PC Gaming

Hilarious. Didn’t Epic just introduce microtransactions for user-created content in Fortnite with intention of taking 63% fee on that? All the while, trying to turn the said Fortnite in Roblox-like major store for games?

TIL that Tim Fortnite does not consider Sony or Nintendo to be 'major stores'.

TIL that the video game industry has never had nor currently has titles that are priced exclusively on certain platforms.

(Where 'its only available for purchase on one platform' is an effective price of infinity on other platforms)

Just... from the article:

"Steam’s rules do explicitly prohibit games from steering players to competing purchase methods, forcing everyone to pay 30% to Valve," he [Sweeney] recently tweeted. "Apple and Google did the same until the court explicitly found this practice to be unlawful. Now they don't!"

It's not clear exactly what rule Sweeney's referring to here, but Steam's own guidelines state that "it's OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time." Though Valve would also prefer that developers "don't give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam key purchasers."

It's almost like this guy is malding, crashing out even, and has just... departed from the realm of even trying to make sense.

What is happening here is that Tim is losing his mind because Unreal Engine 5 only runs on GPUs (mostly from Nvidia) that cost as much as an entire PC did 2 or 3 years ago, and so many AAA studios that used UE 5 to make a pretty but hollow and buggy game are now collapsing or seeing a dramatic consumer pullback.

See how this is all connected, and these idiots did this to themselves?

Nvidia decides that Real Time Ray Tracing is the new paradigm for gaming graphics, and Unreal is the primary way people will experience this, by having all the lighting be done 'auto-magically' by UE 5, from the perspective of game devs.

Fastforward 5 or so years, half of everything computer hardware is too expensive now, hugely funded AAA games are routinely failing and causing financial disasters for publishers, Unreal Engine 5 is a hugely stigmatized joke because its not any kind of optimized for hardware people actually have, and outside of AAA games, is notorious for low quality UE asset store flips and actual scam games...

...this paradigm doesn't work.

Compare that to Valve pretty close to singlehandedly developing its own VR hardware, and showcase AAA tier game for it... and well hey shucks, yeah, its too expensive for wide adoption, but that didn't ruin their entire business's financials.

They just actually properly accounted for the costs of trying that paradigm shift, and are today still iterating on and improving it, ala the upcoming SteamFrame and new software layer for translating ARM to x86 calls.

that seems like an issue that the makers of games can decide. they are not under any gun to choose steam. if the devs don’t see value in steam then they can go elsewhere. for me as a buyer it’s steam, or it’s the developers own website. i will not buy from another store front

Steam is different from the Google or Apple stores, because they aren't the gatekeeper of a platform.

But yeah maybe 30% is a bit high for games that don't use any of the steam features, just the payment processing, review section and download servers.

Right, because managing, securing, updating, and operating steam is all black magic that costs valve nothing.

Listen, they need that revenue for their R&D for the steam deck 2 and steam machines and shit. Fuck off ya hoser, eh?

Tim's opinion is clearly unbiased.