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

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

#111

Post by jplayer01 » Thu, Oct 10, 2019, 9:57 PM UTC

dwild wrote: post #110

jplayer01 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Statements mean and accomplish nothing. Yet a statements is what started all this in the video game world. Blitzchung was banned from making a statement. Tim Sweeney did a statement right now, in support to what Blitzchung did. This statement will have repercussion. You may not believe that the content of the statement is truthful, but it doesn't change that Tim Sweeney accepted the repercussion caused by that stat…

Except he didn’t say anything against China nor did he express support for Hong Kong. He played it extremely safe and didn't say anything to anger the Chinese, but enough to appease the gullible public. Statements aren’t all the same. Just because he says something doesn’t mean it’s on the same level as Blitz who explicitly expressed support for HK. And people need to stop being happy about empty statements.

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

#112

Post by codexon » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 12:07 AM UTC

opn7d7 wrote: post #109

codexon wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Valve is so lazy and incompetent they invented a service to enable internet multiplay of local coop only games. Epic is doing what? Handing out sacks of cash to buy a catalog? Which is going to end the first mover advantage and make your game buried at the bottom of a big App Store list. After making Fortnite, a clone of different game, popular with LOL’s business model? How inventive. 30% to a company doing things f…

Valve was not the first to invent "internet multiplay of local coop only games), Gamespy predates it by like 6 years.

Valve was not the first to invent digital distribution either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_distribution_of_video_...

> Epic is doing what?

Reducing the cut from 30% to 12% is huge, offering a world class engine that used to cost millions to license free to anyone to use with 5% royalty is also huge accomplishment.

If Fortnite is a clone of Dayz, then Half-Life is a clone of Quake. Since HL, all the successful games Valve "made" were made by developers they bought out with the exception of Artifact which was a complete flop and Dota Underlords which is also failing.

Are you really going to complain about Fornite's "LOL" business model when Dota 2, CS:GO, and TF2 also uses the "LOL" business model AND has gambling loot boxes on top of that? Yes I would say Fortnite is much more inventive than making clones like Artifact and Underlords that flopped hard.

> 30% to a company doing things for you? Or Epic who is charging you less but building a catalog of competitors for you as well

I am not a publisher, so a bigger catalog will only benefit me.

And if you think Valve doesn't want a large "catalog of competitors" as much as Epic, then I have a bridge to sell you.

China owns less than half of Epic.

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

#113

Post by dragonsngoblins » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 12:16 AM UTC

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.

That is definitely true, but you can applaud a commitment to not do something negative. The thing is you can't ever really say "look they did what they promised" when they are promising not to do something. We just have to applaud the public commitment and then shit on them if they backpedal or don't live up to it really.

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

#114

Post by dragonsngoblins » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 12:20 AM UTC

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…

Well I dislike them for entering into exclusivity agreements in the first place - something Valve doesn't do.

Even more I dislike them for entering into exclusivity agreements involving kickstarted projects that promised delivery on other platforms. Sure the developers are worse than Epic in this case, because they are the ones breaking the promises but still. It is kind of like sleeping with a married person - sure the person cheating is doing something worse than you, but you are still knowingly enabling it and contributing to something hurtful.

I don't like Valve having a de facto monopoly and buy on GoG where possible or the Humble store, but I prefer a de facto monopoly on selling a product than a de jure one.

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

#115

Post by opn7d7 » Fri, Oct 11, 2019, 2:45 PM UTC

codexon wrote: post #112

opn7d7 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve is so lazy and incompetent they invented a service to enable internet multiplay of local coop only games. Epic is doing what? Handing out sacks of cash to buy a catalog? Which is going to end the first mover advantage and make your game buried at the bottom of a big App Store list. After making Fortnite, a clone of different game, popular with LOL’s business model? How inventive. 30% to a company doing things f…

Valve was not the first to invent "internet multiplay of local coop only games), Gamespy predates it by like 6 years. Valve was not the first to invent digital distribution either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_distribution_of_video_... > Epic is doing what? Reducing the cut from 30% to 12% is huge, offering a world class engine that used to cost millions to license free to anyone to use with 5% royalty is als…

I wasn’t defending Valve.

I was pointing out that outside of some headlines, Epic is hardly being deeply innovative.

They changed a stat. That’s not inventive. Business does that all the time.

Your emotional buy in to the real value of this is skewed. Blands3 sounds to not be selling as well as they’d like as an Epic exclusive.

How “huge” is this if customers don’t buy anything on the Epic store? Cause as a game consumer I have plenty of options to wait spend time on until these exclusives end.

“Oh boy lookit how they changed a stat to take less of my money! But I sold 1/3 fewer copies than I would have on this unused platform I locked myself to.”