An E3 update on their fortnightly free game giveaways that they started late last year...
Epic Games Store now open!
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Soldato
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Generosity or desperation?
Free games are free games I suppose but the amount of them I've seen announced from there that I then check and I've had sat in my library for years probably as part of some dirt-cheap $5 humble bundle suddenly makes it seem a lot less generous...
Free games are free games I suppose but the amount of them I've seen announced from there that I then check and I've had sat in my library for years probably as part of some dirt-cheap $5 humble bundle suddenly makes it seem a lot less generous...
Caporegime
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I got Rime for free recently, it's actually very decent in the mould of Tomb Raider
https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/rime
https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/rime
I don't know about how bad this Epic Games Store/Launcher is (does it actually install malware or aggressive DRM?), but I find it hilarious all these Shenmue "fans" are throwing their toys out the pram over this, after 18 years of waiting for the sequel they were longing for that no one was obligated to provide. I absolutely love Shenmue, and I'll simply be happy to be able to conclude the story (or at least a continuation of the story).
I use Steam. I use Blizzard launcher, and I'll use Epic Games Store to play Shenmue III. If it lets me play the game (and isn't riddled with malware/DRM), then I load it up, launch the game and I play the game. Does it really matter where the game "comes from"? You don't expect to buy shoes in a coffee shop. Why do all your games "have" to be in Steam? You're probably in the launcher a total of about 10 seconds before you're playing the game you want to play. What difference does it make?
Also yes it does look quite bad graphics-wise, but what are people expecting? Shenmue 1 had a budget of $70m, and Shenmue II almost $50m, and they both made huge losses. This has had very non-traditional funding amounting to less than $10m, and the technological advancement and detail in everything from character/environment models, textures and all the rest of it now compared to back then has no doubt meant they've had to cut corners.
I do say all this with fanboy goggles, but I've waited 18 years for this game. Having to load a separate app for 10 seconds to be able to play the game is a complete non-issue to me.
I use Steam. I use Blizzard launcher, and I'll use Epic Games Store to play Shenmue III. If it lets me play the game (and isn't riddled with malware/DRM), then I load it up, launch the game and I play the game. Does it really matter where the game "comes from"? You don't expect to buy shoes in a coffee shop. Why do all your games "have" to be in Steam? You're probably in the launcher a total of about 10 seconds before you're playing the game you want to play. What difference does it make?
Also yes it does look quite bad graphics-wise, but what are people expecting? Shenmue 1 had a budget of $70m, and Shenmue II almost $50m, and they both made huge losses. This has had very non-traditional funding amounting to less than $10m, and the technological advancement and detail in everything from character/environment models, textures and all the rest of it now compared to back then has no doubt meant they've had to cut corners.
I do say all this with fanboy goggles, but I've waited 18 years for this game. Having to load a separate app for 10 seconds to be able to play the game is a complete non-issue to me.
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The developers have no say in the matter, Obsidian didn't even know that Outer Worlds was being pulled from Steam until the deal was done, it's the publishers who are on the leash of the shareholders.
That's the crazy part too, Epic aren't paying for exclusivity, they are paying for the titles to not appear on Steam specifically lol. Isn't there a law against that? I remember when Intel got in trouble for bribing retailers to shelf more Intel products than AMD, this is even worse.
Absolutely, this is one of the situations where I wouldn't fault somebody for using the EGS. For a fan of the series... No brainer, if Timesplitters got a new game that went last minute EGS I'd be installing the EGS... but it doesn't mean people should be happy with it.
There's no malware but it was found that the EGS was collecting data on user activity on Steam, so who knows what else it tracks, and Epic are owned by a company with ties to the Chinese government. Nothing set in stone, but take from it what you will, best to know those sort of things in advance.
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More likely to increase their userbase, get the launcher installed, incentive to install and setup an account I would suspect
Sad times with Epic, this is the developer that provided the unreal engine, and UT games, now look...!! I am very surprised how a company can just **** so many off when all they have to do was open a store, same as Steam, and just sell games and if consumers wanted to buy from Epic they can, thats the problem with PC gaming, its way too split - everyone publisher and developer doing their own thing to maximise the income, with little regard to the consumer, lets not fool ourselves here, EA, UBISoft, Activision - the lot, they all want to keep maximum income to themselves, and Epic knows this, and has given what the publishers want, Epic is not for the consumer, they are a means to allow publishers to keep maximum profits, this is why the likes of Deep silver and many indies are very cosy with the all of this..
Its not going away, Steam has a fight on its hands, Microsoft only did what they did to do some PR on what they know is a right mess with consumers at the moment, ironic really. Tim Sweeney was the one that said it needs to be an open plaform and MS are going to close this down, yet here we are, Stream GOG and MS are very open, wheres Epic , EA and UBISoft are very anti open, and see PC gamers mostly with disdain and dirty pirates I suspect. EA did bring some goodwill with EA Access I guess and EA did offer refunds which did force Steam to do the same, so EA I think can be cut some slack..
I dont think the real fight is with Epic honestly, Gabe knew what was happening in Microsoft from the very start and with xCloud now being a thing along with Gamepass, we know what the future looks like for game distribution.
Its ******, it'll be the same subscription service bloat that the media companies have inflicted upon the world, in absolutely no reality would i purchase a Ubisoft or EA sub to play their ****** games.
Its ******, it'll be the same subscription service bloat that the media companies have inflicted upon the world, in absolutely no reality would i purchase a Ubisoft or EA sub to play their ****** games.
To be fair I had considered EA Access as good value - but now I see it as not so good value at all, as most of the games aren't all that great, and filled with mostly sport titles - which are rehashes of previous years, or fps games trying to take on fortnite, or some battle royale game.
UBISoft have had a distaste for PC games long before, they were, have always been looking for ways to ensure its damn hard to buy or play their games on PC, leaning more towards the console market - draconian DRM was always the in thing with UBISoft - so I have no interesting in their subscription services
As for MS - they are playing a fairly good PR game, you could be right, Gabe has always known the real threat, could be right, game streaming could be the future - things change I guess.
As with everything in life it boils down to the individuals tastes, for example, take Ubisoft..AC:Origins and AC:Odyssey I rate amongst two of the best games I've played in recent years (I gave both of them my game of the year award for their respective years), Anno 1800 is also extremely good imo and I've had hundreds of hours of entertainment in Division 1 and Division 2 and around 80 hours of co-op fun in Ghost Recon Wildlands, so for me there would be a degree of appeal in a Ubi sub, or at least there would be if I didnt already own all the aforementioned titles. A token price to be able to play all of those games is something that I could see appealing to a lot of folks.
EA - Well, I actually already have the Origin sub (£3.99 a month), which grants you, SW-KOTOR , SW-KOTOR 2, Titanfall 1 and 2, Mass Effect 1, 2 and 3, Dead Space 1, 2 and 3, Battlefield 1, Battlefield 3, Battlefield 4 and Battlefield 5, Into the Breach and FTL. Tally up those games and I've probably got over 2000 hours in those titles, so £3.99 for those is a bargain imo.
However neither of those deals carries appeal for anyone who isnt interested in those titles of course.
Now here comes MS with the Gamepass, (currently £3.99 a month) , which gets you Football Manager 2019, Imperator Rome, Gears of War 4 and 5, Metro Exodus and will have Borderlands 3 on it too. Again, 3.99 for those titles, good deal imo.
I think that as Tecman said above, Steam has a fight on its hands, actually I think it has already lost the first few rounds of the fight because its dancing around the ring and not thrown any real punches. To me these days, Steam is a glorified chat interface and even having said that I actually use Discord for my chat mainly anyway. Now yes, Steam has titles to buy but many many folks dont actually buy from Steam anyway they buy the cdkey from cdkey sites and then put it into Steam so even in that respect its not buying the title from Steam. Steam need to do something imo , react to whats going on, otherwise they may not recover in the coming rounds of the fight.
Good response..!! I see some interesting counters in that..
I will agree, I think Steam needs to adapt - its clear game subscriptions are the way ahead. I think the xbox PC games pass is excellent value and MS have played a blinder in the PR game in all of this, come out as the good guys, and thats quite an achievement for MS who have always managed to mess up PC gaming projects.
I think big changes are coming, its sad, but maybe the days of owning large librarys of games is gonna come to an end one day, and we all just stream our games from cloud services.
Only today I learned more about geforce now, parsec etc, all able to stream games, and services allowing you to rent high end machines to run and install games - Stadia is maybe the start of where it all starts to really change? Could be epic is just late to the party anyhow.!!
Some peoples disdain for being lied to in such a blatant and disrespectful way trumps their desire to play the game. As for not being obligated to make the game at all, the series creator has always wanted to make it and the fans ******* paid for it's development, you can hardly imply that these fans are entitled for feeling betrayed and completely ignored. Regardless of what you think of Epic's launcher, buying exclusivity is incredibly anti-consumer and should never be supported.
Microsoft has been hitting it out of the park since they got rid of Ballmer, the fact that Sony is jumping into Microsoft's Cloud service and not AWS or something, is telling. I just wish Steam had some level of discussion with the community as it's by far the most prolific service on the PC, they really should have been out front, visible and making the case that thing's were changing.
But they've been eerily quiet, even with Gabe, I dont get it.
Soldato
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Steam still make money from this, the dev will have to pay a fee for the key activation
I know with Elite if you buy direct from Frontier and activate your key on Steam they then have to pay a fee to Steam for you activating, so don't think that buying from a reseller = no money for Steam
Yeah, I didnt mean solely the financial side of things, I also meant that there are a portion of people who will say that they only buy/use Steam, yet a lot of them dont actually buy Steam anyway they buy from cdkey sites and simply put it into Steam.
Soldato
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Interesting discussions around streaming... I think if 5G ends up being as big a step forward as intended then it could very well be the future as far as games go (without the proposed 5G and satellite coverage I feel game streaming will be severely gimped anywhere that's not in a big city)...
I'm not sure it necessarily means Valve/Steam are done-for though... they need to adapt, sure, but for all the complaining about them Valve have always shown themselves to be fairly keen to drive new technology and ideas, so it wouldn't surprise me if they are already well ahead of this behind-the-scenes... Streaming games is clearly something they have already been dabbling in with the Steam Link stuff so its not as if it's entirely new to them...
Maybe Valve will say something like - here we go, our own streaming service - you get to keep every game that is currently in your library, but you'll be able to stream it completely free (i.e. even if you don't subscribe, your games are yours to play on whatever machine/device you like) but if you choose to subscribe it will give you access to new games each month or a rotating roster of games or something else... maybe subscribing would also improve the spec of the VM you are streaming from (to add further value to any games you already own)... Given that they already have such a large and relatively loyal user-base it seems like if they could offer a service that allowed you to keep your existing library that you have such a lot of sunk-costs in then it could be very popular
I'm not sure it necessarily means Valve/Steam are done-for though... they need to adapt, sure, but for all the complaining about them Valve have always shown themselves to be fairly keen to drive new technology and ideas, so it wouldn't surprise me if they are already well ahead of this behind-the-scenes... Streaming games is clearly something they have already been dabbling in with the Steam Link stuff so its not as if it's entirely new to them...
Maybe Valve will say something like - here we go, our own streaming service - you get to keep every game that is currently in your library, but you'll be able to stream it completely free (i.e. even if you don't subscribe, your games are yours to play on whatever machine/device you like) but if you choose to subscribe it will give you access to new games each month or a rotating roster of games or something else... maybe subscribing would also improve the spec of the VM you are streaming from (to add further value to any games you already own)... Given that they already have such a large and relatively loyal user-base it seems like if they could offer a service that allowed you to keep your existing library that you have such a lot of sunk-costs in then it could be very popular
Jesus, it's not like the announced they're completely pulling the PC version and it's now Xbox exclusive. Boo freaking hoo, you now need to install a ~100mb program which will load up in exactly the same amount of time as Steam would do and still be able to play the game exactly the same way Steam would do.
The entire reason this game exists and is where it is today is because the fans have wanted it for so long. The average gamer would not back this random game on Kickstarter. It's going to be almost entirely backed by fans who have been waiting 2 decades for this, and yet apparently something so trivial as having to walk 10ft to the store next door to get the game is enough to make people not want to finish the story they apparently are so desperate to see finished. The exclusivity would also have given them some extra money to be able to polish things a bit more and deliver a better end result, which coincidentally is exactly the reason for the slight delay in release.
It's like if the next Game of Thrones book was announced to be a WH Smith exclusive and not available in Waterstones. The horror!. If you'd been waiting for the next book for so long, you'd just walk to the nearest WH Smith, buy the book and walk out with the exact same product that you apparently have been so desperate to get your hands on.
Nah that's not true, it's not the same amount of time, Epic loads much quicker! It's the one good thing about it.
So I can earn achievements?
Save on the cloud?
Stream the game to another device?
As you did say I can play the game "exactly" the same way.
Can I auto refund the game if I dont like it?
Can I check for community submitted game guides on the epic launcher?
Soldato
Nah that's not true, it's not the same amount of time, Epic loads much quicker! It's the one good thing about it.
Really? Epic takes way longer to load than Steam on my system, and I don't even have any games installed on the Epic launcher.