A jury saw secret revenue sharing deals between Google, smartphone makers, and game developers. The jury saw internal emails between Google execs that suggested Google was scared of how Epic might convince its fellow game developers to join or create rival app stores, creating unwanted competition for Google.
Fuck Epic and all that, but a silver lining that this has bubbled up because of it
depends how much chinese influence you want in the gaming market. They are already the biggest gaming company in the world.
It’s also a bit hypotritical for chinese companies to be suing US companies for antitrust laws when the Chinese government outright bans app stores like Steam and Google Play in their own country. They get to have their cake and eat it too, then use all the money they make in china to push out further into the world economy.
The domestic market can be, and even that depends on your perspective. For example, China doesn’t have the insane Disney copyright regime the West has that artificially suppresses competition.
Competing in the domestic Chinese market is another conversation entirely, as right now, for video games, China has to come to us. The remnants of insular, planned economy only get you so far when you’re trying to build soft power and expand into foreign markets.
The issue though is that Chinese companies have the ability to tap into the massive domestic market in China in addition to international markets, while non-Chinese companies are locked out of the Chinese market unless their Chinese competitors get a cut. So the Chinese developers who get that additional profit from domestic Chinese players end up with a lot more financial weight to throw around than non-Chinese developers, who easily end up getting bought out or pushed out.
paraphrand@lemmy.world
on 31 Jul 19:28
nextcollapse
Yeah. Tim just wants his shitty App Store in more places so he can make his own anti competitive deals to force people to use it.
If the Epic Games store was a great feature rich platform on PC, Mac and Linux, then I would be inclined to take him at his word. But they have been running it for how many years? And it’s still bare bones and not offering anything compelling apart from subsidized free games.
I wish more people could recognize you can support specific actions without liking or approving of the entity taking those actions. It’s not a binary choice.
in this case, the specific action gives the entity an unfair advantage in the global market. Epic (with help from tencent) is suing US companies for antitrust laws, but tencent benefits from exactly that with stores like Steam and Google play outright banned in china. They have the entire chinese market to themselves and use the profit from that to push out further into the global market by doing stuff exactly like this.
silentdon@lemmy.world
on 31 Jul 20:08
nextcollapse
Any benefit to you is incidental to them trying to make a profit. Don’t be fooled into thinking they are fighting for you.
Epic is ~40% owned by Tencent which is a chinese company that directly benefits from Chinese Governement sponsored monopolies. China legally banned US based stores like Steam and Google Play.
Epic is not here to do you favors, they are here to push Tencent and China’s global agenda.
It's sad that any of this was ever allowed to happen in the first place, and that it took a giant corporation to break it up. This shit should have been stomped out 20 years ago when it was beginning.
All Valve would have to do is announce that they would be making sale and install of mobile games and apps through the Steam App and the entire industry would shit the bed.
Booboofinget@lemmy.world
on 31 Jul 18:11
nextcollapse
I pretty much like Epic. I’ve gotten tons of free quality games for free that don’t have micropayment or tons of ads. Sure they might not be the newest version of the game, but there is something to be said about playing a game free from ads and not feeling like a second class citizen for not spending more on a “free” game than most people spend on rent and groceries combined.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world
on 31 Jul 19:05
nextcollapse
Yeah, I get there’s complications and scummy statements, but at the end of the day people complain a.Lot about a free, reasonably simple and low fee storefront that’s missing tons of features but… works fine? And they have like a 0% chance of ever getting a monopoly.
Hence I never really understand being so vehemently “fuck EGS.” Unreal has given me some sweet games, especially compared to some failures of custom engines. These court cases are another, even if they’re for their own benefit.
Probably a large part of the hate is because of the all exclusivity deals that they made at the time.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world
on 31 Jul 19:42
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Which is understandable, but also feels overblown seeing how Steam has a defacto monopoly and “soft” exclusivity (eg they will allegedly delist you if you try to price lower on lower fee stores). And that there have been exclusives on other stores, albeit less common ones for big games.
I don’t think steam is perfect, but they have shown over the years they will go above and beyond to make a good experience for the consumer, including tagging all kinds of negative things on games such as specific DRMs and drastically advancing the ability to run windows games on Linux
No publicly traded company will ever develop that kind of track record even if you give it a chance.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world
on 31 Jul 20:12
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Not a chance, agreed.
I do fear for Valve’s future though. I feel like the basket should be a little more split in case they enshittify.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 01 Aug 01:23
nextcollapse
The only exclusives AFAIK are Valve games (understandable) and games that don’t bother listing elsewhere. I also think Valve’s “no undercutting” policy is reasonable. They give you free keys to sell elsewhere if you choose, and you can have sales happen elsewhwre at a different time (or the same) vs Steam, the only requirement is that you don’t undercut Steam.
That’s very far from monopolistic behavior. Adding to that, Valve also invests heavily in their own platform, providing features like Steam Input, Proton/Steam OS, etc.
Epic, on the other hand, bribes users to come via free games, bribes devs via paid exclusivity, and hasn’t meaningfully invested in their platform, they’re still lightyears away from Steam, and even GOG is way better from a features standpoint.
Which is showing more monopolistic behavior? Epic, and it’s not even close. The only “monopolistic” behavior from Valve is being really popular, and I think they’ve earned that.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world
on 01 Aug 01:34
nextcollapse
They give you free keys to sell elsewhere if you choose
To be clear, this is a different system than stores listing non steam key games.
That’s very far from monopolistic behavior.
I mean, imagine if, say, Walmart or Amazon did this (assuming they don’t already). Every price is every other store has to be at or above theirs, or their product gets delisted, which is apocalypse for a supplier.
How does that not sound monopolistic to you?
Imagine if Amazon took 20% more cut that Newegg and passed that to hardware prices for literally everyone.
EGS literally can’t be monopolistic because they have like no market share, but yes, they’re being anticompetitive and bribing in an unsustainable way. It’s not good either. And their store is barebones, no question.
But the double standard of bothers me. Valve doesn’t get a free pass just cause they have a better platform and they’ve been fine in other areas so far.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 01 Aug 09:34
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To be clear, this is a different system than stores listing non steam key games.
That depends. For GOG and EGS, yeah, those stores don’t want to sell Steam keys, they want to sell keys for their own platform. But other stores like Fanatical sell Steam keys, and I’m not exactly sure how those work.
My point is that devs can sell keys on their own and take 100% profit if they want, they just can’t undercut Steam. And that’s pretty common in retail, if you see a product in store, it’ll be a very similar price to buy direct. It turns out, retail stores don’t like providing marketing just to get undercut on your website or a competitor store.
Valve doesn’t get a free pass just cause they have a better platform
Neither does EGS just because they take a lower cut and give away free games.
AFAIK, Steam isn’t doing anything differently than other retail stores. If EGS were in Valve’s position, you can bet they’d be way worse.
Steam is full of de-facto exclusives that cannot be purchased and played elsewhere, meaning that you have to accept the Steam price, policies, practices, and their launcher in order to play those. Borderlands 2 was de-facto exclusive to Steam from 2012 to 2020, when Epic effectively rescued it from the exclusivity by paying 2K to give it away and add to the Epic store. If anything, Epic rewarding developers for doing what they’ve been doing on Steam is better than them not getting paid.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 01 Aug 08:27
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That’s a choice those devs made, not an exclusivity deal.
As for Borderlands 2, it looks like it was available on most consoles as well. It was released in 2012, which was before Steam even came to Linux, before the original GOG Galaxy, and way before EGS. Interestingly, according to Wikipedia, The Witcher 1&2 were “exclusive” to Steam until ~2012 when GOG relaunched their website, so CD Project Red didn’t even bother selling their own games on their website. If they don’t, why would other devs?
I get it, I’m sad we don’t have good alternatives to Steam, but it’s not because of anything nefarious Valve is doing, it’s because their platform and policies are just better. I didn’t even have a Steam account until 2012 or so when they came to Linux, it just wasn’t necessary because everything I wanted to play was available elsewhere (e.g. direct from devs). These days I use Steam almost exclusively because they make playing on Linux so easy, not because I don’t have other options (I also play EGS and GOG games through Heroic, a community solution to support those stores on Linux because the stores themselves haven’t bothered).
An exclusivity deal is signed by both parties, so it’s just as much of a choice developers make. By the way, like Valve, Epic seems to favor Wine over native ports, given their donation to Lutris. Unlike Valve though, Epic isn’t iffy about others not using their launcher, so there’s an official GOG Galaxy plugin for Epic endorsed by Sweeney.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 02 Aug 13:31
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Yes, I’m not implying Epic is forcing game devs into anything, I’m saying it’s explicitly anticompetitive. Whether a business partner wants to be exclusive should be 100% their decision and not involve a legally binding contract or coercion, because that’s textbook anti-competitiveness.
Epic isn’t iffy about others not using their launcher, so there’s an official GOG Galaxy plugin for Epic endorsed by Sweeney.
Would they retain that policy if they or GOG became #1? I highly doubt it, this is merely a ploy to try to dethrone Steam, and you can be assured the policy will change once someone else gets on top.
Yes, I’m not implying Epic is forcing game devs into anything
Whether a business partner wants to be exclusive should be 100% their decision
This reads as mutually exclusive to me. How can it not be 100% their decision if it’s their decision? Moreover, it’s very common for a publishing agreement to also be legally binding, so everyone in this and other industries is used to that (or guilty of it if you view it as negative).
that’s textbook anti-competitiveness.
Not if it’s done by an underdog. Much of the US antitrust law for example revolves around monopolizing. Challenging what is argued to be a monopoly in a currently ongoing court case ripe with evidence isn’t monopolizing.
Would they retain that policy if they or GOG became #1?
The reason the Epic store was created is Valve’s unwillingness to lower their store fee that was way above the operating cost (7% still being profitable in Epic’s internal calculations made public by a lawsuit).
Epic has a lot more power in the anti-cheat and game engine spaces, but still keeps their software open, whether it’s by keeping the source code available or making the software compatible with Linux.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 02 Aug 18:59
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How can it not be 100% their decision if it’s their decision?
It’s very hard to break a contract like that. So an exclusivity contract is strictly worse for consumers than a dev choosing to only list with one platform since it removes the possibility of listing elsewhere.
Not if it’s done by an underdog
Anticompetitiveness is bad regardless of market position. They may not get hit with antitrust until they get a dominant position, but it’s not great for consumers.
The reason the Epic store was created
No, it was created so they could keep all the money from Fortnite. It’s the same reason they sued Apple and Google. They don’t seem interested in actually having a competitive platform, they just want people to buy their MTX.
still keeps their software open
Yet their store still doesn’t support Linux, and Fortnite doesn’t work on Linux either, despite their anti-cheat technically being compatible.
So don’t tell me they’re doing open, they merely want their game engine and anti-cheat to sell.
Not in the short term, but having an alternative to Steam (or anything with a lot of market share) is great for the long run. Moreover, at least everyone knows that the majority of the contracts would expire in 6 to 12 months. For all intents and purposes, Steam exclusives are a lot worse because there are many times more of them, and you can’t mark a date on your calendar when you can buy them if you can’t or don’t want to buy from Steam.
Keep in mind that, as an example, just recently Steam just decided to no longer support the local currencies of Argentina and Turkey, resulting in no regional prices for the regions on Steam. If Epic didn’t exist and didn’t support regional prices for those regions, all those users would have for third-party titles is GOG, which has a much smaller catalog and seems to support fewer regions. Microsoft Store is also an alternative now, but I’d argue its rise was spearheaded by Game Pass, which relies on the “paid deal” model pioneered in the PC space by Epic.
No, it was created so they could keep all the money from Fortnite.
I think you’re confusing the launcher with the store. The origin of the store itself can be traced back to Sweeney arguing about Valve’s “junk fee” of 30%.
they merely want their game engine and anti-cheat to sell.
How is targeting niche operating systems helping the anti-cheat sell?
I don't like them because they took games that were perfectly functional on Linux and MacOS and made them not function anymore. I paid for Rocket League with the understanding that I'd be able to play it, and now I can't.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world
on 31 Jul 20:11
nextcollapse
Yeah that parts awful.
To be fair, a lot of the games on EGS are nicely DRM free (so no trouble in proton), but Rocket League is not one of them.
That was a side effect of them upgrading the game from DX9 to DX11 and from 32-bit to 64-bit. Also, are you consistent and dislike Valve as a company for doing the same with CS2 for Mac?
That’s cool and all, but the plan is to buy their way in by running at a massive loss then enshittify. Rather, even if that is not the current plan (it probably is), it will inevitably become the plan because it is a publicly traded company.
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
on 31 Jul 21:58
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Yup. At some point even the play store was cool, somewhat nice to use and full of good free games. It always follows the same rulebook. Sadly people dont learn from history.
Just remember that they are trying to create a walled garden of exclusives, publishers are essentially bribed to publish their games only on the EGS. The money that funds these exclusivity deals, and your free games, are being funded majorly by selling gambling lootboxes to kids.
Also don’t forget that you are not being given ownership of those games, it’s pretty widely known by now that digital copies are not ownership, epic is fully able and capable to take those games from you.
Do you think the moment they decide that this “free game bribe tactic” isn’t working, they won’t just remove the free games given at the drop of a hat.
logan_hero@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 31 Jul 20:22
nextcollapse
The money that funds these exclusivity deals, and your free games, are being funded majorly by selling gambling lootboxes to kids.
How the hell they would make so much money from gambling while not offering it in any first party games? Or the 12% from gacha like games is enough to fuel the entire game shop nowadays?
So true brother. Wasn’t capitalism the embodiment of competition breeds innovation? The lack of regulators to keep up with technology has made this terrible monopoly and billionaire landscape
threaded - newest
Fuck Epic and all that, but a silver lining that this has bubbled up because of it
honestly, my opinion of epic is starting to improve more and more with every legal case they open, It’s about time someone with money stepped up.
They are bringing what everyone knew was going on into official record and forcing countries to do something about it. I’m rooting for em
Don’t fall for the trap. It’s one billionaire mad at the other. Epic has alot of puff but no real pazzaz for their store.
it’s also bankrolled by Tencent.
Is that a bad thing?
depends how much chinese influence you want in the gaming market. They are already the biggest gaming company in the world.
It’s also a bit hypotritical for chinese companies to be suing US companies for antitrust laws when the Chinese government outright bans app stores like Steam and Google Play in their own country. They get to have their cake and eat it too, then use all the money they make in china to push out further into the world economy.
There’s no stopping that train now, Tencent or no.
Traditional devs need to be ready to compete, and breaking up monopolies makes for a market more prepared to do so.
I think that is the problem, though. The Chinese market is inherently anti-competitive.
The domestic market can be, and even that depends on your perspective. For example, China doesn’t have the insane Disney copyright regime the West has that artificially suppresses competition.
Competing in the domestic Chinese market is another conversation entirely, as right now, for video games, China has to come to us. The remnants of insular, planned economy only get you so far when you’re trying to build soft power and expand into foreign markets.
The issue though is that Chinese companies have the ability to tap into the massive domestic market in China in addition to international markets, while non-Chinese companies are locked out of the Chinese market unless their Chinese competitors get a cut. So the Chinese developers who get that additional profit from domestic Chinese players end up with a lot more financial weight to throw around than non-Chinese developers, who easily end up getting bought out or pushed out.
Yeah. Tim just wants his shitty App Store in more places so he can make his own anti competitive deals to force people to use it.
If the Epic Games store was a great feature rich platform on PC, Mac and Linux, then I would be inclined to take him at his word. But they have been running it for how many years? And it’s still bare bones and not offering anything compelling apart from subsidized free games.
I wish more people could recognize you can support specific actions without liking or approving of the entity taking those actions. It’s not a binary choice.
in this case, the specific action gives the entity an unfair advantage in the global market. Epic (with help from tencent) is suing US companies for antitrust laws, but tencent benefits from exactly that with stores like Steam and Google play outright banned in china. They have the entire chinese market to themselves and use the profit from that to push out further into the global market by doing stuff exactly like this.
Any benefit to you is incidental to them trying to make a profit. Don’t be fooled into thinking they are fighting for you.
Epic is ~40% owned by Tencent which is a chinese company that directly benefits from Chinese Governement sponsored monopolies. China legally banned US based stores like Steam and Google Play.
Epic is not here to do you favors, they are here to push Tencent and China’s global agenda.
It's sad that any of this was ever allowed to happen in the first place, and that it took a giant corporation to break it up. This shit should have been stomped out 20 years ago when it was beginning.
All Valve would have to do is announce that they would be making sale and install of mobile games and apps through the Steam App and the entire industry would shit the bed.
I pretty much like Epic. I’ve gotten tons of free quality games for free that don’t have micropayment or tons of ads. Sure they might not be the newest version of the game, but there is something to be said about playing a game free from ads and not feeling like a second class citizen for not spending more on a “free” game than most people spend on rent and groceries combined.
Yeah, I get there’s complications and scummy statements, but at the end of the day people complain a. Lot about a free, reasonably simple and low fee storefront that’s missing tons of features but… works fine? And they have like a 0% chance of ever getting a monopoly.
Hence I never really understand being so vehemently “fuck EGS.” Unreal has given me some sweet games, especially compared to some failures of custom engines. These court cases are another, even if they’re for their own benefit.
Probably a large part of the hate is because of the all exclusivity deals that they made at the time.
Which is understandable, but also feels overblown seeing how Steam has a defacto monopoly and “soft” exclusivity (eg they will allegedly delist you if you try to price lower on lower fee stores). And that there have been exclusives on other stores, albeit less common ones for big games.
I don’t think steam is perfect, but they have shown over the years they will go above and beyond to make a good experience for the consumer, including tagging all kinds of negative things on games such as specific DRMs and drastically advancing the ability to run windows games on Linux
No publicly traded company will ever develop that kind of track record even if you give it a chance.
Not a chance, agreed.
I do fear for Valve’s future though. I feel like the basket should be a little more split in case they enshittify.
The only exclusives AFAIK are Valve games (understandable) and games that don’t bother listing elsewhere. I also think Valve’s “no undercutting” policy is reasonable. They give you free keys to sell elsewhere if you choose, and you can have sales happen elsewhwre at a different time (or the same) vs Steam, the only requirement is that you don’t undercut Steam.
That’s very far from monopolistic behavior. Adding to that, Valve also invests heavily in their own platform, providing features like Steam Input, Proton/Steam OS, etc.
Epic, on the other hand, bribes users to come via free games, bribes devs via paid exclusivity, and hasn’t meaningfully invested in their platform, they’re still lightyears away from Steam, and even GOG is way better from a features standpoint.
Which is showing more monopolistic behavior? Epic, and it’s not even close. The only “monopolistic” behavior from Valve is being really popular, and I think they’ve earned that.
To be clear, this is a different system than stores listing non steam key games.
I mean, imagine if, say, Walmart or Amazon did this (assuming they don’t already). Every price is every other store has to be at or above theirs, or their product gets delisted, which is apocalypse for a supplier.
How does that not sound monopolistic to you?
Imagine if Amazon took 20% more cut that Newegg and passed that to hardware prices for literally everyone.
EGS literally can’t be monopolistic because they have like no market share, but yes, they’re being anticompetitive and bribing in an unsustainable way. It’s not good either. And their store is barebones, no question.
But the double standard of bothers me. Valve doesn’t get a free pass just cause they have a better platform and they’ve been fine in other areas so far.
That depends. For GOG and EGS, yeah, those stores don’t want to sell Steam keys, they want to sell keys for their own platform. But other stores like Fanatical sell Steam keys, and I’m not exactly sure how those work.
My point is that devs can sell keys on their own and take 100% profit if they want, they just can’t undercut Steam. And that’s pretty common in retail, if you see a product in store, it’ll be a very similar price to buy direct. It turns out, retail stores don’t like providing marketing just to get undercut on your website or a competitor store.
Neither does EGS just because they take a lower cut and give away free games.
AFAIK, Steam isn’t doing anything differently than other retail stores. If EGS were in Valve’s position, you can bet they’d be way worse.
Steam is full of de-facto exclusives that cannot be purchased and played elsewhere, meaning that you have to accept the Steam price, policies, practices, and their launcher in order to play those. Borderlands 2 was de-facto exclusive to Steam from 2012 to 2020, when Epic effectively rescued it from the exclusivity by paying 2K to give it away and add to the Epic store. If anything, Epic rewarding developers for doing what they’ve been doing on Steam is better than them not getting paid.
That’s a choice those devs made, not an exclusivity deal.
As for Borderlands 2, it looks like it was available on most consoles as well. It was released in 2012, which was before Steam even came to Linux, before the original GOG Galaxy, and way before EGS. Interestingly, according to Wikipedia, The Witcher 1&2 were “exclusive” to Steam until ~2012 when GOG relaunched their website, so CD Project Red didn’t even bother selling their own games on their website. If they don’t, why would other devs?
I get it, I’m sad we don’t have good alternatives to Steam, but it’s not because of anything nefarious Valve is doing, it’s because their platform and policies are just better. I didn’t even have a Steam account until 2012 or so when they came to Linux, it just wasn’t necessary because everything I wanted to play was available elsewhere (e.g. direct from devs). These days I use Steam almost exclusively because they make playing on Linux so easy, not because I don’t have other options (I also play EGS and GOG games through Heroic, a community solution to support those stores on Linux because the stores themselves haven’t bothered).
An exclusivity deal is signed by both parties, so it’s just as much of a choice developers make. By the way, like Valve, Epic seems to favor Wine over native ports, given their donation to Lutris. Unlike Valve though, Epic isn’t iffy about others not using their launcher, so there’s an official GOG Galaxy plugin for Epic endorsed by Sweeney.
Yes, I’m not implying Epic is forcing game devs into anything, I’m saying it’s explicitly anticompetitive. Whether a business partner wants to be exclusive should be 100% their decision and not involve a legally binding contract or coercion, because that’s textbook anti-competitiveness.
Would they retain that policy if they or GOG became #1? I highly doubt it, this is merely a ploy to try to dethrone Steam, and you can be assured the policy will change once someone else gets on top.
This reads as mutually exclusive to me. How can it not be 100% their decision if it’s their decision? Moreover, it’s very common for a publishing agreement to also be legally binding, so everyone in this and other industries is used to that (or guilty of it if you view it as negative).
Not if it’s done by an underdog. Much of the US antitrust law for example revolves around monopolizing. Challenging what is argued to be a monopoly in a currently ongoing court case ripe with evidence isn’t monopolizing.
The reason the Epic store was created is Valve’s unwillingness to lower their store fee that was way above the operating cost (7% still being profitable in Epic’s internal calculations made public by a lawsuit).
Epic has a lot more power in the anti-cheat and game engine spaces, but still keeps their software open, whether it’s by keeping the source code available or making the software compatible with Linux.
It’s very hard to break a contract like that. So an exclusivity contract is strictly worse for consumers than a dev choosing to only list with one platform since it removes the possibility of listing elsewhere.
Anticompetitiveness is bad regardless of market position. They may not get hit with antitrust until they get a dominant position, but it’s not great for consumers.
No, it was created so they could keep all the money from Fortnite. It’s the same reason they sued Apple and Google. They don’t seem interested in actually having a competitive platform, they just want people to buy their MTX.
Yet their store still doesn’t support Linux, and Fortnite doesn’t work on Linux either, despite their anti-cheat technically being compatible.
So don’t tell me they’re doing open, they merely want their game engine and anti-cheat to sell.
Not in the short term, but having an alternative to Steam (or anything with a lot of market share) is great for the long run. Moreover, at least everyone knows that the majority of the contracts would expire in 6 to 12 months. For all intents and purposes, Steam exclusives are a lot worse because there are many times more of them, and you can’t mark a date on your calendar when you can buy them if you can’t or don’t want to buy from Steam.
Keep in mind that, as an example, just recently Steam just decided to no longer support the local currencies of Argentina and Turkey, resulting in no regional prices for the regions on Steam. If Epic didn’t exist and didn’t support regional prices for those regions, all those users would have for third-party titles is GOG, which has a much smaller catalog and seems to support fewer regions. Microsoft Store is also an alternative now, but I’d argue its rise was spearheaded by Game Pass, which relies on the “paid deal” model pioneered in the PC space by Epic.
I think you’re confusing the launcher with the store. The origin of the store itself can be traced back to Sweeney arguing about Valve’s “junk fee” of 30%.
How is targeting niche operating systems helping the anti-cheat sell?
Allegedly? There is plenty of evidence of that in the Wolfire lawsuit. See for yourself from page 160 here.
I don't like them because they took games that were perfectly functional on Linux and MacOS and made them not function anymore. I paid for Rocket League with the understanding that I'd be able to play it, and now I can't.
Yeah that parts awful.
To be fair, a lot of the games on EGS are nicely DRM free (so no trouble in proton), but Rocket League is not one of them.
Rocket League seems to work fine with Proton GE.
Via EGS? I just assumed DRM for multiplayer broke it or something.
I think it’s anti cheat, not DRM. But recent protondb reports don’t indicate any problems. I haven’t checked areweanticheatyet
That was a side effect of them upgrading the game from DX9 to DX11 and from 32-bit to 64-bit. Also, are you consistent and dislike Valve as a company for doing the same with CS2 for Mac?
That’s cool and all, but the plan is to buy their way in by running at a massive loss then enshittify. Rather, even if that is not the current plan (it probably is), it will inevitably become the plan because it is a publicly traded company.
Yup. At some point even the play store was cool, somewhat nice to use and full of good free games. It always follows the same rulebook. Sadly people dont learn from history.
Just remember that they are trying to create a walled garden of exclusives, publishers are essentially bribed to publish their games only on the EGS. The money that funds these exclusivity deals, and your free games, are being funded majorly by selling gambling lootboxes to kids.
Also don’t forget that you are not being given ownership of those games, it’s pretty widely known by now that digital copies are not ownership, epic is fully able and capable to take those games from you.
Do you think the moment they decide that this “free game bribe tactic” isn’t working, they won’t just remove the free games given at the drop of a hat.
How the hell they would make so much money from gambling while not offering it in any first party games? Or the 12% from gacha like games is enough to fuel the entire game shop nowadays?
They are currently installed locally, and I even played at least one while the internet was down.
What makes this even more funny is that Android is more open than iOS or any of the gaming consoles out there.
Still good to see these anti competive practices come to light.
Yea, but when you dig a bit, it’s all Google Play Store and Services, with a bit of Play Integrity on top
Good, better that the smaller evil company wins rather than the bigger evil one.
So true brother. Wasn’t capitalism the embodiment of competition breeds innovation? The lack of regulators to keep up with technology has made this terrible monopoly and billionaire landscape
I’m still confused how Apple won the same lawsuit against Epic that Google lost.