Hot take: EGS is neither negatively or positively impacting developers to a significant degree.
Era's a pretty active board for "insider" info, and over the last year, there hasn't been some kind of crazy sea change when it comes to devs either going bankrupt or exploding into riches. Come at me all you want, but even if you know of a dev that was about to "go under" without EGS coming to their rescue, there are other devs out there that did go under that EGS did not rescue. We're talking case-by-case examples, not widespread industry trends. Gaming revenues are going up because of mobile, subscription services, and microtransactions, not storefronts.
I'd argue that Microsoft launching so many AAA games on gamepass like FH4 and Gears 5, as well as outright buying up devs is a much much bigger story. What's a crazier story, Hades being on EGS for a year and being sold at a normal price, or Microsoft buying inXile and making Wasteland 3 available via subscription? Which one is the real industry disrupter that people need to be seriously discussing the ramifications of?
Hot take 2: "Curation" is so bad. Not actual curation, like Steam is experimenting with in their Labs initiative, but that idea that a storefront can "curate" just by having a small number of games.
A couple of months after EGS launched, it was "so easy to browse" but even today, there is no way to search by price or discount -during a sale! That is useless. I have to scroll through a flat list of 227 games and make notes about how much stuff costs.
Era's a pretty active board for "insider" info, and over the last year, there hasn't been some kind of crazy sea change when it comes to devs either going bankrupt or exploding into riches. Come at me all you want, but even if you know of a dev that was about to "go under" without EGS coming to their rescue, there are other devs out there that did go under that EGS did not rescue. We're talking case-by-case examples, not widespread industry trends. Gaming revenues are going up because of mobile, subscription services, and microtransactions, not storefronts.
I'd argue that Microsoft launching so many AAA games on gamepass like FH4 and Gears 5, as well as outright buying up devs is a much much bigger story. What's a crazier story, Hades being on EGS for a year and being sold at a normal price, or Microsoft buying inXile and making Wasteland 3 available via subscription? Which one is the real industry disrupter that people need to be seriously discussing the ramifications of?
Hot take 2: "Curation" is so bad. Not actual curation, like Steam is experimenting with in their Labs initiative, but that idea that a storefront can "curate" just by having a small number of games.
A couple of months after EGS launched, it was "so easy to browse" but even today, there is no way to search by price or discount -during a sale! That is useless. I have to scroll through a flat list of 227 games and make notes about how much stuff costs.