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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

#201

Post by guywhocodes »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #161
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…

It's kind of weird how the same companies that can squeeze all possible computational abilities and use every tick that exists to force a computer to show amazing graphics with complex logic behind can't make a simple GUI. Well, even Steam nowadays is kind of a wrapper for a browser.

Wow, my impression was the opposite. Slow and crashing: Just like every game they made. They have a uniquely high input lag and bugs is kind of their thing in general.

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

#202

Post by ui4jd73bdj »

legitster wrote: post #95
mey wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The block chain may be able to validate a license to a copy of the game, but that doesn't encompass hosting/delivery of content. The actual content of NFTs, tiny PNGs, are still hosted behind a URL. Putting 60+GB AAA titles out there for all time isn't something a Blockchain itself can solve. I also don't know how IPFS people would feel if they became the CDN for commercial software.

I think it's reasonable to believe that third party CDNs would pop up in the world. The feature would be that it's structurally decentralized in a way that decouples content creators from delivery.

It doesn't decouple them. The cdn still needs rights to share the content from the creator. Why would the creator give anyone else the right than say steam? So you would have a NFT of your game that only works in one platform since others cannot distribute it.

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

#203

Post by AussieWog93 »

KiranRao0 wrote: post #189
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of weird how the same companies that can squeeze all possible computational abilities and use every tick that exists to force a computer to show amazing graphics with complex logic behind can't make a simple GUI. Well, even Steam nowadays is kind of a wrapper for a browser.

Unverified Rumor, so a healthy grain of salt is required: A friend at a large GPU maker was mentioning that a lot of "squeezing all possible compute abilities" for games are in the driver, rather than in the game itself. Which is why you'll often see significant performance improvements with driver updates after a game has launched. It makes sense as it's in the GPU makers' best interest to have the maximum performan…

My old boss worked on the PC port of Dead Space 3.

He actually did spend significant effort optimising his shaders to get good performance on PC, but an Nvidia driver update would silently replace some of his code with hardware-optimised shaders they'd written themselves (similar to how Windows 95 had a hard-coded fix for Sim City).

This was never advertised publicly, and the only reason he found out was because he debugged the executable and noticed his shaders were never actually being executed.

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

#204

Post by throwaway09223 »

KiranRao0 wrote: post #189
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of weird how the same companies that can squeeze all possible computational abilities and use every tick that exists to force a computer to show amazing graphics with complex logic behind can't make a simple GUI. Well, even Steam nowadays is kind of a wrapper for a browser.

Unverified Rumor, so a healthy grain of salt is required: A friend at a large GPU maker was mentioning that a lot of "squeezing all possible compute abilities" for games are in the driver, rather than in the game itself. Which is why you'll often see significant performance improvements with driver updates after a game has launched. It makes sense as it's in the GPU makers' best interest to have the maximum performan…

It is absolutely the case that drivers contain code to fix errors or optimize away mistakes made in top tier games. This is well-known and often can be demonstrated by renaming the game binary or making other changes. Sometimes this happens with the blessing of the game company, and sometimes it doesn't.

Or, sometimes GPU folks will send a team over to help the game studios fix performance issues during their development.

There are some studios who push the envelope and make beautifully optimized games. There are many, many more who ineptly cobble together components and make something that runs well-enough.

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

#205

Post by throwaway09223 »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #161
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…

It's kind of weird how the same companies that can squeeze all possible computational abilities and use every tick that exists to force a computer to show amazing graphics with complex logic behind can't make a simple GUI. Well, even Steam nowadays is kind of a wrapper for a browser.

There are a couple of highly technical, highly capable game studios. Bethesda isn't one of them.

Most game studios produce poorly optimized junk and are barely managing to ship a working product.

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

#206

Post by dogma1138 »

munk-a wrote: post #165
arka2147483647 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 you're underselling things a fair amount. Steam was first - but lots of first to market products under invest in R&D and end up playing catch-up feature wise... Valve has consistently shown they're willing to experiment with new feature and do-dads to make sure their platform remains competitive. Given all the revenue they draw out of Steam I think that's only fair - but a lot of companies in their position w…

Whilst Steam has invested a lot in R&D they also managed to secure it as a requirement to play several key titles throughout its first years.

And I’m not even talking about Counter Strike: Source, quite a few other influential titles including CoD:MW2 required steam for play on PC.

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

#207

Post by 1_player »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #143
oblak wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what would that "other way" be? Let me guess, another launcher, or simply no launcher, no updates, no "cloud" saves, etc. Downloading games off Steam is easier than pirating them. If that's not progress, I don't know what is. Definitely not the same with movies and music which tells me they don't want it to be that easy.

> Definitely not the same with movies and music which tells me they don't want it to be that easy. It actually is, it's just called "streaming" instead of downloading*. For a very long time, Netflix was the go-to place for any movies, and piracy was on the decline. Now all the old media companies (who have even bigger god complexes than game studios) are doing the exact same thing everyone in this thread is discussin…

> For a very long time, Netflix was the go-to place for any movies, and piracy was on the decline.

In the US, maybe? Because here in Europe Netflix or any other streaming service has never been the go-to place for _any_ movie. You get to watch what they offer today, but if you want a specific movie, tough luck.

Steam is the place to be for 99.9% of PC gaming, anywhere in the world. This is why gaming piracy is pretty much dead while people are still downloading movies and tv shows to this day.

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

#208

Post by FranchuFranchu »

eatsyourtacos wrote: post #174
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…

Steam- * Just works * It's simple * Cloud saves all of my games (with a few exceptions when the game developer doesn't enable it for whatever reason, this has only been for a few games so I'm not sure why) * Family sharing - this is HUGE for me. I can't re-buy every single game for my kids, so the fact that they can just play a game I purchased on their own account when I'm not online is an insane life saver. * Steam…

The thing I like the most about Steam, and this outmatches everything else, is the regional price localization. 60 USD is not worth the same around the world, and Steam compensates for it.

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

#209

Post by nanidin »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #193
eatsyourtacos wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam- * Just works * It's simple * Cloud saves all of my games (with a few exceptions when the game developer doesn't enable it for whatever reason, this has only been for a few games so I'm not sure why) * Family sharing - this is HUGE for me. I can't re-buy every single game for my kids, so the fact that they can just play a game I purchased on their own account when I'm not online is an insane life saver. * Steam…

> * Just works I don't game very often, but the way Steam "just works" can't be understated enough. It's not perfect. I've run into weird bugs occasionally, though they were likely the fault of a specific game. However, it's miles ahead of other game launchers I've dealt with. I'm a casual gamer, so if I end up fighting the game launcher and update mechanism for more than a few minutes, I'm just going to give up and…

Along the idea of streamlining and reducing the mental overhead of actually playing a game - it's great to have my entire library in one place. I refused to use any of the other launchers because I don't want to have to hunt down accounts in 5 years when I get a taste for nostalgia from a game that I don't own on Steam.

Untitled Goose Game got me back into piracy after 15 years of abstinence because of the anti-Steam launch. I would have gladly paid were it on Steam.

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

#210

Post by mywittyname »

martinald wrote: post #184
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of weird how the same companies that can squeeze all possible computational abilities and use every tick that exists to force a computer to show amazing graphics with complex logic behind can't make a simple GUI. Well, even Steam nowadays is kind of a wrapper for a browser.

Is that really surprising? Even a simple GUI is not that simple these days. This was reinforced recently when an incredibly good software engineer I knew recently got stuck with a problem. It ended up being a networking problem but his understanding of anything deeper than basic DNS settings was approximately zero. I was actually amazed given I assumed from his other knowledge that he would have a similar understandi…

Let's not discount the other possibility: they outsource development to the cheapest bidder.
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