The Epic Brutality Of Unchecked Capitalism (Jimquisition) - Videos for the 97.4%

Epic isn't giving developers money to make games. Epic is paying for the exclusive rights to sell games which have already been made. Sony is publishing Kojima's game, Epic doesn't publish games for anyone else.

The fuck does that have to do with anything? They were good because Kojima gave a shit about the final product. Exclusives are flat out anti-consumer, and worse yet in the case of the EGS, anti-competitive.

Platform exclusivity is another kettle of fish though. You have to program shit to work on a different operating system, using a different controller and different hardware. Additionally there's the creation of a physical product in disk form (Streaming has made this less of an issue). Meanwhile on steam or epic it's just how you launch the game. Epic also isn't funding development of new games like Sony does. Kojima is being funded to make new games while Epic just gives a sweet cut of revenue after the game is already made.

The name is as in "a response to people go 'waa EGS exclusives waa have to use another launcher waa' ". As in people crying about how it's "just another launcher why you guys so salty."

i doubt that money is just going to vanish into thin air like, I get that people don't like the epic store. I get that a game you want being on a platform you don't like is inconvenient. But this is just the kinda shit creators have to do to stay above water. I care more about a team of people making good stuff not being homeless than I do about people's convenience.

But the ultimate goal of Epic being a seeming good guy to developers is to muscle Steam out. If they ever gained control of the PC market like Steam had, you bet your ass the good times would be over for everyone involved.

You're right, its going to vanish into their fucking pockets because they straight up said even if literally every single backer refunded they'd still be in the black and have made a profit. No, its not about inconvenience, thats not the whole fuckin picture here, my man. Origin got shat on, but people accepted it. Uplay got shat on, but people ignore it. This CONTINUES to be shit on because of how blatantly, flagrantly, appallingly anti-consumer it is. Tim Sweeny fucking straight up said that consumers dont matter. I dont care about deez poe wittle multi-million dollar devs, i'm the consumer, i'm the one buying the product, that aint my damn problem. Steam isnt hurting these devs in any way, its just pure greed.

They were good because he and his team had the both the skill and the funding required to create good stuff. They got funding from an exclusivity deal. This discussion just seems totally detached from the financial reality of running a development studio. Studios fold all the time. This isn't some wild fantasy, it's a common occurrence.

I dont care.

So? Epic isn't providing funding for future development. Phoenix Point was on track for completion.

Yeah, you're right. Without competition, epic would squeeze every last dollar possible out of the EGS. The same way that, if they could get away with it, Valve would monetize every game like Artifact. That's the goal of a company. To squeeze money out of people. No corporation is ever going to be anyone's friend.

Funny how this wasn't a massive issue until Epic started swinging their dicks around in December. Now suddenly every indie is a starving artist who needs a patron to keep them alive. Never mind the thousands of people who already gave Phoenix Point their money, more than the developers had originally said they required. Also funny how this is always "But the poor indies need the money" when Epic has primarily been targeting AAA games like Metro Exodus, The Division 2, and Borderlands 3.

is the idea that the money went directly into julian gollop's pocket and not into funding the continued operation of the company?

No, they got funded already. These were projects that had already had their development funded. Gearbox doesn't need the funding, Obsidian didn't need the funding. Snapshot Games didn't need the funding. They did it out if greed.

But Randy Pitchford is just a poor little indie dev. Didnt you hear he lost 3 million dollars recently? He needs every cent you can give him.

And they made it as difficult as possible to get a refund, they also limited the date you could apply for a refund. If you've been out of the loop and found out about it today you're shit out of luck.

Actually they fucked about with that and it took threats of legal action to make that happen properly. They were instead trying to say they couldn't do it, which was proven to be a lie, and that it had to be dealt with by giving your bank information to a third party that was not part of the original transaction.

When one of his posts defending the action was to get a house for his kids and wife, yeah that doesn't come off well at all.

Games are incredibly inconsistently profitable, just like most entertainment. You need as much money as you can get. Telltale folded how long ago, exactly? Even relatively large companies can go under if they go too long without a big hit. This isn't a new issue. This is how development has always been.

Yeah and they also said if literally everyone refunded they'd still have made a profit because of Epics bribery. That never fucking happens. Its bribe money, thats all it is. Its bribe money to keep it off every other platform, dont you pretend it isnt. Yeah well guess what we're not developers so why should any of us care.

having stable income does make it a lot easier to get financing for large purchases that doesn't imply that he's now paying himself significantly more than he did before, or that if he is that increase in pay wasn't shared with the rest of the games' staff

Aside from the fact they are of the pioneers of that technology, and that their developer resources are only growing as they just recently announced. Hell, the founder and head of Gears for Breakfast, developers of Hat in Time, just said that the only reason they can provide 50 player multiplayer support for Hat in Time is because of Valve's new networking backend, which Valve worked with them on directly to help implement.

Name fucking one time a game, after being completed or near completion, suddenly got like 10 million in exclusive bribe money and went "oh lets just tack on like 2 more hours to the game". ONE. Name ONE game.

im a guy who buys videogames sometimes and also doesn't get mad at people who're highly at risk of unemployment trying to ensure their future financial stability

Telltale went under because they tried to make too many games in too short a timespan. The quality of their games plummeted and so did their reputation. No one wants to buy a buggy piece of shit that doesn't run well or look good, a game with a story which touts 'your choices matter' when they blatantly do not. If Telltale had focused on making one or maybe two games at a time, or spent some time learning to use an engine that wasn't a trash fire (like Unreal, that's a great engine (oh hey look, it's made by Epic)) they would have done well. Game studios aren't inherently in a constant state of being next to financial ruin. The problem is a lot of game companies are run by people who are fucking terrible at business. There are plenty of smaller and mid sized developers who have been around for decades without a constant fear of collapse because they know how to budget themselves.

can you not think of any games that ended up having to cut a bunch of content that they would've been able to implement with another year of development cause I mean I still cry when I think about what KOTOR 2 could've been

Yet again, i dont fucking care.

Okay, so again, I don't give a dick about devs when my rights are on the line as a CONSUMER. Honestly; the sooner that devs get unionized and we stop idolizing them the better. I've been ripped off, lied too, scammed and also had my time wasted in one go with Phoenix Point. The game was gaining on feature complete and was on track for release. Then suddenly a delay; a fucking engine switch AND STORE EXCLUSIVITY. I'm sorry but how in the fuck am I supposed to look at this? Desperate devs? Really?

There's an element of like, reverse survivor's bias here. Yeah, Telltale was really shittily ran and made a lot of mistakes, but a lot of companies are shittily ran and make a lot of mistakes and still end up making a shitload of money. It's like when some shitty movie comes out and tanks, it's easy to go "well of course this failed, it's trash". But then some other pile of trash will come out and make a billion dollars. Things are a lot less deterministic than you'd think.

It actually sorta fucking is how that works. They were funded and going to release on Steam and GoG, as they specifically stated when they were crowdfunded. There is zero indication of the epic money going in to any further development for starters, and second the release of the game is where future funding comes from. Instead the used crowdfunding as risk free investment, then developed a product and sold it to an uninvolved party, and screwed over the crowdfunders that backed them to begin with.