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people familiar with Tim Sweeny’s life and ideology know that it is an actual important issues to him that platforms be open. your cynical take is often very t
by gameswithgo 6y ago
people familiar with Tim Sweeny’s life and ideology know that it is an actual important issues to him that platforms be open.
your cynical take is often very true but there are sometimes real human ideals behind things.
- n42 6y agointeresting, then, that he is solely responsible for introducing marketplace exclusivity deals to PC gaming.
- rsweeney21 6y agoPAYING game developers for exclusivity is much different than CHARGING game developers 30% of their revenue. Also, the PC is an open platform. Game developers don't have to use Epic's or anyone else' store to distribute games on PC. With iOS you have no choice.
- n42 6y agosure, there is a difference for the developer. anyone who is deluding themselves into thinking that Epic is fighting for the consumer here will be sorely disappointed. Epic recently raised $1.78 billion dollars in capital. how do you think they intend to deliver a return on such a massive investment? anyone paying attention to their moves sees this as what it is. Epic wants to be the exclusive destination to build, buy and play video games. they're fighting Apple because they beat them to the punch. this is not some idealistic martyrdom. it's multi-billion dollar company fights multi-trillion dollar company for market share.
- user5994461 6y agoIndeed, it is paying in order to make sure that 100% of developer revenues go through one platform... the platform may or may not take a 30% cut.
- judge2020 6y ago> PAYING game developers for exclusivity is much different than CHARGING game developers 30% of their revenue. It definitely is - one store, Epic, offers deals publishers can't refuse to make a game exclusive to their storefront which limits a consumer's ability to use a platform of their choice to purchase a game. The other, steam, puts no limits on where you can distribute your game (unless you use assets from Valve's own games, but I digress) and has done no exclusivity deals that would force a game to only use their store. Publishers are free to use steam if they want to have 30% taken, but otherwise they can completely forego steam in their distribution.
- gsich 6y agoCan't refuse? Is this the Godfather now?
- Cyph0n 6y agoDidn’t you know that Epic holds developers hostage until they agree to their terms? I thought this was common knowledge!
- DivisionSol 6y agoJust like Apple holds a gun to developer’s heads to develop for the iOS. Epic is at least bringing the joy of console exclusives to the desktop. Innovative!
- judge2020 6y ago
- cringepirate 6y ago>PAYING game developers for exclusivity is much different than CHARGING game developers 30% of their revenue. The way you frame it is totally incorrect and completely misrepresents Steam (who is obviously relevant in the PC space) doesn't "charge" developers 30% of the revenue. Steam is acting as an affiliate. Affiliate agreements work on the fact that one party will get a commission for driving sales of a particular product. Steam drives sales of a particular product by providing the market place, they provide the payment mechanism, the hosting and update infrastructure and probably a bunch of things I am not aware of. Also the 30/70% split for an affiliate relationship is standard across many industries. This could be Travel, Gambling, House hold items. > Also, the PC is an open platform. Game developers don't have to use Epic's or anyone else' store to distribute games on PC. With iOS you have no choice. You are getting wrong way around. If would be fine if the EPIC store offered the same games as Steam at a lower price (by taking a lower commission). Then that would drive competition and that would benefit the consumer. However that isn't happening here. They are artificially dividing an open market by making some PC games exclusive to their store. This stops competition because the two store fronts can't compete because they cannot offer the same games. In the same way that if you wanna play Halo you aren't doing it on a PlayStation. GoG and Steam will have many of the same games sold on them. I end up buying them on the GoG store, why is that? GoG is guaranteed to be DRM free. That choice cannot exist when some games are exclusive to one store. So GoG competes with the Steam store and offers a better refund policy (you can refund for any reason and at any time) and no DRM. Now it may benefit developers to be exclusive to the EPIC store but this will ultimately make the PC ecosystem less open for the consumer.
- paulryanrogers 6y agoAre the exclusives permanent?
- damnyou 6y agoNow consider that Valve games like Half Life: Alyx are platform exclusive to Steam -- presumably because Valve gets ~100% of the money spent on Valve games on Steam. Is that "less open for the consumer" as well?
- john-shaffer 6y agoWe've had decades of exclusivity deals for one console or another. Those actually prevented people from playing the games without shelling out for an extra console. Total War: Troy is exclusive to Epic Games Store for one year before it comes to Steam. If you got the game on its release date, Epic gave it to you for free. To play it, you need one more launcher to go along with Steam, Battle.net, GOG, and various custom launchers. What is the harm being done here? I like Steam, but I doubt that it will be good in the long term for it to be completely dominant. It needs a solid competitor.
- MikeKusold 6y agoThat’s a false equivalency. A more apt comparison would be if you could only buy a game at GameStop for one year, while all the Best But shoppers weren’t able to buy the game from their preferred retail store.
- jasonlotito 6y agoThis is fairly common in retail. I've never heard a complaint about it before in that regard.
- Macha 6y agoYou never heard complaints about physical store exclusive DLC? It was a big topic for a year or two before Gamestop decided they weren't getting their ROI and it became less common again.
- mrgordon 6y agoWell not everyone wants to have to have ten game stores with ten custom launchers if they only have ten games installed Also Epic may control the release in some ways. For example, Civ 6 on Epic is PC only but on Steam it’s PC & Mac. So I bought it on Epic and then realized I can’t play with my friends who are on Macs. Why would I want an entire new game store, an app that they’ve chosen to make incompatible with one of the two major computing platforms, and yet another thing to keep updated, minimized, and logged into. I’m all for competition but exclusivity deals are overall negative for the consumer. It’s worth $10 million to get a new game exclusively for Epic to force everyone to use a store they don’t want to install or use because they’ll end up spending $100 million on other games. It’s an effective business tactic but it’s not exactly in my interest.
- gsich 6y agoWhich doesn't make the PC a closed platform.
- wilshire_nc 6y agoIf something is exclusive to a platform that's free to use, who cares? It's not like xbox vs playstation where you have to shell out a few hundred dollars to play an exclusive title.
- mxfh 6y agoSure Origin was a failure, but that much of one? Anyone remembers "only on Origin".
- n42 6y agothose were all EA titles, so EA had their own publisher exclusive marketplace. Tim Sweeney introduced buying out third-party publishers with exclusivity clauses. edit: there's a good analogy in another thread -- only being able to buy a Nintendo game at GameStop and not Best Buy.
- slavik81 6y agoTo be clear, you'd be perfectly happy if Epic bought the developers outright and made the games exclusive to the Epic store? To me, that seems like the same end result for consumers.
- Macha 6y agoThis is equally unpopular when it's happening to Rocket League. At the same time, nobody really cared about Nintendo making Bayonetta 2. I think the problem is with taking away something that was already available or announced to be coming, and people have less problems with funding new things with strings attached.
- n42 6y agono, I would not, but it is also not what we were discussing.
- hnick 6y agoBattle.net is a store with de facto exclusivity too under those standards, and is less of a failure.
- chc 6y agoThis is a preposterous claim that requires a lot of revision to be even close to true. Marketplace owners have been using their own games' exclusivity to push their platforms since Steam's introduction. Even just talking about third-party exclusives (which IMO is an arbitrary distinction — they're just as exclusive and for the same reasons), Valve paid for third-party exclusives early in Steam's history. Once they got rich enough, they started just buying companies outright when they wanted exclusivity on a game somebody was making, which is a much stronger exclusivity deal than the relatively tepid "the game comes out a few months earlier on our store" deals Epic is best known for.
- xyproto 6y agoWhy does Unreal Engine have its own marketplace? Is it still an open platform?
- gsich 6y agoYes. You can import assets independently of that marketplace.
- m3kw9 6y agoOpen and closed is relative, as nothing is completely open unless it’s open source. Epic game store isn’t completely open. He’s just defining his version open to suit his bottom line.
- SXX 6y agoThat's true, but Epic is more of a friend to open source than Apple: they donated money to both Blender and Godot Engine. Also Epic benefit from game development being more open in general even if their own engine is not open source. If they gonna win in battle with Apple and will be allowed to have their own store then it's also make it possible to setup more of alternative stores for e.g open source software without waiting for jailbreak.
- alehlopeh 6y agoWebKit alone makes Apple more of a friend to open source than Epic.
- underwater 6y agoApple was obligated to open source WebKit. The only other project I can think of where they have been open by choice is Swift.
- om2 6y agoWe were obligated to provide source code for the LGPL parts corresponding to official releases. We were not obligated to make it a community open source project with a live repo, or to accept code for ports to non-Apple platforms. We chose to do those things. (clang and llvm are also open by choice)
- SXX 6y ago> clang and llvm are also open by choice I do like the fact that we now have two competing compilers and llvm brought a lot of innovation, but everyone know that only reason Apple invested in these projects is to avoid GPLv3. And yeah at the same time Apple's locked platform and Webkit-only policy saves us from Chromium monopoly over the web and helps Firefox live. So yeah world is not just abstract "good and evil" obviously.
- aftergibson 6y agoThis openness ideology hardly extends to the under the table exclusivity deals Epic Store has with a number of titles?
- esrauch 6y agoThat seems meaningfully different. The openness here is you own a piece of hardware, another company wants to sell you software to run on your hardware; can that two-party interaction complete without an adversarial third party being involved? The answer to that question on iOS is a "strong no", on Android it's a "yes, but". On PC that answer is yes regardless if the actions of Epic Store.
- aftergibson 6y agoIndependent of the Epic Vs Apple debate, I’m merely stating that it’s somewhat hypocritical to claim someone is ideologically open while at the same time they take actions to lock down purchases to the Epic platform only.
- esrauch 6y agoI don't really understand the hypocrisy though. It seems consistent to suggest people should be able to run the software they choose on the hardware they own, without also forcing every store to sell every product. Put another way, in real life any legal product should be feasible to sell/buy as long as there's corresponding supply/demand to make it work. No one should force Target to sell things they don't want to sell, but it shouldn't be allowed for Target to use some leverage to block any other stores from opening in driving distance of your house.
- stock_toaster 6y ago> people familiar with Tim Sweeny’s life and ideology know that it is an actual important issues to him that platforms be open. I get that, but I admit to finding it hard to square with his statements[1] that he is fine with game consoles not being open. Seems a strange dichotomy. [1]: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oglnAiHBXEYJ:https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/1113985565433765888%3Flang%3Den+&cd=13&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oglnAi...
- SXX 6y agoI really not going to be surprised that in case Epic manage to win over Apple they'll put pressure on console manufacturers next.
- stock_toaster 6y agoI would presume so as well. If Apple loses their case, I imagine we will see big changes in many platforms. I would also posit... much higher prices for hardware[1] to make up for the "income gap" too, presumably. [1]: hard to image game consoles being sold at a loss if they couldn't make it up in fees on the other side.
- searchableguy 6y agoConsoles have been profitable since PS 4 era. https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/30/sony-posts-2-1b-profit-as-playstation-sales-keep-on-growing/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/30/sony-posts-2-1b-profit-as-...
- stock_toaster 6y agohmm. I presumed they were still initially sold at a slight loss until economies of scale made them per-unit profitable in the middle of the sales curve. If that isn't the case, then it makes Sweeny's statement above seem even stranger.
- chipotle_coyote 6y agoTim Sweeney may be a wonderful man who loves open platforms, apple pie, and kittens, but: - Android is clearly more open than iOS, but Epic is also suing Google. So is this really about sideloading? From that suit, it sure doesn't sound like it. - When you do sideload Fortnite on your Android device, from what I understand, you can't actually sideload Fortnite directly. Instead you have sideload... the Epic Games Store! It seems awfully clear that Epic's real goal here is to force both Apple and Google to let you install the Epic Games Store from the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store. And while I'm not much of a gamer, the stories I recall about Epic's store in the press... well, we'll just say they didn't have a "so ideals! much open!" vibe to them. I think there's a lot of valid criticisms to be made about both the "app console" model that Apple is steadfastly pushing and the specific ways in which they're running the App Store, but I am skeptical that Epic is the general this particular battle needs.
- yyyk 6y agoThe reality of the legal system is that all small companies would just get worn out and forced to settle against Apple, regardless of the justice of their complaint. No company smaller than Epic could afford to file such a case. I wonder whether any company could become large enough without having some way for people to argue that "it is not the general this particular battle needs".
- outworlder 6y agoOr, you know, you could get multiple companies working together. Why does it have to be a single company?
- yyyk 6y agoYes, that would be possible. However, it is difficult to get multiple parties to cooperate and coordinate on an expensive for a long time. It requires a high degree of trust, or some form of legal instrument. Trust isn't very much around these days, maybe some clever legal instrument could have done it?
- 6y ago
- jmull 6y agoIt doesn’t look like the unreal marketplace is open. Nor the unreal engine itself.
- DevKoala 6y agoThen why did he sign with Tencent? There is no open platform competition in China.
- danbolt 6y agoI feel like his standards for openness are always up to where Epic's business model is a best fit. I've never heard him suggest something like letting me run my own Fortnite server or something of the sort. That said, you're right that he's consistent with these views, especially how he was against UWP during its heyday. [1] [1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-03-04-tim-sweeney-blasts-microsofts-aggressive-new-uwp-initiative https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-03-04-tim-sweene...
- 1_player 6y agoHe likes his platforms to be so open he openly said he doesn't care about porting his game store to Linux.
- AJ007 6y agoHe was very vocal years back when Microsoft was trying to pull off with UWP - https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-03-04-tim-sweeney-blasts-microsofts-aggressive-new-uwp-initiative https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-03-04-tim-sweene... - That is too much to go in to here, but I would recommend reading about it if you are concerned about being able to do things like load the software you want on to Windows. Tim Sweeney is thinking years ahead of most other people. In the case of Google and Apple, I suspect what he is actually concerned about is these two companies have control over a VR/AR/XR "metaverse" platform. There are hours of audio and transcripts about him talking about this as well. https://blog.siggraph.org/2019/10/siggraph-spotlight-episode-30-tim-sweeney-and-the-metaverse.html/ https://blog.siggraph.org/2019/10/siggraph-spotlight-episode... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6ClJxjuRvw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6ClJxjuRvw
- risyachka 6y agoEveryone can have his own point of view on closed platforms. But if I make a closed platform - Tim Sweeny should not force me to open it.
- ric2b 6y agoI wonder why his company mostly ignores Linux then.