Community MetaSteam | January 2019 - Steaming along through Epic storms
- Thread starter lashman
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OP
I don't understand this:a few choice quotes from the podcast Sergey was on (via daxy who doesn't like us anymore because he never visits)
by the way - if someone wants to turn thatinto a separate thread, go right ahead
Granted, the EGS doesn't have as much stuff to sort through as the App Store does right now. But in general, the App Store is a gigantic mess, easily as bad, if not worse than Steam.
The Discovery features on Steam (imo) leave a lot to be desired and get easily messed up by simply playing one or two games from a particular genre (e.g., play one F2P game and suddenly that's what you get bombarded with).
But the front-page curation that Apple provides does basically nothing in terms of helping me sort through the bajillion games on the storefront, and does little (I would assume) to actually help most struggling, unknown developers. I'm sure it's nice to be featured on the front page, but what happens when you aren't? If there's no algorithms or machine learning being tested to help those lesser profile devs, what's the difference to any other storefront?
The only major difference seems to be A) the ability to give the customer the middle finger in terms of reviews and B) the storefront isn't crowded (yet) so you by default have more eyes on you.
OP
- Thread Starter
- #954
yes, that's pretty much it
but reading this bit it's basically: either you get to be "the chosen one" (as in: promoted on the front page) or no one will see your game ANYWHERE (unless they scroll down through all the other games, i guess ... or unless you do the marketing yourself)
OP
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- #957
yes ... yes, it will
and that 88% cut won't be 88% anyway ... since they'll have to lower that for ALL the outside stores .... and the "influencer" incentives (glorified affiliate links) count towards that as well ... epic will only be subsidizing that 5% for 2 years ... after that - they'll have to lower their own cut to pay for that .... so it'll be more like 80% really
"I can seeeeeee youuuuuu"
Go away, dammit!
Wow, today was some crazy progress. Lots more story stuff, areas and creatures encountered and even found the entrance to the depths below 900m (where my little Seamoth doesn't cut it anymore). The atmosphere continues to be denser than a protagonist in a romance anime and everything is just so fascinating.
Playing the game for real now so that I can retroactively justify its position on my GOTY list is working out nicely. I've even been thinking about switching it with Yakuza 0 for #1 spot, but it's really hard to compare those 2 games, becaue they have nothing in common at all, lol.
Go away, dammit!
Wow, today was some crazy progress. Lots more story stuff, areas and creatures encountered and even found the entrance to the depths below 900m (where my little Seamoth doesn't cut it anymore). The atmosphere continues to be denser than a protagonist in a romance anime and everything is just so fascinating.
Playing the game for real now so that I can retroactively justify its position on my GOTY list is working out nicely. I've even been thinking about switching it with Yakuza 0 for #1 spot, but it's really hard to compare those 2 games, becaue they have nothing in common at all, lol.
Tbh the game sounds way more scary than it looks. The sound design is bonkers.
Subnautica is very much a horror game. Shit's scary as fuck. I'm only now starting to get used to things after 15-20 hours.
I already thought the EGS was stupid because of the exclusivity and barebones launcher, but that podcast summary makes it somehow sound dumber. So overall their unique approach to a storefront is:
The only major thing that Epic is doing here, which is actually pretty interesting, is trying to reach an untapped PC audience (Fortnite players) that otherwise don't necessarily use Steam. And that's a pretty interesting idea, similar to the rise of GoG and Steam I guess. There are probably a lot of (mostly young) users that stick to PC gaming within their given favorite game's launchers (e.g. LoL, Fortnite, Blizzard, Minecraft etc). I remember I flamed a guy really hard in a LoL game last year, felt bad, and bought him some Humble Bundle and he had no idea what Steam was or how to redeem it. I thought he was pulling my leg, but I actually had to walk him through it. Reaching that kind of player within their own Fortnite ecosystem is probably a reasonable, useful goal.
But if that's all there is to their plan, then this is not the savior of indies like some (dummies) have been proclaiming.
- Courting paid Twitch/YouTube streamers to shill your game in return for a cut of the game.
- A review system that doesn't let anyone review at all times.
- No planned discovery features besides front-page curation.
- Better split for devs.
The only major thing that Epic is doing here, which is actually pretty interesting, is trying to reach an untapped PC audience (Fortnite players) that otherwise don't necessarily use Steam. And that's a pretty interesting idea, similar to the rise of GoG and Steam I guess. There are probably a lot of (mostly young) users that stick to PC gaming within their given favorite game's launchers (e.g. LoL, Fortnite, Blizzard, Minecraft etc). I remember I flamed a guy really hard in a LoL game last year, felt bad, and bought him some Humble Bundle and he had no idea what Steam was or how to redeem it. I thought he was pulling my leg, but I actually had to walk him through it. Reaching that kind of player within their own Fortnite ecosystem is probably a reasonable, useful goal.
But if that's all there is to their plan, then this is not the savior of indies like some (dummies) have been proclaiming.
OP
- Thread Starter
- #963
it's not
well they were both (Tim and Sergey) working really hard for the past 2 years to undermine steam among devs (complete with Sergey giving lots of dev talks everywhere) ... now we know why ... and they're doing it purely to have games on their store, any games (beyond their moneyhats) ... doesn't matter what games ... and the devs of those games don't matter either - from that transcript it sure seems like even when they finally open EGS to "self-publishing" (which makes it sound awfully close to steam direct) the vast majority of those games won't ever see the light of the front page anyway
To be fair, as far as I understood: this podcast was 1) from early December and 2) this particular point not what they'll actually implement but only one idea of many. They might end up with this system (and it's dumb), but it's not a fixed thing yet.
Kurt Russell happy birthday!
Ughh, I'm weak for chess games. This looks pretty neat, even if I've never played DotA (I do have a passing knowledge of the characters through Artifact tho).
It's actually a pretty cool game, although its story? is kinda nonsensical. Is there another Anodyne coming out? I must've missed that
I feel like Artifact is such a slowburn game, on so many levels. It's going to take a while for it to get the ball rolling again, but if anyone can turn it around, it's Valve.The store page of Artifact now shows the recent review score. It is 48% for recent reviews, vs. 53% for all reviews.
Isn't that already more or less the case? I can think of a few French YouTube casters who received a lot of gifts, including travels abroad and an helicopter trip, for the release of Spider-Man.
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Tell me about it! The first time I encountered a Reaper Leviathan while being young and naive and swimming around merrily, I literally screamed out loud and hurried the fuck away as fast as I could. It took me over 10 hours of playtime until I managed to collect enough scraps of courage to get close to that area again.
The game really is quite awesome.
Oh yeah, it's already bad. Even mainstream gaming press reviewers get free "swag" and trips from time to time. But getting free "stuff" and free game codes is at least theoretically different than getting a cut of the game.
E.g., the devs of Atlas sent out tons of promo stuff to streamers, and they were ravaging the game on stream. Rare sent out a ton of Sea of Thieves stuff, but streamers fairly quickly dropped it.
Will streamers be less willing to ravage games on stream when they could be getting cuts of sales? Will they be encouraged to stick with bad games longer as well?
I dunno, but it seems like it's at least going to make the already murky waters of streaming impressions murkier.
OP
- Thread Starter
- #970
absolutely .... you can already see how bad stuff is with affiliate links ... and this will be EXACTLY that - affiliate links, but for games
so it's in their (influencers') best interest to present the game in the best light possible (to get their audience to buy it) ... and, preferably, for the longest time possible as well ...
Every once in a while my PC/TV randomly throws up a black screen for about a second or two. The GPU isn't the issue, nor the PSU, CPU, or motherboard. I've looked and looked and tested and tested. With some googling I've narrowed it down to two things.
1: Electro-static discharge. Which in the dry winter air is totally plausible. Last winter I fried an HDMI cable just by touching it. (And getting shocked, cuz the air was dry and I have a carpeted room.) Rip. The thing is I don't touch my PC or the TV. So the ESD would have to be happening in inside the case, and with the airflow or something... Very weird. But plausible.
2: HDMI cable is wearing out. Also very possible. This one is kinda oldish, worked pretty hard for my PS4 Pro before I switched it to my PC and it'll be coming up on two years of service at 4K/60FPS. Plus it has been effected by ESD as well a few times, so there was bound to be micro-level damage that made wear and tear speed up.
So I've ordered like $70 in HDMI cables, from 3 different sources including a German company, a startup, and a certified HDMI Manufacturer. Let's hope one of these fixes my issue and delivers 4K/60FPS without problems.
1: Electro-static discharge. Which in the dry winter air is totally plausible. Last winter I fried an HDMI cable just by touching it. (And getting shocked, cuz the air was dry and I have a carpeted room.) Rip. The thing is I don't touch my PC or the TV. So the ESD would have to be happening in inside the case, and with the airflow or something... Very weird. But plausible.
2: HDMI cable is wearing out. Also very possible. This one is kinda oldish, worked pretty hard for my PS4 Pro before I switched it to my PC and it'll be coming up on two years of service at 4K/60FPS. Plus it has been effected by ESD as well a few times, so there was bound to be micro-level damage that made wear and tear speed up.
So I've ordered like $70 in HDMI cables, from 3 different sources including a German company, a startup, and a certified HDMI Manufacturer. Let's hope one of these fixes my issue and delivers 4K/60FPS without problems.
It's always annoying to me whenever people mention the steam forums being unmoderated shit.
All of the game specific forums have to have mod assigned to them by the owner of the forum so whoever is the admin of the entire thing (I.E, the actual game dev) has to stop being lazy for 10 minutes and either assign someone they think won't ruin the entire place (Like they do with their discords, facebook pages, twitter accounts, whatever else that doesn't magically fucking run its self) and wow amazing it will start to have a semblance of order.
All of the game specific forums have to have mod assigned to them by the owner of the forum so whoever is the admin of the entire thing (I.E, the actual game dev) has to stop being lazy for 10 minutes and either assign someone they think won't ruin the entire place (Like they do with their discords, facebook pages, twitter accounts, whatever else that doesn't magically fucking run its self) and wow amazing it will start to have a semblance of order.
OP
- Thread Starter
- #975
good luck with that!
yeah, exactly ... each individual dev can designate mods for their steam community forums ... there's nothing stopping them from doing so
but i suppose they want volvo to provide at least one moderator for that as well for their 30% ... or something
and on that note:
so yeah ... good luck with that
I'm hoping! Only reason I ordered so many cables and from different brands is cuz those Amazon reviews man... So many horror stories of cables not performing to their stated rates, not working period, not lasting, not playing right with HDCP, etc... The problems go on and on. I just wanna make sure I get a good one. (And hopefully keep some on hand for future devices or whatever.)good luck with that!
The life of a PC Gamer on TV as opposed to a monitor.
That bit in the Epic store interview (or whatever it is) about Steam not being as integrated into PC gamers (or rather, people that play games on PC lets say) as people might think (especially here) doesnt surprise me. Anecdotally, most people I play the types of games people around here usually DON'T (your mobas, your mmos, what have you), either dont even have steam or dont particularly care if something is on Steam or not.
MY WoW posse for example, now that we've stopped, most of them migrated to Battlefield 5. They dont give 2 fucks about Origin or Steam, they just wanted to play BF5, its that simple. Same for the people (different people) I played Heroes of the Storm with, like only one of them is "like me" and plays a huge variety of games, but most play like 1 or 2 games outside the moba, if that. And again, they dont care where they play.
In fact, I probably interact with more people that don't care where a game is from than that do (outside the forum that is), because there's also the console contigency.
MY WoW posse for example, now that we've stopped, most of them migrated to Battlefield 5. They dont give 2 fucks about Origin or Steam, they just wanted to play BF5, its that simple. Same for the people (different people) I played Heroes of the Storm with, like only one of them is "like me" and plays a huge variety of games, but most play like 1 or 2 games outside the moba, if that. And again, they dont care where they play.
In fact, I probably interact with more people that don't care where a game is from than that do (outside the forum that is), because there's also the console contigency.
OP
- Thread Starter
- #979
pretty sure it's not much better with consoles .... 50 different versions of the HDMI standard (sic!) and each piece of hardware uses a different one (not necessarily the latest one either)I'm hoping! Only reason I ordered so many cables and from different brands is cuz those Amazon reviews man... So many horror stories of cables not performing to their stated rates, not working period, not lasting, not playing right with HDCP, etc... The problems go on and on. I just wanna make sure I get a good one. (And hopefully keep some on hand for future devices or whatever.)
The life of a PC Gamer on TV as opposed to a monitor.
yeah i can see that, specially since many of the big pc games like league/minecraft/fortnite/blizzard's games/world of tanks/mmos are on their own platforms first
but i kind of would argue a lot of those players aren't probably potential customers cos if steam hasn't attracted them yet with its ubiquitousness and its crazy then what would it take?
maybe free games and that's why the epic store is doing that, but most league players won't buy league skins let alone other games so it's hard to say, tho if they're being advertised games when they launch the game like epic plans to do with fortnite, who knows
I'm not sure if it's already the 14th on his timezone, but it's the 14th on mine Happy birthday pahamrick !
Happy birthday pahamrick !
This is another stupid thing said to excuse their lack of features. Book stores and theaters could not be more different in how customers utilize them. Hell, theaters are more like concert halls - you basically never just go to a theater and decide what to see there, especially since timing is a huge component. And even then, you do get bombarded by posters, giant oversized cardboard displays, ads, and trailers for other things.a few choice quotes from the podcast Sergey was on (via daxy who doesn't like us anymore because he never visits
Discovery will mainly take place outside of the store. Galyonkin draws parallels to a book store or theater, where you usually know what you're going to buy/attend before going there rather than look through what's available. Primarily new/featured releases are shown on the storefront.
Book stores heavily rely on featured items, genre organization, knowing about similar authors, etc. within the store itself. I worked in a book store for 8 years, if you were working with a customer but weren't familiar with their favorite author or genre you went and asked an employee that was so you could give them actual suggestions. Just walk into any book store today and you'll see new releases by type, staff suggestions, best seller face outs, genre recommendations, and even shelves dedicated to "if you like X, try these!". Discovery and recommendations, even passive ones, are huge for stores like that.
Epic is saying they don't want to even bother creating a bare-bones digital system that's still critical enough to be utilized manually by brick-and-mortar stores using up valuable shelf space, they would rather just not do anything and count on "outside sources" to market their store for them. The app store is one of the things that people say is worse than Steam at discovery and curation, and it sounds like they don't even want to implement that level of effort.
The more this guy says the more I hate that company. They are faking so much of their "good intentions". Not only is discovery helpful for customers, it is crucial for developers. It's literally the thing developers complain the most about on Steam.
So if they implement everything that was talked about in that interview, like 1-2 years from now, we'll be left with an Epic Store that:
- Has games exclusively on the store because Epic paid for them (anti-competitive monopolization)
- Has much fewer consumer features
- Has much less fair consumer features
- Has worse discovery than Steam for developers
- Has more expensive games in regional markets
- Has worse support options than Steam
- Has more conflict of interest points than any other PC gaming store currently (more anti-competitive monopolization)
And that's if they implement everything they talked about for the next 12+ months. So fucking competitive, right everyone?
Edit: I will say, many people did come into a book store knowing exactly the item they wanted. That was maybe, maybe 30-40% of our customers. And of that amount, at least half of them lingered to browse and "discover" more items, either by asking for suggestions or seeing our displays or just skimming through the actually organized shelves.
Thank you!I'm not sure if it's already the 14th on his timezone, but it's the 14th on mine
I KNOW I AM DAMMIT. You don't need to remind me!not for another 90 minutes
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regardless: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BITCH!!!
have an adequate one, pahamrick
P.S. you're fucking oooooooold
Thanks bby <3
get off my lawn you damn kidsSo excited to get the chance to play this series now
Happy birthday to all the birthdayers
Tbh I don't really think of Subnautica as a Survival game. I'm actually playing without Hunger and Thirst (it quickly became annoying and limiting in my first save, so I restarted).
I like to think of it as a story-driven open-world adventure game with a big focus on exploration, atmosphere and terrifying-ness, and some crafting. It's not complete sandbox open-world either, since you're gated by depth and it guides you towards new things via story stuff. (The world is not random either).
Hah, thanks for the repost. That was a pain to translate accurately. There are some more choice excerpts in the thread I posted. The whole idea that influencers will be handling most discovery for games on there is a little baffling, but who knows. It's been a weird last couple of years. Anything is on the table I guess.a few choice quotes from the podcast Sergey was on (via @daxy who doesn't like us anymore because he never visits
And yeah, I've been skimping on MC time
It runs a bit slow on my phone for some reason so I can't sneak a peek as often as I'd like to.On a different subject: D: OS2 didn't quite grab me the the way I hoped to, which was disappointing. Reinstalled DQ XI and will finish that up over the coming weeks most likely. Had to take a break from it because sweet baby cheeses is that a long game.
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Happy birthday pahamrick !!!
Fantastic! I just started it again yesterday, so this is perfect. That DLC sounds impossible though, I have enough trouble already with the B-sides, of which I could only beat the second one.
Finished Minit (so it will be on second place in my GOTY 2018, after La-Mulana 2 )
)
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OP
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- #1,000
i'm sure some of that will change now that people are complaining ... but ultimately - i think it'll just end up being EXTREMELY similar to steam .... because, let's face it, that's EXACTLY what people want
maybe you can do the separate thread in here as well?
maybe because of all the images and embeds?And yeah, I've been skimping on MC time
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