Can confirm from recent experience that the Epic store is a bizarre piece of consumer technology. Luckily all I care about is getting games I want for cheap
I haven’t installed the Epic Game Store despite my interest in free and/or cheap games, and I’m sure that because Epic is a large-ish company, it is not a good thing, but I’ve seen enough posts from Gamers literally calling for attacks on/boycotts of it in order to defend Gamer Culture (including pestering Japanese devs on Twitter to come out and condemn it), that I am reflexively pro-Epic Game Store.
I read an article that I now cannot find that makes the case that gamers are mad at Epic because this is actually a Capitalism problem, but they don’t have the language for that so they just call it anti-consumer or Bad 4 GamerZ
The sale is a really great example of how bad it is though: they don’t give developers a choice of participating and instead are paying the developers for whatever discount is applied automatically. On paper this sounds like “then why are you complaining?” but the reality is that it is devaluing already cheap indie games that aren’t even out yet. I can’t remember what game it was, but basically it was a $15 dollar game you could preorder for $5, which is like…yeah that’s the price people are going to expect now! And it’s not even out!
It’s just Epic using its infinite Fortnite money to buy customers with the eventual goal of trapping them in that ecosystem, which hurts customers eventually but immediately hurts developers.
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Ok, this sounds pretty bad.
Surprised Gamers are mad about it, though, since it mostly seems to risk fucking over small developers, who I presume most Gamers hate with a passion by default.
Well gamers are mad because they got convinced th Epic store was BADWRONG when it started grabbing exclusives they wanted on Steam. It’s a separate issue from the sale issue, but once something is gamerbadwrong, it is always gamerbadwrong.
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yeah I kind of hope they alienate devs with this tbh
every time Tim Sweeney opens his mouth I hate him and pretending that Steam only has value as a store and not as a largely really good platform/ecosystem (they’ve done so much non-Windows work and made so much cool weird hardware!) is asinine
I, too, will just take their Fortnite money because whatever, it’s not like I don’t want Steam to be pressured to change their revenue split at the same time, but Epic is basically using their bad product to make another bad product and pretending it’s about consumer choice
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it’s really interesting to continually see all the directions from which the next videogame collapse could occur
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honestly, I can’t see why there would be one as long as all these indies are basically gambling on making money at this point anyway
AAA stuff has a huge dedicated lifestyle fanbase and every other dev seems to be making games because they don’t have any more compelling options
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Ha:
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i just do not see the current state of AAA surviving indefinitely. it’s like every other month we see another write up of abuses at these studios.
not sure what you mean re: indies. that they’re hobbyists hoping for a break, or…?
videogames have all the hallmarks of late capitalism where expecting the market to crash doesn’t really make sense because for the vast majority of their consumers there is no equivalent good that can be substituted; people are not playing videogames because they’re good entertainment per se, but because videogames are like, their own lifestyle industry and if you want videogame nothing else will do.
I mentioned indies because whenever anyone’s brought up a crash in recent years it’s always been in the context of “there’s so much stuff on steam! no one can be making any money! this surely can’t last!” whereas instead what’s happened is that no one expects to make money any more unless they get a publisher deal or get featured on PS+ or whatever, and yet people would still apparently rather make videogames than anything else that’s likely to compensate them at this point
they’re hobbyists hoping for a break, or else they have non-consumer revenue sources, basically
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From jump YIIK looked waaaaay too “sleeve worn influences practically stabbing you in the eyes” like saccharinely so new hip retro that I was immediately repulsed. At best a cohesive amalgamutt whereas Undertale was the kind that knew how to wrap and craft itself much more cleverly.
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My defense of YIIK’s use of Murakami without citation should not be confused with any kind of defense of the game as a whole. I need you all to know this.
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I wonder if indie games are in the 2009-20015 period of the web, of blogs and independent websites, where almost no one is making money on the project per se, and the early, best talent has already been poached by the established players, and with just a small push towards user-friendly mass platforms the whole thing will collapse and we’ll see dramatically fewer non-remunerative works.
But that supposes a creative alternative the way that writers working on websites moved to, uh, twitter?
I think the economic/cultural expectations of indie devs from this point out are sufficiently different from those of, like, gawker writers a decade ago that it’s not a good comparison. my impression of extremely online young people (<24) is that they overwhelmingly do not really expect to have normal incomes and if they get to make weird stuff for a community that only exists on twitter even if they have to live at home then, like, fine.
it’s almost an analog of Gen X vs. Millennials except it’s on a truncated timeframe as usual, so the basement-level expectations of remuneration of people who have only been playing in this space since 2015 are almost unrecognizable to people who got there earlier, but … that doesn’t seem to be stopping anyone.
The spiraling budgets and move towards fewer and fewer games taking more and more time and marketshare is what’s threatening to big publishers; the working conditions are still drastically better than they were 10 years ago as the workforce continues to age and demand better.
I’m going to be equivocal here, and not because I support this exploitation, or think workers shouldn’t have the power to demand better, but because I think with perspective game jobs are still easier and cushier than basically any non-office job. Anyone who’s worked retail during the holiday season has a lot more scars on their back than almost all game workers.
The writeups coming out are people learning to speak up for what they deserve, and it’s absolutely necessary. But the bulk of crunch at big studios, the kind that drags on for months and months, is the low-grade 50-60 hours, and game workers are like any other office worker or human who believes they worked 60 when they did 52 (because it really does feel like you do nothing but wake up and work when you get much beyond 50).
Of course, they’re not getting paid for this overtime, so it’s completely wrong, but that is the case for most white-collar work in the US.
The most exploitative loop is QA, who are almost always kept as temp workers and shuffled between 6-month contracts. There’s an obvious class division inside studios between permanent workers, who tend to be highly-paid devs, and near-minimum QA, many of whom have 5+ years of experience but no stability.
The next rung up is junior staff, who float between contracts. This is where many of the culture whistleblowers come from, because they’re trapped in temp work with only a slight shot at a permanent hire, which tends to open up only due to permanent staff leaving at the end of a project. Because of this, they have every incentive to overwork themselves for a shot at a permanent position, and are rightfully upset when their hard work is rewarded with a boot out the door at the end of the project and a fresh job search. In this, games are cyclical and need something like the film trade unions to cushion project-hopping staff.
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yeah, this is more specifically what i meant. i just think the current model is unsustainable and if workers are successful in obtaining what they want then it’s possible studios will just pull the plug altogether and pursue other interests.
something something socialism in one country
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There’s a lot of money in AAA games but it’s really precarious to try to be the one that grabs it. A very plausible outcome is that we further winnow out the teams doing single-player; as we’ve seen in the past 5 years, open-world is believe to be the only feasible single-player structure at this budget level, as it promises ‘weeks of engagement’ like a multiplayer game. I could reasonably see EA, Activision getting out of that space and leaving it to Take 2 (Rockstar) and Ubisoft (who has this down to a factory line), with everyone else making small gains and waiting for the one wild miss to knock them out.
Multiplayer has huge upside and reasonable-in-comparison development costs and it’s logical for big studios to aim at it, but without huge budget needs they lose their biggest competitive advantage.
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A cool thing about playing single-player games for one or two hours a night for two to four nights a week is that every game is weeks of engagement for me, and often longer if I’m bad at it, which I usually am.
This is not a useful contribution to this conversation.
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