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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

#81

Post by belltaco »

philliphaydon wrote: post #78
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 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.

Unfortunately there's no competing against monopolies because of the network effect and the chicken and egg problem. A better product won't solve much, exclusives are almost the only option.

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

#82

Post by jsgo »

devy wrote: post #39
jsgo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What're they going to do? Sell their stake?

They will fire the CEO.

If they're structured so that shareholders can do this directly (not a case of needing to be able to influence the board), they'd have to convince 11% of other shareholders to either not vote (if just a majority of yays/nays is needed) or vote with them.

Sweeney on the other hand has allowed Fortnite to become their top item and it generates money other developers only dream of so I highly doubt other shareholders are particularly angry with him (they probably love him quite frankly). He's sufficiently defensive/offensive when things are setup to work against Epic Games (when Microsoft was ambiguous as to how important Windows Store would be to the Windows 10 ecosystem. To the chagrin of vocal gamers, he's aggressively going after Steam which could've frankly crushed Epic Games Store at the onset if not for how aggressive Epic has been).

Honestly, their best course of action would be to cut bait.

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

#83

Post by belltaco »

wishinghand wrote: post #65
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…

> while being a paid service Steam is not a paid service. I do think they should lower their 30% cut, though that is the industry standard.

They take a 30% cut of every game and make billions. They are not a free service like, say, Discord is. They should not be showing popup ads.

People are up in arms about Windows 10 showing ads in the Start menu, but somehow Valve showing them in a popup which you have to actually close is okay.

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

#84

Post by belltaco »

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 :)

It was and still is very poorly optimized with terrible UI.

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

#86

Post by bloody-crow »

philliphaydon wrote: post #78
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 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.

Why exclusives are bad?

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

#87

Post by taurath »

goatinaboat wrote: post #27
kangnkodos wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for correcting me. I see my mistake now. Tencent controls 40% of Epic. Tencent controls 100% of Riot/League of Legends. Epic has no control over Riot/League of Legends.

Tencent controls 100% of Riot/League of Legends As Matt Levine observes, an American company can simply ignore its foreign owner if necessary https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-01/citgo-...

Certainly, but the rule of law and trust breaking down has a systemic effect on everyone else.

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

#88

Post by anoncake »

codexon wrote: post #75
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

> And the only price you pay is to install another launcher that costs you nothing

Yeah, no. I'm not going to install another launcher that wastes RAM, bandwidth etc. and begs for my attention. Having games spread across multiple launchers is horrible UX too.

The Steam monopoly is a good thing for customers. What's bad is that it's private property and run for profit rather than to be useful.

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

#89

Post by Phillipharryt »

jsgo wrote: post #82
devy wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will fire the CEO.

If they're structured so that shareholders can do this directly (not a case of needing to be able to influence the board), they'd have to convince 11% of other shareholders to either not vote (if just a majority of yays/nays is needed) or vote with them. Sweeney on the other hand has allowed Fortnite to become their top item and it generates money other developers only dream of so I highly doubt other shareholders ar…

Almost no companies have direct elections because CEOs rightfully hate them, shareholders get scared and can make uninformed decisions, and the board is better informed to decide on the behalf of shareholders. In the cases they do exist, stock is issued with different voting rights to prevent activist shareholders turning over a company without the board's approval. Also in this case, even if there was a direct election structure at Epic, there is no other 11% for Tencent to convince. Sweeney himself owns more than 50% of the stock.

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

#90

Post by bloody-crow »

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…

I personally couldn't give two shits about which installer I'd have to use in order to play the game I supported on kickstarter and I don't get why other people care.

If the developer gets more money from Epic, that means that they now have more resources to make a decent game, which actually benefits me as a consumer.

Also, if the game is good, I'd prefer more money to make its way to the developer rather than storefront and Epic has a better deal.

From all above it seems to me that Epic Store is overall doing a good thing and I'd prefer it to Steam if I had a choice.

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