Sharing their developement roadmap with Trello is a thing Epic game has done since 2015 when Unreal Engine went free. He might alienate the consumers, but as far as creators are concerned Epic Games is one of the most successful and innovating firm in the entertainement industry with Unreal Engine being used everywhere from movie/serie/ArchViz/.. to video games, and it's been going on for a couple years. All those developpers had interesting deals which provided them with stability, let me tell you they're more than happy with it. That's exactly what the Phoenix Point devs are saying. Case study: * Release game on Steam / Gog - Your target audience isn't large, game is decently received but within 2 months you've lost press attention, people forget about it, your incomes are low and you can't work on your game anymore. * Sign a one year deal of stable income guaranteed to work on your game - But you have to be Epic Exclusive for a year. You've already spent a couple years of your life working on this game, i'm not surprised people would go in the way that would help them to get the most out of it.
Yea i loved unreal 3 that looked liked everything was made out of plastic. 4 where stuff looked a bit less like plastic. Or maybe that was 2 to 3. either way. Yea unreal took the xbox generation about every other game was made on it all over the industry. Then they got FU money on fortnight. Despite all that success with unreal. unreal the game was the glorified tech demo that manged to be a decent game, then they really brushed up the engine and once their unreal flag series had taken off they started marketing their game engine, and boy did they market it. IDs engine was not wo issues but it was equally solid that generation. It never got close to the market that unreal managed. cryengine came along looking to ride its "glorified tech demo" to sell its game engine, but never got the success, and they pretty much on their last legs, though looks like cryengine will live on via lumberyard and star citizen. be nice if amazon could make cryengine into a competitor of unreal. but they going to keep throwing money at devs to sign exclusive deals, whos going to stop them? only if consumers refuse to use epic store will they maybe ease up on bs. but will they? that fortnight money will last a while in the meantime not like they spent through it singing a bunch of indy games yet, which is the bulk of their exclusives.
Epic has created a situation that I've never seen before - a crowdfunded studio signing a deal with a minimum sales guarantee so high that they'll be fine even if all pre-orders were refunded and treating the people who believed in them with contempt and calling them "toxic". They're a positive influence only to those who'd like to cash out of the PC market at this point. They're bringing out the worst in indie devs and certain publishers. I've no respect left for anyone involved. At least thanks to the pc sales guarantees they're offering, we needn't worry about any of these studios. If they're in the red, it will be because their game is a dud on console than pc players ignoring them. Screw 'em.
Yea but that say more about the devs than epic . Not a contract lawyer but i would look at the promise to provide steam and gog keys, which i think you could argue that the average consumer expected that that entield getting those keys ate release, and not a year after epic. Hard to see that coming. The game devs should have given the backers a heads up at the bare min before the deal went down. But i dunno you would need to get a lawyer and who is going to pay for that?
I don't have anything left to say about Epic Sweeney, Tencent, and Co. don't care about the final customer and think they can be forced to do business with them and accept an inferior service and fragmentation. I think they're retarded. Even their refund policy is two no questions asked refunds and then you have to go through support lol. I can think of another service where the refund policy is uninstall. This creepy guy wants you to play with him and he'll get you to do it by book or by crook and spy on you in the process Nothing would happen in courts because they're offering refunds. However the method of refunds is crap. People are getting it quicker and at no cost via Fig or their bank. I hope they all exercise that option instead of what that weasel is offering.
It's been a few days since it was posted on reddit, but it clearly shows the disconnect with their backers.
Doesn't matter how long it has been, they've shown their hand. Any window dressing and platitudes afterwards doesn't mean anything.
Ugggh, stop defending them, you're starting to sound like a shill. For the last time, no customers, no money. I'm not sure why you seem to have so much trouble with this concept. I know you are trying to look out for your own best interests but the reality is that you are hurting your own interests by supporting this kind of trash.
Who cares for customers when you've already been paid for the PC version before a single copy has been sold? That's the attitude we're seeing now and why I consider them "cashing out". Spitting on the people who actually pay into the system never works in the studio's favor. It didn't work for a brand name like battlefield, good luck with indie rogue like pixel art #6996 or 2K Xcom clone in this case. They're being paid by Xbox Game Pass and Epic, they really couldn't care less about gamers and shouldn't be trusted at all. At least with Denuvo in its early days, the people who were chiefly affected were pirates. Here it's the people who are actually willing to pay - on PC (and soon Android!). Epic managed to be worse than Denuvo
Yah, the greed is on full display and the customers are not liking it. The likely BL3 exclusive will do nothing to calm things down as people don't like Bobandy Bitchford either, that will draw a significant amount of ire and lost sales It's all very well making games and getting paid to sell them on Epic's store and we already know what kind of scumbag that attracts, people who don't care about their product or if anyone actually sees it or not, they sacrifice everything, even their own integrity, in the name of avarice. Epic may have a lot of Fortnite money but this business model is not sustainable and the hatred for Epic (and Sweeney) grows daily.
Speaking of greed, the fact that you can't buy epic games exclusives outside of the epic store itself is an own goal Want to play Metro the legit way? $60 please. Prior to the bs, you could easily get the game for $35-45. Thanks, competition. Dumbasses
@lucidus It's fairly obvious that this Sweeney guy lives in a bubble where he is incredibly greedy and is surrounded by likeminded muppets who tell him everything he is doing is awesome because they are all making large short term gains out of it. If the object is to destroy your good name and spend large amounts of money on getting developers to sell on your incredibly unpopular platform, I'd say they are on the right track. As that lying scumbag Gollop said, even if they had to refund all the pre-orders (AKA Customers they flat out lied to), they would still be in the black. You can clearly see where this weasel's priorities lie.
Its sounds so much better / thought out in advance to have a roadmap y'know. I'll follow up with one of my made-up dialogues again: Dev: "The client's operative but missing all QoL features. I'll be able to implement them in a few..." Exec: "The client's fine! Release it and we'll announce the missing features as updates later. Gosh, didn't you read your EGS Orientation Manual!?" Dev.: "o.. okay sir! I just thought about customer user exp..." Exec. "F**k the customer!"
They've chosen economic stability to develop their studio and their game with more peace in mind than the traditionnal insanely stressful environnement which is game developement. They knew there would be backlash which means there weren't totally disconnected, they just made a decision and took responsability. I really think you're blowing the reddit/twitter drama out of proportion. If the game is good, people will come, Epic Game store or not. You seem to believe people are disgusted and politically engaged toward this and the Epic Game Store, i think that between people speaking out and actually acting there's a huge margin. It's like people which keep saying "i'm done with EA" while keep bying every Battlefield games or whatever. Moreover, most gamers do not follow gaming news anyway, they have some spare time, see an ads, read a review and consider buying games.
No, I'm concerned that you only seem to care about your bottom line no matter what the cost to everyone else. Being angry that a company is stealing private data from my PC is now considered 'blowing things out of proportion', right I know people are disgusted by this, I don't 'seem to believe' that they are. EA's stupidity with BFV has hurt them, make no mistake, it has not ended them by any stretch of the imagination, but it has hurt them. Again, a terrible comparison in so far as EA actually did make good games at one point, The EGS was never a good store, it started out bad and is steadily getting worse. People won't come 'just because the game is good', that is why Epic are having to pay so much money to get developers to sign these contracts, essentially (and if Gollop is to be believed), EGS is underwriting their entire pre-order take (and beyond) in order to have them sell on the EGS. You think that is competition do you Either they didn't care about the backlash because they were handsomely compensated in spite of it or this deal was signed some time ago and they were trying to ride out the Exodus backlash, either way, it does not speak well of them. Exclusivity is bad for everyone in the long run, there are no two ways about it. Oh yeah, I don't think you of all people speak for 'most gamers', those two YongYea videos alone garnered ~760,000 views in under 24 hours, so I would argue that there are plenty of gamers who are not only well aware of this but equally annoyed about it if the like/dislike ratio is any indication of the general sentiment.
And the stupidity continues, I'm going to be saving ALOT of money this year. And to be fair, Steam needs to reduce it's split, 30% is too much and they are not helping themselves by not reacting to this.
Okay, now they're just rubbing it in... What saddens me the most, is not so much that the games are exclusive to the other mentioned PC platforms, but the fact that they're coming to the same PC platform on Steam, one year later. but as @BangTail said, Valve really ought to lower their 30% platform tax to help indie studios and I'm sure even the most greedy of publishers would come crawling back with their tail between their legs, when they do. However developers and publishers who only have short term monetary gains in mind and breaks our trust, will end up on my "naughty" list of games I will never buy or support.
@RzrTrek This is only going to hurt PC gaming, that's what exclusivity does and I have no doubt Steam will start doing it as well which is good for no one. It is a terrible shame that Epic couldn't have presented with a much more polished, ready for market store that actually made customers want to use it as opposed to the train wreck that they chose to run with (while throwing ridiculous amounts of money at developers and dividing customers instead of using the same money towards enhancing their storefront). As with many things in this world, this kind of divisive crap really turns me off and I will not be forced to use something I don't want to use, ever.
What saddens me is that so many PC gamers are willing to turn to piracy. Every time I post on reddit advocating against piracy I get massively downvoted, with plenty of redditors telling me proudly and openly that they will pirate the game. I thought PC gamers would be better than this, but I guess I thought wrong. At this point, I feel ashamed that I'm associated with such crooks.
Yeah, you just know valve will also start playing this game. It's sad. Instead of having epic be another place to sell games with discounts or bonuses and the schtick of being developer friendly, they force people to buy from them. There will be people who will buy anything and from anywhere, anti consumer practices from the previous decade proved that to me more than anything, at least I know I won't be paying into this system. I'll be saving a lot of money this year and the next if it comes to that. All the money they could've invested into the client, they're blowing it and a lot more on timed exclusives. Another side effect of this could end up sending a message that client quality doesn't matter and that will certainly harm pc gaming in the long run. You should see pirate communities though, they're laughing at the drama and the negativity will just drive up that traffic. I don't blame them, they don't need any of these clients.
