Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by _carbyau_ » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 1:48 AM UTC

paulryanrogers wrote: post #223

mywittyname wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, it's that my 20 year old account has games I bought 20 years ago. I can trust that anything I purchase from Steam will be around for a long time. No other company has demonstrated that kind of reliability, except maybe Apple. Plus, I think Steam is a superior product. That being said, I also try to buy on GoG as much as possible, since I really prefer to have DRM-free games and I want some competition in the…

> I can trust that anything I purchase from Steam will be around for a long time. Unless the publisher pulls it or pushes an update cutting music because of license deals expiring. Or gets a stealthy replacement with a worse remaster. Or your OS drops 32 bit / x86 support.

I agree with most of your comment ... but "OS drops 32 bit / x86 support" gets a hard disagree.

Steam provides the game. It "will be around for a long time."

It is not Steams job to ensure the game runs on every device or OS version for eternity however. That is up to the publisher of the game.

If you install Steam on an older version of the OS that does have 32bit/x86 support, Steam does its job.

I do think however that Steam should add clarification to the "game requirements" to specify OS version or hardware however.

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

#242

Post by ralusek » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 1:48 AM UTC

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #211

throwaway09223 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The question I ask is if Bethesda spent all the time on technical things would they make the amazing games they do? Give me a Bethesda game with bugs over any other smooth game with no heart any day. Every company has an attention budget to spend from.

Nobody wants them to spend energy on the technical side, we want them to use an existing engine like Unreal.

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

#243

Post by vkou » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 1:49 AM UTC

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…

> Is there a technical reason why Steam is a such a force in the space?

First mover, just works, not too bloated, all your games are on it.

It's possible to build a better storefront/launcher, but for some weird reason, every competing one except GoG fails point #2 or point #3.

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

#244

Post by squeaky-clean » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 1:50 AM UTC

weaksauce wrote: post #227

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…

What's funny is the original CS:GO gui was built using flash.

For anyone interested, they used Scaleform which is a middleware a lot of games would use to have flash-based UI. It's technically a discontinued product but even Hitman 3 last year used it.

As crappy as Flash is for security, it was such a good tool for interactive animations.

Here's a list of games that used Scaleform, though it often isn't used as the only UI system. Sometimes it's just main menus or world-space UI elements. Found in a quick Google so I can't guarantee it's totally accurate, but I know many on here are correct.

https://list.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_games_using_Scaleform

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

#245

Post by alxexperience » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 1:54 AM UTC

philistine wrote: post #240

AussieWog93 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

Can you say more about the hardcoded fix for Sim City? This sounds fascinating.

EDIT: Was rushing, but updated with the exact quote here so people don't need to go digging :)

I believe this is the story OP mentioned [1].

> Windows 95? No problem. Nice new 32 bit API, but it still ran old 16 bit software perfectly. Microsoft obsessed about this, spending a big chunk of change testing every old program they could find with Windows 95. Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here’s the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away. That’s the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii...

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

#246

Post by philistine » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 2:01 AM UTC

paulryanrogers wrote: post #219

indymike wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there a technical reason why Steam is a such a force in the space? \ I'm not much of a gamer - but my five kids are, and I can see the difference. It starts with being multiplatform. Buy once, run on PC, Mac, Linux. Steam's promise isn't cheap subscriptions, or trendy titles. I can buy games with confidence and know they will run - even if school requires a Mac next year or the only machine around is Dad's Linux…

> I can buy games with confidence and know they will run - even if school requires a Mac next year or the only machine around is Dad's Linux laptop. This hasn't been my experience. Plenty of Steam games have fallen by the wayside as operating systems evolve. GOG is slipping in this regard as well, but began as a way to buy and run older games. It also provides some nice pressure for Steam and its publishers to compet…

> Then there is Mac dropping 32 bit support, to which Steam seems to have thrown up their hands.

Steam's copy on a 32-bit title is much better than GOG. It's big, it's in red, it's clear that this title is limited because its 32-bit.

On GOG, you have a small line of text at the bottom of the Mac system requirements. That's way too small a warning (try to find it on this page: https://www.gog.com/game/darwinia)!

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

#247

Post by squeaky-clean » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 2:01 AM UTC

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…

My Steam copy of the original Crysis has the same issue. Not necessarily Steam's fault, but other publishers can always stack their own DRM on top of the Steam DRM. And yep, EA published Crysis.

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

#248

Post by jholman » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 2:01 AM UTC

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…

Technically? I dunno, maybe? It works better than most software, but that's mostly because the bar is so low. But yeah, technically, their launcher is better, sure. Lower-resource-using, cleaner-UI, more effective than any other I've seen.

But the real thing is... I've been a Steam user since I needed to go legit with HL1 to play NS1 on public servers, over 20 years ago. Valve has never screwed me over in that time. Never. They treat me like a valued customer, like they like my business. I mean, not like I'm a VIP. Just like they actually like their users, and want them happy.

I guess the lock-in of my over-600-game library doesn't hurt. But the reason that number keeps climbing (that's an average of 30 games a year!) is because Valve keeps redeeming my trust, better than literally any other business I've dealt with, ever. I've abandoned my accounts with other services because the $20 or $200 of games wasn't worth the hassle of dealing with companies that were obviously actively trying to fuck me short-term and damn the long-term.

Praise be to St Gaben. The crazy part is, I actually mean it.

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

#249

Post by stubish » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 2:04 AM UTC

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…

> 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.

What I find interesting is that Microsoft and/or Bethesda chose to migrate users to Steam rather than the Microsoft Store or Gamepass. It would have been an opportunity to get more eyeballs looking at Gamepass subscriptions, but also would have been less popular. Or maybe all the legacy stuff being migrated is a burden they don't want?

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

#250

Post by usrusr » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 2:05 AM UTC

rkido wrote: post #224

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…

That Steam was a first-mover is basically irrelevant. PC gamers are a particularly demanding audience and they will abandon your product in a heartbeat if a vastly superior one comes along. For instance, TeamSpeak and to a lesser extent Ventrilo and Mumble more or less dominated voice chat for many years. Then Discord came along and those older products became irrelevant practically overnight. Valve uses its 30% cut…

First mover is a strong part of Valve's position: they have almost two decades of not failing their users under their belt, very few other digital content purchase platforms have a similar backlog. iTMS appeared a little earlier, but the rebrandings haven't exactly been helpful in terms of perceived seniority and it didn't really start with a wide audience, because non-pirated access to hl2 was much less of a rarity than non-pirated filling of ipods.

And as long as Valve does not burn that trust (there have been a few hickups in the very first years, but quickly forgotten), their lead can only grow. You can't throw money at the problem of potential customers wondering what the chances are that the service will still be around in five years. I'd even say that throwing money would only increase doubt: the more money invested, the higher the threshold of success required to be considered worthwhile of continuing.