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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

#321

Post by p1necone »

ziml77 wrote: post #260
KiranRao0 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The reason that you see drivers release with specific games mentioned is exactly because of this. And also why the driver installer packages are so large. What I can't say is how much of a difference the GPU manufacturers work makes on average. I would have to assume there's a reasonable bump otherwise it wouldn't be worth it.

You get an absolutely massive performance boost by using newer drivers on Halo Infinite. I don't know exactly why, but it never goes above about 36 fps on low settings on older (AMD, 6800xt) drivers, but hits smooth 80+ at 4k on high with the drivers that mention Halo Infinite in the patch notes.

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

#322

Post by adam_arthur »

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…

The truth is nobody really made a good effort to compete with them early on. Epic seems to be the only one making a serious effort at this point.

Also services like steam are naturally sticky/monopolistic because there's a network effect with the games. Consumers don't want to have multiple services that do the same thing, so if you have a handful of games on steam, may as well use it for all.

There really needs to be protocols for ownership etc, such that the UI is decoupled from the ownership aspect. otherwise network effect makes it monopoly-esque. It's a principle that promotes greater competition across many types of businesses

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

#323

Post by usrusr »

LegitShady wrote: post #284
shp0ngle wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

but it wasn't a general marketplace for games.

To be fair Steam wasn't either, in the beginning, which also ruins my argument wrt the iTMS quite a bit: even the Orange Box was still a retail product to most (it's even in the name!) that just happened to be consumed through Steam. Not much different from how iPod users had to use the client app for CDs bought in retail (or far more likely: mp3 from the Napster substitute du jour)

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

#324

Post by maven29 »

vgb2k18 wrote: post #311
martinald wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Is that really surprising? >I was actually amazed... You countered your own argument there.

Nothing wrong with changing your mind in light of new evidence. While you might be aware of the effect, you can still easily underestimate its impact.

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

#325

Post by Ekaros »

tayo42 wrote: post #228
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...

That's 10 million dollars, that pays for a team of 10 people for 4 years.

10 people in 4 years don't sound like a lot to setup and run support, distribution, payment integrations for let's say 100+ countries. Which many having unique payment providers.

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

#326

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

> I wonder whether the experiment didn't work, or if it worked, but now the goals have changed again?

I think Steam has a big first mover advantage, like a user's default browser or text editor, always on or starting up, while the others were an extra step that users only did when they had to. The recurring sales and frequently updated offerings of games and updates on Steam's home page is also a plus; Origin was static, Epic is minimalistic, Steam is more of a proper website with a load of different angles - sales, recommended games, new / early access games, updates, and jazzy graphics if they have a big sale on. The other launchers are purely functional.

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

#327

Post by maccolgan »

stingraycharles wrote: post #24
TillE wrote: post #5

You can theoretically solve a lot of problems with crappy, multitudinous game stores - easier payments, lighter software. But the real question is: do I trust that I'll be able to continue downloading my purchases for the foreseeable future? I trust that Steam will be around for a very long time. I can download DRM-free installers from GOG. Everyone else? I don't know, I have much less confidence.

I see this as is something that legislation could fix: digital licenses should be transferable between digital stores. If I buy a game in store X, and it’s available on store/platform Y, I should be able to play it on both. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s the case. I recently bought a Nintendo Switch, and although I’m happy overall, some games have very heavy limits built in (think: max number of units in games),…

As bad as the HN echochamber is, NFTs.

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

#328

Post by baud147258 »

eulers_secret wrote: post #297
judge2020 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The other issue is Epic's buying exclusivity for certain titles on PC - even after they were announced as available on other online stores. These bribes, especially since Epic wasn't involved during development, upset a lot of folks.

it's not (wasn't? I don't know if they still do it) as much as making games exclusives to Epic as making sure they aren't released on Steam; I'm pretty sure Epic's head honcho said something to that effect and a few games which had deals with Epic also released on the Microsoft store

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

#329

Post by maccolgan »

mey wrote: post #85
legitster wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something blockchain would actually be very good at solving. Download a legal copy of the game from anywhere. No DRM, but your license key gets checked against the blockchain.

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.

>CDN for commercial software

What does that have to do with IPFS? IPFS doesn't really care what's on top of it.

All of the prospective "stores" can host their own IPFS nodes and contribute to the bandwidth availability, just like how a CDN works.

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

#330

Post by tyfon »

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…

It also "Just works" in linux. None of the other launchers do that :)
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