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Epic Games has acquired Rocket League developer Psyonix [Up: No Announced Plans to Stop Selling Rocket League on Steam] [Read Staff Post & Threadmark]
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And what does that mean, in your opinion?
Can you explain why you think it's anti-consumer?
That's because anything that isn't a Valve game is free to publish anywhere they want. Nobody is forcing them in the store. They can use the money they earn while being in the store to develop their own APIs, tools and ingame store if they don't already have them (or integrate other store apis, etc) and publish them in every store or even their own launcher, just like Warframe did (available through their own website, Steam, Discord Store, Microsoft...).
More or less. Why would it stay on there? So far every game that's contracted to get on the EGS HAS been taken off Steam. Rocket League will not be an exception. It'll get off the store. Hope Epic implements their own version of the Steam workshop soon cause that's one helluva loss.
I wonder when console gamers will understand the difference between an exclusive and a game that's only available on one platform
this was already in the works since a year (cross platform inventories)
To be fair to him/her:
Market Cap of Disney fluctuated a lot and increased in the last months as its purchase of Fox was approved.
Dont get me wrong, I believe Netflix share value (which is linked to its market cap) is inflated and that Disney is a healthier company (much more diversified with dominance in several industries with great synergies between them).
That's true. It's been a wild year and a half with this stuff. The broader point that Netflix is not currently an underdog is still correct too I suppose, since despite having lower mcap than Disney at the moment, they're still colossal, even if I agree with your point about diversification weakness.To be fair to him/her:
Market Cap of Disney fluctuated a lot and increased in the last months as its purchase of Fox was approved.
Dont get me wrong, I believe Netflix share value (which is linked to its market cap) is inflated and that Disney is a healthier company (much more diversified with dominance in several industries with great synergies between them).
Man I wish Era talked about the market/M&A more :/
The upside is Epic already has a really good service in place for this. Seamless across all platforms. Voice, text, universal account is in Fortnite and being brought to Dauntless. Would be terrible to leave out the best possible feature. Also really hope this mean the game will move onto using whatever Epic uses for dedicated servers as this is something that has always been problematic.
Jesus-Christ, not again that condescending PC gamer vs Console gamer talk ! This has to stop.
Please explain to us - stupid console gamers - why we don't get what the term "exclusive" means please ? I guess we haven't witnessed any exclusivity wars on consoles for over 3 decades... But we're talking about PC so parallels cannot be made, right ?
You are very intelligent for pointing that out. How much did Valve pay to keep them off other platforms?
I can't believe there really IS something that would have me swear off of Civilization and XCOM.
Imagine XCOM 3 on PC, except without the bountiful and easy to install mods that have come to define the PC version of XCOM 2, because Epic doesn't compete that way.
Imagine Civilization 7 on PC, except without the scads of crazy good deals that enable players to bring their friends in for easy multiplayer sessions, because Epic doesn't compete that way.
Fuck that noise.
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Who needs those features anyways? Like no one uses them! This is the MVP my dudes!
I don't approve of the tone that poster took to you, but to answer directly, the "Exclusive steam games" mentioned are simply games that the developers didn't port to other stores because they didn't think it was worth their time. This is analogous to when Japanese developers sometimes bring out games on PS4 or PS4+PC, but don't port it to Xbox, because they don't think the market is large enough for their product to warrant the effort. Or perhaps when a game might be Windows-only because they don't think it's worth the effort to port to Linux/Mac OSX. There's no deals associated with that, just the decisions made by developers based on economic forces or whether they have the capacity to do the port. The two most popular stores are Steam and GoG for third party developers who don't own their own storefronts, but there's a lot of games where they're only on Steam becuase it's the biggest game in town and if you're a tiny indie studio that makes the most sense to focus your efforts on it.
The exclusivity deals secured by Epic in recent history remove them from stores that developers otherwise would have brought them to for fixed periods (usually 12 months, or 6 months for Borderlands). This is more similar in console terms to when Microsoft purchased exclusivity on Rise of the Tomb Raider.
This thread is on the specific topic of Epic purchasing a developer outright, which is not the same as either of the two things I mentioned above, but I felt it worthwhile to give broader context since this is really just part 50 of an ongoing discussion running across many threads over the last six months.
I once had someone actually suggest Nexus Mods as the reason why Steam Workshop is ultimately irrelevant and unnecessary
Safe to say that if that person even games on PC, they've never touched a mod that wasn't for a BGS game or The Witcher 3
We're lucky to even have the privilege to add to Epic's coffers and I congratulate them for extending such an offer. After all, uh, erm... competition
That twitter statement seems to deliberately leave them open to removing the game from the Steam store in the future.
I just wished they could be a bit more open about it.
I just wished they could be a bit more open about it.
I have encountered this argument a couple times as well. I cant really fathom how the thought process goes. Workshop is so much more easier and relatively hassle free compared to downloading files from Nexus (or using the NMM.)
Yeah, it sure was something.
Like, nevermind how the mere presence of a mod workshop built into the client itself has historically enabled massive mod communities for games of all shapes and sizes where no significant modding community would have otherwise materialized at all...
...but like, I play Tabletop Simulator. A game that is completely reliant on mods for much of its gameplay. So I knew right away just how full of it that that line of thought really was.
Nexus hosts around 250 mods for Tabletop Simulator, and you have to install them manually, since Nexus Mod Manager only supports 24 games, and Tabletop Simulator is not one of those.
Steam Workshop hosts, well, let's just say they host a few more mods for Tabletop Simulator than that. And you can install them in one click. Uninstall them in one click. Install entire collections of mods curated by other people in one click. etc. etc.
oh and by a few more mods, I didn't mean a couple hundred more. Or even a couple thousand more. I didn't mean five times more mods, or twenty-five times more mods, either. Steam Workshop hosts 25,000 mods for Tabletop Simulator. That's literally one hundred times as many mods as what Nexus has to offer. Or in other words, to lose Steam Workshop support for that game would be to lose access to, quite literally, 99% of the mods available for that game, not to mention a dead-simple platform for managing said mods and for distributing your own.
Steam Workshop is generally far better and far more complete than the Nexus page for a given game. The only games that don't apply are games that do have Nexus pages and don't have Workshop support.
Another example: XCOM 2 has a great and well-trafficked Nexus page with over 600 mods.
Steam Workshop? Over 5,000. Enough said, amirite?
(I don't mean to shit on Nexus, they're an invaluable resource. It's just that Nexus isn't close to a replacement or stand-in for Steam Workshop.)
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they(Psyonix) had blog posts hinting at this way back and in Jan they officially posted their roadmap for RocketID
I've been playing Fire Pro Wrestling World lately, and there is a game that needs Steam Workshop
Most of these games can be bought outside of steam, for competing prices.
None of these games were paid by Valve to be removed from other storefronts.
What's difficult to comprehend here ?
Did Steam pay to actively keep those games away from other stores, or was it a publisher's decision to only offer their game on Steam?
Pretty huge difference you seem to be forgetting.
Thats not Valve's fault though. They aren't paying these developers to lock their games to Steam.
That's like saying Sony is being anti-consumer because some JPN developers decide to put the games on PS4 and not Xbox.
Thanks I really appreciate your post. I wish more poster would respond so clearly and eloquently as you do.
Yes I understand that this is about Epic buying a developer and it is different that exclusive deals. However the question of exclusivity was again brought to the table in this thread following that purchase of Psyonix by Epic.
However I do see some parallels between what Epic does and Microsoft. Recently Microsoft bought several developers like Ninja Theory and Obsidian ; but they also had some exclusive deals like the one you mentioned, Rise of the Tomb Raider. Epic is doing the same here imo.
I guess the difference may be that Microsoft let Minecraft on all platforms. They didn't have to do it though. Same with the Outer Worlds coming on PS4 and Hellblade on Switch. Why they did so ? Because I think they feel it was more interesting from a business Standpoint.
But for Epic it's different. Their store is starting from nothing, they need to be extremely aggressive and disruptive in order to be able to compete with a giant like Steam. This reminds me more of Playstation entering the console business ( vs the dominant Nintendo ) or more recently Disney entering in the streaming business ( vs the dominant Netflix ). You need to be aggressive ( from a pricing, content snd service standpoint ) and disruptive ( as 88% share revenue for devs for example ) in order to challenge a dominant leader as Steam, otherwise you have no chance. I think that's what Epic is trying to do.
They are a pubblisher now. It will be exclusive only on their store on pc, but it will come on every console and tablet existing
Hahaha..
I just bought Rocket league only a week ago on steam. So by end of 2019 we gotta migrate to EGS to play multiplayer. Does EGS have a robust friend list etc. ?
I just bought Rocket league only a week ago on steam. So by end of 2019 we gotta migrate to EGS to play multiplayer. Does EGS have a robust friend list etc. ?
At most you'll have to create a new account, at no extra cost, that will carry over all your progress. And you'll always launch the game through Steam.
That is what they're trying to do. The anger at epic is coming from several directions, for some it's about not having the kinds of features expected from a store, for others it's objection to 3rd party exclusive contracts in general, for some it's about unnecessary inconvenience from further fragmentation of their game libraries, friends lists and so on. For some it's about being charged hidden transaction fees, or being blocked in China or what have you. Some people really just are steam fanboys. But whatever the case, I think that at minimum everyone would agree that they should have had a good service before they started trying to convince everyone to use it with these exclusive deals.
My personal opinion is that the exclusive contracts suck hard and they could have pursued a lot of other mechanisms to gain marketshare. Discounting games out of their own pocket, more / higher profile free games, making more of their own 1st party titles, trying to offer a really good launcher that people might want to use (perhaps even building a PlayNite like service that attempted to unify other launchers under their umbrella in addition to all these offerings). Nobody with major financial muscle has tried to do anything other than put their own games under a different launcher - like EA and Ubisoft etc haven't bothered seriously trying to take on third party games in more than an experimental scale. So it's a case of "we tried nothing and we're all out of ideas", imo.
they've added as much as they can add to a single video game and as much as people have bought their loot boxes, it seems that they're gonna move on to RL2.
It's just natural at this point if they can charge 39.99 for RL2 and add new loot and features, it's just better for them .
Funnily enough, my main modding "experience" comes from the Witcher 3 and EGS games (im sure most of my over all mod dls are from Nexus also) and I had no idea workshop is that much bigger in some games.
Modding something like Cities Skylines would be an absolute nightmare without WS.
Valve isn't stopping them from putting their games everywhere, nor did they have to pay them to be there.
It speaks volumes about how piss poor a platform is if they have to keep throwing money around to get games.
Also, Epic has still to explain why it was digging though my Steam files way beyond any right it should had for their hacky and most likely lawsuit magnet of a steam friends list importer because using official APIs were just too hard
I think there are other stores outhere like GOG or Itch.io which seem to have great feedback from the community, but they are no match for Steam of course. So having s good service is not enough to shine.
I agree maybe Epic could have waited in order to get better service in place. But give me an example of a new service that start perfectly from Day 1. I think Epic is aware of the backlash and I think Tim Sweeney said this exclusivity strategy wasn't a long term approch. They are just trying to be on thr map and this exclusivity strategy was the best short term option they had to be relevant on the market. And clearly it is working.
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If you want to shove all the issues regarding Epic and their store under the rug, sure...
I'd rightfully criticize such a move if they highly implied to stop selling the game on their rival system.
Really tempted to uninstall and never touch it again, and I have about 1000 hours between 3 platforms.
Of course. I'd be just as disgusted if Facebook bought them.
Of course. I'd be just as disgusted if Facebook bought them.
I bet you if Sony or Microsoft did this and there was more than 0% chance they'd take the game off the other stores there would be a hell of a shitstorm. Just the timed exclusive of Rise of the Tomb Raider went over pretty badly.