmic balance had to be preserved somehow. So Outlook filter wisely decided to move some client emails into the spam folder. :D

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Quoting: orochi_kyoThere are more than 3k games with gold status on Protondb, 3000 games you cannot play before without tweaking Wine, others were always unplayable, and you all are whining because a sh!tty Battle Royale game doesnt work, anymore? LOL, cant care less if KIDS are wasting their time playing this cancer called Fortnite, Single player games still have a niche and as I can play those games story or single player modes Im ok with it.
Single players games are strong yet, because since everyone else in playing Fortnite/PUBG some devs doesnt even try to make multiplayer games anymore, they go single player.
Too much whining, that is why some devs prefer to make WIndows games only, yeah Windows gamers are a bunch of whiners too but at least they are a much bigger market than us.

Putting aside the fact that (in the free world at least) every game genre has the same dignity, the take away from this post is that any platinum game (including single player games) can become borked overnight if the developer decides to adopt a library that is not wine compatible. And such libraries do not include just the vast majority of anti cheat stuff but also DRM stuff. And if it happens that you bought such former platinum game on the basis that it used to be proton compatible you have no entitlement to get obtain a refund from Valve. It will be interesting to see if Valve will agree to a refund if this ever happens with supported games though.

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