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Voldenuit
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The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Wed Mar 20, 2019 6:15 pm

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Waco
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Wed Mar 20, 2019 6:59 pm

Yeah, I saw this earlier today. I'm pissed. :(
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bthylafh
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Wed Mar 20, 2019 7:55 pm

On one hand, perkele. On the other hand, I was probably going to wait about that long anyway for the price to go down & bugs to be fixed.
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Thu Mar 21, 2019 6:00 am

Oh, for the... here I was excited for Outer Worlds. So much for that.
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Thu Mar 21, 2019 6:16 am

Oh no, I won't be able to see all the BS review bombing, and get an inventory full of trading cards that I don't care about. What a pity.
 
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Thu Mar 21, 2019 7:11 am

Steam trading cards can DIAF.
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TheRazorsEdge
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Thu Mar 21, 2019 8:50 am

I was gonna buy it at launch for $50 or $60, and then I'd probably get DLCs/expansions as they come out. Now it looks like I'm waiting for the GOTY edition in a year or two for $30-$40 instead because I'm not dealing with more stupid stores besides Steam and GOG.

Selling exclusivity to Epic just screams, "We don't give a **** about our customers."

I'd give them a free pass if they had money problems and had no choice. But Microsoft just bought them, so their financials are either solid or fixable.
 
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Thu Mar 21, 2019 10:04 am

If you expect a company craven enough to bribe publishers into exclusivity on its inferior platform to have your best interests at heart in the long term, you deserve what's coming to you. When I hear "Epic exclusive," I hear "company that isn't getting my money." Another one bites the dust.
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LostCat
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Thu Mar 21, 2019 10:19 am

Cool, though I'll probably be buying it on Xbox. Like most games.
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Thu Mar 21, 2019 11:32 am

Concupiscence wrote:
If you expect a company craven enough to bribe publishers into exclusivity on its inferior platform to have your best interests at heart in the long term, you deserve what's coming to you. When I hear "Epic exclusive," I hear "company that isn't getting my money." Another one bites the dust.


It is disappointing to find that Obsidian falls into that category.

It's getting to the point where the only developer you can trust anymore is CD Projekt Red.
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NTMBK
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Thu Mar 21, 2019 12:13 pm

Concupiscence wrote:
If you expect a company craven enough to bribe publishers into exclusivity on its inferior platform to have your best interests at heart in the long term, you deserve what's coming to you. When I hear "Epic exclusive," I hear "company that isn't getting my money." Another one bites the dust.


Yeah, because I'm sure that the company skimming 30% off the top of the PC market has consumers' best interests at heart.
 
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Thu Mar 21, 2019 12:21 pm

NTMBK wrote:
Concupiscence wrote:
If you expect a company craven enough to bribe publishers into exclusivity on its inferior platform to have your best interests at heart in the long term, you deserve what's coming to you. When I hear "Epic exclusive," I hear "company that isn't getting my money." Another one bites the dust.


Yeah, because I'm sure that the company skimming 30% off the top of the PC market has consumers' best interests at heart.


Valve being complacent and greedy doesn't make Epic's attempt to hijack distribution and expect customers to obediently fall in line alright. Nice whataboutism, though.
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Voldenuit
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Thu Mar 21, 2019 12:34 pm

NTMBK wrote:
Concupiscence wrote:
If you expect a company craven enough to bribe publishers into exclusivity on its inferior platform to have your best interests at heart in the long term, you deserve what's coming to you. When I hear "Epic exclusive," I hear "company that isn't getting my money." Another one bites the dust.


Yeah, because I'm sure that the company skimming 30% off the top of the PC market has consumers' best interests at heart.


Bafore valve, distributors and retailers took a 75% cut. After valve, the developer/publisher share went from 25% to 70%. Did we see game prices drop by 50%? No, we did not.

First party games on UPlay, Origin and consoles get 100% the sale. Are their games 30% cheaper than third party AAA games on Steam? No, they are not.

Developers and publishers are not looking out for you. They are charging what the market will bear.

Itch.io charges as little as 0% cut. By your logic, any game sold on Epic is skimming 12% of the money that should be going to developers too, right?

As Concupisence says, straw man arguments against Valve (and I am no Steam fanboy) don't excuse the shady things that Epic is doing.

If GOG were to reduce its developer cut to 12% (btw Discord is only charging 10%), people would be lauding this move, because GOG has a good reputation with gamers and has built up the trust that it's earned. Epic, on the other hand, is burning through its goodwill rather than building it.
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Waco
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Thu Mar 21, 2019 1:42 pm

Voldenuit wrote:
Developers and publishers are not looking out for you.

Well, to be fair, it's almost always the publishers, not the developers. I place blame on both Epic and whomever agrees to their BS.

I refuse to give money to Epic due to these tactics. If they were truly trying to be competitive on features/price/whatever, they'd get publishers to list their games on their store for cheaper than Steam and let users decide if the difference in cost was worth the features of each platform.

I have no love for Steam (I mean, it has great features, but the store is a cesspool). I have negative love for Epic; at least Steam generally isn't screwing with the free market. Devs go for Steam because of the features, not because they're being bankrolled by the Chinese.
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Thu Mar 21, 2019 2:52 pm

The best game distro service, GOG, is having a sale today and you can get Witcher 3: GOTY for 15 bucks. Do yourself a favor and support CDPR and play an amazing game at the same time.

https://www.gog.com/game/the_witcher_3_ ... ar_edition
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Redocbew
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Thu Mar 21, 2019 3:56 pm

Sold!

I probably won't have a chance to play it for a while, but if it helps fund development of Cyberpunk 2077 I'm good with that. :P
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NovusBogus
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Thu Mar 21, 2019 9:50 pm

Don't worry y'all, now that Obsidian is owned by Microsoft they'll make sure that franchise gets taken off EGS as soon as the contract expires...and straight into the hands of the Windows Store! :lol:
 
LostCat
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Mon Mar 25, 2019 1:36 am

NovusBogus wrote:
Don't worry y'all, now that Obsidian is owned by Microsoft they'll make sure that franchise gets taken off EGS as soon as the contract expires...and straight into the hands of the Windows Store! :lol:

It's already going to be on there, and many current MS games are on Steam so that doesn't really make any sense.
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NTMBK
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Mon Mar 25, 2019 8:53 am

Clearly being on EGS instead of Steam didn't hurt Metro: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/ ... at-tell-us
 
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Mon Mar 25, 2019 10:22 am

NTMBK wrote:
Clearly being on EGS instead of Steam didn't hurt Metro: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/ ... at-tell-us

Clearly it's not quite that simple. Exodus was on the uber-hype train long before it went to EGS thanks to many big industry players. Nvidia, for one, advertised it very hard.
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Mon Mar 25, 2019 10:52 am

Games ARE cheaper on epic than steam. So....
 
NovusBogus
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Mon Mar 25, 2019 8:26 pm

Most customers simply won't care; it's just another digital store account along with Steam, GOG, Origin, Uplay, etc. And then there's the whole thing about no such thing as bad publicity. Gamers like to complain about stuff like exclusivity and lack of privacy/portability/etc. but very few of them actually stick to their guns and pick a side; the rest just moan about how they were 'forced' to use less desirable distribution options. As evidence I submit to you the massive amount of money the AAAs have been raking in from everyone, including PC. Honestly, the more I think about it the less of a problem I have with what Epic is doing. Tim Sweeney is just giving the game industry and its customers what they've all said they want for the last 10+ years.
 
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Mon Mar 25, 2019 10:16 pm

NovusBogus wrote:
Honestly, the more I think about it the less of a problem I have with what Epic is doing. Tim Sweeney is just giving the game industry and its customers what they've all said they want for the last 10+ years.

[insert joke about getting screwed here]
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superjawes
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Tue Mar 26, 2019 9:01 am

NovusBogus wrote:
And then there's the whole thing about no such thing as bad publicity.
Tell that to THQ Nordic...

Anyway, what Epic are doing is completely understandable...it's not very convenient for players, and it's definitely creating real headaches for crowdfunded projects that promised Steam and/or GOG keys. But it forces adoption of their product, getting their foot in the door.

If it comforts anyone, know that this won't be sustainable. I think ~1 year from Metro's launch is probably all they have before the cost of exclusivity outweighs the benefit. At that point, Epic will either have a decent platform that players want to use, or they'll just be another fringe product like Origin or UPlay. (Most likely result, IMO, is the latter.)
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Tue Mar 26, 2019 10:32 am

superjawes wrote:
But it forces adoption of their product, getting their foot in the door.

I guess I'm one of the few who don't see it that way.

I know it won't amount to much, but I'm not giving any money to developers that pull this crap (switching after promising something else). I have no ill will for games that are going to be birthed on that store and were always headed that way. It's the publishers jumping ship after promising something else that bother me.
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Voldenuit
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Tue Mar 26, 2019 11:07 am

Waco wrote:
superjawes wrote:
But it forces adoption of their product, getting their foot in the door.

I guess I'm one of the few who don't see it that way.

I know it won't amount to much, but I'm not giving any money to developers that pull this crap (switching after promising something else). I have no ill will for games that are going to be birthed on that store and were always headed that way. It's the publishers jumping ship after promising something else that bother me.



Same. I'd bought some games from Epic, because I wanted to support developers, and I was looking forward to titles they were bringing to PC that were formerly console exclusives, like Journey.

However, their shenanigans with forced exclusives has rapidly soured my enthusiasm for the company, coupled with shady practices like scraping personal information from users in an underhanded fashion.

I won't be buying any third party exclusives that are ill-gotten gains from bribing developers to screw their users. In my case at least, Epic went and lost a customer they already had.

I'm sure Epic knows they will lose some customers from this. But they did the calculation and saw that they would gain more customers by forcing people to use their platform, because most people don't care what happens behind the scenes in the industry (and honestly, why should they? Asking someone to pay attention or care about how their entertainment is made is asking too much. It's entertainment. People want to have fun and enjoy themselves. They shouldn't need to feel guilty about it, or make personal sacrifices for it. So I don't begrudge anyone who wants to buy their games from whichever store is selling the games. I'm not alone in making my stand, and I know that I'm in the minority. Hopefully, once Epic builds up the userbase they want, they'll realize that to win over the remaining stragglers, they'll have to give up on underhanded exclusivity deals).
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superjawes
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Tue Mar 26, 2019 11:57 am

Just for the record, I'm not defending Epic here. I don't really have a horse in this race. So I'm just trying to understand what they're doing, and what they're doing is spending PR capital (and $$$ capital) betting that they can get through the short-term negative press (and negative forum posts) for the long-term sustainability of their store. Will they be successful? Depends on how good their product gets, and how quickly it gets good.

And my gut feeling is that Epic's exclusive deals will eventually dry up, leaving their store as little more than a Fortnite launcher.
On second thought, let's not go to TechReport. It's infested by crypto bull****.
 
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Tue Mar 26, 2019 12:11 pm

The reason I won't buy anything from Epic is stuff like this:

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/0 ... ping-code/

Logging activity for games run though their own launcher is understandable (if a little creepy). But logging activity for games that have nothing to do with their launcher and was not purchased from them is spying, full stop.

Not letting one line of code from them on my machine.
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Tue Mar 26, 2019 12:13 pm

Voldenuit wrote:
Hopefully, once Epic builds up the userbase they want, they'll realize that to win over the remaining stragglers, they'll have to give up on underhanded exclusivity deals).


If I were in the business, the deal would have to be pretty sweet to convince me as an author. Sure it makes perfect sense for Epic to want exclusive titles for their store, but there's no good reason I can think of for the studio to want to restrict themselves to selling on only one storefront unless there are some super juicy strings attached. I can't imagine Epic is going to keep doing that forever. There may still be exclusive deals, but my guess is the deals won't be as good as they probably are now.
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Re: The Outer Worlds goes Epic exclusive

Tue Mar 26, 2019 12:48 pm

NovusBogus wrote:
Most customers simply won't care; it's just another digital store account along with Steam, GOG, Origin, Uplay, etc. And then there's the whole thing about no such thing as bad publicity. Gamers like to complain about stuff like exclusivity and lack of privacy/portability/etc. but very few of them actually stick to their guns and pick a side; the rest just moan about how they were 'forced' to use less desirable distribution options. As evidence I submit to you the massive amount of money the AAAs have been raking in from everyone, including PC. Honestly, the more I think about it the less of a problem I have with what Epic is doing. Tim Sweeney is just giving the game industry and its customers what they've all said they want for the last 10+ years.

I've come to the realization that there's a vocal minority ready and waiting to bitch and moan, lynch, picket, start a silly internet petition, boycott, etc, about everything. Focusing the energies of internet anonymity and OCD. But who said that when people are whining, they are just showing they care? Seems like it also boosts product awareness.
Last edited by swaaye on Tue Mar 26, 2019 12:53 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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