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What's up with Epic Games?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2023
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Yeah, and somehow they managed to invent like 90% of all "evil" MTX and DRM in the process, take a bigger cut than competitors and actively reject having a returns policy until pushed by regulators and competitors, all the while being super not evil.
It's a fine line to walk, that.
I mean, do you have any good examples though? Because most of those things are blatantly false and/or happened 9+ years ago. If that's that's the worst you've got then Valve is must be amazing.
See what I mean? That's nuts. That's a nuts sentence right there. Imagine having a brand so sticky that people go "but did they do something really bad recently?
For the record, Valve's games run loot boxes today. Like, right now you can buy loot boxes from Valve. CS gambling is also still happening, although I'm not into it enough to know how much better it is these days.
They invented the battlepass, too, that's a Dota 2 thing. Hey, remember how people refer to buying cosmetics for games as "buying hats"? That one's from TF2. Oh, and technically the trading cards you get for purchases are NFTs,, since the term doesn't require the tokens to be stored in a blockchain.
And then there's the dev side. Everybody was super pissed with them on that end while they were figuring out greenlight processes, which... I'm not sure if they did or people just kinda got used to what's there. And if you're around devs you'll know that Valve's whole deal is to tell people what to do and give them zero support to do it. And there are other horror stories about shadowbans and Apple-style manual rejections and delistings and stuff, but at that point you're getting more into inside baseball and I wouldn't expect it to be shaping public perception at all.
Well I'm not going to be eternally mad at Coca Cola because they put cocaine in their soda a century ago, there's got to be a cut-off point somewhere. If I'm going to hate them it's because of the things they are doing right now. Valve over the last eight years has been pretty well-behaved considering their market position gives them the capacity to be way worse. There's nothing stopping them from
buying up exclusivity contracts
making a DRM that actually functions
developing only proprietary software
making their games pay-to-win
I will be eternally mad at Coca Cola because they took the cocaine out of their soda a century ago.
Oookay, so we're all cool with MTX cosmetics, loot boxes, battlepasses and lacking full ownership or transferability of games, then?
I'm just trying to figure out if the things Valve is doing right now are fine for everybody or just for Valve.
Which again, is my problem. I'll keep saying it, because having to argue for reality makes it sound like I'm a hater. I like Steam, I think Valve games are generally great (and it's a shame they've stopped making them), and I think Valve's management is a good example of many of the pros of a private company (look at Twitter for all the cons).
But holy crap, no, man, they are THE premier name in GaaS. Everybody is taking their cues from Valve, Epic or both in that space. Their entire platform is predicated on doing as little as possible and crowdsourcing as much as possible to keep the money machine churning. Corporations are not your friends.