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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

#371

Post by jeffwask »

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…

Epic Game Store was the nail in their coffin. They all wanted to have their own Steam and rake in all the revenue directly but didn't want to invest the time and effort to build a platform like Steam. Valve virtually stopped making games to focus only on Steam. I feel like watching EGS hit the market, the difficult road it is to build a true Steam competitor for them, and how long before it will actually be profitable was a reality check for everyone else. Like using AWS over Bare Metal, somethings are worth paying someone else to do for you.

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

#372

Post by gpderetta »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #40
jcranmer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With "just don't do it" being perhaps the most common solution.

But then people forget that the bugs back then were just as bad as today, you would get crashes literally every 15 minutes, and some were hilariously malicious - Pool of Radiance (late 90's version) would straight up nuke your C:\ drive if you uninstalled it from the non-default location.

to be fair, steam is not above wiping your disk in similar scenarios: https://github.com/valvesoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671

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

#373

Post by gpderetta »

NullPrefix wrote: post #30
Ekaros wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is package manager needed on Linux? Isn't it better to download everything as source code and compile yourself?

My package manager allows me to see the URL to download it and compile it manually. Does Steam/Bethesda/other game launcher allows this?

There are command line tools to download steam packages, yes.

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

#374

Post by gpderetta »

mikepurvis wrote: post #32
mFixman wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is a launcher even needed? Isn't it better to provide downloads and payments from their website rather than paying 25% of transactions to Valve?

The siblings mention some good ones, but another for Steam in particular is the console-like experience available via Big Picture mode. Not only is this a significant aesthetic/ergonomic step up from how you launch software directly from the desktop OS, but it's also able to do some niceties like automatically handling controller mapping— for example, presenting your PlayStation or Switch pad to games as an xinput de…

Also steam link!

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

#375

Post by mmastrac »

seabrookmx wrote: post #307
mmastrac wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't know this - thanks!

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

#376

Post by Bayart »

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 Software is the one that comes to mind. Even with the Zenimax acquisition and Carmack's departure, they don't seem to have lost their engineering chops. Doom 4 and Doom Eternal are known to run incredibly well.

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

#377

Post by Bayart »

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…

> Is there a technical reason why Steam is a such a force in the space?

It just works and doesn't get in the way. In all my time using Steam, I've never had a case when it wasn't maxing out my bandwidth during a download. The only friction I can remember is with Half Life 2, which required you to use Steam to decode the files installed with your physical DVD and that took ages. But that was the first real game ever shipped on the platform. On the dev side, Steam seems pretty easy to integrate.

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

#378

Post by sbarre »

Gigachad wrote: post #148
sbarre wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google would have struggled to get a catalogue for their subscription I think, if only because they had to convince publishers (some that would consider Stadia to be competition) to put in work to get games running on their platform. I wonder if they tried the subscription thing first but then gave up and just went with the buy model as a least-worst choice at a point in the cycle where it was too late to back out of…

The ideal solution would have been charging a fee to use stadia and then just letting people link their steam account in. You still buy the games at full price, Google still gets paid, and you keep the games after they shut down.

Yes, that's exactly GeForce Now's model, but since Stadia uses custom hardware and requires work to port games over (a huge mistake in my mind), it would still not have worked to just bring in Steam.

They should have gone with standard hardware basically.

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

#379

Post by Haegin »

martinald wrote: post #184
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.

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…

Another example of this is Dan Abramov's post from 2018 about things he doesn't know - https://overreacted.io/things-i-dont-know-as-of-2018/

As a very well known figure in the React community, the creator of Redux and currently working for Facebook on the React core team, he says people often think he's an expert in everything.

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

#380

Post by DanHulton »

mLuby wrote: post #292
awill wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I choose to use Steam because it's good. If you have an iPhone, you don't choose the AppStore. You're stuck with it.

If I want to play a game that's only sold via Steam, I have no choice but to use Steam. It's less bad than the App Store since game devs technically have a choice, but in effect it's often the same.

Oh yeah, from the consumer's point of view, fair. I'm talking about why _developers_ choose Steam. Valve makes it worthwhile for developers to fork out that 30%. Consumers, ultimately, have to go where the game is.
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