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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

#301

Post by mburns »

smoldesu wrote: post #281
nanidin wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ironically, that game was written by Panic, the same studio thats perfectly contented with paying Apple 30% of their revenue on their other apps...

It was developed by House House, Panic was the publisher.

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

#302

Post by shagie »

simion314 wrote: post #75
charcircuit wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>to provide downloads There are 2 problems with this. 1. You can't downloaded patches of game updates (with good ux). You would need to downloaded the entire game for every update which is bad. 2. You can't install the game to the system without a program. >and payments from their website Steam can provide less friction to make a payment since someone likely already has payment information attached to their account.…

>1. You can't downloaded patches of game updates And with Steam(at this moment) there is no way to tell it to "please don't update this game and let me play this version". You can disable the automatic updates but you won't be able to run a game from the launcher if you are not uptodate because the Play button is changed to Update.

Some games (not all) allow you to select a beta that is an older version of the game. https://imgur.com/a/ieZdqxc

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

#303

Post by blevin »

smoldesu wrote: post #281
nanidin wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ironically, that game was written by Panic, the same studio thats perfectly contented with paying Apple 30% of their revenue on their other apps...

Developed by House House, published by Panic

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

#304

Post by meibo »

belval wrote: post #18
mastax wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has been happy-ish to have their games on Steam for a while now. They probably would've gone all-in on the Xbox store if the windows store (backend) wasn't so shitty.

The Xbox app is a masterclass in how not to design a user interface, it is clunky, the menus don't go anywhere, they mixed terminology (some places have "Add friend" others have "Follow friend"), users with multiple screens will find their game launching on the non-principal one, language is tied to the OS so if you want your games in English but your Windows is in French you have to change the OS-level language. I d…

It's just so bad. When games install and you can actually play, which is a miracle, adding friends is like navigating a maze. I think we spent 20 minutes last time trying to get each other to show up and finding what you have to press/accept to actually befriend someone.

Not to mention that it basically kills modding if you don't also want to crack the game yourself/get a pre-cracked version from somewhere.

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

#305

Post by rkido »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #235
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…

Steam game libraries routinely become worth hundreds or thousands of dollars as you spend more money to acquire digital goods. You can't move those to a different account, sell the entire account safely, or activate the titles you already own on a new platform. Nobody would spend all that money on repurchasing all their games just because the EA launcher is more shiny. The lock-in cost is real and literal. It's far e…

Why would users need to re-purchase everything just to adopt a different store launcher as their primary platform? GOG Galaxy for instance interfaces with most existing stores and friend networks. As long as you're buying games on PC, you're not really locked into much of anything.

That said, buying certain games can lock you into using Windows. So there's that. But it's far better than buying games on modern consoles, which force you to use some special-snowflake hardware just to access the game you bought.

It's impossible to completely prevent all classes of lock-in, but it can be minimized. I would argue that my personal lock-in is minimized, across the axes I care about, by buying everything from Steam and GOG. No hard Windows dependency, no silly hardware dependency, and I'll almost certainly still have access to my games in 40 years.

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

#306

Post by seabrookmx »

oAlbe wrote: post #231
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.

> There are a couple of highly technical, highly capable game studios. Which ones are those?

id

Epic

Valve

Guerilla Games

(IMO)

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

#307

Post by seabrookmx »

mmastrac wrote: post #252
squeaky-clean wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 U…

When I was doing work for Nickelodeon around the iPad 1 days, we just could not get around the fact that flash was an amazing tool for animation and anything else we used would have tradeoffs. Tech-wise, a poor product. As a tool for design-minded people? Unmatched.

Flash "for animations" still exists. It was rebranded Adobe Animate (presumably just to avoid the negative branding).

It's still used heavily for vector animations to my knowledge.

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

#308

Post by SXX »

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.

There is huge difference. Google makes it's harder and more user-hostile to install APKs from 3rd-party sources. They also create vendor lock-in ecosystem where half of Android features are only available when using Google Play Services that might not work unless you use Google Play.

On other hand Steam is just a software that works across multiple OS.

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

#309

Post by SXX »

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…

Totally agree with one exception.

"They have all the features" isn't the case for game developers. Steam backend for developers and statistics is still pretty terrible.

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