Except the part where Epic already maintains a storefront with a ton of features missing from the Epic Store for the Unreal Engine. Approaching a lot of this isn't foreign to them.
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Epic removed expected feature delivery dates from their Trello board
- Thread starter DailyCalmSpirit
- Start date
Except the part where Epic already maintains a storefront with a ton of features missing from the Epic Store for the Unreal Engine. Approaching a lot of this isn't foreign to them.
As much as I think this is a good move for them, I will admit that this kinda reminds me of those scenes in thriller/disaster movies where all of the boards in airports suddenly flip over to "DELAYED" in a really amusing way.
They deserve every criticism regarding this, don't promise something than pretend that you didn't promise it. They did it to themselves. This gives me even less confidence that they will get egs into an decent state.
Very disappointing to hear.
In one sense, I feel like they abused the good will of the gaming press & devs by painting their detractors in a GG-like light.
On the other hand, Steam has been taking financial advantage of indie game developers for way too long. Even if they had to launch an unfinished product, I'm glad devs have a better opportunity to make some money. They've gotta hunker down and get their product up to snuff, now, though!
In one sense, I feel like they abused the good will of the gaming press & devs by painting their detractors in a GG-like light.
On the other hand, Steam has been taking financial advantage of indie game developers for way too long. Even if they had to launch an unfinished product, I'm glad devs have a better opportunity to make some money. They've gotta hunker down and get their product up to snuff, now, though!
Nah, the only roadmap worse than the Star Citizen roadmap has to be the one for completing that weird-ass evil looking skyscraper in North Korea that they've been building for 30 years.
this is not even close to the truth, nothing wrong with them taking the stability but Steam hasn't taken advantage of anyone.
They completely removed "Moving and rediscovering game installs" from the board.
I normally move games I'm finished with to my secondary hard drive just in case I wanna play it again when DLCs come.
Everyday hurts a little more knowing that the 1tb SSD was the much better buy.
I normally move games I'm finished with to my secondary hard drive just in case I wanna play it again when DLCs come.
Everyday hurts a little more knowing that the 1tb SSD was the much better buy.
In what way are they taking advantage of indie developers? By offering an industry standard rate to put a game on their very open platform with hundreds of millions of potential customers?
The biggest issue with this decision is that what we have still isn't even near the youngest of storefront, Discord. Because they were so specific yet so lacking in features from the beginning when they launched late 2018 their Trello board was seen as both a showcase they were improving but also just how lacking the store is in basic features. Now it's just even more hidden and still unknown as to what the heck this store is doing.
Development is fucking hard. I've been in sprint meetings for a game we were making for uni where we had to revamp core parts of the mechanics because it literally made no sense to the user. That sucked, and put us a good few weeks back. I understand agile development is hell but in saying that there really is no excuse for releasing something in modern day storefront expectations that is so subpar it's actually working AGAINST the user to use your store.
Development is fucking hard. I've been in sprint meetings for a game we were making for uni where we had to revamp core parts of the mechanics because it literally made no sense to the user. That sucked, and put us a good few weeks back. I understand agile development is hell but in saying that there really is no excuse for releasing something in modern day storefront expectations that is so subpar it's actually working AGAINST the user to use your store.
it's not like the trello meant anything, they moved preloading to shipped and then sweeney tweeted this
It's almost as if running an PC digital distribution store is hard and time consuming or something...
Timmy must've felt pretty good about himself when he bragged on twitter about the store's missing features and Steam's "bloat".
Timmy must've felt pretty good about himself when he bragged on twitter about the store's missing features and Steam's "bloat".
I don't see this as a bad thing. Sometimes expectations change and shift during a project. Better for them to be honest and transparent about where they are on the development timeline than dangling features out that still aren't realistically hitting soon.
They essentially made the consumer focus on it though? I don't see your point here bar a thinly veiled "why are we even discussing EGS lol?" bait.
So can people who've defended EGS finally admit that this is actually an issue where EGS doesnt have basic features and it's not easy to develop them? Constantly people dismiss claims stating that the basic features will be up and ready in no time and now months later, Epic has proven they don't really give a shit anymore about their store, they rather continue putting most of the work on fortnite as they always do.
I'm sure Epic with their history of crunch was forcing the EGS developers to try to get these features out by an unreasonable timeline and now they're removing it because they can't even keep up with it consistently. They really should've placed more resources here.
Steam has a lot of issues too. Every storefront does. However, they at least have some basic features.
I'm sure Epic with their history of crunch was forcing the EGS developers to try to get these features out by an unreasonable timeline and now they're removing it because they can't even keep up with it consistently. They really should've placed more resources here.
Steam has a lot of issues too. Every storefront does. However, they at least have some basic features.
You just flip a switch I think. Should've hired me, I woulda flipped it so fast.
It was a PR focussed move, so I imagine so. But obviously we won't ever know for sure.
It's the little things that you take for granted.
It's a running joke at this point, but I always thought the outrage over something like a shopping cart was a bit overblown (you can still buy the game, so what's the big deal?).
Then reality hit me over the head with a cartoonishly large hammer. They recently decided to block my credit card (after attempting two successive purchases) and subsequently wasted hours of my time. I'll happily continue to redeem the free games, but man, what a rushed/barebones mess.
It's a running joke at this point, but I always thought the outrage over something like a shopping cart was a bit overblown (you can still buy the game, so what's the big deal?).
Then reality hit me over the head with a cartoonishly large hammer. They recently decided to block my credit card (after attempting two successive purchases) and subsequently wasted hours of my time. I'll happily continue to redeem the free games, but man, what a rushed/barebones mess.
You mean when Epic had to directly address people getting their accounts timed out because they bought too many things during a sale?
Probably not a good idea to have a store-wide sale and when they have a system that bans you for buying many things in succession, which is the only way to take advantage of the sale cause no shopping cart.
Yeah mostly agree, though I do think there are opportunities to be open with your audience in a controlled and considered way. I'm tangentially involved in a project that has been engaging with a community in a really healthy and mutually beneficial way. You need really good community managers and producers to manage it, but it can be done (and it's a requirement for any live service game so if you're developing one of those, best figure out community engagement early).
Some of the best community teams I've crossed were the Paragon community team, Dragon Age Inquisition Multiplayer stream team, Warframe, and Insomniac's James Stevenson. I wonder what happened to Paragon's community people, Fortnite BR doesn't seem to have weekly live streams from what I saw a while ago, maybe they do now though. This was a time when Epic seemed very chill and not much to really do but base Fortnite, Paragon, UE4, and UT.
This was in 2018 btw, Steve was having fun without the other people realizing he, a Warframe dev, put something related to Anthem on the Warframe 2019 roadmap plans board.
This was in 2018 btw, Steve was having fun without the other people realizing he, a Warframe dev, put something related to Anthem on the Warframe 2019 roadmap plans board.
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Yah totally agree here, especially on the bolded. Finding the fine line of mutually beneficial and positive engagement while striking the correct tone and setting tangible expectations is a delicate balancing act, and requires a genuinely passionate and well focused team. The unfortunate reality of many game dev environments however is lots of competing priorities making it hard to consistently engage in this way.
I think indie studios that have stable resources to dedicate to outreach are particularly well poised to do this well, and it gets somewhat harder as you scale.
While I agree on the principle, the problem is that Tim Sweeney and Epic pushed that Trello board as a point when they got criticism on features.
"See our Trello board, it's coming at this date".
This is a videogame discussion board. How is this any higher or lower level than dissecting a Nintendo tweet for thirty pages, aside from the fact that, in this case, the subject at hand was actively used as deflection for the company's shortcomings?
I understand the circumstances of this situation, I just don't find it weird or uncommon. If I sift through the public roadmap released every quarter for my company for the past 3 years, they've all been shifted in meaningful ways and features promised to our paying client base back in 2018 are still not available because shits hard and priorities change. Overall, the trello board was a bad idea because it doesn't work to a client base that will put 0 effort in understanding how software development works out to manage expectations.
They added Cloud Saves. So if you ask me the store has everything it needs to have. I don't care if it takes them years to develop the storefront, I'll still buy stuff there if I want to play something.
Yet I think they should ease up on the exclusivity deals. Make some, get some big fish, but also let Indies sell on all platforms at the same time.
Yet I think they should ease up on the exclusivity deals. Make some, get some big fish, but also let Indies sell on all platforms at the same time.
on the one hand they have to deal with not crunching their developers because of public perception.
on the other hand the public demands the features promised in a roadmap they probably shouldn't have released.
on the one hand, fortnite and unreal engine probably makes them more money than the store so it's obvious where the resources at the company are going.
on the other hand they give naysayers continued reason to hate on their store. obviously fortnite/unreal engine are their bread and butter but i feel like letting the store linger without some baseline parity with steam makes it an easy target. if they had gotten out more of the features that most people have wanted it would have made it more difficult to be such naysayers of their platform.
anyways, project deadlines are always tough to make, probably even tougher with the public watching your trello board.. yeesh.
on the other hand the public demands the features promised in a roadmap they probably shouldn't have released.
on the one hand, fortnite and unreal engine probably makes them more money than the store so it's obvious where the resources at the company are going.
on the other hand they give naysayers continued reason to hate on their store. obviously fortnite/unreal engine are their bread and butter but i feel like letting the store linger without some baseline parity with steam makes it an easy target. if they had gotten out more of the features that most people have wanted it would have made it more difficult to be such naysayers of their platform.
anyways, project deadlines are always tough to make, probably even tougher with the public watching your trello board.. yeesh.
We use Jira & Confluence at work and the latter is the worst piece of collaboration software I've ever experienced.
Jira's alright tho. It helps that our DPOs really stick to Agile methodology which makes navigating quick & easy, but because Confluence is used as our intranet with very little process control over how teams build & maintain their spaces.
I'd swap it for SharePoint in an instant.
As for missing development goals, multiple failed Sprints indicates poor release planning & job size estimates IMO. If they're fighting fires for feature/bug fixes to the extent it's causing issues with the funnel someone at Epic needs to really look at how they're allowing BAU to impact their Sprints so badly.
It provides Transparency about what features are being worked on at the moment, as well as a road map for future features.
Speak for yourself.
People now saying software dev is hard as an excuse ignoring that the simple solution was to not start this nonsense until you had a storefront ready to go with the features every modern store has.
People called them out on that
They put out a specific roadmap to shut people up
They consistently miss dates they put in
They now remove said dates
???
Profit
People called them out on that
They put out a specific roadmap to shut people up
They consistently miss dates they put in
They now remove said dates
???
Profit
Or alternatively, don't make your agile boards public because then they look pretty much identical to a roadmap.
how to spot a developer who has no idea how customer relations and expectations work ;)
- how does Steam take financial advantage of indie game developers while also being the only big place with an audience where indies can sell their games
- How can indie devs have a better opportunity to sell games if they can't release on EGS.
Not surprising. I still feel like most of this stuff is never coming. They just threw this thing together to try and shut people up. Consumers are not a part of Epic's plan.
And this whole saga has highlighted just how many folk in the industry fall into this camp.
Quite odd for customer driven market, hmm...
