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Epic CEO says it won't ban Fortnite players for taking a stance on human rights

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Re: Epic CEO says it won't ban Fortnite players for taking a stance on human rights

#71

Post by jplayer01 »

larkeith wrote: post #25
sdinsn wrote: post #20

Epic is owned ~45% by Tencent. So I doubt this is going to be true.

There are several tweets specifically on this in the twitter thread: Tim Sweeney @TimSweeneyEpic 4h Replying to @CherrishChoerry @calibrono and 3 others > Epic is a US company and I’m the controlling shareholder. Tencent is an approximately 40% shareholder, and there are many other shareholders including employees and investors. Cherrish Choerry @CherrishChoerry 4h Replying to @TimSweeneyEpic @calibrono and 3 others…

So we’re just blindly believing whatever CEOs say now? There are so many incentives for them to say whatever the public wants to hear that it doesn’t make sense to take any of it at face value.

Re: Epic CEO says it won't ban Fortnite players for taking a stance on human rights

#72

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

jdance wrote: post #66
belltaco wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason Valve seems to have a lot of very rabid fans on Reddit, from many many years. Valve gets a free pass for showing annoying ads on every Steam update while being a paid service and also for their forced 30% cut and essentially being a monopoly. All the while barely improving the product for years while making billions from the cash cow. When I saw Epic was jumping into the fray I figured there'd be vici…

On top of this, as I recall everyone hated steam when it came, that you had to have it running to launch Counter-Strike through steam. I know I found it very annoying. Now Steam is home to most people and they are angry over the next change. Like the guy in the sibling comment defending 30% cut for a digital service like Steam, it is Stockholm syndrome, or just human nature :)

Indeed, I was one of those who hated the idea of Steam when it came out. However they won me over by just not being anywhere near the evil I predicted they would be. In the process, they basically saved PC gaming from almost certain doom, helped create the indie explosion, and made buying games so easy and cheap that many people have not even played a third or more of their library. Then they went and made Linux a viable gaming platform for free. Then they helped create a VR system and opened it to everyone unlike their competitor.

Re: Epic CEO says it won't ban Fortnite players for taking a stance on human rights

#73

Post by rifung »

jplayer01 wrote: post #70
nickthegreek wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if that is true, they are at least on the record now with a position and I do feel like that is important. I would hope to see other game companies make these statements as well.

Statements mean and accomplish nothing. I thought after decades of being fucked over and lied to by corporations, maybe the public would become a bit more suspicious of people like this, but I guess not.

Indeed, actions speak louder than words, but in this specific case, making a public statement is itself a very significant action. After all, it was nothing but public statements that are the center of the controversy.

Re: Epic CEO says it won't ban Fortnite players for taking a stance on human rights

#74

Post by SparkleBunny »

belltaco wrote: post #54
bloody-crow wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate? I've seen a lot of arguments along those lines, but none were willing to actually explain what it is exactly they're doing that is wrong.

For some reason Valve seems to have a lot of very rabid fans on Reddit, from many many years. Valve gets a free pass for showing annoying ads on every Steam update while being a paid service and also for their forced 30% cut and essentially being a monopoly. All the while barely improving the product for years while making billions from the cash cow. When I saw Epic was jumping into the fray I figured there'd be vici…

You can disable the ads in the steam client by going into Setting > Interface > Uncheck "Notify me about additions or changes to my games, new releases, and upcoming releases."

https://i.imgur.com/Gh9V45t.png

Re: Epic CEO says it won't ban Fortnite players for taking a stance on human rights

#75

Post by codexon »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #59
belltaco wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason Valve seems to have a lot of very rabid fans on Reddit, from many many years. Valve gets a free pass for showing annoying ads on every Steam update while being a paid service and also for their forced 30% cut and essentially being a monopoly. All the while barely improving the product for years while making billions from the cash cow. When I saw Epic was jumping into the fray I figured there'd be vici…

Valve advertises games on a platform that sells games and only does it when you start Steam. 30% is standard. They're a de-facto monopoly because they basically invented the market and no one has managed to do better, they have not engaged in anti-competitive practices and in fact allow people to sell Steam keys for their game on other storefronts without paying Valve at all .

Valve has gotten lazy and incompetent from their rent seeking on the Steam monopoly. I will try to list some of the reasons.

The service goes down for 15-30 minutes every single Tuesday during peak hours. Can you imagine if your internet, TV, or cellphone did this?

There is also an absurd amount of unplanned downtime as well https://twitter.com/steamstatus there's a major outage every 2 months on average where you cannot even open Steam. The trading system is down A LOT. I don't know of any website like steamstatus that logs it, but it seems like it is down every other week. I also can't seem to trade more than 15 items at a time or the page will just hang, and this system is at least 6 years old already.

Before EA released Origin, there were no refunds on Steam.

I've emailed Valve exploits and they don't respond, not a single reply after years when 10 years ago they would have at least replied maybe 2-3 months later. They took HALF A YEAR to even acknowledge my exploit on hackerone.com and did not even fix it yet.

Their password system is also a huge sign of incompetence. They use RSA encryption on your plaintext password instead of just hashing the password. If someone hacked Valve, they will have your plaintext password. And if you're going to argue that someone can middleman an https server, I'm going to tell you the attacker could just serve up javascript to make the user send the plaintext password.

They also killed 3rd party servers in TF2 by putting them in a button at the bottom of the screen. It is similar to Apple putting all 3rd party apps in a link at the bottom of the app store. They also killed 3rd party servers in CS:GO by banning servers that were giving people default items and then being too lazy to ban servers that gave people items from their online store.

30% is standard? Why is it a standard and why can't it be lowered to 12% if Epic Games can do it? Why does Valve get to use the same standard as brick and mortar retailers when digital stores are way cheaper to maintain and more profitable because of forced online DRM and no reselling?

This is about all I care to ramble off right now, but there's more.

It is time for Valve to get a rude awakening from their comfortable monopoly. The Epic store is a good thing that will result in better service for consumers. And the only price you pay is to install another launcher that costs you nothing.

Re: Epic CEO says it won't ban Fortnite players for taking a stance on human rights

#76

Post by philliphaydon »

ahupp wrote: post #58
nvrspyx wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If EPIC backtracks on something their CEO said, it wouldn’t be the first time. Tim Sweeney consistently makes a fool of himself and his statements turn out to be completely false pretty often. I wouldn’t take anything he says either seriously or as an actual position of the company.

Can you give an example?

He slammed Microsoft store for being basic and incomplete, then released the epic store basic and incomplete.

He promised transparency on the epic store then made the trello board private after a month, and decided to not be transparent at all.

Re: Epic CEO says it won't ban Fortnite players for taking a stance on human rights

#77

Post by robbrit »

jplayer01 wrote: post #71
larkeith wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several tweets specifically on this in the twitter thread: Tim Sweeney @TimSweeneyEpic 4h Replying to @CherrishChoerry @calibrono and 3 others > Epic is a US company and I’m the controlling shareholder. Tencent is an approximately 40% shareholder, and there are many other shareholders including employees and investors. Cherrish Choerry @CherrishChoerry 4h Replying to @TimSweeneyEpic @calibrono and 3 others…

So we’re just blindly believing whatever CEOs say now? There are so many incentives for them to say whatever the public wants to hear that it doesn’t make sense to take any of it at face value.

He also now has a strong incentive to stick to what he said. Complying with China after publicly saying he wouldn't would be an even bigger PR disaster than what Blizzard is facing right now.

Re: Epic CEO says it won't ban Fortnite players for taking a stance on human rights

#78

Post by philliphaydon »

belltaco wrote: post #54
bloody-crow wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate? I've seen a lot of arguments along those lines, but none were willing to actually explain what it is exactly they're doing that is wrong.

For some reason Valve seems to have a lot of very rabid fans on Reddit, from many many years. Valve gets a free pass for showing annoying ads on every Steam update while being a paid service and also for their forced 30% cut and essentially being a monopoly. All the while barely improving the product for years while making billions from the cash cow. When I saw Epic was jumping into the fray I figured there'd be vici…

Valve needs serious competition. But I hate epic for trying to buy its way into competition by taking exclusives which were sold on steam initially. Instead of trying to actually be better than valve.

Re: Epic CEO says it won't ban Fortnite players for taking a stance on human rights

#79

Post by d1zzy »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #57
bloody-crow wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate? I've seen a lot of arguments along those lines, but none were willing to actually explain what it is exactly they're doing that is wrong.

The short version is pretty simple. Epic has been paying developers a whole shit-ton of money for an exclusive release on their storefront and launcher, and a lot of PC gamers do not like exclusive releases or having additional launchers. That's not such a big deal though, the real problem is that they did this with games that were in development for years with Kickstarter-style backing that had up until that point e…

It's a bit more nuanced than that. It seems to me that most PC gamers have no problems with exclusive PC releases as long as they are exclusive to Steam. It's when they are exclusive to other DRM-ed platforms that they start to make a fuss, a self-centered hypocritical view.

Now as a pure GOG game buyer, used to having to wait decades to get games that were released on Steam on release day, I can't say I'm not finding some satisfaction out of all the Epic exclusivity outrage but, feelings aside, I'd prefer that there was no exclusivity whatsoever.

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