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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

#271

Post by LegitShady »

dspillett wrote: post #220
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.

* companies that can squeeze all possible computational abilities … to show amazing graphics with complex logic … can't make a simple GUI. The wage slaves they've got working on the store and launcher front-ends are probably not the same highly talented designers and others that they have working 80 hours trying to panel-beat a game into a shape that they can get out of the door without too many major patches being n…

>without too many major patches being needed in the days following release.

this is bathesda. There won't be many patches, but not because its bug free, but because its broken and will remain that way. The community will patch it, right?

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

#272

Post by shp0ngle »

usrusr wrote: post #250
rkido wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wasn't battle.net the first mover? I think it's way older than Steam. But I am not sure now

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

#273

Post by Torifyme12 »

1_player wrote: post #197
Aeolun wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> haven't tried to use any very dark patterns to make more money They don’t really have to. They’re still private right? What are they going to do with even more money?

They don't need dark patterns, they're already making a boatload of money indeed. If the trend continues, that means more paid consultants working on open source Linux desktop libraries [1]. Win-win in my book. It actually feels good that the 30% cut Steam takes out of my purchases partly goes to improve my Linux desktop experience. Better for me as a user than if they were taking a smaller cut and focusing on Window…

For all that the Linux community tried, and god did we try, we didn't make real gaming on Linux progress until Valve started throwing developers are the projects. You can easily attribute real gaming (I love free civ as much as the next person, but it's not the same) coming to Linux Desktops.

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

#274

Post by nameisname »

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…

There are a million ways to distribute an APK so I'm not sure where that parallel came from. I'm anti steam until they add decent support. I've dealt with marketplace issues too many times.

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

#275

Post by LegitShady »

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.

hasn't bethesda been limping "the creation engine" which is really gamebryo along for the last 10 years? They are doing technical things, they're just doing them poorly.

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

#276

Post by remexre »

ralusek wrote: post #242
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The incredible moddability of their RPGs, at least, is in large part to the flexibility of their engine. How many other games have active modding communities 12 years after launch as large as New Vegas'?

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

#277

Post by dundarious »

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…

Modern CPUs are extremely capable superscalar processors. In order to properly feed them, you must design with SIMD in mind. Even then, you can almost never rely on compiler auto-vectorization, and you must use intrinsics yourself. This is necessary even for such simple things as automatically opening doors when you move near them. In other words, many many things that are never even done on the GPU.

Of course, after release, the biggest improvements come from outside the game dev team. The point is not to forget all the improvements very carefully and skillfully baked in before release, just because consumers don't see the delta.

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

#278

Post by judge2020 »

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..

The issue with Epic is the pure lack of features (user profiles, reviews[^1], community forums) , and no Mac/Linux support.

^1: I doubt reviews are ever coming since it would mean bad games would get fewer sales; Imagine how many more sales Cyberpunk 2077 has gotten on the Epic store as no potential buyer sees the negative reviews for the game.

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

#279

Post by judge2020 »

nameisname wrote: post #274
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…

There are a million ways to distribute an APK so I'm not sure where that parallel came from. I'm anti steam until they add decent support. I've dealt with marketplace issues too many times.

Marketplace is the one area where support is a negative; they can't be returning items to people because of accidental purchases, upsetting the seller which is likely just another regular gamer/steam user.

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

#280

Post by judge2020 »

Hjfrf wrote: post #187
dzqhz wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you can conveniently buy, download and update certain programs.

Those could be a package manager and a web page. Microsoft did this to themselves by not having a standard package manager installed by default.

The Microsoft Store on Windows exists. They just aren't going to start letting you download full games without paying, so the Store still ends up mediating licensing, which publishers aren't too keen on.

But the Microsoft Store is pretty bad; ie. I still cannot install games to my second ntfs hard drive due to some weird error, so I don't use it.

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