From Newsgroup: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action

Spalls Hurgenson <[email protected]> looked up from reading the entrails of the porn spammer to utter "The Augury is good, the signs
say:

On a related note:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXqJejlFp6k

<snip>

As the video points out, Epic makes loud claims about how Steam is a >monopoly. But Epic has close to 300 million users (a significant
portion of the PC gaming market) and almost none of them choose to
spend their money on EGS. Despite what Epic CEO Tim Sweeny says, there
/is/ a lot of choice in the PC gaming market-space: Steam, GOG, Epic,
XBox Gamepass, EA, UPlay, etc. Steam gets all the sales because they
put the time, the money and the effort into giving customers what they
want. If Steam dominates the market, it's not because it is an
unassailable monopoly but because they are the better choice for
gamers--- and, because of that, for developers too.

I'm reminded of the release of that Kanye album where he "broke the
internet", when the truth was that he went with a new rival to iTunes,
who, trying to deal with the FOMO-Fans rushing to get the album
immediately, promptly crashed under the load.

They charged less, and they delivered less.

Steam vs Epic, is like say Uber picking you up in a Ferrari, and some
nameless Rival charging half as much and picking you up in a Tata Nano.

The price is half as much, but the drive experience is 1/100th as much,
so there's no value for money despite the cheapness.

Almost no one is going to go for that, no matter how much you advertise
your cheapness.

70% of 100,000 sales is still a lot more than 85% of 1,000.

Basic economics. Methinks Tim does not understand that at all.


Oh and having listened to the video, I don't think it's AI reading it,
the reader actually pronounces words properly for the context, and
follows punctuation pauses and stops and says sentences in a normal way
with normal cadence.

I've listened to a bunch of HOA horror stories, HFY and revenge tales on Youtube and the AI is hilariously bad at words with multiple
pronunciations depending on context - always gets it wrong.

Like the job interviewee with his res-ume, or the man with his
rhymes-with-cow, bow tie and the weird pauses mid sentence and sudden
reading of the second half and part of the next sentence run together,
or the pronouncing punctuation - one of those AIs always does ". As"
the end of one sentence and start of the next, as "dot a s", has a T, E,
D, talk and so on.

This was just someone with a boring, droning voice reading the script,
just as we'd have heard 10 or 20 years ago.

I've heard similar droning voices in people who do STO videos, just in
love with the sound of their own voices with no observable reason why so
you get 8 minutes of info spread over an hour and a half.

Xocyll
--
I don't particularly want you to FOAD, myself. You'll be more of
a cautionary example if you'll FO And Get Chronically, Incurably,
Painfully, Progressively, Expensively, Debilitatingly Ill. So
FOAGCIPPEDI. -- Mike Andrews responding to an idiot in asr
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From Newsgroup: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action


Speaking of Epic Game Store:

[and I know, I'm really the only one speaking about it...
but I find the whole thing so /fascinating/. Here's Epic,
with decades of game's development and oodles of market
research and billions of dollars, with a self-set goal
of out-doing Steam... and yet they produce the world's
worst launcher and do nothing to improve it despite
everyone telling them exactly what they need to improve
it. It's a baffling amount of incompetence that I can't
help but marvel at! Hence the constant posts. ;-)]


But Epic has announced that their EGS client will be getting an
overhaul.* Will they finally create a viable competitor to Steam,
making it feature-comparable?

Well, you tell me... because the features they are adding is 'cross
platform text chat', and adding player profiles and avatars! And maybe
later in the year, EGS will be getting voice chat!

Also, good news for third-party developers: if you sell games on EGS,
you'll be able to start selling "Fortnite" cosmetics, as well as
avatars for player's EGS profiles! (Please ignore that fact that even
Epic has reported that Fortnite has peaked and is slowly declining in popularity. It's very important to get your Fortnite cosmetics ;-)

You know, assuming any of this stuff actually gets developed. It
doesn't exist yet. It's just an announcement, not an actual release.

No news on adding a workshop, VR support, an equivalent to Steam
Input, family sharing, proper screenshot and streaming support,
forums, user reviews or anything like that. But who wants any of that
when you can get profiles and funny hats in Fortnite?!?






----
* announcement here https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/news/epic-games-store-2025-year-in-review


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From Newsgroup: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action

On a related note:
(related in the sense I get to bash Epic again. C'mon, it's a fun
hobby!)

Apparently Epic has deleted their roadmap for the product development
of their Epic Game client. Or at least so claims some random person on
Reddit*

I mean, who knows what that really means. Maybe they just don't want
to use Treo to share the roadmap. But given how the client has been in
the news recently and even Epic recognizes that it's bad, you'd think
they'd be careful about mis-steps like this.

Maybe they borrowed the GOG marketing team? ;-)





----
* trustworthy? Who knows. But I've got a hobby! ;-) https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1rfbx18/epic_has_deleted_its_entire_epic_games_store/
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