cringepirate

No it doesn't weaken the argument. The point is that seems to elude you is that they aren't bribing other devs by offering cash for an exclusivity deal. In the cases you highlight they bought IP outright. Also people seem to forget that Valve released a lot of their games on consoles which aren't open market places.

Anyway this is distraction from the general point I was trying to convey that store specific exclusives doesn't promote competition, it actually retards it.

If Epic had a store and just offered the same games for cheaper. I would be fine with it.

Also everyone keeps pretending that EPIC is this tiny company when nothing could be further from the truth.

Them doing exclusives is on their own IP isn't really the same thing is it? I will give them a pass on it.

People have to remember perfect is the enemy of the good. Considering Steam's position in the market they don't seem to abuse their position. Anecdotally I know people that have developed indie games and they told me they are generally quite happy with Steam.

We are talking about stores acting as if they are publishers (because with a exclusivity deal that is what is really happening). Steam is a open market place for all intents and purposes.

If Epic is successful we will have every store front acting as a publisher. This won't benefit the consumer (publisher tend to interfere with the creative process) and it won't benefit the developers because those low commission rates will suddenly vanish.

I am all for free markets. But this is not what is happening here. EPIC is flush with cash from Fortnight and dominating the game engine market with UE3, UE4 and probably do the same with UE5 (they have over 25% in a very fragmented market) and they are trying to artificially divide what is an open ecosystem.

>PAYING game developers for exclusivity is much different than CHARGING game developers 30% of their revenue.

The way you frame it is totally incorrect and completely misrepresents

Steam (who is obviously relevant in the PC space) doesn't "charge" developers 30% of the revenue. Steam is acting as an affiliate. Affiliate agreements work on the fact that one party will get a commission for driving sales of a particular product.

Steam drives sales of a particular product by providing the market place, they provide the payment mechanism, the hosting and update infrastructure and probably a bunch of things I am not aware of.

Also the 30/70% split for an affiliate relationship is standard across many industries. This could be Travel, Gambling, House hold items.

> Also, the PC is an open platform. Game developers don't have to use Epic's or anyone else' store to distribute games on PC. With iOS you have no choice.

You are getting wrong way around. If would be fine if the EPIC store offered the same games as Steam at a lower price (by taking a lower commission). Then that would drive competition and that would benefit the consumer.

However that isn't happening here.

They are artificially dividing an open market by making some PC games exclusive to their store. This stops competition because the two store fronts can't compete because they cannot offer the same games. In the same way that if you wanna play Halo you aren't doing it on a PlayStation.

GoG and Steam will have many of the same games sold on them. I end up buying them on the GoG store, why is that? GoG is guaranteed to be DRM free. That choice cannot exist when some games are exclusive to one store. So GoG competes with the Steam store and offers a better refund policy (you can refund for any reason and at any time) and no DRM.

Now it may benefit developers to be exclusive to the EPIC store but this will ultimately make the PC ecosystem less open for the consumer.

It generally fails at that in my experience.

> Sounds like acquaintances

No. They were drunks (I was becoming one myself). I told you in the sentence before that once I didn't come to the pub they weren't interested in spending any time with me. That what addicts are like.

This really isn't difficult stuff to understand. The acquaintance relationship only existed because of substance abuse basically. There is no friendship of shared interest outside of that.

I was thinking about writing a rebuttal to everything else you said. But there really isn't much point because you can't even understand this part of social interaction.

All my real friends btw, keep in touch via email, text etc. As for me demanding I use a communication medium, everyone has a cell phone with SMS and everyone has an email address. If people can't be bothered to do that ...

Yes I am aware. It can be confusing if you are new. I had someone ask me why it was different the other day.

Because for some is us the signal to noise ratio was too low (did I get that the right way around?).

For me LinkedIn for me was a total waste of time. Good you find it useful use it, but I don’t and I don’t like the company so I am deleted my account.

Also most of the contacts weren’t other devs or dev companies but recruiters. A lot of those recruiters flooded the feed with bullshit recruitment feel good articles and other trite. That combined with all the estalking and slimes dudes on there it just isn’t somewhere that is worth being around.

That maybe but it differs from what is shown in the inspector (which shows the <head> and <body> tags). This could be confusing as the source html doesn't match how the browser interprets it.

I used to drink regularly down the pub. After a while I got sick of putting on weight and feeling rubbish and decided to give it up. The people I drank with after a few weeks stopped calling me (because I wasn't interested in going for a drink) and I haven't spoke to them in years. They wasn't such great friends were they?

If I had friends that didn't bother with me because I wasn't on the platform (facebook) they probably wasn't worth bothering with in the first place.

You can always find an excuse as to why you keep on using these services, some odd thing that you claim you need. I just decided I wasn't going to use them anymore and stop making excuses for having to deal with companies that couldn't give a fuck about me.

I literally setup almost everything I personally need in about a day on a VPS. As for services like LinkedIn I almost never got anything of value from it, it is worse than most job board it is filled with slimey recruiters these days and not a lot else.

I bought a NAS for backups with freenas and moving my email to a domain with a provider literally took me a few minutes (plugging DNS entries into my domain provider). It not that hard.

People should be making tools for helping people move away from platforms. I am personally going to write it all up and identify pain points.

I get plenty of business through (gasp) word of mouth and ex-colleagues. So I am fine.

Disgusting attitudes like yours is all too common these days. It is anti-freedom, full of snobbery and it is nihilistic.

The article is talking about forced updates by vendors of consumer grade software. That is what we are talking about.

Also the same rule still applies. If I had to use some terrible software everyday I would leave a job if it was that bad. I had to develop on a terrible CMS, once I realised it was never going to change, I looked for another job.

Well it will go on longer if people are encouraged by those that are capable to stay ignorant.

Also Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Making excuses for ignorance is simply promoting learned helplessness.

Yes I appreciate there are edge cases such as the mentally handicapped. However realistic I am talking about the majority of the population which are capable of looking after themselves.

Again this much like another reply I received. You are making it an all or nothing scenario.

Realistically it will be a combination of regulation and people starting to get wise to what these companies are doing. At the moment the regulators don’t have the power or aren’t up to speed. So instead of waiting for the shit to hit the fan you can protect yourself and start mitigating risk.

I really don’t like this attitude of people that you cannot try to protect yourself.