Epic Games acquires PSYONIX, developer of Rocket League

The big deal people are making about this just blows my mind. What's so hard about downloading another store front ? Good Lord I have Steam,Origins,Uplay and Epic on my PC.

It's all about the games people, who gives a toss about the storefronts?

 

Windowshopping :V

layers

 

Indeed. Unlike consoles where exclusives means buying extra, expensive hardware, store exclusives just means registering yet another account on yet another web portal and installing another store application. There's no real cost or inconvenience.

I suppose the worry is if one store is big enough to buy up all the games and gain critical mass to collapse the others, they'll become a monopoly. But given there's very little running costs, it's not like Steam or GOG would die and you'd lose your entire catalogues with them if all they sold were indie titles.

 

Anything that makes more projects successful and allows more niche and risky games worth attempting is a good thing. I cannot find it in me to hate on Epic for trying a storefront that puts more into the development side of the industry.

 

The "We need the current monopoly to ensure free speech" hot take.

 

Maybe, why don't you try replying with something different than an ad hominem to see if there is any depth of thought behind my argument.

Centralization is just a fact of life of the modern internet, we don't need any given monopoly for free speech ... but if we will get defacto monopolies regardless it's better if it is one which supports free speech.

 

A marginal shift in income per copy isn't going to shift a whole lot more projects into viability, media in general is a market of big winners and big losers. Only a big publisher which can average those out is really going to make its investments depend on this kind of shift ... and I don't see why they'd use it for more diverse titles instead of just making the AAA titles a little shinier. A dominant outlet for PC gaming with gatekeeping, that does have a chance to fundamentally change the current market.

 

I don't agree with this at all

 

How? Everyone moves over to Epic store and overlooks the content elsewhere meaning indies fade into obscurity?

 

Not indies, just indies for which the developers have no faith they will be able to convince the Epic reviewers or have successful crowd funding. Not like we have not been here before with Steam.

 

That's only a problem if you think everyone will ditch Steam and move to Epic though. Is that realistic? Why won't people use both?

 

The way I see it is that it will drive innovation. Steam had become stagnant and now they have to spend some of the enormous cash reserves they must have and that's a good thing.

 

Please clarify what you mean by that statement.

 

A single entity defacto gets to decide what goes and what doesn't on the platform.

 

That will never happen on the PC. It's already split into 3 regions by the first layer; one OS by Apple, one OS by Windows, and the other OS by Linux and the other unixes.

The second layer is still entirely open but has some large store providers. One has primarily Apple. The other has Valve Steam, EA Origin, Ubisoft Uplay, Activision BlizzardNet, Good Old Games, Humble Store, Direct2Drive, Green Man Gaming, and Microsoft Store.

To think it would be controlled by the addition of yet another entry from Epic is laughable at best and delusional at worst.

 

Only way steam becomes irrelevant is if they refuse to compete. That seems unlikely. They'll have to lower their cut and offer some kind of value over epic. If they don't then that will just be another example of how complacent they've become with their functional monopoly position in the pc market.

 

Steam won't need to lower their cut until devs start moving over to Epic. Devs probably aren't that likely to move over until Epic has massive user numbers - 90 million monthly actives users on Steam is just a huge market and not one to walk away from. Steam also has services that devs might tie into which may bring value to devs, which Epic will need to match; I domn't reall yknow if they have value or not.

It's going to be competition as normal between an entrenched giant and a spritely young upstart with money to burn. They'll play out the confrontation the same as every other business rivalry over many, many years to come. It's not the death of PC gaming, nor the rebirth, or anything exciting or scary at all. After 25 years of PlayStation, Nintendo is still around and managing to make a name for itself.

 

It's just social media outrage culture spurred on largely by a new generation of young people that have grown a warped sense of entitlement in what they view to be a battle between consumers and everyone else. You don't need to question your sanity once you move beyond the realm of reddit and twitter and filter out the noise from people that are too young to have any worthwhile perspective on this. I'm more or less at the point where if I see outrage utilizing phrases like "anti-consumer" and "consoles wars" that I stop treating them seriously.