No one is betting their business in such tiny communities, while having exponential costs in development and dealing with very vocal and entitled gamers.
So naturally a couple of studios test waters, and then they just target Android instead.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/forum/topic/3409
https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1223457395419930627...
The packaging story, the driver stories, the market share...
The stores don't lose anything when a developer supports Linux, Epic's own engine supports Linux as a target
The problem is the support costs don't seem to add up at all, and I fail to see why the store fronts would be to blame...
Steam has been providing support for the Linux community for years, through native ports of their games, explicitly selling Linux ports on their store, and just making sure their client works on Linux as well. This isn't to mention their actual innovations such as the Steam Controller, Steam In-home Streaming, Steam Remote Play, and even Proton.
In contrast, we have Epic Games who, besides adding nothing to the market besides a bunch of free games (which is likely going to end when/if they feel like they have a good enough share), actively killed the Linux version of Rocket League when they purchased the game.
I appreciate Epic Games for the Unreal engine, but if this is how they want to get a share of the PC game store market, they're not getting a dime from me.
You shouldn't talk about things you don't know about...
- Millions in grants for developers
- Unlimited free backend services for game developers, the same the power one of the most successful games in recent history (and the first serious offer for this caliber of service outside of Steam despite AAA publishers having stores for years)
- Millions invested in arguably one of the most technologically advanced game engines freely available
- Thousands of dollars in free content to help developers kickstart their projects
- Finally moving the needle for developer revenue splits after years of stagnation
- No built-in DRM (Games can still optionally include their own DRM, but there's no Steamworks-style DRM options)
- Built a publishing house with a blanket deal for studios which is very competitive, (50/50 split of all profit)
- _Retroactively_ waived fees for any game that made under 1 million dollars running on Unreal.
Say you didn't care about anything Epic did besides release a few free games, they did plenty more than that
Can't reply to your comment directly but for a reply...
How is massively supporting the game industry and providing a real competitor in a the market not doing anything for the end-user?
You realize the games the end-user plays benefit from literally every single thing I mentioned right?
I'm speaking explicitly as an end user here, and from my point of view the Epic Store is a straight downgrade from Steam in almost every aspect.
Yes, really. This just sounds like the standard Linux Desktop evangelist "Works for me! (TM)". Take this case [0], where in it is claimed that support requests for Linux were vastly disproportionate to the number of Linux users.
Linux has huge problems as a platform due to its fragmentary and ever-changing nature combined with its near-total disregard (in userland) for backwards compatibility. People have been screaming this at the community for the better part of a decade and a half (including Linus himself!) and mostly falling on deaf ears.
Which is not to say that one should support Epic if you do happen to care about gaming on Linux. Quite the opposite, as Valve has done more than anyone[1] to try and make it work.
[0] https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760
[1] With the exception of the entire WINE project in general
"Linux definitely has a long way before it's usable for the majority of the public for gaming", is the crux of my comment.
Linux users on here just get very defensive when you bring up very obvious shortcomings and immediately go into "it's not that bad"-mode
Steam however sells me Civ6 which works, which costs about £3,000 (£15 for the game, £3,000 for the lost time I know it will cost me if I install it)
That developers pay millions to license and use. This isn't charity work.
> build out the first "full house" competitor to Steam
So they can control the market as a replacement for Steam, a superior platform that has (a) an instant return policy [1], (b) the ability to emulate input for any game for the disabled[2], and (c) the ability to share your entire game library with family without having to share accounts and save files.
[1]: Obviously hasn't always been the case. [2]: Via Big Picture Mode, which allows you to use any controller for any game and remap inputs for games that have no such settings. A total blessing for anyone disabled or with a preference for different controls.
They retroactively waived licensing fees for any game that made under 1 million dollars in revenue going back years!
But, ah yes, you got them! They're a company in a capitalist society trying to make money, what crooks!
>So they can control the market as a replacement for Steam
I don't know how you can say this with a straight face. By that logic anyone who makes any store that isn't Steam is just trying to control the market.
Anyone who makes anything that isn't the current incumbent in a monopolized industry is just trying to become the new monopoly!
And the rest of your points are in the worst faith.
Epic games is how old? You're complaining that a new player hasn't matched every feature of a decades old incumbent?
Not to mention, Epic games has instant-refunds on some games (developers can disable this, also yeah, bringing up Steam in a conversation about refunds is a joke, you knew that enough that you had to pre-emptively footnote it)
And Steam was an accessibility NIGHTMARE until very recently, to the point that I had seen petitions come out against it! Not to mention accessibility in games is largely on a game-by-game basis, acting like Big Picture was made to improve accessibility is laughable when it launched without the ability to even change text sizes for years.
On that note, Epic actually supports screen readers as a first class citizen in their engine: https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/UMG/UserGuide/Scr...
Most of the rest of the arguments seem to revolve around Epic doing paid (timed) exclusive deals with an interesting cross-section of developers. (Using the weight of their Unreal engine licensing fees to sweeten the pot of what they could offer in some cases.) It's something common to console games, but some PC gamers seemed disturbed to see it on the PC. It also seems to betray a short-term memory with respect to Steam, as Steam also bootstrapped on exclusives such as Half-Life 2. (Half-Life 2 wasn't even a timed exclusive as most of Epic's have been, HL2 still requires Steam in 2020, whether or not you bought it or The Orange Box on a physical disc from a retail store back in the early oughts. Which leaves prevarication room for some Steam fans because Valve did allow multiple stores to sell the game even if it was a platform exclusive to play the game; but it still ignores the historic controversy when Steam did that in the first place and many gamers at the time called it a mistake and the death of PC gaming.)
(ETA: Also, Epic did do one sleazy/evil thing early in the EGS: it scraped private Steam files for friends lists, rather than using documented APIs, to try to bootstrap its social network.)
Epic just gave away amazing games for a month or two. I got GTA5 and Civ6 for free amongst other treasures.