351–360 of 584 posts
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The point is that Proton puts them in a win win position. If Windows stays popular, they're fine. If Windows tanks, they're fine.
If Windows tanks their fountain runs dry.
Lots of new/recent native MacOS releases nowadays: https://store.steampowered.com/macos
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I think they're arguing that it should not be up to the companies being nice. Yeah, Epic's layoffs were nice, but a lot of companies give shit or no severance at all. I've been laid off and I only get paid until the end of the week, and for healthcare the only thing I have access to is overpriced COBRA.
Is COBRA your only option? Have you checked your state's insurance marketplace?
I live in NYC, and when I was laid off from a job in 2023. I looked into the COBRA options, and they wanted something like $3500/month, which is a lot of money. I called around around and I was eventually able to do a program through NYC where we got insurance for free. It actually worked great; we were able to get insurance within a week. NYC ain't perfect but every now and then they come through.
If I get laid off or fired, I will likely check this option again.
Often when I see layoffs like this, I can't help but think "Wow that company has so many employees and yet, in practice, does so little". This perhaps a rather uncharitable sentiment, but I can't help but have it. Yes, Unreal Engine keeps getting improved, more Fortnite content gets produced. But there is a general lack of innovation, one that I find personally painful when I look at Epic's recent-ish track record. N…
Nanite? Lumen? Metahuman?
They are bleeding edge when it comes to real-time rendering tech
And that's just rendering, there are a lot of other engine domains
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They aren't losing money on Fortnite, they're losing money on vanity projects like the Epic Game Store where they spend tens of millions of dollars for exclusivity deals with developers, and give away free games to try to poach Steam users with an otherwise inferior product. Unfortunately it is their employees that are paying the price of leadership making it rain with their overflowing coffers they couldn't help but…
Everybody says this. It's so weird. How on earth will epic win without exclusives? It's like launching some Facebook competitor "but you get two profile pictures". Noone would switch. All these geeks singing steam and lamenting competition. Competition bad for me mkay, steam good. /me shakes head
Two anti-consumer products is probably better than one, but I also hate Epic as a company, so I would just prefer for Steam to win. At least I like half-life.
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In my experience, the Epic Games Store downloads faster, installs more efficiently, and launches games faster than Steam. The social features I actually use (i.e., add a friend, join them in a game) work fine. I'm not aware of any features Steam has that EGS lacks that I actually use frequently (Valve's VR, streaming tech, and Proton are great, but I don't use those frequently). It's not just me, many indie game deve…
How is steam a monopoly? People would be excited for EGS just like they are for GoG, except EGS has a track record of anticonsumer behavior. I fear for valve in a post gaben world, and they certainly aren't blameless. They also aren't a monopoly. Hell, steamOS is the opposite of a locked ecosystem.
It has 90% marketshare and has been shown to use its monopoly uncompetitively to force price parity on devs. Textbook definition.
>People would be excited for EGS just like they are for GoG,
People "like" GOG. I woildnt say they are "excited for it". The revenue of GOG these years don't reflect the supposed enthusiasm.
>EGS has a track record of anticonsumer behavior.
Anticonsumer isn't anti competitive. Especially not as a new player in the game. They can't brute force this stuff with money like a trillion dollar company could.
> Hell, steamOS is the opposite of a locked ecosystem.
I'll believe that when they release a full distro with all the feature the Steam Deck enjoys.
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It's still funny to me that they would rather burn 9 figures in cash on these silly deals to try and 'trap' gamers on their platform instead of just... I don't know... making a better platform? The reason nobody competes with Steam is simply the sheer number of integration and platform features that make it easy to buy, play and share games with my friends. It's not that hard, stop trying to 'force' me to use your pl…
Network effects disagree, sadly. You don't get market share from the leader by simply "being better". There's way better netowkrs than Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit out there. But some habits are as harder to break than they were to form.
> "We're spending significantly more than we're making, and we have to make major cuts to keep the company funded," he said. Sorry, HOW?!? How can a company like Epic games with one of the most successful gaming products of the last few decades be losing money with a product that is so mature? Almost every other games developer would love to be in their position on Fortnite but they've somehow turned that into a loss…
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They aren't losing money on Fortnite, they're losing money on vanity projects like the Epic Game Store where they spend tens of millions of dollars for exclusivity deals with developers, and give away free games to try to poach Steam users with an otherwise inferior product. Unfortunately it is their employees that are paying the price of leadership making it rain with their overflowing coffers they couldn't help but…
It's still funny to me that they would rather burn 9 figures in cash on these silly deals to try and 'trap' gamers on their platform instead of just... I don't know... making a better platform? The reason nobody competes with Steam is simply the sheer number of integration and platform features that make it easy to buy, play and share games with my friends. It's not that hard, stop trying to 'force' me to use your pl…
But once I saw the interview with the guy from epic or someone big there, I don't remember and they said the money for developers was from marketing campaigns which makes sense to me. They said that they wanted to make a better experience so the developers themselves would try to help being people to the platform but that never happened.
It seems that the technology behind the epic store is, epically broken, pun intended. I've read somewhere that they tried to decouple chunks of the store and restart but the thing was so poorly done that it would be more expensive than just let it fade away and at some point they had a new epic store 2 created from scratch but to develop it to the end would be too expensive.
As a swe myself, maybe they were trying to scale to steam level before being steam? I don't know.
My last experience trying to use epic was trying to buy a game. But being greeted by a store login, then a loader of a store then a initial store that tried very hard to sell me call of duty and EA stuff. I found whatever I was trying to buy but I couldn't due to some bug in the payment.
And never again. Not for any particular reason. I just didn't spend more time there.
And now, with these layoffs what are they going to do? Are they revoke all the licenses for the games they gave and sold?
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Why would Apple care if WhatsApp has a monopoly? They don’t make money from iMessage
That must be why they're so happy to open up iMessage to Android in the US!
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They aren't losing money on Fortnite, they're losing money on vanity projects like the Epic Game Store where they spend tens of millions of dollars for exclusivity deals with developers, and give away free games to try to poach Steam users with an otherwise inferior product. Unfortunately it is their employees that are paying the price of leadership making it rain with their overflowing coffers they couldn't help but…
> Unfortunately it is their employees that are paying the price of leadership making it rain [...] Epic's employees reaped the gains while it rained in the form of paychecks. While it sucks that people are losing their jobs, those individuals received (much of) the upside of this investment and their jobs never would have existed in the first place had the investment not been made. Their paychecks are not being clawe…
IMO investing in a marketplace was fine, but hemorrhaging money for 7 years on non-performant software + free game bundles is probably not defensible from an executive standpoint.