Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[MrWiggles]

As in, they couldnt even if they wanted to use that money to retain the workforce they let go. Also, the workforce letgo was managers, and adminstrators. Which probably means that 15m in cash wouldnt be enough to secure all those positions. Assuming all those positions still exist, when they dont have to support Destying.

[Iduno]

Yeah but profit expectations have been driven through the roof because of MTX. Literally billions of dollars a year, and valuation shooting up to the stars in just a few years because of it. It's an unsustainable level of growth, and the games have gotten quicker and shallower to try and keep up with that perceived demand.  And so players look at what's being offered and decide they don't want it. So these MTX vehicles undersell then under-deliver because no one is playing it and pumping their dollars in to MTX.

It had to come crashing down, and as usual, it's the workers who can't unionize who pay the ultimate price. Meanwhile executives get 8 figure hiring bonuses and stock options even when they're underperforming on the system they built.

Shit is broke.

Try my new game: Guillotine Builder.

[Trolldefender99]

https://kotaku.com/facing-financial-pressures-gog-quietly-lays-off-at-lea-1832879826

It looks like the situation at GOG is worse than I thought

https://www.pcgamer.com/gog-is-ending-its-fair-price-package-so-it-can-give-devs-a-larger-cut/

For them to do that, I imagine means they are in pretty dire straits.

[Kagus]

Thanks, Obama Epic.


I mean, on the flip side, devs are at least getting a larger share of the proceeds. But it's still sad to see that program go.

[Reelya]

However, we need to take into account the fact that pricing is dynamic, not static.

If GOG takes a smaller cut, then devs will find it more profitable to drop their prices, since there is elastic demand for games and competition among games. The equilibrium pricing point will therefore be lower if platforms take a smaller percentage, and more total units will be sold. This will (partially) offset GOG's lost revenue, since they'll end up selling more total games.

As for the fair-price mechanism, that was subsidizing some regional player's purchases at the expense of making the overall game's base price higher. Removing the subsidy and handing that money back to the devs should have an overall downward pressure on the price of affected games.

There's really no reason to think Epic's low 12% platform fee is going to destroy the digital download market any more than the frequent insanely discounted sales and Humble Bundle already are. We live in the age of market disruptors. The services like Steam and GOG were disruptors themselves of bricks-and-mortar businesses, who have lost big. Think of all the lost retail jobs due to services such as GOG, not just the lost GOG jobs. Sure, GOG sells different games to retail game stores, however all games stores are competing for the limited time and attention of players. Sure, GOG is great, but it got where it is by being on the side of disrupting previously existing jobs. We can't really whine about another even lower-cost store coming along and challenging Steam and GOG.

[MrRoboto75]

its cheaper but is it better

[wierd]

Indeed. I am willing to pay extra for the "Never DRM" nature of the offering. 

DRM technologies are buggy, are notorious for doing very bad things to computers they touch, are very difficult to remove once they infest, they break single player gameplay with absurd demands for online verification 100% of the time, and a whole host of other bads.

A little extra on the price is well worth not dealing with that.  If the market is going to try and push in a "Look! It's cheaper! [but with assloads of DRM!]" direction, that's what promotes piracy. (because the pirate offer is a superior offering, at the superior price of free.)

With any market intersection, there is a finite number of ideal pricepoints for offers, and currently I think GOG hits very close to that.  The issue is that many buyers do not consider the bads involved with lower prices. (as seen by all the Freemium and Pay to Win shit out there.)


Cheaper may not mean better, and at this point, I am very skeptical that the new offering will be as steadfast in the "Never DRM" stance as GoG.

[MrWiggles]

I'm pretty sure, its more simple then this. gog is popular, so when they let go poeple its sad. Activision is hated, so whatever they do is bad. Like Steam. Steam hasnt really gotten worse. Its just gotten less popular. So now its fine, to call out steam and Valve for its shit.

[Bumber]

I'm pretty sure, its more simple then this. gog is popular, so when they let go poeple its sad. Activision is hated, so whatever they do is bad. Like Steam. Steam hasnt really gotten worse. Its just gotten less popular. So now its fine, to call out steam and Valve for its shit.

But what determines popularity, if not their decisions?

[Reelya]

Well, everyone is hating on the Epic Store apparently mainly because they're competition for the stores they like. That reeks more of the type of tribalism that defines these sorts of commercial "rivalries" than it does for any specific decision or difference that the stores are doing.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Epic is giving away a ton of free games and they're dropping the cut the store takes, which developers are obviously going to be happy with. Which would almost certainly be seen as positive things if they were announced by stores people already had a connection with. Steam gets bashed for being greedy and evil because they take a too-high cut. Now, a rival store does the exact opposite, and people are online calling them greedy and evil for doing that.

Like I said, all the online stores are disruptors who destroyed a lot of retail game-related jobs that many on this forum would have been happy to be involved in, but now really don't have those opportunities, yet we exalt GOG and Steam as the best thing since slice bread. GOG and Steam made things really cheap, which is why we love them, however that's at the expense of a lot of jobs that existed before. That's where the savings came from, duh.

Now, additional stores pop up with economic models that disrupt Steam and GOG, and suddenly ... we're talking as if those additional stores are The Devil.

As for the whole MTX debacle, that wasn't really something that the big 3-4 publishers had much choice about. They're in an AAA arms-race with each other. Games gotta look good to get sold. Additionally, many of the big games where we're complaining about MTX are now hybrid-type games which are high-budget PC games, but with after-market online play support.

Developing a game is one cost, and the box price should cover that. However, it's not fair on people who just want to play the game single-player or on a LAN, or self-hosted, to have to cover server-costs for people who want to play the game online with the ease of the company's game-matching system. The people who want that experience of online play should pay for it via a separate cost to the base development. People like me, who buy action games only for the campaign/story, and have no interest in online PvP play should have to subsidize the server-time of other people. The choice is either optional MTX, or a subscription. Cramming a one-size-fits-all "server costs fee" into the box price isn't a good or fair option.

[MrRoboto75]

Well, everyone is hating on the Epic Store apparently mainly because they're competition for the stores they like. That reeks more of the type of tribalism that defines these sorts of commercial "rivalries" than it does for any specific decision or difference that the stores are doing.

Epic is giving away a ton of free games and they're dropping the cut the store takes, which developers are obviously going to be happy with. Which would almost certainly be seen as positive things if they were announced by stores people already had a connection with. Steam gets bashed for being greedy and evil because they take a too-high cut. Now, a rival store does the exact opposite, and people are online calling them greedy and evil for doing that.

No one wants 8 storefronts on their computer because A B C and D are exclusive to stores W X Y and Z.  Its another program that takes up hard drive space, runs in the background on your RAM, takes up bandwidth for its own automated updates, yada yada yada.  Its a waste of time for no benefit to the customer at all.  My comp used to have just one storefront.  It was called my bookshelf full of CDs.

Furthermore that drop in cut, customers will never see that, only the developers.

[Reelya]

If there are enough digital stores then perhaps we can eventually have a manager program that interfaces with multiple stores. That would give smaller publisher-owned storefronts a chance to get a foot in the door. I have some purchases which were directly from the game developer's site so it would be nice if I could have a game-manager that recognized that and stored my keys for me, but also recognized my GOG collection and Steam collection.

The solution is not to disallow competing online stores, it's to break the (entirely unnecessary) connection between Steam the online store, and Steam the all-engrossing downloaded app. Steam won't have any incentive to do that: we need rival stores to drive the consumer to want that. One way it would be possible to get what I'm talking about is if a few smaller stores got together and created an open standard for talking between the stores and an app. e.g. if there was an app that allowed you to get stuff from both GOG and Itch.io, that would be a great start. Grow that enough, and Steam might eventually be forced, reluctantly, to come on board, too.

The argument you've given about centralizing could also be used to justify using Facebook as your Auth for literally everything, too.

[itisnotlogical]

If Steam is the only place to buy your games from...

1. If Steam wants to screw over developers in any way they totally can, and devs can't do anything because there's no other stores.

2. If Steam wants to screw over customers in any way they totally can, and you can't do anything because there's no other stores.

Just because they haven't done these things yet doesn't mean they won't, and when (not if) they do these things, would you prefer there be no competition or alternatives? If the tiny performance hit from having another storefront in the background is really your only reason for not liking the idea, just kill the program when you're done with it like any sane person does with any other program.

Besides, with Steam having no competition there's no reason for Steam to ever upgrade or get better or do anything besides exist and absorb the near-100% market share it's been enjoying for decades now.

My comp used to have just one storefront.  It was called my bookshelf full of CDs.

And where did those CDs come from? Unless you pirated everything and then for some reason burned it, chances are you didn't buy them all from one brick-and-mortar store. If store A didn't have a game, I would to go store B, C, etc. until I found it. That's how a free market works, sans monopolies like Steam.

Furthermore that drop in cut, customers will never see that, only the developers.

And developers actually earning money = bad? Not every developer is EA or Blizzard or Epic, most indie studios live or die with every game they put out.

[MrRoboto75]

There still isn't an alternative.  The game's exclusive to one store anyway.

[Reelya]

"OMG I can't have every game that literally ever existed unless I have accounts at more stores" is really a pretty poor complaint compared to "there's only one store to shop at, period".

Virtually everything is "Steam exclusive" already, so I think that argument is weak that if other stores exist, they'll get "exclusives" too, so people who only want to use Steam will be butthurt, so we shouldn't encourage there to be more shops. Cry me a river.