Does anyone else remember when Steam was the Evil Empire?

Phoenix Point
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Tencent is one of my biggest client and I literally just worked all day long yesterday in their Beijing headquarter in YinKe building so please, stop preaching something I already knew.

I’m not saying our market is perfect and I do know the policy continuity problem (like the license thing you mentioned) is one major obstacle for any long-term investment happening down here. I also knew the exact number of 32 foreign films that can be approved each year 'cause I also have friends working in DMG. Let alone partnership stuff, and the ties between government and enterprises.

But then so what?

when you decide to do business in a country, the first thing you do is to evaluate social stability and government credibility, in other word, the cost. If you can withstand bullets flying over head and willing to tempting fate of course you can open a factory in some backward third world countries in civil war. And if you are not happy with certain conditions you simply withdraw. Yea, we have our problems, but Investment keeps coming in, because despite all odds China still provide foreign investment a relatively convenient and safe way of doing business. The profit overweight the cost, simple as that. Otherwise why are you doing business with us? Yes China sucks then try Georgia or Laos or Russia? Do you really think your fellow businessmen are that stupid, willingly stay in a death trap all the time?

When a German company came to my hometown local government would immediately take them to an already setup industry zone where utilities are ready to use, land flatten for you to build, and a paved road right in front of your door. Not to mention tons of discount of tax. Do you know what I got when I was trying to setup a factory in southeast asia? You get nothing but a rice field.

Not to say if you are willing stay there is a pretty good chance you earn some big money. You are doing business here, and making money is what you want. And it IS what you get when you come to China. Yes there are policies that you don’t like but in any other country outside of US you gonna feel the same.

Also despite everything happened to Tencent, just one of their mobile game brought them a total revenue of 1.9 trillion dollars in the last year. Huh yea Chinese market sucks.

p.s. Next time when you are at party with your friends laughing at how ridiculous our repressive autocracy regime is, ask them: Why would you go there if China is such a shithole for business owner? Why China top the FDI ranking for several years in a row? Are you insane?

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k bro. I’ll stop.

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Not everyone would let cut himself just to please others.

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Its really easy to take the ‘moral high ground’ when you literally hvae nothing at stake other than a few bucks which you can refund at zero risk to you.

Its not so black an white when you are a head of a studio and your decisions can mean having to lay off dozens of people.

If you could pay for some long term stability for your team, your coworkers, your friends, would that not be something to at least think about as worth while. In an industry that just laid off thousands of workers, wouldn’t ‘this would allow us to at least go into the next 2-3 years even if everything goes to hell in a handbasket’ be something worth considering.

Its easy to talk about ‘morality’ when you don’t have any actual difficult decisions to make.

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It depends on what you see as more ‘moral’. Let me phrase this in terms of a current national debate.

Say you’re the head of a company, and your choice is between investing in the long-term future and financial stability of your employees, or paying your shareholders (in this case backers) a dividend that might put your company in jeopardy in the current fickle financial circumstances. So your moral choices are:

a) Guarantee that you can pay your employees for 1 or 2 more years during the most dangerous time in your company’s growth
or
b) Pay out a dividend to your backers and pray that your product sells well.

A lot of us here appear to be employers, so we don’t see a) as an immoral choice - and given the amount of outrage in the media forums about ‘Fat Cat’ shareholders getting huge dividends while companies lay off workers, much of the general public would agree (as long as it doesn’t mean they get their game late, it would seem).

Others do see that as immoral, and I get that, but I refer you to my original post above about the level of overreaction there has been.

But once you’ve made that choice, you have a whole bunch of other moral choices to make. Do you:

  1. Take the money and run, leaving your backers twisting in the wind.
  2. Offer refunds to anyone who can’t or won’t go in the direction you have now chosen.
    or
  3. Negotiate a compromise which can’t please everybody, but at least means you can deliver what you promised once your company is financially secure.

I would say that Snapshot chose option 3. It’s won’r please everybody because that’s the nature of a compromise - but it also doesn’t shaft everybody either. What’s more, they are offering you compensation in kind (ie. free DLC) for the inconvenience up to at least 100% the value of an original basic pledge - probably only 30-40% of the value of a higher pledge, but then anyone who pledged $95 or more cannot have expected to get that fully redeemed by the value of the game, or if they did they were severely deluded.

That IS a big deal, regardless of what people say on other forums. Say that DLC is worth £40, and 94% of the 10,000+ original backers take up the offer, as currently seems likely: that’s £376,000 that isn’t going to Snapshot or Epic. Now you can argue all you like that the Epic deal will more than make up for that shortfall, but THAT’S THE POINT. By taking the Epic deal, Snapshot has ensured that they will be around to deliver on that content and can start working on it now, rather than waiting a year and keeping their fingers crossed that the game will raise enough money to make it possible. Based on the last figures I read, about 94% of us really like that idea.

That really does suck, and I’m sorry. Right now, you’re feeling how I felt when Madden went to Playstation. All I can say in return is at least you won’t have to wait 11 years, and when you do get the game it will be completely polished, with all kinds of Wiki forums to help you get the most out of it. That was how I came to XCOM: Enemy Unknown, about 2 years after it launched. I’m now in my third campaign of XCOM2 (this time trying LW2) and still loving it. In fact, I usually opt to wait a year for all the bugs to get ironed out of a game before I buy it - Phoenix Point is the exception, because I really want to be a part of shaping the XCOM that its original creator always dreamed of making.

I’d also like to thank you for respecting this forum’s politeness policy, Ren, despite severe provocation. I really appreciate it - and I thought your answer was illuminating.

M<

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68

Overall, a well thought out post MichaelIgnotus. We do not agree on every point in it, but i can appreciate your post anyways.

With regards to your alternativ a+b, i mostly agree, though i think their presales and the history of recent XCOM sales etc. should have given them confidence that it would sell well.

With regards to 1, 2 & 3 i have a couple of comment.

  1. This option would be almost guaranteed to kill any company, and leave them open to lawsuits.
  2. This option is a requirement to avoid being open to complains/lawsuits with regards to consumer protection laws, atleast here in Europe where we have fairly strong consumer protection.
  3. In theory they could have negotiated a compromise that pleased everybody. And perhaps they even tried, and maybe it was Epic that put their foot down and said “no”. But they COULD have made sure that their backers got what they were promised at launch, a gog/steam key. They had the option of saying “no” when Epic came with their counter-offer to go exclusive, or they could have said "I’m sorry, but we already have promised X to our backers, and we want to fulfill that promise, but we can make it exclusive for any new purchases. While entirely possible, i doubt Epic would have said “Sorry no, we do not want to publish your game, because you do not want to be 100% exclusive.”

Personally my reasons for requesting a refund are kind of 3-fold.

  1. I do not like/support exclusivity.
  2. I will not use Epic game store.
  3. I do not like broken promises.

So to me, those 3 things combined were enough that i felt that i needed to “vote with my wallet” so to speak.
My refund from Fig.co came through today, so i’ll mostly fade into the background now, and time will show if i come back when the game becomes available on other platforms.

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69

Thanks for your reasoned response, Gelanin.

With regard to 3), I suspect that Snapshot could not have got the deal they needed without ceding some form of exclusivity. Let’s face it, what’s in it for Epic if everyone’s just going to use their Steam/Gog keys anyway?

But I respect your opinion just as you respect mine. Here’s hoping you get to play and enjoy the game in the future, once it’s bug-free and open to all.

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70

I guess one of the questions we’ll never know for sure is, did SG need the Epic money or not. According to the AMA, they did not, but i also see how it could be very tempting to accept that money to be able to produce an even better end product.

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They did not need it to finish basic development of PP. But after that was unknown for them. Now it is known future.

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Perhaps. I understood it as they had enough to finish the game as originally promised, if that is considered basic or not, who knows.

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Yes i meant what was originally promised without DLCs or additional not met streach goals from fig. :slight_smile:

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Also being an older fellow, I do remember when Steam showed up. And no, we didn’t like it, and we had good reason. Previous to that, we were mostly left alone. We purchased a game, it was on disks. If we wanted to loan it to a friend (just like a console gamer) we could, as long as we uninstalled it. If we wanted to sell it, we could (depending on where you lived). Steam was a shift towards removal of rights. It was not wanted by consumers, and it did very little for them. It was an erosion of first sale doctrine, and if government actually was focused on its people and not run by old people, it would have been struck down or severely regulated.

So Steam came out and many people avoided it. Eventually though, games ceased to come out on disks. Boxes just came with a code. The whinging and gnashing of teeth over some perceived loss of revenue for pirated games caused a reducing in people making PC games or some inclusion of crazy and usually invasive DRM methods. Largely, PC gaming was looking at a slow death, or good for nothing but flight sims and the occasional RTS.

The PC gaming world became progressively worse, while Valve worked to try to make Steam the least odious of the options. Valve put in a lot of time and effort to do this. While I would prefer we go back to consumers actually having rights, Steam provided a lot of advantage in exchange for some of the limitations. It’s brought back PC gaming. It’s brought back Mac gaming, they even made a hard push to bring back Linux options. Valve has improved gaming. Everyone who’s tried to do something similar (uPlay, Origin, etc) as a stand-alone publisher platform and not a shop (so GoG or Greenman) has failed at it, because they’re focused purely on the money, as opposed to balancing revenue with respect.

The Epic store is the worst of the bunch. They have put in no effort to support customers. They have put in extremely little effort into foresight of their platform. I mentor a lot of new software developers (a profession I’ve been in for 20+ years now) and their whole platform and store is an embarrassment of design and forward thinking.

When Steam started on this, they were somewhat ground breaking. At this point, given all the aforementioned examples of other shots at this, there is no question as to what should be available and is expected. The lack of it is just showing they don’t care. They’re going to attempt to brute-force their way, using Fortnite money, to try to leverage people onto their platform. They’re exploiting smaller developers to do this. They will not be pushing customer supporting features. They will not be pushing Linux or Mac development, they do not care.

Also, we were promised Steam Keys on release. Not a year later. The DLC makes no difference, because within a year, the DLC will be on sale or included for free on any expansion that comes out. That’s how PC games work. The cost value for that proposition is drastically reduced, because the Kickstarted funds, will be less than the cost to purchase the game + DLC when that year is up.

I personally haven’t asked for the refund. All things equal, I probably should, because I found it disrespectful, and I won’t support Mr. Gollop in any future endeavors as any good will is now burnt; but I want the other studios to not instantly reject any non X-COM turn-based strategy games, and so I’m just accepting this kickstarter as “failed”. I lost my money. The product I wanted, will not be delivered. There’s a reason most mail order places don’t charge you till they ship the product. Buying something and then not providing it at the chosen sale is considered fraudulent.

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Interestingly, people who were organizing lan parties on a regular basis or working on cyber cafes, or playing online a lot (which wasn’t as widespread as it is nowadays) tend to have much better memories of Steam.

Don’t forget that Steam was an alternative to gamespy and (later on) the godawful games for windows live. It also avoided the frustration of making sure everybody was on the same patch and reduced the hassle of finding said patches on various hosting websites and slow ass mirrors.

It also launched at a time where MMOs were hitting a broader audience, and publishers didn’t need Steam to realize that always online features would help them.

Having worked for publishers and dealt with steam, I understand the many reasons that would drive big publishers to create uplay or origin. Steam used to have a potatoidal organization where you could never get a decent point of contact. I don’t know if it has noticeably improved. They could routinely forget to send you crucial information or action security requests when shit hit the fan.

Uplay and Origin are also (arguably badly) designed to sell full service packages to prospective developers, and also permit more freedom to handle worldwide markets and tap into emerging payment methods. With the advent of GDPR, it also alleviated some data protection concerns. They aren’t entirely unattractive to the customer, as they can offer their own perks (Ubisoft Club allows you to earn on demand discounts, Origin access is far from a bad deal for 5€ a month). Hating greedy EA, Ubisoft or Activision execs. is fully justified, and they have their fair share of scummy practices, but Uplay and Origin aren’t the worst things I’ve seen.

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So I’ve only read through the first few posts under this topic. Watched a few youtube videos. And you know what I see most of all? “Exclusives are bad”

And yet, there are so many titles that are steam exclusives. Because the companies who develop them, or port them, only sell them on Steam. Why is that ok? We do not hear these same people who talk about EPIC also cry foul of Steam (or of certain developers) who only release their games on Steam.

The snowflake generation is literally causing the slow decline of western civilisation, and yet this is the most important, most earth-shattering thing they can waste their time and energy on.

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77

I touched this point on another topic. One common response is that Steam do not make exclusivity deals like Epic, hence if a game is exclusive to Steam is a developer choice and thats OK. Another one is that there is no exclusivity on Steam because you can buy STEAM KEYS on another storefront.

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Epic have just announced partnership with Humble Epic partners with Humble Bundle for Epic Games Store titles | Shacknews

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Don’t ruin this beautiful drama about Epic exclusivity.

80

I’m gonna tell you lot one thing and one thing only…

…cheese is delicious!

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81

Many years ago, before the common World Wide Web and broadband and digital downloads, grampa Simpson explained to us all what this all “EPIC IS EVIL!!!” is really about.

When Bart gets a doll for his birthday, grampa starts screaming: “That doll is evil, I tell ya! Evil! EEVVIILLLLL!!!.. I just want attention…” Here, take a look:

(not to mix EPIC OUTRAGE with legitimate complaining backers, please… I’ve been seeing many of them already claiming to have received their money back)

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I’m 43, played computer games since the 80s (from multiple floppy disks no less), and I have used Steam and GOG. I don’t think those two are anything special, but I felt utterly lied to and betrayed with the announcement of the exclusive agreement with Epic.
That is why I asked for a refund. There’s plenty of stuff out there for me to play, without getting lied to and having a switcheroo played on me.

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