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Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam

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Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam

#151

Post by Godel_unicode »

xxs wrote: post #132
Ekaros wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30% from 0 to 10 million 25% from 10 to 50 million and 20% from 50 million on. They might have even better deals, but at some point 20% for handling everything and supporting payments with potential of fraud, chargebacks etc. in nearly every country should start look like not horrible deal. Remembering what the retail margins were back in the day when they needed to make and ship physical boxes...

>at some point 20% ... start look like not horrible deal Not, if you are Microsoft.

Pay 20% now, or be forced to spin out Xbox via anti-trust ruling in the future. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam

#152

Post by ssl232 »

slavik81 wrote: post #136
NikolaNovak wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 100 Croatian Lipa: Steam's value proposition is a single place to conveniently manage all my games, and it works very well as such. It's unobtrusive, comprehensive, manages installs, pre-requisites and updates nicely for me and then gets the heck out of the way. No publisher-oriented launcher has such proposition. In fact, I put forward that no publisher-made launcher has value proposition of any kind for the cons…

I own Mirror's Edge on EA Origin. I bought it shortly after release. I still have the box with the CD key. I can still download and install the game. However, I can't launch the game because I've exceeded the install limit of five copies. I need to run the deauthenticator utility on the computers I installed the game on, but that's not possible because those hard drives were wiped years ago. I generally trust Valve t…

It's in this situation where pirating the game is 100% justifiable. You literally own it already.

Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam

#153

Post by bob1029 »

arka2147483647 wrote: post #134
BbzzbB wrote: post #114

Is there a technical reason why Steam is a such a force in the space? People, myself certainly included, often criticize Apple for taking 30% of developer revenue for merely existing in it's walled garden. Right or wrong, they control the ecosystem, so their ability to monopolize and heavily tax the App Store is unsurprising, they're exercising their pricing power as much as they possibly can. But how is it that on P…

My opinion: - Steam was first, and because of that; - They have all the features (both for users, and gamedevs) - They have all the Games - They have all the Users In particular, in the Gamedev side, Steam is not a Storefront, they are a platform, much like say, Xbox Live or PSN. For example Steam provides: - Friends - Leaderboard - Chat (Text and Voice) - Multiplayer/Network api, which handles routing and NAT punch…

I think the user base and market demographics are why no one really complains on the publisher side. There's no other digital store on earth with more whale-like clientele.

Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam

#154

Post by nimbius »

ivraatiems wrote: post #52

Thank goodness. Bethesda's launcher was uniquely awful in a number of unpleasant ways. Slow, prone to crashes, bad user communication, not suitable for use on small monitors. The worst of the launcher apps I have used - and there are so many! I remember when it was in vogue for every game maker to build their own launcher or even full Steam clone - when EA pulled all its new games from Steam to get people to use Orig…

Occhams razor: Microsoft owns Bethesda, so one would naturally assume they would seek to kill off competition to the windows store, or any poor performers that arent driving the appropriate revenue.

the worst part of the bethesda launcher was it existed as a cudgel for Todd Howard and others to effectively silence dissent during the launch of Fallout 76 in 2018 either by flogging it as an excuse to refuse refunds, or using the platform to outright threadlock and silence user complaints and criticism. the launcher directly contributed to the wholesale review bombing of virtually every bethesda title on Steam and even showed up in the class action lawsuits filed during the fallout 76...well...fallout.

Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam

#155

Post by munk-a »

jcranmer wrote: post #15
notjustanymike wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People always forget what a pain in ass it was to download patches before Steam existed.

With "just don't do it" being perhaps the most common solution.

Especially when it came to mods - since auto-updating wasn't a thing mod devs were a lot more happy to tie their mod to a specific patch of the game and just refuse to support other versions. There's something to be said about this making modding more accessible since you weren't committing to long term support patches as the game evolved... but it also made things a royal pain.

Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam

#156

Post by enra »

ramesh31 wrote: post #27

I imagine this probably means the eventual death of Battle.net as well. Honestly though, it's time. Battle.net was incredible back in the day, but now it's just another annoying launcher that segments my friends lists.

Battle.net is probably the only launcher that is quite as reliable and high quality as Steam. One example is that you can start playing WoW way before the download or install is complete. Downside is that they have been really pushing for upsells in the recent years.

All other launchers are garbage. Origin doesn’t even render text properly on my 4k screen, and pretty much all of them forgets my login each week.

Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam

#157

Post by Macha »

sbarre wrote: post #87
ivraatiems wrote: post #52

Thank goodness. Bethesda's launcher was uniquely awful in a number of unpleasant ways. Slow, prone to crashes, bad user communication, not suitable for use on small monitors. The worst of the launcher apps I have used - and there are so many! I remember when it was in vogue for every game maker to build their own launcher or even full Steam clone - when EA pulled all its new games from Steam to get people to use Orig…

With the rise of the Epic Game Store, I think there's more competition in the launcher/store space and I bet the big publishers got better deals which removed the need for them to invest in the ongoing development and maintenance of their own stores/launchers. It can't be that cheap to maintain an app like Origin or UPlay and all the associated infrastructure, etc..

It's not just the store cut. From what I understand, a big part of the motivation of Origin was also to avoid having to compete, at least in consumer perception with the sales. Battlefield 3 at €80 while it was a year old looked terrible value when Borderlands 2 had dropped to €50 and was regularly 30% off despite being only a couple of months old.

Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam

#158

Post by munk-a »

nimbius wrote: post #154
ivraatiems wrote: post #52

Thank goodness. Bethesda's launcher was uniquely awful in a number of unpleasant ways. Slow, prone to crashes, bad user communication, not suitable for use on small monitors. The worst of the launcher apps I have used - and there are so many! I remember when it was in vogue for every game maker to build their own launcher or even full Steam clone - when EA pulled all its new games from Steam to get people to use Orig…

Occhams razor: Microsoft owns Bethesda, so one would naturally assume they would seek to kill off competition to the windows store, or any poor performers that arent driving the appropriate revenue. the worst part of the bethesda launcher was it existed as a cudgel for Todd Howard and others to effectively silence dissent during the launch of Fallout 76 in 2018 either by flogging it as an excuse to refuse refunds, or…

I think, honestly, that Microsoft is feeling pretty happy with how things are working with steam right now - they've probably only got to do a very minimal amount of work to integrate with the platform while internally they have MS Game accounts that tie everything together for any of the tracking needs they have. I'm sure they'd love to convert all of the MS Games users to their own store but they've managed to extract a whole bunch of unexpected business from AoE2 and other titles and they're probably hoping to minimize any damage to the ecosystem.

Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam

#159

Post by Macha »

slavik81 wrote: post #136
NikolaNovak wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 100 Croatian Lipa: Steam's value proposition is a single place to conveniently manage all my games, and it works very well as such. It's unobtrusive, comprehensive, manages installs, pre-requisites and updates nicely for me and then gets the heck out of the way. No publisher-oriented launcher has such proposition. In fact, I put forward that no publisher-made launcher has value proposition of any kind for the cons…

I own Mirror's Edge on EA Origin. I bought it shortly after release. I still have the box with the CD key. I can still download and install the game. However, I can't launch the game because I've exceeded the install limit of five copies. I need to run the deauthenticator utility on the computers I installed the game on, but that's not possible because those hard drives were wiped years ago. I generally trust Valve t…

Similarly EA banned my Steam issued Red Alert 3 key from multiplayer because it had been used by too many users and refused to help.

I never shared the key anywhere, and only installed it on 3 machines over 5 years.

Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam

#160

Post by adamrezich »

FanaHOVA wrote: post #118
adamrezich wrote: post #19

nice, about time. I wonder if e.g. Quake Champions would've flopped as hard as it did if it was just released on Steam at launch instead of moved there later. I had a ton of fun with it despite its controversial formula changes, and the soundtracks (there's two, you can pick one or both, the second one is by Andrew Hulshult) are really good.

Pretty sure QC was on Steam at launch, it was on the Bethesda Launcher only during beta. Quake games are just too hard for most people nowadays, and the new stuff pushed away some of the old players. I enjoyed it but Live was still better, and with matchmaking being dead I just stopped playing it.

the "beta" was more of an "early access" though. completely agree though it definitely did split the difference between being appealing to new and old players and kind of floundered as a result. I had a blast though just playing Ranger.
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