108 replies to this topic

[Dr Hobo]

LordKnightFandragon, on 25 July 2019 - 07:38 PM, said:

Well, when Russ and PGI stop being dumb, they can sell MW5 to HBS....

The woke moments,mary sue story,bad characters,poorly designed UIs,and terribly built Unity games? I mean,if you want more of that..
Nah,it's time for Microsoft to pull PGI's licence of Mechwarrior.

[LordKnightFandragon]

Dr Hobo, on 25 July 2019 - 07:40 PM, said:

The woke moments,mary sue story,bad characters,poorly designed UIs,and terribly built Unity games? I mean,if you want more of that..
Nah,it's time for Microsoft to pull PGI's licence of Mechwarrior.

The question is who to give it to next? Seems like all the dev teams anymore are trash....

As for all the stuff in HBS BT, at least they kept to their word as far as I know. Id rather have HBS get it than these dopes....

Edited by LordKnightFandragon, 25 July 2019 - 07:43 PM.

[Dr Hobo]

LordKnightFandragon, on 25 July 2019 - 07:42 PM, said:

The question is who to give it to next? Seems like all the dev teams anymore are trash....

Honestly? Battletech as a whole will never get better until all the licences are under the same roof again. With Battletech as a whole being so split,it makes it impossible to have a coherent universe.

HBS did,but even with an original writer going woke(Jordan Weismann) it's quite clear that Battletech was nowhere near ready to be taken out of the oven.

The Story was terrible,the characters were bland as wallpaper paste,and the game ran terribly. They only kept their promise with 2 mediocre DLCs.

Edited by Dr Hobo, 25 July 2019 - 07:45 PM.

[LordKnightFandragon]

Dr Hobo, on 25 July 2019 - 07:43 PM, said:

Honestly? Battletech as a whole will never get better until all the licences are under the same roof again. With Battletech as a whole being so split,it makes it impossible to have a coherent universe.

Yeah and of all the people to have it again, id rather the daddy of BT get the games....

[Dr Hobo]

LordKnightFandragon, on 25 July 2019 - 07:44 PM, said:

Yeah and of all the people to have it again, id rather the daddy of BT get the games....

FASA? They'll never come back. Weismann went woke,and Battletech didn't need wokeness(Natasha Kerensky, Johanna,Kells wife who's name evades me, Katrina Steiner,etc). It needed a story that wasnt so full of holes and magic luck. I think the Mech Assault series had a better story than Battletech 2018 did.

[The6thMessenger]

Sure, money may allow them to hire some competent coders for once -- could have used them in MWO but we're killing it now, it's a dead-horse that we've beaten with stick for years.

I don't know how popular MW5 is, but I'm sure that MWO playerbase has been loyal and patient, and the most of the buys in the first place. Shafting them like this isn't exactly conducive to their prospect.

The way I see it, Epic-Fail loses money, and PGI loses credibility.

[LordKnightFandragon]

Dr Hobo, on 25 July 2019 - 07:49 PM, said:

FASA? They'll never come back. Weismann went woke,and Battletech didn't need wokeness(Natasha Kerensky, Johanna,Kells wife who's name evades me, Katrina Steiner,etc). It needed a story that wasnt so full of holes and magic luck. I think the Mech Assault series had a better story than Battletech 2018 did.

I wont lie that the BT storyline was about as cliche as you can possibly get.....

Betrayed heir fights to get her throne back from a treasonous family member.......basically MW4 Vengeance all over again? lol....

[The6thMessenger]

Khobai, on 25 July 2019 - 03:32 PM, said:

steam takes 30% which is completely outrageous. and PGI would still have to give 5% to epic for unreal engine royalties on top of the 30% to steam. for a total of 35%.

epic takes 12% and waives the 5% royalty they would normally charge.

35% vs 12%... its a no brainer which PGI would choose. what sane company would give up 23% of their profit margin?

if you wanna blame anyone blame steam for ripping game developers off. or blame yourself for thinking MW5 was ever going to be a good game in the first place or that PGI wouldnt lie when they have a history of lying repeatedly lololol.

Oh please. Higher cuts or lower cuts would be less relevant if the total is lower anyways.

They could either face the 35% and earn probably up to 5 million, and take home 3.25, or they could take the easy route and just earn 1 million for mere 12% cut which is just 880K + assuming 2 million of exclusivity deal.

If that's the scenario, i'd rather have the 35% royalty fees, and not screw up my loyal customer, Epic-Fails can keep their money. One thing for sure, PGI is not CD-Projekt Red.

Khobai, on 25 July 2019 - 03:32 PM, said:

The problem is steam not EGS. Steam is the one charging the outrageously high fees that everyone agrees are completely excessive for the service provided by Valve. Steams outrageous fees are what set the baseline price of games so high.

Price of doing business.

The problem is exactly EGS gate-keeping by throwing money around to the detriment of consumers. You could "follow the money" all you like, but you're nothing without people buying your game -- it'll just be a waste of money for what is basically a vanity project for Epic-Fails.

Khobai, on 25 July 2019 - 03:32 PM, said:

and EGS is absolutely competition for steam. The same way that netflix is competition for amazon or hulu because of their exclusive shows that you can only watch on those streaming services.

You must be joking. Streaming services at least have great services. Steam is Great and because of that we flock to it, GOG at least tries and is nice about it, so we let it pass.

EGS is ****, and the people are doing anti-consumer stuffs that benefit no-one. They think it will benefit the developers, but really they're just taking away the credibility and the patrons.

Khobai, on 25 July 2019 - 03:32 PM, said:

competition has become more than just whoever has the lowest prices. for distribution services, competition has become a war to monopolize intellectual properties through exclusivity contracts. Although I definitely think a strong case could be made that exclusivity contracts are monopolies and violate trade laws by not allowing fair competition.

Well, exactly, monopoly isn't exactly a good thing. But the thing is that, Steam pretty much have monopoly because they are great at what they are doing. At least Steam is "monopoly" because it's great at what it does, and doesn't exactly prevent competition -- it's just hard to compete with the best.

What EGS should be doing is improving it's store, throwing money at their own devs than throwing money to the desperate.

That's not competition don't you even ******* dare call it "competition", you're shooting the other runners at the leg and winning by default because they can't run. It's not people being enticed by what is best, they are instead forced to buy something from somewhere because that's the only place you can get it.

Edited by The6thMessenger, 25 July 2019 - 09:47 PM.

[CFC Conky]

Sounds like either a risky or a desperate move on PGI's part. How unbiased will former MWO players' reviews be when MW5 drops? The bad taste MWO is leaving in so many mouths will still be there, so the new game better be reaalllyyyy good because it looks like PGI has created a very large group of unhappy campers.

The refunds, while fair, probably won't do much to regain our goodwill. I work in a service industry, and once you've lost a customer, it's hard as hell to get them back.

Conky

[Y E O N N E]

It's literally the same set of tactics used by a drug dealer muscling in on an area.

[Papaspud]

Dr Hobo, on 25 July 2019 - 02:31 PM, said:

Greater exposure on Epic?

I dunno,their storefront barely works.

How many days would this stay on the steam store pagefront.....not many, this is way too small.

[Anjian]

Dr Hobo, on 25 July 2019 - 07:37 PM, said:

Epic is owned by Tencent(40% controlling shares with the CEO holding the rest.). Who is a well known Chinese intelligence gathering agency. Epic,also has had many data breeches in the past several years where critical information has been stolen.

Pretty sure someone's 3 to 1 KDR is of interest to Chinese national security.

Quote

Epic Game Store also is essentially spyware,scraping data from Steam and other places it shouldn't be.

Epic store barely works,is hot trash,and the only reasons I can logically think of that PGI and Russ backed out of Steam and went to Epic is because

Lack of reviews or curation of games on Epic Store
Lack of a refund policy on Epic Store
Epic gave Russ a fat purse of Tencent money and Russ in his usual not thinking of long term effects jumped in head first to get that money.

It tells me that Russ/PGI are not confident in their game.

Tencent buys shares of game companies to help guarantee licensing of said products to China under Tencent's umbrella --- which is where the real money is. The Real Money. They honestly could not care less what their global subsidiaries do. See Riot Games.

Nonetheless, Tencent could have licensed Fortnite and they did. Guess who threw cold water over it. Yup, the Chinese government, which is getting heat from Chinese tigermoms about their kid's game addictions. In fact the Chinese government threw a freeze on all new game approvals the whole of 2018 and Tencent lost billions from that when their stock fell.

Despite having the Fortnite license, Tencent also has the PUBG license to China, and created a censored version of it (no blood and gore, the guy who gets shot, waves at you and leaves the map). That passed the censors. Tencent also runs the mobile PUBG which ranks highly (like among the top 10 games) in gross ratings in both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, despite said app is in direct competition to Fortnite which is non store download. This shows that despite the 40% ownership in Epic, Tencent doesn't really agree with Epic making their own store or doing rogue with mobile downloads but respects their CEO decision. Ownership, or part ownership, does not translate to corporate synchonicity.

The Autochess incident also reveals a limit to Valve's own 'charity'. Autochess started as a mod to Dota 2, and soon become the most popular mod in a matter of month all within 2019. Suffice to say, a new game genre was born. Smelling the bucks here, Valve and the mod developers of Autochess had a fall out, and Valve went on to develop Dota Underlords. Drodo, the original Autochess developers, signed up with an indie Chinese publisher Dragonnest (Drodo is from China) and published Autochess without the Dota art assets in mobile. With Dota Underlords in Steam, Autochess Original is now headed to obviously, the Epic store, for its eagerly awaited PC version.

Complicating everything, Riot Games made their own version, Team Fight Tactics, and Tencent made their own mobile version, Chess Rush, despite Riot Games being owned by Tencent. None of them, well, are in the Epic store. Autochess, Dota Underlords and Chess Rush are all duking it out for mobile marketshare in the Apple and Google Play Stores.

Epic makes enough money from Fortnite to subsidize their store. They don't need Tencent, and I doubt Tencent would be willing. Tencent is more interested in publishing US games to China, than publishing their own games in the US with the exception on mobile.

Edited by Anjian, 25 July 2019 - 09:08 PM.

[MischiefSC]

Tencent has no more access to Epics data or proprietary anything that you'd have of Boeing military contract information because you own shares of Boeing. EGL isn't spyware - though it is pretty nosy. However no more so than Facebook and Twitter - again though, that's not a good thing. It's not however inherently malicious.

The Epic game client/launcher/whatever doesn't run well though. Bloated, inefficient and problematic. It has 0, as in Zero, as in absolutely no, benefit to the user. It makes stuff run WORSE.

However I absolutely get that from PGIs perspective the Epic store is both far more profitable (cutting embedded costs per copy by a third is some real money) and because they're not competing for front page space with 50 pieces of shovelware a day on the Steam page it's going to be better for marketing.

Even this drama helps them - it's getting their name out there. For all the rage at Epic sales of games on the Epic platform have been pretty strong. So the question is for the 1,000 people who refund (maybe 2,000?) will they get more than 2,000 new customers because of longer time 'in the public eye' than they would have gotten on Steam.

However, to be crystal clear - this move benefits PGI at the direct expense of the games consumers. The Epic platform is absolutely and sincerely inferior to Steam in a raft of ways and provides an inferior experience.

HOWEVER HOWEVER -

Russ said that you'd be able to download the game through the Epic launcher and play it directly without having to have the Epic launcher up. If that's the case I'm good - I want PGI to keep more of the revenue from the game and I just don't want to use the Epic launcher, because every time I've tried to use it with a game it's been absolute crap. Still got one game my wife literally can't play, has never worked and their support is utterly worthless.

If I don't have to use Epic launcher and deal with Epic support, I'm good. Will keep preorder, enjoy MW5. If not, I'm probably going to bite the bullet and refund. Which I hate to do - I'm willing to give PGI a good shot at giving me the game I believe they can make. 100% of the direct experience I've had with Epic though has been bad and I'm not willing to put up with that in yet another game.

[Anjian]

Dr Hobo, on 25 July 2019 - 07:49 PM, said:

FASA? They'll never come back. Weismann went woke,and Battletech didn't need wokeness(Natasha Kerensky, Johanna,Kells wife who's name evades me, Katrina Steiner,etc). It needed a story that wasnt so full of holes and magic luck. I think the Mech Assault series had a better story than Battletech 2018 did.

Don't confuse 'woke' with 'waifus'. Lara Croft, Xena the Warrior Princess, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, aren't there for SJWs or wokeness, but because they are earlier examples leading to what the geek phenomenon known as waifus.

You get so many strong, lean women in many genre fiction --- Sarah Conor is one of them, Ripley from Aliens is another --- not because they're woke or SJW, but because strong women are a big turn on for many genre loving men. And not just from the audience, but also for the creators.

[SpectreHD]

MischiefSC, on 25 July 2019 - 09:42 PM, said:

Russ said that you'd be able to download the game through the Epic launcher and play it directly without having to have the Epic launcher up. If that's the case I'm good - I want PGI to keep more of the revenue from the game and I just don't want to use the Epic launcher, because every time I've tried to use it with a game it's been absolute crap. Still got one game my wife literally can't play, has never worked and their support is utterly worthless.

If I don't have to use Epic launcher and deal with Epic support, I'm good. Will keep preorder, enjoy MW5. If not, I'm probably going to bite the bullet and refund. Which I hate to do - I'm willing to give PGI a good shot at giving me the game I believe they can make. 100% of the direct experience I've had with Epic though has been bad and I'm not willing to put up with that in yet another game.

If you only need to use the Epic launcher to download/update MW5, can't the MWO Launcher do that already? The MWO Launcher has worked very well for me so why can't PGI just make another for MW5. That way 100% of the money from sales goes to PGI. But I guess PGI cannot resist the Fortnite money.



Also, one thing I have not seen mentioned about Steam's 30% cut actually covers other things like differences in regional pricing and the running of fast servers for downloads. So Valve uses their cut to cover costs so that developers/publishers don't have to deal with regional pricing as well as maintaining servers.

[Y E O N N E]

SpectreHD, on 25 July 2019 - 10:19 PM, said:

Also, one thing I have not seen mentioned about Steam's 30% cut actually covers other things like differences in regional pricing and the running of fast servers for downloads. So Valve uses their cut to cover costs so that developers/publishers don't have to deal with regional pricing as well as maintaining servers.

Epic has a widely licensed game engine and Fortnite revenue streams that let them reduce the cut they demand from game sales through their store.

TBQH, Valve really ought to get back into making games so they can have this same weapon in their arsenal. Right now they are just hoping that the open-arms policy and existing marketshare they have with Steam will ensure their survival.

[phoenix risen]

VonBruinwald, on 25 July 2019 - 02:23 PM, said:

Benefits of moving to Epic...

• More money for PGI to "develop the game".
  
• It increase competition in the market place. Competition is good for the consumer.

There's not an ouch of competition if its on one store. Stupid.

[GeminiWolf]

Wing 0, on 25 July 2019 - 02:30 PM, said:

They wanted to be china's milk drinkers by going Tim Sweeny at Epic Fail Store. They stabbed a Community in the back. Now were stabbing PGI back for allowing epic's tortious interference.

Epic Games, Inc. is an American video game and software development company based in Cary, North Carolina. The company was founded by Tim Sweeney as Potomac Computer Systems in 1991, originally located in his parents' house in Potomac, Maryland. Following his first commercial video game release, ZZT, the company became Epic MegaGames in early 1992, and brought on Mark Rein, who is the company's vice president to date. Moving their headquarters to Cary in 1999, the studio's name was simplified to Epic Games.

Second time I've heard someone mention they are a Chinese company....they are not. Quit spreading lies.

[Darth Futuza]

SpectreHD, on 25 July 2019 - 10:19 PM, said:

If you only need to use the Epic launcher to download/update MW5, can't the MWO Launcher do that already? The MWO Launcher has worked very well for me so why can't PGI just make another for MW5. That way 100% of the money from sales goes to PGI. But I guess PGI cannot resist the Fortnite money.

Yeah this is one of the things that bugs me the most. The new MWO launcher was named "MWO Portal" I assumed for a reason. Cause they wanted to actually have other games on it eventually. They already have a distribution setup through MWO for patching and everything, why don't they just keep it in house and make all the monies? I'm guessing its because they ran out of money and literally have nothing to keep on the lights without a hefty payout from Epic.

[Walle87]

Dr Hobo, on 25 July 2019 - 07:43 PM, said:

Honestly? Battletech as a whole will never get better until all the licences are under the same roof again. With Battletech as a whole being so split,it makes it impossible to have a coherent universe.

HBS did,but even with an original writer going woke(Jordan Weismann) it's quite clear that Battletech was nowhere near ready to be taken out of the oven.

The Story was terrible,the characters were bland as wallpaper paste,and the game ran terribly. They only kept their promise with 2 mediocre DLCs.

Harebrained did far from perfect, agree. But where does the measurement bar lie? They have done far more for Battletech than PGI did. And this in far less time.

Yeah, Flashpoint and Urban Warfare are mediocore but they never promised anything beforehand. And the Mod-community is swole af and is doing a real good job. So all in all they are far more better for the BT Universe than the ****heads that screwed us over.