Yes, and the game’s publisher has an exclusivity deal in place and the devs can’t turn around and decide to give their game to another publisher.
Exclusivity deals has been part of art history (and employment in general) forever. There’s nothing new about what Epic is doing. You see it for music composers, visual artists, poets, even writers! But somehow PC game devs are in a different category and are supposed to just hope for the best and release on platforms that doesn’t give them a guaranteed compensation for their work… Well I say good for them if both systems exist now!
nothing was broken to fix it by exclusivity
If it was the case, devs wouldn’t sign those deals. They’re not new and there’s nothing to be happy about that the biggest distributor on the market doesn’t have to give any income guarantees to the people that put in the hours to create the product that they sell.
How hard is it to understand that it’s guaranteed income and that is important to some people? There’s a whole lot of things that the majority of people do that a minority isn’t comfortable with, that argument is extremely weak.
Go check /r/gamedev and you’ll find tons of discussions of people that thought they were releasing something that would financially compensate for all the time they spent on it and for having to leave their job to work full time on their project only to see it fail miserably because no one paid attention to it no matter the quality while they saw another product of similar quality get picked up by a steamer and it just exploded in popularity.
You never answered the question, do you have a job or expect to make it by winning the lottery?
Yes, and the game’s publisher has an exclusivity deal in place and the devs can’t turn around and decide to give their game to another publisher
This is not the exclusivity that I am talking about. Publishers as a rule still publish games through multiple channels. I am talking about exclusivity of the storefront. Not publishers’.
Imagine if all storefronts had only exclusive games. Then they would have nearly zero incentives to have a good storefronts that users like and instead just hunt for the best games. The users would not have a choice which storefront they like - the market is totally broken and not working in this case.
I spend noticeable amount of time choosing games, reading reviews, participating in forums, plus having convenient library is important too. Reading news, plans about games, updates… yes all of that is important to me and how well it is implemented matters.
That’s user reviews, game news provided by game making companies. The storefront is a platform where those are posted. Storefront is a place where you search for product and having them in the storefront is very convenient and is something users want. But you are right, they should not be controlled and manipulated by storefront. And they are not in case of STEAM, for example. Storefronts should compete how good they can give this ecosystem to user, not how much games they can lock out from other stores. That, and the cost of games.
Let me introduce you to reviews on Steam and their forums!
You’re also the one who pointed out that you prefer Steam because it’s got them but now it suddenly doesn’t? You’re hard to follow buddy! Unless you’re saying they don’t have control over their own forums and the user reviews posted on their storefront???
publishers do thatYes, and the game’s publisher has an exclusivity deal in place and the devs can’t turn around and decide to give their game to another publisher.
Exclusivity deals has been part of art history (and employment in general) forever. There’s nothing new about what Epic is doing. You see it for music composers, visual artists, poets, even writers! But somehow PC game devs are in a different category and are supposed to just hope for the best and release on platforms that doesn’t give them a guaranteed compensation for their work… Well I say good for them if both systems exist now!
nothing was broken to fix it by exclusivityIf it was the case, devs wouldn’t sign those deals. They’re not new and there’s nothing to be happy about that the biggest distributor on the market doesn’t have to give any income guarantees to the people that put in the hours to create the product that they sell.
How hard is it to understand that it’s guaranteed income and that is important to some people? There’s a whole lot of things that the majority of people do that a minority isn’t comfortable with, that argument is extremely weak.
Go check /r/gamedev and you’ll find tons of discussions of people that thought they were releasing something that would financially compensate for all the time they spent on it and for having to leave their job to work full time on their project only to see it fail miserably because no one paid attention to it no matter the quality while they saw another product of similar quality get picked up by a steamer and it just exploded in popularity.
You never answered the question, do you have a job or expect to make it by winning the lottery?
This is not the exclusivity that I am talking about. Publishers as a rule still publish games through multiple channels. I am talking about exclusivity of the storefront. Not publishers’.
Imagine if all storefronts had only exclusive games. Then they would have nearly zero incentives to have a good storefronts that users like and instead just hunt for the best games. The users would not have a choice which storefront they like - the market is totally broken and not working in this case.
Man… Are you buying games to play them or to spend time looking at the storefront?
I spend noticeable amount of time choosing games, reading reviews, participating in forums, plus having convenient library is important too. Reading news, plans about games, updates… yes all of that is important to me and how well it is implemented matters.
Reviews, forums, news… All things you shouldn’t depend on a storefront to do because the store has an incentive not to be neutral…
That’s user reviews, game news provided by game making companies. The storefront is a platform where those are posted. Storefront is a place where you search for product and having them in the storefront is very convenient and is something users want. But you are right, they should not be controlled and manipulated by storefront. And they are not in case of STEAM, for example. Storefronts should compete how good they can give this ecosystem to user, not how much games they can lock out from other stores. That, and the cost of games.
“and they are not in case of Steam”
Let me introduce you to reviews on Steam and their forums!
You’re also the one who pointed out that you prefer Steam because it’s got them but now it suddenly doesn’t? You’re hard to follow buddy! Unless you’re saying they don’t have control over their own forums and the user reviews posted on their storefront???