Metro Exodus will be Epic Store Exclusive, Steam Preorders will still be honored
464 replies, posted
MANY COMPLAINTS CENTRE AROUND A DISDAIN FOR EXCLUSIVITY, BUT THAT’S WHAT WE NEED IF WE WANT THE PC MARKET TO DEVELOP
This is such fucking bullshit. The PC market has known an absolutely incredible growth these last few years thanks to Steam in the most part, and to healthy competitors/partners like Humble Bundle, GOG and Origin. Epic are working against it and are bribing every media outlet to try to sway the public opinion to their side. Fuck them.
I only ever got Origin for the Mass Effect and Sims/Sim City games, but it's actually such a good service. As you said, all they need is to draw in more devs, because they honestly have the better client imo
Give'em an inch they'll take a mile. It starts with a handful of games and then it's the norm. It's the same way we got saddled with loot boxes and micro-transactions, people kept accepting more and more and then oh look we're drowning in crap. "How could this have happened!?!?"
You have gas station A and gas station B, Both act the same but B is slightly worse with customer service. Gas station B has extra cash so they buy all the diesel preventing A from selling it. Now B can charge whatever they want because they are the only ones who can sell said product. This is by definition anti competitive since you are eliminating the competition by making your service the only way to obtain the exclusive product.
TB is rolling in his grave.
I don't normally rate dumb but this post is just disingenuous. I'm hostile towards this because the idea of it becoming standard practice in the industry is fucking awful.
name a single game that was pulled from storefronts to change to steampowered less than a month before release, preorders already made en masse. Bonus points if Steam was directly involved in making it happen.
you can't. I can't even think of a game that uses steam drm exclusively that isn't sold on a plethora of other storefronts that valve didn't make on their own, and even the ones they did have been on those sites, just not being sold on those sites anymore due to lack of demand
I must say it's getting quite tiresome hearing the same bad defenses of this crap over and over.
Even worse all I've ever done is play Fortnite STW on their shit and i get an email saying they locked me down because someone's broken into my epic games account at least every week
I've heard I'm not the only one by a pretty sizable sample. Whoever's doing it can have it epic
The difference is that Steam didn't force that on them. They chose to just release on Steam.
how much did Epic pay you because I want some of that too.
maybe you should actually read the thread to see why people are angry instead of writing bullshit like these
Because as far as I am aware, Steam doesn't pay developers ridiculous amounts of money to make stuff exclusive to their platform. And yeah I have an investment in Steam but I also think it's a piece of garbage that absolutely needs a competitor.
However Epic isn't providing that here. Rather than attracting a customer base through providing a better service, they're just throwing money at developers in an effort to force people to use their incomplete platform. This sets the precedent that you don't NEED to provide better service to get customers, just the games people want.
And in my opinion that's a dark and shit filled alley for companies to go down.
Not the developer, publisher.
And if you dump a truckload of money infront of someone like koch they'd do whatever you say even if it fucks over both their developers, and the company they're a subsidiary of
Nintendo's exclusivity is based on hardware differences though, which while still bad, is more justifiable and a whole other debate. No such barrier exists on PC, it's 100% artificial.
As to indirectly providing service, that's pure speculation and doesn't justify the fact that in this present moment, it is the very definition of an anti-competitive move. You cannot justify this action based on what they MIGHT do, if they choose to withhold their plans that may or may not exist from the public, the consequences are 100% on them.
And as long as Fortnite and exclusives provide a steady revenue stream, I guarantee you, they WILL continue to do this.
the difference is you can release your shit on Steam as well as any other service that you like, even at a lower price ala uPlay. Steam doesn't block publisher from doing so, just that most publisher decide to release it on Steam only because Steam got the better infrastructure for many things.
However, in Metro Exodus's case, it is clear that they signed a deal with Epic that prevent them from releasing the game on Steam (at least for a year), which is the complete opposite of what Steam does and that's what I call anti-competitive. It can't be denied that they're stopped from releasing it on Steam because they literally pulled the game down from steam and changed the date on other platforms, even changing the content of physical copies after people have ordered it. It's scummy practice that hurt the consumer and the industry.
Yeah, obviously. But Steam gained a monopoly simply by being the first one in the race, as far as I know Valve has never really used exclusivity deals or underhanded tactics to maintain their monopoly. Companies just went with them because they were the best place to get coverage.
It seems difficult to challenge Steam, yeah, but it's not impossible. Steam as a platform, isn't good. It's clunky, outdated, suffers frequent downtime, the in-game interface is buggy and awful, it suffers from Valve building on top of old features and thus becomes difficult to navigate, etc... the list goes on. The point is, all you need to do is provide a basic set of services superior to these and build up a decent library and people WILL move over in time.
Let's also remember that back in 2004 the concept of online digital store didn't exist back then and Valve were the first who successfully implemented that.
It did absolutely suck when Valve did it with Half-Life 2 but it was also Valve's product so it's slightly more understandable. This, is poaching 3rd party products from competitors which have no mechanical connection to the client and is 100% just to deny a product to a store.
Whether you agree exclusive dealing is a bad thing or not, it's just your opinion at that point. The fact is, it denies business and consumer opportunities.
Because if you want to legally buy and play the game on PC you're being forced to install another platform that offers absolutely nothing over Steam. Tell me what Epics store offers over steam for the consumer? Fucking nothing, the only thing they got over Steam is the better revenue split for devs and nothing else.
Also it's a shitty practice paying someone enough money for exclusivity rights after the thing has been on sale elsewhere for a while. Instead of having healthy competition and improving their service to make people want to use it, they're just gonna force people. On top of that it's just limiting peoples options.
Also a majority stake in Epic is from Tencent (40%), a humongous tech company in China, so have fun with whatever information it collects being given to the chinks (like we need more of that)
except this is a publisher decision which doesn't really benefits the developer/maker
It was shit, but it was 14 years ago and no actual competitor to Valve existed so it was impossible to be anti-competitive, which is my main point.
When developers make stuff exclusive to their own platform it fucking sucks, but there's little we can do about it. This, on the other hand is breaching a space untouched, making 3rd party titles exclusive to platforms which IMO is going a step too far. Exclusivity among a company's own products already sucks, so why should we tolerate extending that to 3rd parties?
And yes, denying ownership of a product on a certain platform is anti-consumer, it doesn't matter how much the price drops. I should have the right to choose whether I'd prefer to buy something on Steam or the Epic store based on my personal preference. This is a company choosing for me in the name of their personal profit, it is by definition anti-competitive and anti-consumer.
It doesn't matter whether I can still get the game, it's the fact that they blatantly advertised it on another platform and are now denying me the opportunity to use that platform. It is extremely legally and morally ambiguous.
If you have a problem with what is seen as anti-consumer and anti-competitive, take it up with the courts.
https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/online-shopping/shopping-online
It is quite literally my right as an Australian citizen.
God damn where is the Zing rating when you need it?
Because anti-competitive habits go hand in hand with consumer rights, it's a pretty basic concept.
I've yet to see a convincing argument that this benefits consumers in any meaningful way in the long run, nor how this isn't blatantly anti-competitive.
To me it sounds like you're arguing just for the sake of arguing
Well, that's not the case for me. Considering thier information collection policy wasn't GDPR compliant until some people on Reddit pointed it out and this was their refund policy
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/129/d76e64af-cca9-4ca2-9f47-59e5e78c0dd6/Screenshot_20190130-040422.png
until Eurogamer made an article about it and Epic used the excuse "Yeah, we redid the process but our agents didn't know about it". Both of those things changed of course, but the EULA saying Epic has the right to take things posted about the games on the Launcher modifying it to suit their needs, along with taking anything down they see fit, has not. I'm not salty that Epic has basically bullied their way onto the field, because they made it clear the Game Launcher is for the full benefit of developers and publishers, with very small or completely non-existent benefits to the end users, which is what Steam is going for currently.
People complained about Steam back then, but if you compare Half Life 2 to Metro Exodus in this case you can see the clear difference where one funded and developed the game while the other just bought the distribution rights.
As I've said before, company funding/developing games to put on their store doesn't hurt that much since it's actual competition: they're paying for new entries to be developed for the series. As much as I hate exclusivity, they're still helping for new product to be introduced. However, Epic just undercut with the price afterward, which does not benefit the developers nor consumers of the game, just the greedy fuck at the publishing side.
and does all that time living in Russia makes you forget what is consumer rights? or is that not a thing at all there?
Excuse me? He literally just showed that Epic is breaking the law of Australia.
Doesn't matter where they are located, they still have to adhere to Laws of Countries they are selling to.
Also that epic zinger at the end there, are you serious?
What does that have to do with anything?
I'm biting the bait here I get that, but you clearly are saying that just as a jab.
Also for the record our Classification Board isn't as Censorship happy as it used to be, the amount of Censorship in Games in Australia has gone way down over the last 2 years.
If you didn't add that jab, I wouldn't have come here to school you about this because you are already doing quite well looking stupid.
The reason why Australia had so much Censorship during the first few years after R18+ was introduced, wasn't because of our Culture and Values, it was because these guys didn't know HOW to implement it in such a way that would justify the R18+ rating, and make it actually useful.
So they just became trigger happy and falsely rated games, and censored them for the first few years.
There has been so many games that would have been censored/refused Classification, that came out over the last few years, that would have been if it came out during the early life cycle of the R18+ rating board.
I'm getting heavily offtopic so I'm gonna go back to your "No logical Argument".
We have the fundamental right to choose where we get our shit from, no matter if the company is situated in America, Japan, China or wherever, we still have the right because of our Laws.
Valve doesn't have an office in Australia, but the way they treated refunds directly interfered with our consumer rights, that they were taken to court over it.
Epic may be Consumer friendly in other Countries despite pulling this shitty move (and I know they aren't Consumer Friendly in other countries because this move is anti-consumer), but in Australia, where they are SELLING Games to, is NOT Consumer Friendly.
The only time Exclusivity works is if it's the Platform Creators own Products.
Nintendo with their Games, Valve with their games, EA with theirs, so on so forth.
Epic has gone out of their way to buy the exclusivity rights, fucking over people who were wanting to buy the game on Steam, and fucking over Steam by clearly not giving them enough warning based on the Message they put on the Metro page.
The only time I can say that this would be fine is if the Epic Client was actually decent, they had regional pricing, and they gave people PLENTY of time before they actually pulled it off Steam and not weeks before release.
I'd just like to say POTENTIALLY violating Australian law.
I am admittedly not a law expert but at the very least they're treading a thin line.
I wouldn't be surprised if they are considering how strict they are.
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