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Steam has succeeded (I think) because they've managed to walk a thin line w/ drm and not screwing up the user experience too much. Facebook would be smart to h

Steam has succeeded (I think) because they've managed to walk a thin line w/ drm and not screwing up the user experience too much. Facebook would be smart to have gaming and social as two separate things with optional integration with Facebook. They'll screw it up because they'll make the optional part super annoying. Because when have they not? I turned off my Facebook years ago. That works fine for me, but I'm frustrated any time someone uses Facebook to post something I'd like to read (like yann lecun or john carmack) because it's a step backwards. It'd be like Doom being released as an AOL exclusive. Anyway, my money's on steam and ue4 dominating for years to come, not a new dist platform and not unity.

ythl 10y ago
I hate to break it to you, but Unity already dominates in terms of popularity.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- dave_sullivan 10y ago
  Yes, hence why everyone that doesn't make games is super excited. UE4 is the superior engine, made by a company that actually makes games. Networking, rendering, UI, lots more -- it all comes built-in to ue4 where unity has built this plugins ecosystem that is sort of a mess. Also, does Unity still not give you the source code? I assume they'll change this soon enough; you get the source code with ue4. I kind of see it like blender vs maya or something. Lots of people are using blender, and it's very powerful. But industry is using Maya (because it's more powerful), and that won't change for a bit I think (good for autodesk).
  - Sleaker 10y ago
    You don't get source with unity unless you pay a lot, and that's incredibly unlikely to change.
  - jarsin 10y ago
    > unity has built this plugins ecosystem that is sort of a mess. I regret every non-art unity asset store purchase I made. Need behavior trees pick one of 10 crappy maintained assets etc etc. Constantly felt like I needed to purchase something to fill some gap in unity or spend tons of time developing my own solution. I don't feel that way at all in UE4.
  - babuskov 10y ago
    > Also, does Unity still not give you the source code? I believe that the issue isn't that they don't want to share, but that the code is a pile of patchwork that would need to be re-engineered before presenting it to anyone outside the company. Unity has better marketing. The captured larger audience and thus got more content on their asset market and it has became default engine for beginners (C# seems much easier to learn than C++). Unity is like Visual Basic of gamedev.
    - nucleardog 10y ago
      'Seems much easier to learn'? I'd attribute the ability to work with it from a managed language with a large part of its success relative to UE4. Large swathes of even professional programmers have now come into the industry never having had to really deal with manual memory management. (And I happen to think that's fine.) Given that, and the rising popularity of indie/amateur games, I fail to see how one couldn't count C/C++ as a negative as far as market penetration is concerned.
      - babuskov 10y ago
        > Seems much easier to learn Since I started from Assembler, it's hard for me to estimate how hard is C++ to some beginner. Managing memory came as a natural extension of understanding how the computer works. > I'd attribute the ability to work with it from a managed language with a large part of its success relative to UE4. You are probably right, but I simply cannot feel it. Thus "seems". > Given that, and the rising popularity of indie/amateur games I believe indie games reached their peak in 2011/2012 and got a huge drop in quality/quantity ratio since.
    - niteshade 10y ago
      I'd go a step further, Unity is the Fisher-Price of games development.
      - szatkus 10y ago
        So what is Game Factory or other game makers?
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Following Unity's growth is like watching again the developers that were trying to create games in "managed languages" (C, Pascal, Modula-2, AMOS,...) slowly wining over the ones writing in pure Assembly. Yes, there is a lot of of C++ under the hood in Unity, but I also remember the days when writing game engines in C and Pascal dialects actually the majority of the code looked something like: procedure MyProc; assembler; asm (* assembly *) end; Yet 30 years later we seem to have forgotten how bad those compilers were targeting home computers and how much they have improved in all these years. We need more success stories like Unity to keep driving the industry forward.
  - justinhj 10y ago
    I was one of those developers. I wrote a game in 93 that used mostly c rather than assembly because I didn't want to write it twice for Amiga and PC. At the time games were mostly assembler and it was felt that c compiled code had too much overhead. It was probably true to an extent for another couple of years. The next fight was to move from C and C++ to Java and C++. This still hasn't happened in console gaming because the overhead needed for gc is not palatable to aaa developers that have to milk every byte of ram in the machine.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      Yeah, I was one of those early C++ developers being bashed for using a bloated language (vs C), just like C# devs are nowadays. Regarding GC and consoles, how do the UE 4 developers approach it, just disable the GC related features then?
      - SeanBoocock 10y ago
        I haven't shipped a game on UE4 yet but in profiling our in-development game I've yet to see Unreal's GC emerge as a performance concern. The UE4 GC is purpose built, simple (mark and sweep), and limited to only certain objects/allocations. The only time I've seen significant GC times/hitches was related to a bug that resulted in thousands of small allocations every second. I would much prefer if Epic dropped the GC - losing tight control over object lifetimes is as bad or worse than any potential performance overhead issues in my experience - but failing that I don't think its inclusion is a serious concern for shipping on consoles.
mevile 10y ago
Facebook's Oculus has already tried to go the way of exclusives and walled gardens so I doubt it will take off. PC gamers are an opinionated noisy bunch and they will cause all kinds of drama for Facebook if they aren't as open as Steam. I don't really get this anyway. Steam works. Origin and Battle.net kinda make sense since those are the publisher's platform, and there's also GoG's Galaxy. There's really not any more room for another competitor.
- eswat 10y ago
  > Steam works But does it still provide a great experience for gamers and creators? I'd wager so say they can do a lot better, but they're letting their success stagnate them. Buggy mobile apps, questionable revenue share on Workshop items, no strong answer to the discovery of good games ever since Greenlight came out, IMHO Valve isn't doing enough with their platform on their own. I'd welcome competition to get them to perk up their step a bit.
  - mevile 10y ago
    There already is competition. GoG's Galaxy. It's great. Nobody I know uses it. Not a single streamer on twitch I've ever watch uses it. I'm fine with competition too, but not from Facebook. They've already fucked up with the Oculus store and I don't trust them anyway. Facebook is an unscrupulous advertisement company that turns intimate personal information into pay per click ad dollars. I'd even go so far as to say Valve not caring is a good thing. They don't try to interfere too much and when they do and it blows up they walk it back.
    - serge2k 10y ago
      > I'd even go so far as to say Valve not caring is a good thing. Ridiculous statement. Waiting weeks for a support request is not a good thing. Waiting weeks then getting response in russian is not a good thing. The app being a generally slow clunky experience is not a good thing. Piss poor preview games is not a good thing. CS Go gambling is not a good thing. DotA2 is not a good thing. :p A lot of things were even worse before Origin arrived and Valve started at least a half-assed attempt to make things better.
TAForObvReasons 10y ago
> someone uses Facebook to post something I'd like to read (like yann lecun or john carmack) because it's a step backwards. It'd be like Doom being released as an AOL exclusive. Worth pointing out that both were employed by Facebook (and AFAICT both are still there). I would genuinely be surprised if they used google+ or some other platform for posts
funkyy 10y ago
Steam might lose fight for players in the future, but for sure it will not be to Facebook. Worthy opponent it seems is GOG, they are superb platform with great values behind their offering.
- jamiesonbecker 10y ago
  And GOG is committed to DRM-free, too: https://www.gog.com/support/website_help/what_is_gog_com https://www.gog.com/support/website_help/what_is_gog_com I've only had great experiences with GOG as a platform. ..and I love Steam, too, and both are committed to Linux as a platform for the future. (When is Portal 3 coming?!) They each have carved out such a great niche and they're each both gamer and developer friendly.. I'm not so sure that FB has demonstrated being either of those things.
20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
Why UE4 over Unity? I have downloaded both and while both have a steep learning curve the one for UE is steeper, and the initial experience is much worse. Seems they never really tested it on the mac much.
- estefan 10y ago
  I don't know. I did the space shooter tutorial on unity last week and I'm finding it a doddle to make my first 2D game... I'm super impressed, having never done game dev before.
- jarsin 10y ago
  Ya if you are developing for mobile and/or primarily working on a Mac then UE4 is not as good of choice. I develop on the mac and pc in UE4. On the mac ue4 performance is bad and you need the top of the line mac to deal with it. Personally I just write c++ on the mac and keep the editor closed most of the time until i need to test the code real quick in a very basic level. Then when im on my pc i do the heavy stuff.
plandis 10y ago
Agreed. It's really annoying that others use Facebook for auth as well. Want Spotify? Nowadays you better have a Facebook account because that is how you sign in unless you were lucky enough to have acces to their beta prior to the partnership.
- mitm2mitm 10y ago
  What do you mean? You can create a new Spotify account with your e-mail. But I already gave up on Spotify since the web player is buggy and full of memory leaks. But I'm sure their apps are fine.
- eslaught 10y ago
  Spotify switched their policy back to accepting signups via email: https://www.spotify.com/us/signup/ https://www.spotify.com/us/signup/ If you already have an account, I'm not sure there's a way to de-associate it, but you could probably delete the old account and create a new one.
busterarm 10y ago
People seem forget that the Friends/Community feature on Steam didn't really work at all for _YEARS_ when the platform launched. I'd love to take the same bet you do, but if you have a killer product that requires the platform, people will use it. Half Life 2 and Counter Strike 1.6 were the killer products for Steam. Mass Effect 3 and The Old Republic are mostly the only reasons anyone I know installed Origin at first (and I'm sure other games now). If Facebook finds that app, it won't matter how terrible their platform is.
Impossible 10y ago
I'm curious why you think UE4 will dominate. I can think of a lot of reasons why, but many of them depend on the definition of "dominate" (raw users in the ecosystem, number of released games, number of successful titles, number of AAA or high-end indie titles, etc.)
stcredzero 10y ago
Facebook would be smart to have gaming and social as two separate things with optional integration with Facebook. They'll screw it up because they'll make the optional part super annoying. Because when have they not? It will be enjoyably ironic when Facebook starts Google-Plussing it's own projects to death!
stcredzero 10y ago
Facebook would be smart to have gaming and social as two separate things with optional integration with Facebook. I don't exactly disagree. Rather, I think the underlying problem is orthogonal to the one you're paying attention to. Facebook's problem is that they let people think of Facebook games as being somehow separate from mobile. The far-seeing move would've been to make Facebook across the desktop, mobile, et al., as views into a single ecosystem. Anyway, my money's on steam and ue4 dominating for years to come, not a new dist platform and not unity. I like the sound of this, but what are your reasons for this?
ekianjo 10y ago
> I turned off my Facebook years ago. That works fine for me, but I'm frustrated any time someone uses Facebook to post something I'd like to read (like yann lecun or john carmack) because it's a step backwards. It'd be like Doom being released as an AOL exclusive. Especially disappointing coming from Carmack who used to be a champion of openness. How has he changed...
- pjmlp 10y ago
  You mean this Carmack? http://www.geek.com/games/john-carmack-finally-prefers-directx-to-opengl-1326739/ http://www.geek.com/games/john-carmack-finally-prefers-direc...
  - ekianjo 10y ago
    Yup, even though he used to champion OpenGL for his games for a long time. That's why I mentioned he has changed.
    - mercer 10y ago
      Has he ever commented on this? I'd really like to know what changed his mind.
nso95 10y ago
They seem to realize that users don't necessarily want to be linked to a Facebook account. For example: you no longer need a Facebook account in order to use messenger. Hopefully they're smart enough and willing enough to apply that same philosophy to this product.

ythl 10y ago

I hate to break it to you, but Unity already dominates in terms of popularity.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dave_sullivan 10y ago
Yes, hence why everyone that doesn't make games is super excited. UE4 is the superior engine, made by a company that actually makes games. Networking, rendering, UI, lots more -- it all comes built-in to ue4 where unity has built this plugins ecosystem that is sort of a mess. Also, does Unity still not give you the source code? I assume they'll change this soon enough; you get the source code with ue4. I kind of see it like blender vs maya or something. Lots of people are using blender, and it's very powerful. But industry is using Maya (because it's more powerful), and that won't change for a bit I think (good for autodesk).
- Sleaker 10y ago
  You don't get source with unity unless you pay a lot, and that's incredibly unlikely to change.
- jarsin 10y ago
  > unity has built this plugins ecosystem that is sort of a mess. I regret every non-art unity asset store purchase I made. Need behavior trees pick one of 10 crappy maintained assets etc etc. Constantly felt like I needed to purchase something to fill some gap in unity or spend tons of time developing my own solution. I don't feel that way at all in UE4.
- babuskov 10y ago
  > Also, does Unity still not give you the source code? I believe that the issue isn't that they don't want to share, but that the code is a pile of patchwork that would need to be re-engineered before presenting it to anyone outside the company. Unity has better marketing. The captured larger audience and thus got more content on their asset market and it has became default engine for beginners (C# seems much easier to learn than C++). Unity is like Visual Basic of gamedev.
  - nucleardog 10y ago
    'Seems much easier to learn'? I'd attribute the ability to work with it from a managed language with a large part of its success relative to UE4. Large swathes of even professional programmers have now come into the industry never having had to really deal with manual memory management. (And I happen to think that's fine.) Given that, and the rising popularity of indie/amateur games, I fail to see how one couldn't count C/C++ as a negative as far as market penetration is concerned.
    - babuskov 10y ago
      > Seems much easier to learn Since I started from Assembler, it's hard for me to estimate how hard is C++ to some beginner. Managing memory came as a natural extension of understanding how the computer works. > I'd attribute the ability to work with it from a managed language with a large part of its success relative to UE4. You are probably right, but I simply cannot feel it. Thus "seems". > Given that, and the rising popularity of indie/amateur games I believe indie games reached their peak in 2011/2012 and got a huge drop in quality/quantity ratio since.
  - niteshade 10y ago
    I'd go a step further, Unity is the Fisher-Price of games development.
    - szatkus 10y ago
      So what is Game Factory or other game makers?
pjmlp 10y ago
Following Unity's growth is like watching again the developers that were trying to create games in "managed languages" (C, Pascal, Modula-2, AMOS,...) slowly wining over the ones writing in pure Assembly. Yes, there is a lot of of C++ under the hood in Unity, but I also remember the days when writing game engines in C and Pascal dialects actually the majority of the code looked something like: procedure MyProc; assembler; asm (* assembly *) end; Yet 30 years later we seem to have forgotten how bad those compilers were targeting home computers and how much they have improved in all these years. We need more success stories like Unity to keep driving the industry forward.
- justinhj 10y ago
  I was one of those developers. I wrote a game in 93 that used mostly c rather than assembly because I didn't want to write it twice for Amiga and PC. At the time games were mostly assembler and it was felt that c compiled code had too much overhead. It was probably true to an extent for another couple of years. The next fight was to move from C and C++ to Java and C++. This still hasn't happened in console gaming because the overhead needed for gc is not palatable to aaa developers that have to milk every byte of ram in the machine.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Yeah, I was one of those early C++ developers being bashed for using a bloated language (vs C), just like C# devs are nowadays. Regarding GC and consoles, how do the UE 4 developers approach it, just disable the GC related features then?
    - SeanBoocock 10y ago
      I haven't shipped a game on UE4 yet but in profiling our in-development game I've yet to see Unreal's GC emerge as a performance concern. The UE4 GC is purpose built, simple (mark and sweep), and limited to only certain objects/allocations. The only time I've seen significant GC times/hitches was related to a bug that resulted in thousands of small allocations every second. I would much prefer if Epic dropped the GC - losing tight control over object lifetimes is as bad or worse than any potential performance overhead issues in my experience - but failing that I don't think its inclusion is a serious concern for shipping on consoles.

mevile 10y ago

Facebook's Oculus has already tried to go the way of exclusives and walled gardens so I doubt it will take off. PC gamers are an opinionated noisy bunch and they will cause all kinds of drama for Facebook if they aren't as open as Steam. I don't really get this anyway. Steam works. Origin and Battle.net kinda make sense since those are the publisher's platform, and there's also GoG's Galaxy. There's really not any more room for another competitor.

eswat 10y ago
> Steam works But does it still provide a great experience for gamers and creators? I'd wager so say they can do a lot better, but they're letting their success stagnate them. Buggy mobile apps, questionable revenue share on Workshop items, no strong answer to the discovery of good games ever since Greenlight came out, IMHO Valve isn't doing enough with their platform on their own. I'd welcome competition to get them to perk up their step a bit.
- mevile 10y ago
  There already is competition. GoG's Galaxy. It's great. Nobody I know uses it. Not a single streamer on twitch I've ever watch uses it. I'm fine with competition too, but not from Facebook. They've already fucked up with the Oculus store and I don't trust them anyway. Facebook is an unscrupulous advertisement company that turns intimate personal information into pay per click ad dollars. I'd even go so far as to say Valve not caring is a good thing. They don't try to interfere too much and when they do and it blows up they walk it back.
  - serge2k 10y ago
    > I'd even go so far as to say Valve not caring is a good thing. Ridiculous statement. Waiting weeks for a support request is not a good thing. Waiting weeks then getting response in russian is not a good thing. The app being a generally slow clunky experience is not a good thing. Piss poor preview games is not a good thing. CS Go gambling is not a good thing. DotA2 is not a good thing. :p A lot of things were even worse before Origin arrived and Valve started at least a half-assed attempt to make things better.

TAForObvReasons 10y ago

> someone uses Facebook to post something I'd like to read (like yann lecun or john carmack) because it's a step backwards. It'd be like Doom being released as an AOL exclusive. Worth pointing out that both were employed by Facebook (and AFAICT both are still there). I would genuinely be surprised if they used google+ or some other platform for posts

funkyy 10y ago

Steam might lose fight for players in the future, but for sure it will not be to Facebook. Worthy opponent it seems is GOG, they are superb platform with great values behind their offering.

jamiesonbecker 10y ago
And GOG is committed to DRM-free, too: https://www.gog.com/support/website_help/what_is_gog_com https://www.gog.com/support/website_help/what_is_gog_com I've only had great experiences with GOG as a platform. ..and I love Steam, too, and both are committed to Linux as a platform for the future. (When is Portal 3 coming?!) They each have carved out such a great niche and they're each both gamer and developer friendly.. I'm not so sure that FB has demonstrated being either of those things.

20yrs_no_equity 10y ago

Why UE4 over Unity? I have downloaded both and while both have a steep learning curve the one for UE is steeper, and the initial experience is much worse. Seems they never really tested it on the mac much.

estefan 10y ago
I don't know. I did the space shooter tutorial on unity last week and I'm finding it a doddle to make my first 2D game... I'm super impressed, having never done game dev before.
jarsin 10y ago
Ya if you are developing for mobile and/or primarily working on a Mac then UE4 is not as good of choice. I develop on the mac and pc in UE4. On the mac ue4 performance is bad and you need the top of the line mac to deal with it. Personally I just write c++ on the mac and keep the editor closed most of the time until i need to test the code real quick in a very basic level. Then when im on my pc i do the heavy stuff.

plandis 10y ago

Agreed. It's really annoying that others use Facebook for auth as well. Want Spotify? Nowadays you better have a Facebook account because that is how you sign in unless you were lucky enough to have acces to their beta prior to the partnership.

mitm2mitm 10y ago
What do you mean? You can create a new Spotify account with your e-mail. But I already gave up on Spotify since the web player is buggy and full of memory leaks. But I'm sure their apps are fine.
eslaught 10y ago
Spotify switched their policy back to accepting signups via email: https://www.spotify.com/us/signup/ https://www.spotify.com/us/signup/ If you already have an account, I'm not sure there's a way to de-associate it, but you could probably delete the old account and create a new one.

busterarm 10y ago

People seem forget that the Friends/Community feature on Steam didn't really work at all for _YEARS_ when the platform launched. I'd love to take the same bet you do, but if you have a killer product that requires the platform, people will use it. Half Life 2 and Counter Strike 1.6 were the killer products for Steam. Mass Effect 3 and The Old Republic are mostly the only reasons anyone I know installed Origin at first (and I'm sure other games now). If Facebook finds that app, it won't matter how terrible their platform is.

Impossible 10y ago

I'm curious why you think UE4 will dominate. I can think of a lot of reasons why, but many of them depend on the definition of "dominate" (raw users in the ecosystem, number of released games, number of successful titles, number of AAA or high-end indie titles, etc.)

stcredzero 10y ago

Facebook would be smart to have gaming and social as two separate things with optional integration with Facebook. They'll screw it up because they'll make the optional part super annoying. Because when have they not? It will be enjoyably ironic when Facebook starts Google-Plussing it's own projects to death!

stcredzero 10y ago

Facebook would be smart to have gaming and social as two separate things with optional integration with Facebook. I don't exactly disagree. Rather, I think the underlying problem is orthogonal to the one you're paying attention to. Facebook's problem is that they let people think of Facebook games as being somehow separate from mobile. The far-seeing move would've been to make Facebook across the desktop, mobile, et al., as views into a single ecosystem. Anyway, my money's on steam and ue4 dominating for years to come, not a new dist platform and not unity. I like the sound of this, but what are your reasons for this?

ekianjo 10y ago

> I turned off my Facebook years ago. That works fine for me, but I'm frustrated any time someone uses Facebook to post something I'd like to read (like yann lecun or john carmack) because it's a step backwards. It'd be like Doom being released as an AOL exclusive. Especially disappointing coming from Carmack who used to be a champion of openness. How has he changed...

pjmlp 10y ago
You mean this Carmack? http://www.geek.com/games/john-carmack-finally-prefers-directx-to-opengl-1326739/ http://www.geek.com/games/john-carmack-finally-prefers-direc...
- ekianjo 10y ago
  Yup, even though he used to champion OpenGL for his games for a long time. That's why I mentioned he has changed.
  - mercer 10y ago
    Has he ever commented on this? I'd really like to know what changed his mind.

nso95 10y ago

They seem to realize that users don't necessarily want to be linked to a Facebook account. For example: you no longer need a Facebook account in order to use messenger. Hopefully they're smart enough and willing enough to apply that same philosophy to this product.