The glory days of Epic Games are long gone and Tim Sweeney is a god damn moron.
Valve revolutionized Linux gaming; Tim categorically rejects it.
Valve banned shitcoins and blockchain scams; Tim welcomed them with open arms.
Valve enforces honesty regarding AI slop; Tim wants to literally deceive people.
All that on top of what they did with third-party exclusives.He’s like that annoying kid who didn’t get invited to a birthday party and vowed to always do the opposite of what the popular kid does. Petulant fucking overgrown child.
Valve banned shitcoins and blockchain scams
would’ve been nice if they banned gambling, too, but that’s part of their business model unfortunately.
I hear people say this sometimes, but I don’t know what they mean. Is there part of Valve’s system that has a gambling mechanic I’ve just never engaged with?
Or is it one of their games that has gambling?
Because I’ve been using it for years as basically my sole gaming interface and haven’t seen any gambling.
The short version is that an enormous, multibillion dollar gambling industry has been built around Valve’s item marketplace, and in particular around CS:GO skins. If that sounds completely insane and stupid, I’m with you, but it exists. Valve takes their typical cut off of all of these trades, and thus derives massive profits from it.
Here’s the long version: https://peertube.gravitywell.xyz/videos/watch/a8e6d20c-3003-4b14-b9c4-cb6a25b238e7?isPeertubeContent=1
Huh. I didn’t know this was a feature Steam had. Weird!
Mainly Team Fortress 2 and Counter Strike GO/2, cuz both of them have cosmetics with rarities obtained via what effectively amounts to lootboxes. In one sense they also have an out-of-game economy around these things where these items are traded for actual money
TF2 was the original gacha game.
There is a massive secondary market for in-game items (primarily CS skins) that Valve refuses to combat or even officially acknowledge. Some of it is legitimate, some of it is literal lottery for children. And since every transaction takes place on Steam, they get a cut of that.
Loot boxes in Counter-Strike
All their big multiplayer games have lootboxes and stuff like that.
At least the shit is all cosmetic not like EA sports games with their UT packs I guess. Low bar.
It might be cosmetic, but it can be sold, which fuels the addiction mechanic. EA is bad, too, but this whataboutism.
I think difference is EA is more a game company so people see a game they like then judge the monetization because its a full priced game that turns out to have f2p monetization.
But, Valve is more judged for its experience as a launcher and less for its games. So with the launcher itself being the draw things like Valve game lootboxes can be something people are completely unexposed to as they play other games.
But, EA is still at a stage where the products that receive the most visibility are their games, and the launcher and services side so underwhelming it isn’t a selling point.
Its like Costco versus a company known for its pizza. Costco is a warehouse store people love going to that happens to sell pizza, but is judged on multiple things that draw them there over other stores as opposed to pizza. A pizza company is just known primarily for its pizza so judged on the quality of their pizza.
The launcher?! This bloatware is the second worst thing about Valve’s services right after the gamble mechanics.
Gambling mechanic is as impactful to me as Costco selling alcohol and junk food. I don’t play those games, so only reason I’m even aware of it is because of people bringing it up. Those who seek it out can get it those who come for other things can avoid it.
And I like the steam launcher when it comes to linux compatibility, steam workshop, reviews, categorizing my games, note function, and gamepad support. I absolutely would not want to go back to the old days of CDs for games. Too many to manage and keep track of. And I like my Steam Deck for introducing me to Linux gaming, and being one of the few launchers that actually has Linux support and doesn’t need to rely on third party work arounds.
Those who don’t value that can buy from Epic or other launchers the way some people don’t see the difference buying from Costco vs Walmart and see membership fees as a waste of money. Or go over to consoles to be free of launchers entirely.
I’d say the only thing that bothers me about Steam is that you can’t completely ignore updates for games, so have to go into offline mode or save a copy then update then replace the directory or use steam console to retrieve the old version if you accidentally updated. That’s been my only gripe as a Steam user for games like Skyrim where I don’t want updates.
I don’t want to discredit Steam’s features like compatibility layers, but the software itself is a mess. It is an unnessecary RAM-heavy chromium instance, to be fair, just like most other launchers. I replaced it with Playnite which is streamlined, responsive and more feature rich for managing a library (Steam still needs to be installed of course because they don’t offer offline installer like GOG). And I’d argue that console user saren’t free of launcher, they are locked into a very specific one.
But as someone who’s neither been to Costco nor Walmart, what is the difference?
LordGabn has to buy Aston Martin’s so how.
I don’t want AI-generated assets in games at the expense of past, present, and future artists – artists that created all the source material in the first place and had it pirated by corporations who had enough money to ignore all existing IP law globally.
If Tim Sweeney is fine with pirating other’s art, he should be cool with people pirating his games.
Yeah this is my take as well. AI can be a useful tool but putting people out of work so you can save money to create soulless art is just wrong.
Sounds like Epic needs to try to make a online game store to compete with Steam, but filled with AI slopware.
Wait a minute… lol
definitely keep doing it then. Sweeney is consistently on the wrong side.
Bingo! Valve is one hell of a monopoly, but they don’t totally fuck their customers. Sweeney has to answer to his shareholders. Those are the real customers; not you and me.
Sweeney has to answer to his shareholders.
which is like 40% tencent.
Not 10%? I thought tencents thing was they just have a 10% share in an absurd amount of stuff
Both Valve and Epic are private companies and thus have a bit more of a say over what they do than public companies would. Sweeney actually just answers to himself, and I mean that pejoratively, otherwise he would have invested in EGS more to compete with Steam and focused more on Unreal Engine’s near-monopoly in the AAA space.
Instead, he focused on “owning” the metaverse, and courting crypto. If I were a shareholder, I would say he wasn’t acting in my best interests.
And if it’s as he says, and eventually all games get labeled that way, what’s his problem with that? Man just doesn’t want to compete.
I like how he’s basically admitting that it’s a negative that would hurt the game sales. Because consumers don’t want it.
Yep all those people not liking the idea of AI labels telling on themselves. For how much the AI bros talk up AI they are incredibly skittish about having to show what products were created using it. If it is so awesome why the fear?
Like an artist who traces their drawings, but doesn’t want to disclose it so more people will assume they free handed it.
Of course epic doesn’t understand empowering consumers with information. They don’t care about consumers. If they did, they’d maybe try adding some long requested features to their storefront.
Sweeney’s customers are the shareholders. Not the gamers.
And that’s why he’ll fail.
Shit like this is why people only use that storefront for the free games. Completely out of touch.
If the developer puts shampoo in the game box, I’d probably want to know that before opening it.
This sounds like “If we let men marry men, what’s next? Men marrying goats?”
His leap of logic sounds more like, “If we let men marry men what’s next? Cars eating babies?”
yeah dumbfuck that’s why we require ingredients what the hell is this man oh - oh
oh yeah
this adds up hold on
yeah: DAIN BRAMMAGE
I think I just understood why UE5 sucks that much…
You are the first person I have ever heard say UE5 sucks. Why?
I really am? (no sarcasm here, honest surprise)
I thought it’s widespread knowledge that the “upgrade” to UE5 mainly brought a lot of performance loss compared to UE4 while having a signature blurry (or whatever) style which actually worsens the perceived quality.
For example expedition 33, while it’s style is awesome, it’s performance is absolutely not. It should run flawless on ps5 and on superior pcs but still doesn’t and the fps range is not in line with the hardware capabilities.
I hate to be the one to say it but an ambitious game made by a small team is a shit game to use as an example. They did not have the budget to optimize and the game is full of small technical flaws. Who ever told you that UE4 is better than UE5 is wrong, even without Lumen or Nanite. Also most games in UE4 only used 2k textures and in UE5 8k textures are used. The assets are heavier in general.
I seem to have struck a nerve there, apologies.
I don’t think it’s a shit example. It’s the latest I experienced. It’s a good game but hampered technically. Nobody needs to tell me, I’ve been gaming since before dos and grew up with it; I’ve also been working in it for a few decades.
Look; you could just have a bigger or more gpus with more ram in a pc but if the end result does not significantly look better the question is for what all the effort is.
And that’s what happened with UE5.
Yes, maybe in a few years it might look different but it’s also been some time and hasn’t really been worth any of the performance impact.
And - as said - I see quality impact in UE5 games which I personally can not comprehend in an supposed upgrade.
However, feel free to disagree.
Maybe it’s my background in datacenters: of course you can always meet demand with more raw power but it’s a losing fight and the intelligent progress is to optimize and use resources in a clever way.
While UE5 is a one size fits all for game dev, it does not mean all games have to try to have the highest quality graphics possible. CO took that route. You can do whatever you want and optimize as much as you can. You are correct, studios are just going ham on the capabilities and not caring about the hardware requirements. Having a min requirements of a 12th Gen intel, 32GB RAM and 3060 is fucked up. And you need 64GB of RAM for good performance. My biggest gripe on the UE4 vs 5 opinion is that you can still make a low-fi game that runs at 200fps. It’s a design choice not an engine choice.
Sweeney has Steam living rent free in his head. Whining about Monopoly
Meanwhile, Epic Games already has something resembling a monopoly with the unreal engine, its buggy and resource hungry as fuck, and just seems to be getting worse. Necessitating an arms race of computer upgrades just to run the newest games on their obtuse engine thats being used for everything now. Epic certainly isnt doing anything about it. Its just a money printer for Tim’s legal battles.
re: unreal - and unity - have stopped caring about devs and just chase new tech like nanite or new advertising shite.
godot ftw, they’ll never come back and say “hey we’re changing the contract now you gotta pay for every install” or “hey everything is AI now”.
“Waaaahhhh! Waaaaahhhh! Why is Steam such a good service? That should be illegal! Tell them they should be worse!”
That’s all I’m hearing from these other corpos.
Epic Boss Tim Sweeney can go fuck himself
Bullshit translator: “I want to sell more AI made games, so i can reduce costs by firing everyone, and being held accountable for using AI is gonna prevent me from bilking idiots to increase my fortunes by another billion or 5”
Bingo.
Tum Sweeney: “Please stop labeling all these turds, because everything will be made with shit at some point”
If Sweeney can read this, I just want to tell him something. As someone who made games with ZZT as a kid and thought it was the best thing ever, you need to understand that no AI could make something like that, even if as a kid using copied and ‘inspired’ code from other games (and learned how to hexedit out the protections from other ZZT worlds so I can see how they worked) the cycle of just working through a rudimentary coding language was the reward in and of it self even if I never did finish the game I had in mind.
BTW, that game just involved an adventurer in a kingdom that is being troubled by… Hitler’s ghost, and your objective was to send his ass back to hell. I found a boss fight in another ZZT world that I thought was too cool not to reuse for that purpose, too. But sadly it was never finished.
That being said, we DO need ‘AI generated’ or ‘AI assisted’ as a tag. There isn’t anything weird or wrong with that. In online art spaces like deviant art you can tag stuff as ‘traditional’ art (meaning done on paper/canvas with whatever media you used, like pencils, various paints, etc) or digital or a combination thereof, like a hand drawn sketch that was completed and colored with photoshop. Why the fuck would anyone be against telling people what tools were used?
