Posts: 3053
I respect the fight to add some competition, but paid exclusives or so cancerous.
Steam has many problems. I would love an actual serious alternative to force them into improving.
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Don't forget his love of barely legal porn. Which perhaps explains the two women wearing school uniforms in the pile of **** that was Duke Nukem Forever.
The gaming industry is failing apart.
The wrong people are in charge and all they care about is money.
The good people that care about making good games are leaving and are getting replaced by people that do not care.
AAA for the most part at this point is how much money is thrown at a game not quality.
More and more games will fall victim to bad management and sloppy execution. The state of some studios is horrible. The game industry is bleeding talent and is taking unqualified developers that will not question the status quo or bad decisions. The Bioware that made great games is gone. The people that made it what it was are gone.
The biggest waste of money is not graphics or things of the sort. It's incompetence and poor decisions by people who have no idea what they are doing or talking about.
For the most part it's because someone did not do the job they had to do or did not listen to someone that knew what they where talking about. Most studios will push out a broken product that is not working instead of scrapping it to get some money back. That's on the executives not the developers. The top level management also meddles in game development often to the detriment of the game. And it's a strange occurrence but sometimes some people invest more time and energy in finding reasons not to work instead of just getting the job done. For the most part the big studios are not what they started out as anymore. Blizzard is full corporate now so is Bioware. And corporate studios are a (I hate to use that word but it fits perfectly) toxic environment. Talent gets crushed and "yes man" thrive. That's why good people are quitting.
David Brevik @davidbrevik
https://twitter.com/davidbrevik/status/1110239294264737792
I'm very worried about the future of the gaming market. All of these services where developers get paid by the minute are going to have radical impacts on design motivations and predatory practices. If you thought Free-to-play was bad, you haven't seen anything yet.
There is no way to stop this. These changes are coming. When mega-companies like Google and Apple are making this a corporate initiative, gaming is going change forever.
Marcello Lins @MarcelloLins
Care to elaborate! I'm genuinely interested in your take about this new monetization model. What exactly worries you?
David Brevik @davidbrevik
Spotify had a profound impact on the music industry. Imagine a world where authors didn't sell books, but you subscribed to a service and they got paid a penny by the page read instead. It would change everything.
10 Posts: 963 | Subs: 11
Wargaming have their own.
Blizzard (which now holds activision games)
Hmm...
Kaz Hirai has served as President and CEO of Sony since 2012, but his tenure will soon be over. With less than a week left before Kaz turns the company over to its next leader, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford decided to make a last-ditch effort to try to convince Sony to be more open on the subject of cross-play with Xbox. Unfortunately, Pitchford's request was directed to a parody account.
Twitter user @KazHiraiCEO has been amusing gamers for years with his antics, and he's acquired a following of over 120,000. One of these followers is Pitchford, who has been following the account for months and "thinking Kaz is so much cooler than I actually thought he was." A quick glance at the account's bio shows the phrase "PARODY ACCOUNT" in unmissable all-caps. Whoops.
Mike Rose @RaveofRavendale 6. feb. 2019
https://twitter.com/raveofravendale/status/1093167950360690691
Little thread of potential horror:
I am getting very, very worried about the future of Netflix-like subscription models. In the last 6 months, I have been contact by over a dozen different services, who all want to put No More Robots games on their upcoming platforms.
But here's the catch:
None of these platforms want to pay anything upfront. Instead, they want to pay us "per number of hours" that their users play our games, compared to how many hours their users are playing games overall. Which is obviously going to be *shit* for indie devs.
Now here's the real problem: If bigger studios begin adopting this style of platform -- which they already kinda are with things like Xbox Game Pass, Discord Nitro etc -- it forces smaller devs into a position where they may *have* to start being a part of these platforms.
So let's say in 5 years, if Netflix-style subscription models have become the norm, and no-one is paying for games anymore, a la what happened with both music and TV... how are indie devs even making money anymore?
They're not, is the horrible answer.
So yeah, I'm honestly super worried about this upcoming trend -- and this is coming from someone who owns a publisher, and can potentially maximize sales by selling multiple games at once.
If this trend takes over, I don't know how dev studios are even going to survive.
To clarify: From a consumer standpoint, I *love* sub models. I currently use Netflix, Now TV, Amazon Video, Spotify, Xbox Game Pass...
It's not that I'm rallying against them -- I just think we could do with having a real conversation about how they should be implemented best.
*SNIP*
As @rje has pointed out, if you are currently subscribed to PlayStation Plus, Xbox Games With Gold, Twitch Prime, and Humble Monthly, you have already received *28 free games* in February alone.
Fast-forward three years. Can you honestly say you'll still be buying new games?
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"And so we’re going to swallow the Epic Games Store pill with Borderlands 3. And some of you guys are going to hate it and scream bloody murder and you’ll even blame me, personally, for it. And you can bitch and moan and brigade and stalk my shit, but at the end of the day when we look back at this moment we’ll realize that this was the moment where the digital stores on PC became unmonopolized."
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10 Posts: 963 | Subs: 11
Since Epic started taking a 12 percent cut of sales revenue generated on its new Games Store, much has been made of whether Steam's baseline 30 percent revenue cut is justified. But a new analysis shows that Valve sometimes receives much less than that headline revenue percentage for some of the most popular games on Steam.
*SNIP*
When the revenue Valve is missing from these Steam keys is taken out, the company's average cut across these popular games hovers around 20 percent of all sales revenue rather than 30 percent
https://twitter.com/tomgvalve/status/1109257799173730304
Customers want and need different things, and behavior from one place to the next is wildly different. Our job is to help you reach more users in more places, so we have to invest accordingly. Payment methods are an easy example…
Conventional wisdom is, standard payment methods like credit cards and Paypal cover most of the pie. Not if you want to reach emerging markets or make the opportunity bigger for devs. Players buying your games in Asia in 2018 actually used 87.5% “non-standard” payment methods!
Cash is important. Our cash cards are available in 50 countries. They’re much more expensive than standard payment methods, costing Valve 10-15% of the price, but that's fine with us- it's the level of investment necessary to grow emerging markets for your next game.
Sometimes the access barrier is technical or cultural, so we've invested heavily in PC Cafe support as well. This makes it super easy for your games to show up in the PC cafes of Manila or Lima- literally just a couple of clicks. Reach out if you want more info on this program!
And if you're operating an online multiplayer game, we have your back. The new networking APIs solve problems for your game on Steam and off. DDoS protection, less latency, and better matchmaking pools.
*SNIP*
https://www.fortressofdoors.com/operation-tell-valve-all-the-things-3-0/
The goodwill is spent. People used to stick with Valve because they honestly felt it was the best platform for both customers and developers. Now they stick with Valve because of power. And the second they have an alternative, they will jump ship.
*SNIP*
I know a lot of people are talking about the Epic store. Epic is making a really strong developer-first push, offering 88% revenue share across the board, and reportedly giving out money by the truckload to buy exclusives and free game giveaway deals. It's a strong offering. I can say for a fact that it's VERY popular among developers right now, and the survey results bear that out. Now, let's be honest here. Epic is not a threat to Steam... today.
So You Want To Compete With Steam: Epic, Discord, Kartridge, and RobotCache
https://www.fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to-compete-with-steam-2/
Competing head-on with an entrenched market leader is called Red Ocean strategy, because it's like a feeding frenzy of sharks all tearing each other apart to get at the same piece meat. Now, I'm not saying nobody should compete against Steam. What I am saying is that taking on the top shark is fraught with peril, and nearly every company that's tried so far has repeated the same fatal mistakes. Steam has reigned supreme for over 15 years for a reason, but recent rumblings suggest things are about to change.
*SNIP*
Piracy
Did I say there were only four contestants? Looks like a secret fifth contestant has snuck onto the set when we weren't looking.
Those of you who have read Piracy and the Four Currencies or the rest of the series know where I'm going with this -- you are always competing against piracy, and the "price" of your service is measured not just in money-dollars but also time-dollars, pain-in-the-butt-dollars, and integrity-dollars. Piracy charges zero money-dollars, but has a certain time and pain-in-the-butt cost, not to mention an integrity cost for those who are scrupulous or just afraid of getting in trouble with the law. If your service can't compete on the time and pain-in-the-butt costs, or you piss of your audience so much that they see you as the bad guy (raising your integrity cost), they'll become "customers" of Piracy instead.
As the exclusivity war between Netflix and its competitors heats up, we're starting to see a surge in video piracy after years of decline. When faced with the cost and hassle of having to maintain several different subscriptions, or not being able to access content at all due to regional licensing scuffles, more and more customers are opting to just pirate their content.
The parallels between streaming video services and the digital PC games market aren't perfect, but any competitor seeking to bank on subscriptions, paywalls, and DRM should be wary, lest they succumb not to Valve but to the Jolly Roger.
Check Point Research provides leading cyber threat intelligence to Check Point Software customers and the greater intelligence community.
*SNIP*
In the last few weeks, however, Check Point Research discovered multiple vulnerabilities in Epic Games’ online platform that could have allowed a threat actor to take over the account of any game player, view their personal account information, purchase V-bucks, Fortnite’s virtual in-game currency and eavesdrop on and record players’ in-game chatter and background home conversations.
Check Point Research informed Epic Games of this vulnerability and a fix was responsibly deployed, ensuring their millions of players can continue their gameplay in a secure environment.
“The truth is that most developers make a lot less than a 30 percent profit margin on a game. So the difference between 12 and 30 is not just a little bit of money. In many cases, it’s more than a majority of the profit already,” Sweeney told The Verge during an interview at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last month. “It’s about economic efficiency when you have these stores sucking out a huge fraction of the profits from games. Valve, Apple, and Google make more profit through there storefront fees than the devs make off their own games.” Sweeney has also expressed distaste for how Apple and Google operate their mobile app stores. And in the case of Fortnite for Android, Epic bypassed the Play Store and its revenue cut altogether.
*SNIP*
Despite the pushback, Sweeney says the company will continue this strategy, either until Epic’s store becomes popular enough to stand on its own or Valve acquiesces to more developer-friendly terms. “Epic is open to continuing to sign funding / exclusivity deals with willing developers and publishers regardless of their previous plans or announcements around Steam,” Sweeney said on Twitter at the beginning of the month.
“In many ways, Valve has had the kingdom to itself for well over a decade.
For a long time, as a PC game developer, Steam was the only place to go. You couldn’t go against them and it was in [Valve’s] benefit to hardline that conversation because Valve has so many players on Steam.” In January of this year, Valve said Steam had 90 million monthly active users.
“Valve had 15 years to develop and build Steam. The newcomers have a lot less time. In order to send your rocket into space, you need to overcome gravity. It costs a fortune,” van Dreunen says. “Epic now, with its success from Fortnite, suddenly comes into all this money. Suddenly, you have a player in the market sitting on a pile of money who says, ‘Let’s go after that.’”
“Epic is doing is the Amazon thing. [Amazon CEO] Jeff Bezos is always fond of saying things like ‘your margin is my opportunity,’” van Dreunen says. “Well, Epic realized the situation – the one thing it could go after is Valve’s margin.”
“The idea of a fragmented library on PC has been around for a decade. You could have a dozen of these shortcuts on your desktop, and every time you want to play a game you have to remember which of these buckets did I leave it, where does it live,” van Dreunen says. He’s unconvinced that Epic has all of the ingredients to fix this issue, instead of just making it worse.
“You can talk about the match that started the forest fire, but it’s really about the drought that occurred for three months that led to that forest fire,” van Dreunen says. Fortnite was very clearly the match, sparking a huge transformation at Epic and earning it enough money to transform its run-of-the-mill game launcher into a genuine Steam competitor.
But it’s not clear how long that game’s success will last or how much of a threat Epic will pose to Steam in the long run if it doesn’t set out a clear vision of what it wants its store to become and to what end Valve fits into that vision. “Two years from now, are you just going to have two Steams?” van Dreunen adds. “Or do we have a group of people who outsmarted one of the smartest monopolies in the industry?”
10 Posts: 963 | Subs: 11
*SNIP*
Few people outside of Valve are more intimately familiar with Steam’s inner workings than Galyonkin. He has always described the Steam data-gathering mainstay, used by major developers and publishers to take stock of Steam and justify their games’ existence, as a “side project.” His main gig? Director of publishing strategy for Epic’s new store, as it turns out. He announced yesterday that he’s been working on the project for “the past several years.”
*SNIP*
“I’ve learned a lot about how games are tracking [week] over week, how effective are sales (not as much as people think, exposure is more important), and more importantly, I got to talk to hundreds of developers to learn what they want from a digital store and what they like and don’t like about existing ones,” he said.
I've created SteamSpy - a service for gaming analytics and audience research for PC games developers that is used daily by over 25,000 professionals over the world.
I was included in the lists of the most influental people in Russian games industry by both VC.ru and Kanobu.ru.
10 Posts: 963 | Subs: 11
“I said I would love to come back,” Baker started. “They [Gearbox Software] said I’m not coming back.”Troy Baker:
Baker continued, “Their timeline tells an interesting story. I think it’s interesting that Randy Pitchford tweeted out that I turned it down, and then he said he heard that I turned it down. I would fact check before I tweeted out to the internet.”
The tweet he's responding too:
https://twitter.com/DuvalMagic/status/1115943285007290368?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
*SNIP*
We know large rodents helped determine the name of game companies. We now also know that Randy Pitchford vanquished Gabe Newell in a poker match on a riverboat to win the name of the house of Borderlands. [UPDATE: Valve denies.]
So reports Joystiq, in a new series that looks at the secrets behind the names of video game studios. To learn more, the site asked Randy Pitchford co-founder of Texas-based Gearbox to explain how his company got his name.
[UPDATE: 6:17 PM - A Valve spokesperson cast doubt on this story today, saying Pitchford and Newell did not meet until after Valve shipped Half-Life, meaning this poker match couldn't have happened. Kotaku has contacted Pitchford for clarification. UPDATE 2: Pitchford informs us that this was a "tall tale." Kotaku regrets the error.]
Posts: 823 | Subs: 3
Borderlands 3 will be pirated and played over hamachi or similar things.10 Posts: 963 | Subs: 11
10 Posts: 963 | Subs: 11
*SNIP*
That's according to an exposé by Polygon, which says that staff - both in-house and contractors - are working as much as 70 hours a week, with that figure rising to 100 in some instances.
Polygon interviewed current and former employees of Epic, including full-time staff, managers, and contractors working in development, QA, and customer service departments. They all requested that their identities be protected, for fear of retribution from Epic or other employers in the game industry. Epic requires that current and former staff sign nondisclosure agreements limiting their ability to speak about the company’s operations.
“All [management] wanted was people who are disposable,” said a source. “The situation was, ‘Come in and do as many hours as we need you.’ They put the contractors in a situation where if they don’t do that overtime, they know they’re not coming back.
“One senior guy would say, ‘Just get more bodies.’ That’s what the contractors were called: bodies. And then when we’re done with them, we can just dispose of them. They can be replaced with fresh people who don’t have the toxic nature of being disgruntled.”
Posts: 868 | Subs: 5
Posts: 76
amis
SK
SKamis
Posts: 3600 | Subs: 1
4 Posts: 550 | Subs: 1
There is something fabulous here is that everyone is talking about steam excepted steam themselves. Would be fun if steam replies "don't care, continue with your store exclusives."
10 Posts: 963 | Subs: 11
Epic's determination to score exclusives for its game store now includes buying well-known studios. The company has acquired Rocket League creator Psyonix for an unspecified amount, and will bring the vehicular soccer game to the Epic Games Store by late in 2019. You can likely guess what's happening next, though -- Epic is expected to halt sales of Rocket League on Steam. You should still have access if you already own the game, but newcomers will have no choice but to turn to Epic's portal.
@EpicGames
We're excited to welcome @PsyonixStudios to the Epic Games family!
https://twitter.com/EpicGames/status/1123674304602832896
10 Posts: 963 | Subs: 11
Gearbox sees a badass MTV animated video, asks the artist (Ben Hibon) to help design an unnamed video game, artist exchanges emails, project "fizzles out".
Then GB releases Borderlands 1 with a vaguely similar style/tone. Even though it used to look like this prior to the short being released.
*SNIP*
CodeHunters was the brainchild of Ben Hibon, who had been commissioned to produce the film by MTV back in 2006.
In fact, Gearbox was very much aware of CodeHunters when they made the art-style changes, though no credit was given to the film by the studio.
They'd been in touch with the film's creator prior to the game's release.
"I was contacted by Gearbox prior to the re-design of the game – in 2008," Ben Hibon told Gather Your Party's Mark Ceb in an interview (the above comparison screens are taken from that interview.)
"They asked me if I would be interested to direct/design some cut-scenes for them. We exchanged a few emails but the project didn’t materialize in the end. I didn’t think much of it at the time – until I saw the final game in 2009."
The project may not have materialized, but Borderlands certainly did, and Hibon says he's more than a little confused by the outcome.
"I think most of the team that worked on “CODEHUNTERS” would have loved the opportunity to work on game like that – including myself," he said. I asked Hibon to comment further but he declined, though he confirmed that he stood by everything he said in the previous interview.
"To be absolutely clear," Hibon told Gather Your Party, "I have never created or designed anything for Gearbox or Borderlands. Gearbox saw my work and decided to reproduce it – make it their own – without my help or my consent."
10 Posts: 963 | Subs: 11
Epic says it will stop store exclusives if Steam offers a better cut
https://twitter.com/DuvalMagic/status/1124094984326488064
@DuvalMagic
You may be right. I am hyper sensitive to insinuations of me being misleading. I sufferred a lot from false claims about me from A:CM and my error was not immediately engaging and debunking false stories and claims. I don’t want to make that mistake again.
https://twitter.com/DuvalMagic/status/1124344684187242497
@Jed05
Good to know. Thanks for the reply.
When will we get the Aliens Colonial Marines remaster?
@DuvalMagic
I would love that, but that game was a work-for-hire for Sega and they have authority on all such decisions. Given that they cancelled the Wii U version, I have doubts they will ever feel motivated to further support the game.
10 Posts: 963 | Subs: 11
I was fine moving on after Gearbox. But when my former boss starts mouthing off about various aspects of my employment including “how highly compensated” I was and how “generous” he is, I feel obligated to correct the record.
I had a lot of mixed feelings when asked to reprise the role of Claptrap late last year and eventually realized I was willing to put differences aside and do something cool for Borderlands fans with my friends at Gearbox.
I ultimately offered to do it for “free” in exchange for past royalties owed plus an apology for something I’ve never spoken about publicly until now: Randy physically assaulted me in the lobby of the Marriott Marquis at GDC 2017.
Personally, I think Randy’s been on tilt the last few years. He's not the victim he portrays himself to be. I even blocked him a couple years ago for stalking me on social media. Enough is enough.
It's nice not feeling the need to spot any sleight of hand these days or wonder if the card was chosen or forced. I'm happy to be free from the half-truths and full-on deceptions. And thankful to no longer hear people referred to as "muggles" like a con-man refers to a "mark".
As an aside, seems a bit conspicuous that he chimed in on my salary but didn't mention anything about the $12M of revenue he siphoned away from the employee royalty pool.
FYI - GBX employees are asked to take lower salaries with the promise of royalty shares.
2K says they won't give a statement regarding an ongoing lawsuit but if the allegation is false then it sure seems a lot easier to just deny it since that's the only reason they're mentioned.
The whole thing stinks.
https://threader.app/thread/1125565281261297664
https://twitter.com/davideddings/status/1125565281261297664
Glad to hear @GearboxOfficial is taking the claim "very seriously" as I'm eager to cooperate with whatever independent firm Gearbox/2K chooses for the ongoing investigation into Randy's misdeeds (which should be fairly easy to conclude).
For the record, Gearbox HR was informed of the assault the morning of Monday March 6, 2017. Randy fired me the next day.
https://twitter.com/davideddings/status/1126198610637537280
*SNIP*
In November 2016, Pitchford belatedly informed Callender that Randy had privately reached a “side-deal” with Take 2 Interactive/ZK Games, the Publisher of Gearbox’s Borderlands franchise. This deal—Which Pitchford insisted upon concealing—afforded Randy Pitchford a personal, secretive “Executive Bonus” of $12,000,000 to be paid directly to a Pitchford entity called “Pitchford Entertainment Media & Magic, LLC.”
Because Pitchford agreed to have his private “bonuses” counted as advances upon the royalties owed to Gearbox employees, those employees—and their families—won’t receive any of their accrued royalty or “profit” shares until their work repays Randy’s bonuses to the Take-Two Interactive/ZK Games.
This is a particularly tragic exploitation, because these millions are being syphoned to Randy Pitchford’s personal accounts instead of funding the development of Borderlands. It bears repeating: While Randy Pitchford accuses others of breaching their duties to Gearbox in order to show them the door, Gearbox personnel are having their royalties burdened and theirbelts tightened by Randy Pitchford himself.
Source:
https://www.scribd.com/document/397272204/Gearbox-lawsuit#fullscreen&from_embed (Wade Callender lawsuit)
https://jamesbellpc.com/professionals/ (law firm involved)
Update: Gearbox has responded to our request for comment. It continues to refrain from commenting on the $12 million accusation, a reference to a lawsuit from January, which is an 'ongoing investigation'. It has responded to the physical assault allegation with this statement: "Gearbox takes any and all claims of this nature very seriously and we will abstain from commenting on the allegations Dave is making because it is a personnel matter. We appreciate David’s contributions to the Borderlands franchise and have continued to assert we would welcome him back into the mix as the voice of Claptrap and other future opportunities."
Original story: Former Claptrap voice actor David Eddings has accused Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford of physical assault, following a week of controversy regarding his absence in the forthcoming Borderlands 3.
elvislaw
The company is down the street from me in Frisco Texas. I have heard people, or more often people’s significant others, complain on Facebook and social media and the answer to why they don’t leave is often about not wanting to move. There aren’t a lot of game companies here. There are a hell of a lot of tech jobs as the city is growing incredibly fast in that area, but many of the developers don’t want to leave their industry. Now all of that is completely anecdotal of course.
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Relic Entertainment
cblanco ★ 
보드카 중대 
VonManteuffel 
Heartless Jäger 
