7 ms·

Thank goodness. Bethesda's launcher was uniquely awful in a number of unpleasant ways. Slow, prone to crashes, bad user communication, not suitable for use on s

Thank goodness. Bethesda's launcher was uniquely awful in a number of unpleasant ways. Slow, prone to crashes, bad user communication, not suitable for use on small monitors. The worst of the launcher apps I have used - and there are so many! I remember when it was in vogue for every game maker to build their own launcher or even full Steam clone - when EA pulled all its new games from Steam to get people to use Origin, when Ubisoft forced uPlay on you no matter how you bought the game, and so on. Now, it seems like we're pulling back from that situation somewhat - a lot of EA games are back on Steam, for example. I wonder whether the experiment didn't work, or if it worked, but now the goals have changed again?

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
> I wonder whether the experiment didn't work, or if it worked, but now the goals have changed again? I think Steam has a big first mover advantage, like a user's default browser or text editor, always on or starting up, while the others were an extra step that users only did when they had to. The recurring sales and frequently updated offerings of games and updates on Steam's home page is also a plus; Origin was static, Epic is minimalistic, Steam is more of a proper website with a load of different angles - sales, recommended games, new / early access games, updates, and jazzy graphics if they have a big sale on. The other launchers are purely functional.
jeffwask 5y ago
Epic Game Store was the nail in their coffin. They all wanted to have their own Steam and rake in all the revenue directly but didn't want to invest the time and effort to build a platform like Steam. Valve virtually stopped making games to focus only on Steam. I feel like watching EGS hit the market, the difficult road it is to build a true Steam competitor for them, and how long before it will actually be profitable was a reality check for everyone else. Like using AWS over Bare Metal, somethings are worth paying someone else to do for you.
ocdtrekkie 5y ago
More than likely Valve has offered better deals to these larger companies to get them back in-house. It's very probable EA, Bethesda, Microsoft, etc. all have gotten more favorable terms now, by proving they were willing to leave Steam and roll their own launcher.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  30% from 0 to 10 million 25% from 10 to 50 million and 20% from 50 million on. They might have even better deals, but at some point 20% for handling everything and supporting payments with potential of fraud, chargebacks etc. in nearly every country should start look like not horrible deal. Remembering what the retail margins were back in the day when they needed to make and ship physical boxes...
  - xxs 5y ago
    >at some point 20% ... start look like not horrible deal Not, if you are Microsoft.
    - Godel_unicode 5y ago
      Pay 20% now, or be forced to spin out Xbox via anti-trust ruling in the future. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - tayo42 5y ago
    That's 10 million dollars, that pays for a team of 10 people for 4 years.
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      10 people in 4 years don't sound like a lot to setup and run support, distribution, payment integrations for let's say 100+ countries. Which many having unique payment providers.
  - amatecha 5y ago
    source for these numbers?
sbarre 5y ago
With the rise of the Epic Game Store, I think there's more competition in the launcher/store space and I bet the big publishers got better deals which removed the need for them to invest in the ongoing development and maintenance of their own stores/launchers. It can't be that cheap to maintain an app like Origin or UPlay and all the associated infrastructure, etc..
- Narishma 5y ago
  Epic's launcher is one of the worst, constantly consuming resources doing who knows what in the background.
- mjevans 5y ago
  Intangibles are a major cost factor as well. Not just the servers, but an entire authentication and customer support infrastructure. Scammers are not an easy cost to estimate or an easy value to sell resistance against.
- Macha 5y ago
  It's not just the store cut. From what I understand, a big part of the motivation of Origin was also to avoid having to compete, at least in consumer perception with the sales. Battlefield 3 at €80 while it was a year old looked terrible value when Borderlands 2 had dropped to €50 and was regularly 30% off despite being only a couple of months old.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    That seems backwards to how the actual customer perception worked out though. I very quickly noted that Origin prices were worse than Steam prices, and avoided it. If that was their intent, they forgot the storefront itself has a perceived value.
- judge2020 5y ago
  The issue with Epic is the pure lack of features (user profiles, reviews[^1], community forums) , and no Mac/Linux support. ^1: I doubt reviews are ever coming since it would mean bad games would get fewer sales; Imagine how many more sales Cyberpunk 2077 has gotten on the Epic store as no potential buyer sees the negative reviews for the game.
brendoelfrendo 5y ago
Microsoft owns Bethesda, and has transitioned to primarily offering its games via Steam or via the Xbox app. I imagine that Bethesda is doing this to align with Microsoft; existing library through Steam (with potential to add them to the Xbox app if they join get added to GamePass, maybe), future releases through Steam and Xbox.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
nimbius 5y ago
Occhams razor: Microsoft owns Bethesda, so one would naturally assume they would seek to kill off competition to the windows store, or any poor performers that arent driving the appropriate revenue. the worst part of the bethesda launcher was it existed as a cudgel for Todd Howard and others to effectively silence dissent during the launch of Fallout 76 in 2018 either by flogging it as an excuse to refuse refunds, or using the platform to outright threadlock and silence user complaints and criticism. the launcher directly contributed to the wholesale review bombing of virtually every bethesda title on Steam and even showed up in the class action lawsuits filed during the fallout 76...well...fallout.
- munk-a 5y ago
  I think, honestly, that Microsoft is feeling pretty happy with how things are working with steam right now - they've probably only got to do a very minimal amount of work to integrate with the platform while internally they have MS Game accounts that tie everything together for any of the tracking needs they have. I'm sure they'd love to convert all of the MS Games users to their own store but they've managed to extract a whole bunch of unexpected business from AoE2 and other titles and they're probably hoping to minimize any damage to the ecosystem.
- stubish 5y ago
  > Occhams razor: Microsoft owns Bethesda, so one would naturally assume they would seek to kill off competition to the windows store, or any poor performers that arent driving the appropriate revenue. What I find interesting is that Microsoft and/or Bethesda chose to migrate users to Steam rather than the Microsoft Store or Gamepass. It would have been an opportunity to get more eyeballs looking at Gamepass subscriptions, but also would have been less popular. Or maybe all the legacy stuff being migrated is a burden they don't want?
LudwigNagasena 5y ago
It's kind of weird how the same companies that can squeeze all possible computational abilities and use every tick that exists to force a computer to show amazing graphics with complex logic behind can't make a simple GUI. Well, even Steam nowadays is kind of a wrapper for a browser.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rtpg 5y ago
  To be fair steam has always been a wrapper around a browser for its store content etc. Maybe the outer chrome has been pulled into that though…
  - chungy 5y ago
    In early Steam days, the store and community pages where handled by using mshtml.dll, with most of that ported to Chromium when they launched Linux and Mac OS versions. I'm pretty sure the "new" Steam UI (the current one) is fully ported to basically be like an Electron app (I don't think it's literally Electron, but same concept).
    - modo_mario 5y ago
      They use CEF(Chromium Embedded Framework)
- martinald 5y ago
  Is that really surprising? Even a simple GUI is not that simple these days. This was reinforced recently when an incredibly good software engineer I knew recently got stuck with a problem. It ended up being a networking problem but his understanding of anything deeper than basic DNS settings was approximately zero. I was actually amazed given I assumed from his other knowledge that he would have a similar understanding of deep network concepts. I think this happens just as much in companies. Yes, they may have 100s of insanely good graphic programmers who can do crazy low level stuff with shaders on GPUs, but do you know how to build a set of scalable and extendable web services to power a GUI app, with localisation, payment methods, 2FA, etc. I have seen some absolutely insane APIs written by game devs before, basically reinventing the wheel to pull a news feed in.
sam0x17 5y ago
It's mainly the economics of "If you don't ship on steam, you miss out on the steam market" imo
weaksauce 5y ago
What's funny is the original CS:GO gui was built using flash.
- squeaky-clean 5y ago
  For anyone interested, they used Scaleform which is a middleware a lot of games would use to have flash-based UI. It's technically a discontinued product but even Hitman 3 last year used it. As crappy as Flash is for security, it was such a good tool for interactive animations. Here's a list of games that used Scaleform, though it often isn't used as the only UI system. Sometimes it's just main menus or world-space UI elements. Found in a quick Google so I can't guarantee it's totally accurate, but I know many on here are correct. https://list.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_games_using_Scaleform https://list.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_games_using_Scaleform
  - mmastrac 5y ago
    When I was doing work for Nickelodeon around the iPad 1 days, we just could not get around the fact that flash was an amazing tool for animation and anything else we used would have tradeoffs. Tech-wise, a poor product. As a tool for design-minded people? Unmatched.
    - seabrookmx 5y ago
      Flash "for animations" still exists. It was rebranded Adobe Animate (presumably just to avoid the negative branding). It's still used heavily for vector animations to my knowledge.
      - mmastrac 5y ago
        I didn't know this - thanks!
BeefWellington 5y ago
Yeah I for one am glad that these launchers are going by the wayside, especially the onerous DRM-"enforcing" launchers.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

> I wonder whether the experiment didn't work, or if it worked, but now the goals have changed again? I think Steam has a big first mover advantage, like a user's default browser or text editor, always on or starting up, while the others were an extra step that users only did when they had to. The recurring sales and frequently updated offerings of games and updates on Steam's home page is also a plus; Origin was static, Epic is minimalistic, Steam is more of a proper website with a load of different angles - sales, recommended games, new / early access games, updates, and jazzy graphics if they have a big sale on. The other launchers are purely functional.

jeffwask 5y ago

Epic Game Store was the nail in their coffin. They all wanted to have their own Steam and rake in all the revenue directly but didn't want to invest the time and effort to build a platform like Steam. Valve virtually stopped making games to focus only on Steam. I feel like watching EGS hit the market, the difficult road it is to build a true Steam competitor for them, and how long before it will actually be profitable was a reality check for everyone else. Like using AWS over Bare Metal, somethings are worth paying someone else to do for you.

ocdtrekkie 5y ago

More than likely Valve has offered better deals to these larger companies to get them back in-house. It's very probable EA, Bethesda, Microsoft, etc. all have gotten more favorable terms now, by proving they were willing to leave Steam and roll their own launcher.

Ekaros 5y ago
30% from 0 to 10 million 25% from 10 to 50 million and 20% from 50 million on. They might have even better deals, but at some point 20% for handling everything and supporting payments with potential of fraud, chargebacks etc. in nearly every country should start look like not horrible deal. Remembering what the retail margins were back in the day when they needed to make and ship physical boxes...
- xxs 5y ago
  >at some point 20% ... start look like not horrible deal Not, if you are Microsoft.
  - Godel_unicode 5y ago
    Pay 20% now, or be forced to spin out Xbox via anti-trust ruling in the future. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- tayo42 5y ago
  That's 10 million dollars, that pays for a team of 10 people for 4 years.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    10 people in 4 years don't sound like a lot to setup and run support, distribution, payment integrations for let's say 100+ countries. Which many having unique payment providers.
- amatecha 5y ago
  source for these numbers?

sbarre 5y ago

With the rise of the Epic Game Store, I think there's more competition in the launcher/store space and I bet the big publishers got better deals which removed the need for them to invest in the ongoing development and maintenance of their own stores/launchers. It can't be that cheap to maintain an app like Origin or UPlay and all the associated infrastructure, etc..

Narishma 5y ago
Epic's launcher is one of the worst, constantly consuming resources doing who knows what in the background.
mjevans 5y ago
Intangibles are a major cost factor as well. Not just the servers, but an entire authentication and customer support infrastructure. Scammers are not an easy cost to estimate or an easy value to sell resistance against.
Macha 5y ago
It's not just the store cut. From what I understand, a big part of the motivation of Origin was also to avoid having to compete, at least in consumer perception with the sales. Battlefield 3 at €80 while it was a year old looked terrible value when Borderlands 2 had dropped to €50 and was regularly 30% off despite being only a couple of months old.
- Talanes 5y ago
  That seems backwards to how the actual customer perception worked out though. I very quickly noted that Origin prices were worse than Steam prices, and avoided it. If that was their intent, they forgot the storefront itself has a perceived value.
judge2020 5y ago
The issue with Epic is the pure lack of features (user profiles, reviews[^1], community forums) , and no Mac/Linux support. ^1: I doubt reviews are ever coming since it would mean bad games would get fewer sales; Imagine how many more sales Cyberpunk 2077 has gotten on the Epic store as no potential buyer sees the negative reviews for the game.

brendoelfrendo 5y ago

Microsoft owns Bethesda, and has transitioned to primarily offering its games via Steam or via the Xbox app. I imagine that Bethesda is doing this to align with Microsoft; existing library through Steam (with potential to add them to the Xbox app if they join get added to GamePass, maybe), future releases through Steam and Xbox.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

nimbius 5y ago

Occhams razor: Microsoft owns Bethesda, so one would naturally assume they would seek to kill off competition to the windows store, or any poor performers that arent driving the appropriate revenue. the worst part of the bethesda launcher was it existed as a cudgel for Todd Howard and others to effectively silence dissent during the launch of Fallout 76 in 2018 either by flogging it as an excuse to refuse refunds, or using the platform to outright threadlock and silence user complaints and criticism. the launcher directly contributed to the wholesale review bombing of virtually every bethesda title on Steam and even showed up in the class action lawsuits filed during the fallout 76...well...fallout.

munk-a 5y ago
I think, honestly, that Microsoft is feeling pretty happy with how things are working with steam right now - they've probably only got to do a very minimal amount of work to integrate with the platform while internally they have MS Game accounts that tie everything together for any of the tracking needs they have. I'm sure they'd love to convert all of the MS Games users to their own store but they've managed to extract a whole bunch of unexpected business from AoE2 and other titles and they're probably hoping to minimize any damage to the ecosystem.
stubish 5y ago
> Occhams razor: Microsoft owns Bethesda, so one would naturally assume they would seek to kill off competition to the windows store, or any poor performers that arent driving the appropriate revenue. What I find interesting is that Microsoft and/or Bethesda chose to migrate users to Steam rather than the Microsoft Store or Gamepass. It would have been an opportunity to get more eyeballs looking at Gamepass subscriptions, but also would have been less popular. Or maybe all the legacy stuff being migrated is a burden they don't want?

LudwigNagasena 5y ago

It's kind of weird how the same companies that can squeeze all possible computational abilities and use every tick that exists to force a computer to show amazing graphics with complex logic behind can't make a simple GUI. Well, even Steam nowadays is kind of a wrapper for a browser.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rtpg 5y ago
To be fair steam has always been a wrapper around a browser for its store content etc. Maybe the outer chrome has been pulled into that though…
- chungy 5y ago
  In early Steam days, the store and community pages where handled by using mshtml.dll, with most of that ported to Chromium when they launched Linux and Mac OS versions. I'm pretty sure the "new" Steam UI (the current one) is fully ported to basically be like an Electron app (I don't think it's literally Electron, but same concept).
  - modo_mario 5y ago
    They use CEF(Chromium Embedded Framework)
martinald 5y ago
Is that really surprising? Even a simple GUI is not that simple these days. This was reinforced recently when an incredibly good software engineer I knew recently got stuck with a problem. It ended up being a networking problem but his understanding of anything deeper than basic DNS settings was approximately zero. I was actually amazed given I assumed from his other knowledge that he would have a similar understanding of deep network concepts. I think this happens just as much in companies. Yes, they may have 100s of insanely good graphic programmers who can do crazy low level stuff with shaders on GPUs, but do you know how to build a set of scalable and extendable web services to power a GUI app, with localisation, payment methods, 2FA, etc. I have seen some absolutely insane APIs written by game devs before, basically reinventing the wheel to pull a news feed in.

sam0x17 5y ago

It's mainly the economics of "If you don't ship on steam, you miss out on the steam market" imo

weaksauce 5y ago

What's funny is the original CS:GO gui was built using flash.

squeaky-clean 5y ago
For anyone interested, they used Scaleform which is a middleware a lot of games would use to have flash-based UI. It's technically a discontinued product but even Hitman 3 last year used it. As crappy as Flash is for security, it was such a good tool for interactive animations. Here's a list of games that used Scaleform, though it often isn't used as the only UI system. Sometimes it's just main menus or world-space UI elements. Found in a quick Google so I can't guarantee it's totally accurate, but I know many on here are correct. https://list.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_games_using_Scaleform https://list.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_games_using_Scaleform
- mmastrac 5y ago
  When I was doing work for Nickelodeon around the iPad 1 days, we just could not get around the fact that flash was an amazing tool for animation and anything else we used would have tradeoffs. Tech-wise, a poor product. As a tool for design-minded people? Unmatched.
  - seabrookmx 5y ago
    Flash "for animations" still exists. It was rebranded Adobe Animate (presumably just to avoid the negative branding). It's still used heavily for vector animations to my knowledge.
    - mmastrac 5y ago
      I didn't know this - thanks!

BeefWellington 5y ago

Yeah I for one am glad that these launchers are going by the wayside, especially the onerous DRM-"enforcing" launchers.