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Major P2P issues in Israel and possibly other Middle East countries
141–150 of 157 posts
Re: Major P2P issues in Israel and possibly other Middle East countries
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why aren't the customers going to Epic Game Store? It's the PC, after all. It's explicitly not a walled garden
EGS has yet to reach the feaure parity of Steam from 15 years ago.
As a user of both EGS and Steam, the one thing that EGS doesn't have that Steam does is multi-threaded downloading. Steam can saturate any connection I've thrown at it, whereas EGS gets a few-hundred mbit/s and saturates a single CPU while doing it.
Perhaps game devs get a whole bunch of "gee whiz" features from the Steam Platform that Epic Games doesn't provide, but I -personally- couldn't care less about those.
Re: Major P2P issues in Israel and possibly other Middle East countries
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd question the idea that they treat developers poorly. Epic Games Store exists and Famously beats Steam (and others) over the head by charging only a 12% fee Hell, they even buy timed exclusive access to certain games And yet. Steam persists
Having worked in the games industry for long time, everyone is constantly trying in vain to escape the 30% tax.
It makes a lot of sense for businesses to seek to reduce their costs wherever they can. But, from what I've heard about brick and mortar distribution, you used to pay quite a bit more and get a lot less than what Steam gives you.
From what I can tell, that 30% cut gets you -for the rest of forever-
* distribution for both the current version of the game and some number of older versions you choose to make available [0]
* a place in their searchable games index [1]
* "cloud" storage for your players' savegames
* basic forum and blog hosting for discussion of and news about your game
From what I could tell as someone who used to buy games in retail stores, in a bricks and mortar distribution unless you were -like- the Starcraft/Diablo/Warcraft boxed set, you got like maybe a half year of time on the shelf. I've heard folks say that you had to pay a 50->80% cut for that.
[0] Valve will even distribute games that don't work anymore. This is both good and bad, but Steam's no-hassles refund policy combined the existence of unofficial patches that make games work on current versions of Windows make me generally fine with charging for and distributing games that no longer work as-is.
[1] ...at least until the wrong horde of pearl-clutching busybodies demand that credit card companies require your game be erased from the commercial world because it is art that discusses those busybodies' bugbear du jour
Re: Major P2P issues in Israel and possibly other Middle East countries
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
I lack an informed opinion on the matter but I have to wonder what you think the one thing has to do with the other? Developers have very little choice but to go where the customers are.
Why aren't the customers going to Epic Game Store? It's the PC, after all. It's explicitly not a walled garden
I go to EGS once a week or so just to see which free game is on offer, and the experience is only barely tolerable.
If you're giving away free games and can barely manage to attract people to your storefront, you might be doing something wrong.
In their defense I suppose, most other competitors weren't much better. I don't think anyone misses Origin, and you'd have to pay me to spend any amount of time on Ubisoft's storefront. Only GOG comes close, and they earn a lot of good will in other ways.
Re: Major P2P issues in Israel and possibly other Middle East countries
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
EGS has yet to reach the feaure parity of Steam from 15 years ago.
As a user of both EGS and Steam, the one thing that EGS doesn't have that Steam does is multi-threaded downloading. Steam can saturate any connection I've thrown at it, whereas EGS gets a few-hundred mbit/s and saturates a single CPU while doing it. Perhaps game devs get a whole bunch of "gee whiz" features from the Steam Platform that Epic Games doesn't provide, but I -personally- couldn't care less about those.
You don't need multiple threads to saturate a gigabit connection. Even many embedded SoCs can do it.
That said, Steam has a rather absurd CDN.
Re: Major P2P issues in Israel and possibly other Middle East countries
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a user of both EGS and Steam, the one thing that EGS doesn't have that Steam does is multi-threaded downloading. Steam can saturate any connection I've thrown at it, whereas EGS gets a few-hundred mbit/s and saturates a single CPU while doing it. Perhaps game devs get a whole bunch of "gee whiz" features from the Steam Platform that Epic Games doesn't provide, but I -personally- couldn't care less about those.
You don't need multiple threads to saturate a gigabit connection. Even many embedded SoCs can do it. That said, Steam has a rather absurd CDN.
> You don't need multiple threads to saturate a gigabit connection. Even many embedded SoCs can do it.
What I've observed is
* when Steam downloads are in progress, between four and nine logical CPUs worth of processing power on my 32-way Threadripper are being used and zero logical CPUs are running at 100%
* when EGS downloads are in progress, exactly one logical CPU on that Threadripper is pegged at 100%
It's true that you can do gigabit downloads without having a multithreaded downloader. [0] But it seems to be true that the two biggest PC-game-store clients absolutely cannot... for whatever reason. Given the prevalence of gaming machines that have CPUs with four or more logical CPUs, I expect it's not really worth the effort to make whatever Steam is doing single-threaded, or whatever single-threaded thing EGS is doing fast enough to saturate a 1gbit+ download.
[0] One widely-deployed example would be SSH/SCP.
Re: Major P2P issues in Israel and possibly other Middle East countries
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would be the “Linus Sebastian misconception”
Ok, but I can't possibly be the only one who has no idea who that is, let alone what misconceptions they have.
Re: Major P2P issues in Israel and possibly other Middle East countries
#148Paging Fletcher Dunn
Whats he going to do? Stop the Israel conflict?
Re: Major P2P issues in Israel and possibly other Middle East countries
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
What lets you host Monkeyball like that. Are you going to port Xonotic to WASM?
Starting a sustainable steam competitor with piracy sure seems like a great idea!
It's how Spotify started. And CrunchyRoll. And slightly metaphorically Uber. And in a way Netflix. Turns out you can't scale if you never offer anything of value to customers and therefore never get customers.
Re: Major P2P issues in Israel and possibly other Middle East countries
#150I think what we’re seeing here isnt Valve messing up but rather the middle east conflict expanded to cyberspace and spilling over to impact civilians. Look at the timing and affected countries. China isnt also exactly known for free internet. WebRTC works as fallback. WebRTC is encrypted and cant be used for much else. STUN in the otherhand is unencrypted and the protocol itself can be used for DDoS reflection/amplif…
I developed WireGuard-like P2P VPN on WebRTC and performance was great 300Mbps+
I think we can align on WebRTC for realtime P2P gaming and enterprise networking and more, instead of IPs base solution as end-users will not need to figure out firewall issues and IPv4/IPv6 differents