Darwinia was eventually released in March 2005, but despite a strong opening weekend, sales soon slipped too low to sustain the company. Within six months, the developers were back on UK government benefits until November, when they contacted Valve “on a whim”[10] to try to set up a digital distribution deal on their Steam platform. Valve responded enthusiastically and, following a 14 December 2005 online launch, digital sales, which exposed the game to a new, global audience, kept the company going through to the release of their third game, DEFCON.
Valve didn’t reach out to Introversion to make demands, they actually saved the company. For a game basically no one had ever heard of and abysmal sales for were about to make the company go bankrupt. Valve didn’t pay for this exclusivity. It is however true that 18 years ago, they had an exclusive game.
This is a big difference compared to Epic paying 2K for exclusive access to Borderlands 3 so they can secure the profits of a huge franchise. Epic pays big companies big money to secure early profits to exclusive titles. Valve may have technically had an exclusive game, but Epic’s business model is literally paying for exclusive access to the biggest games they can get, so they can get the biggest cut of the sales at the highest price point, before discounts.
Only one of these two companies is trying to “Pay 2 Win.”
There really isn’t. This is personal opinion.
Some of us just have issues with Epic Games. Some others have issues with Valve.
No private company is really “good.”
But the argument with Epic is things like:
They brought “exclusives” to PC gaming for the first time. Previously, a PC game was a PC game, and it didn’t matter what storefront you bought it from, because it was available at all storefronts. Epic chose to pay companies to restrict their titles just to Epic, in an attempt to move the market towards them.
In a similar vein, trying to fight Valve’s dominance, they started giving away free games. They have been firing people left and right because their financials are in the toilet, and yet they’re still pissing away money on free games and exclusives to their store.
People who care about access to music and paying artists hate them because they have effectively put a death warrant on Bandcamp, buying them for two years, doing nothing with the product, and then selling it to Hedge Fund fuckies who already shitcanned half the staff and the site is officially on life support. They basically killed the last place you could buy music and make sure all the proceeds went to the artist and not a middle man (Bandcamp Fridays).
During all of this, they refused to spend any money on actually improving their fucking game store. Things that have been staples of Steam for a decade now are still on a waiting list of features to be added. The User Experience for Epic Games Store is just bad, bad, bad, bad. There’s no excuse for it, especially when they chose to piss money away on exclusives and free games instead of paying people to produce a better product than Valve has. They refused to even try to release a better product, believing they could buy their way to dominance.
Do you really want to support a company that doesn’t give a flying fuck about your user experience as a customer and has such bad business plans that they’re letting go tons of staff? It’s bad enough that they had a bad business plan, but it also seems like they’re not very good to their employees, either. Compared to Valve’s “flat” management where there are no managers, or where Newell famously paid the writer for Portal to “be sick” for two years while he had a serious disease. “Your job here at Valve is to get better.” This was before he wrote Portal, no less.
One company clearly cares about the user experience that their users experience, and one clearly cares about using every tool at their disposal to be the top of the market, everything from paying for exclusives and free games to suing in court to try to carve out a niche for yourself where you don’t have to pay vendor fees.
Of course, I also encourage you to do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Valve offers a better product, better user experience, and treats their employees with more respect, but it doesn’t mean Valve hasn’t made their own share of anti-consumer decisions.
An important detail regarding exclusivity. What made a ton of people pissed off (and justifiably so, in my opinion) is that they bought exclusivity for games that were kickstarted which resulted in the option for Steam keys being removed for these games.
They brought “exclusives” to PC gaming for the first time.
Please stop with this horseshit. Valve and GOG had both done third-party exclusives before EGS was even a thing. Epic absolutely in no way "brought [them] to PC gaming for the first time.
Yes, they did make them a pillar in their strategy to try to enter a marketplace that was dominated by an 800-pound gorilla - which is a perfectly legitimate approach to take - which neither of the other two did, but they 100% categorically did NOT bring the practice to PC first.
they refused to spend any money on actually improving their fucking game store.
Wow, you’re just full of misinformation on this post. They have constantly been updating their store since day one. No, it’s not on parity with Steam (and it likely never will be), but to just flat out say that they haven’t spent anything on improving it when there has been a steady stream of improvements over the years is ignorant at best and actively disingenuous at worst.
And before you even go there, yes, it was a long time ago, no, they haven’t really done it since then. But the discussion here is about whether or not Epic did it first, which they did not. By about a decade and a half.
Darwinia still sold copies through their site. Steam didn’t even support macos or linux back then yet the game did and that was how you got those versions. It wasn’t exclusive.
Tell me you didn’t click the link without telling me you didn’t click the link.
Darwinia still sold copies through their site.
Straight from the linked forum post:
As part of the launch and Steam’s exclusivity, we will no longer be offering Darwinia as a download option from our site, although it will still be possible to purchase shipped boxed copies. At Valve’s request we will also be removing the demo from our site for about a month.
So, yes, they were still selling boxed copies - because it was 2005 - but Valve made them stop selling digital copies from their own site and even made them take down their own demo.
It wasn’t exclusive.
Again, same quote as above:
As part of the launch and Steam’s exclusivity
Not sure how you’re getting “it wasn’t exclusive” from a post that explicitly says that they signed their game up for Steam exclusivity.
I like how they ignore that it saved the company and Valve didn’t reach out to them to make demands. Introversion was about to go out of business, were on benefits (“on the dole”), and their deal with Valve saved them.
But that’s exactly the same as paying for Borderlands 3, a huge fucking game whose company wasn’t about to go out of business is exactly the same.
Darwinia was eventually released in March 2005, but despite a strong opening weekend, sales soon slipped too low to sustain the company. Within six months, the developers were back on UK government benefits until November, when they contacted Valve “on a whim”[10] to try to set up a digital distribution deal on their Steam platform. Valve responded enthusiastically and, following a 14 December 2005 online launch, digital sales, which exposed the game to a new, global audience, kept the company going through to the release of their third game, DEFCON.
I found elsewhere that said they only sold 6000 copies before contacting Valve, but I can’t verify that it’s true.
Yeah, exactly the same as massive games with huge followings like Borderlands 3. /s
So just because it worked out for both parties, that means it doesn’t count?
The claim was that Epic created exclusivity on PC. You seem to be acknowledging my point that Valve did it years before EGS even existed, but then you’re digressing into “BUT IT’S OKAY BECAUSE REASONS!!!1”
Focus. Valve did it before Epic. GOG did it before Epic. Think what you like about the circumstances surrounding all of these, but admit the incontrovertible fact that Epic didn’t start this.
Yes, and Valve was trying to establish their upstart digital store against the big established sales leader by buying exclusive distribution rights to a game they didn’t make…
How was it exclusive if it was available to purchase in two separate places? Maybe if your comment had a qualifier like “digital download version exclusive” it could be considered correct
What’s your point though? Every one of Epic’s exclusivity deals is done with the consent of the game publisher. Does it matter who makes the offer? Do we even know that there aren’t cases of publishers reaching out to Epic?
Does anyone know how to permalink a post on Lemmy? Anyway, here’s what Snot said:
Also, to be clear on the differences, Valve didn’t reach out offering to pay for a massively popular upcoming game, which is what Epic does as a business model. They had a company that was about to fail reach out to them, and they made an exclusivity deal with them, but Valve did not pay them for this deal. If you really fail to see the difference between those two things, I don’t know what to tell you.
Are we pretending publishers not bothering putting their games on every storefront is the same as paying publishers to not put those games on competing storefronts?
Steam was literally forced on those who owned a physical copy of Half-Life and wanted to play it. The dominant position has nothing to do with the service offered by Steam. It was dominant when it barely had any features. GOG competing with it on features and in fact offering the bonus of DRM-free games hasn’t improved its market share of about 0.5%.
For real, Steam literally took off because they made HL2 exclusive to it. It doesn’t matter that it’s a first party game, the effect and intent was identical. They could’ve made it generally available but chose not to. They forced people to use their proprietary product to install a game.
It’s crazy how many people shill for valve on Reddit and lemmy when they’ve already done most of the shit Epic gets accused of.
So unless you bought a physical copy of this game and kept it off the internet (not sure if anyone is collecting any data through FO3 itself), or got it gifted to you through GOG and you don’t have an account there, you’re in the same boat. Except you paid for the game with money in addition to data.
I was going to say. This is probably the opposite. Unfortunately once epic goes down. Because of their awful launcher you won’t actually be able to use it
It’s not a free game. It’s a license to access a file through the epic launcher. They really shouldn’t be able to sell it as a game. It’s inaccessible without epic.
But it’s not a sale. It’s a game, and it’s provided for free, and as of right now there is no end date where your access to the game will expire. No money leaves your wallet.
I still don’t understand.
Is this some sort of coping mechanism by people who paid for the game 10 years ago?
… because unless you bought it from GOG over Steam (which is my preferred place to buy digital games, not Epic), you’re in the same boat: Haven’t bought a game, you’ve bought a license. Except with Epic, it’s $0.00 today.
Ultimately, if you want a free game and have no issues with Epic, then hurray, you get a free game. Some of us don’t like Epic and prefer to give them nothing (including our data), even if it means passing up on free games. I have no shortage of games to play, so I won’t be missing a free copy of FO3 or whatever else they decide to offer up.
Mate I got it. I have all the free games from epic.
My point was that it’s not a “game” in the traditional sense. Anything online that requires a launcher is a licence.
Similar to me “purchasing” a film on prime. I don’t actually purchase the film, I purchase a license to access the file solely through their system.
They can revoke or lose that license and I lose access. Different to me buying a DVD and I can use it whenever I want as long as I have a DVD player.
I agree. I was just following on the point from above. It is shit that we can’t buy from company. I bought the game 10 years ago. Bit of double dipping. I’ve rebought a bunch of older games.
It’s definitely a game in the modern sense. If you want games in the traditional sense, your choices are pretty much GOG and physical copies. And even those aren’t a guarantee, with things like…
“Physical copies” that are really just download codes or a DRM key on a disc
Day one patches
Patches that make the game drastically different than it was on launch, particularly when the game was drastically different (aka. shittier) on its unpatched launch
Games that require proprietary servers to run the game properly, and won’t be kept alive after a certain date because they won’t release the required code for fans to run their own servers
For a lot of gamers, “licenses to games” or any of the above cases make up the majority of the games they play. Yet we still call them gamers, we still call them games, and we still call it gaming.
Tell me you don’t understand business terms like “license” without telling me you don’t understand business terms like “license.”
Also:
Valve has made clear that if they ever go out of business, they will transfer a copy of each game you have a license for to you (providing they still have distribution rights).
This isn’t even a problem with GOG because they still distribute games in the old way where you can download a standalone installer and keep that copy of the game in perpetuity.
Again I don’t disagree. I think untill gamers or consumers lobby the industry, we will keep getting shafted. None of those things listed help the consumer. Maybe patches and new updates but not if it doesn’t ship with a completely unbroken game
EDIT: RE: Valve and Darwinia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introversion_Software#Financial_history_and_independence
Valve didn’t reach out to Introversion to make demands, they actually saved the company. For a game basically no one had ever heard of and abysmal sales for were about to make the company go bankrupt. Valve didn’t pay for this exclusivity. It is however true that 18 years ago, they had an exclusive game.
This is a big difference compared to Epic paying 2K for exclusive access to Borderlands 3 so they can secure the profits of a huge franchise. Epic pays big companies big money to secure early profits to exclusive titles. Valve may have technically had an exclusive game, but Epic’s business model is literally paying for exclusive access to the biggest games they can get, so they can get the biggest cut of the sales at the highest price point, before discounts.
Only one of these two companies is trying to “Pay 2 Win.”
There really isn’t. This is personal opinion.
Some of us just have issues with Epic Games. Some others have issues with Valve.
No private company is really “good.”
But the argument with Epic is things like:
They brought “exclusives” to PC gaming for the first time. Previously, a PC game was a PC game, and it didn’t matter what storefront you bought it from, because it was available at all storefronts. Epic chose to pay companies to restrict their titles just to Epic, in an attempt to move the market towards them.
In a similar vein, trying to fight Valve’s dominance, they started giving away free games. They have been firing people left and right because their financials are in the toilet, and yet they’re still pissing away money on free games and exclusives to their store.
People who care about access to music and paying artists hate them because they have effectively put a death warrant on Bandcamp, buying them for two years, doing nothing with the product, and then selling it to Hedge Fund fuckies who already shitcanned half the staff and the site is officially on life support. They basically killed the last place you could buy music and make sure all the proceeds went to the artist and not a middle man (Bandcamp Fridays).
During all of this, they refused to spend any money on actually improving their fucking game store. Things that have been staples of Steam for a decade now are still on a waiting list of features to be added. The User Experience for Epic Games Store is just bad, bad, bad, bad. There’s no excuse for it, especially when they chose to piss money away on exclusives and free games instead of paying people to produce a better product than Valve has. They refused to even try to release a better product, believing they could buy their way to dominance.
Do you really want to support a company that doesn’t give a flying fuck about your user experience as a customer and has such bad business plans that they’re letting go tons of staff? It’s bad enough that they had a bad business plan, but it also seems like they’re not very good to their employees, either. Compared to Valve’s “flat” management where there are no managers, or where Newell famously paid the writer for Portal to “be sick” for two years while he had a serious disease. “Your job here at Valve is to get better.” This was before he wrote Portal, no less.
One company clearly cares about the user experience that their users experience, and one clearly cares about using every tool at their disposal to be the top of the market, everything from paying for exclusives and free games to suing in court to try to carve out a niche for yourself where you don’t have to pay vendor fees.
Of course, I also encourage you to do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Valve offers a better product, better user experience, and treats their employees with more respect, but it doesn’t mean Valve hasn’t made their own share of anti-consumer decisions.
An important detail regarding exclusivity. What made a ton of people pissed off (and justifiably so, in my opinion) is that they bought exclusivity for games that were kickstarted which resulted in the option for Steam keys being removed for these games.
Heard this had even killed projects
Please stop with this horseshit. Valve and GOG had both done third-party exclusives before EGS was even a thing. Epic absolutely in no way "brought [them] to PC gaming for the first time.
Yes, they did make them a pillar in their strategy to try to enter a marketplace that was dominated by an 800-pound gorilla - which is a perfectly legitimate approach to take - which neither of the other two did, but they 100% categorically did NOT bring the practice to PC first.
Wow, you’re just full of misinformation on this post. They have constantly been updating their store since day one. No, it’s not on parity with Steam (and it likely never will be), but to just flat out say that they haven’t spent anything on improving it when there has been a steady stream of improvements over the years is ignorant at best and actively disingenuous at worst.
Which games did valve pay to be exclusive to steam?
Darwinia.
And before you even go there, yes, it was a long time ago, no, they haven’t really done it since then. But the discussion here is about whether or not Epic did it first, which they did not. By about a decade and a half.
Darwinia still sold copies through their site. Steam didn’t even support macos or linux back then yet the game did and that was how you got those versions. It wasn’t exclusive.
Tell me you didn’t click the link without telling me you didn’t click the link.
Straight from the linked forum post:
So, yes, they were still selling boxed copies - because it was 2005 - but Valve made them stop selling digital copies from their own site and even made them take down their own demo.
Again, same quote as above:
Not sure how you’re getting “it wasn’t exclusive” from a post that explicitly says that they signed their game up for Steam exclusivity.
As you said, it was 2005. Physical sales were the norm.
I like how they ignore that it saved the company and Valve didn’t reach out to them to make demands. Introversion was about to go out of business, were on benefits (“on the dole”), and their deal with Valve saved them.
But that’s exactly the same as paying for Borderlands 3, a huge fucking game whose company wasn’t about to go out of business is exactly the same.
Via Wikipedia about Introversion Software:
I found elsewhere that said they only sold 6000 copies before contacting Valve, but I can’t verify that it’s true.
Yeah, exactly the same as massive games with huge followings like Borderlands 3. /s
So just because it worked out for both parties, that means it doesn’t count?
The claim was that Epic created exclusivity on PC. You seem to be acknowledging my point that Valve did it years before EGS even existed, but then you’re digressing into “BUT IT’S OKAY BECAUSE REASONS!!!1”
Focus. Valve did it before Epic. GOG did it before Epic. Think what you like about the circumstances surrounding all of these, but admit the incontrovertible fact that Epic didn’t start this.
Yes, and Valve was trying to establish their upstart digital store against the big established sales leader by buying exclusive distribution rights to a game they didn’t make…
🤔
Exclusive distribution rights how? The physical edition wasn’t just a steam code, otherwise I’d agree with you.
Since you are being a bit nitpicky here: The people you replied to did say „exclusives“ and „games“, so…
Careful you don’t throw your back out helping them move those goalposts!
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https://forums.introversion.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=40203
What do I win?
How was it exclusive if it was available to purchase in two separate places? Maybe if your comment had a qualifier like “digital download version exclusive” it could be considered correct
Based on the other poster above, it was the Darwinia devs who reached out to Steam. So Darwinia isn’t a particularly good example either.
What’s your point though? Every one of Epic’s exclusivity deals is done with the consent of the game publisher. Does it matter who makes the offer? Do we even know that there aren’t cases of publishers reaching out to Epic?
Does anyone know how to permalink a post on Lemmy? Anyway, here’s what Snot said:
Gamers and developers benefit from the developers being paid rather than not being paid for the same thing.
A large chunk of steam games can’t be brought elsewhere.
Are we pretending publishers not bothering putting their games on every storefront is the same as paying publishers to not put those games on competing storefronts?
The end result is the same for the consumer.
Intention matters too.
Not to me. I just want to play games. Already have multiple launchers. Doesn’t make a difference.
It really isn’t.
In one case a publisher is choosing to publish where the customers are. If consumers don’t like that service they are free to publish somewhere else
In the other case a company is trying to force consumers to use their service, instead of providing a better service that they would want to use.
Either way you install a client and play a game. Already have a few so it doesn’t really matter.
Steam was literally forced on those who owned a physical copy of Half-Life and wanted to play it. The dominant position has nothing to do with the service offered by Steam. It was dominant when it barely had any features. GOG competing with it on features and in fact offering the bonus of DRM-free games hasn’t improved its market share of about 0.5%.
No one is upset about having to use EGS for Fortnite. Their own games that they develop themselves they can do what they want with.
The issue is when Epic approaches other developers, especially those that have already announced a Steam release, and try to get exclusivity out of them: https://medium.com/@unfoldgames/why-i-turned-down-exclusivity-deal-from-the-epic-store-developer-of-darq-7ee834ed0ac7
Epic: We would love to have you on our service
Dev: I’m not interested in exclusivity
Epic: then we have no interest in having you on our service
Having more options for their customers makes their service better, but Epic isn’t interested in being a better service.
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All the same to me. I have to install a specific client to play a game.
For real, Steam literally took off because they made HL2 exclusive to it. It doesn’t matter that it’s a first party game, the effect and intent was identical. They could’ve made it generally available but chose not to. They forced people to use their proprietary product to install a game.
It’s crazy how many people shill for valve on Reddit and lemmy when they’ve already done most of the shit Epic gets accused of.
I don’t think getting freebies from them counts as supporting them
You have to create an account to get them.
If you don’t think data harvesting to sell the data isn’t part of that equation, you’re just a little bit naive.
Of course it’s part of the equation.
It’s part of the equation on Steam and GOG, too.
So unless you bought a physical copy of this game and kept it off the internet (not sure if anyone is collecting any data through FO3 itself), or got it gifted to you through GOG and you don’t have an account there, you’re in the same boat. Except you paid for the game with money in addition to data.
Yeah, but the argument was “does taking a free game help them or not” not shifting goalposts to whether Valve does it, too.
I think it’s funny how people create accounts only to never actually spend any money on this platform
I do. Some examples off the top of my head:
There are probably other ways in which it supports them. Those are just the first ones to come to mind.
Ok, but they give free games so it’s cool. They’ll surely make a lot of money off of my “never pays us” behavioural data
I was going to say. This is probably the opposite. Unfortunately once epic goes down. Because of their awful launcher you won’t actually be able to use it
It’s not a free game. It’s a license to access a file through the epic launcher. They really shouldn’t be able to sell it as a game. It’s inaccessible without epic.
But it’s not a sale. It’s a game, and it’s provided for free, and as of right now there is no end date where your access to the game will expire. No money leaves your wallet.
I still don’t understand.
Is this some sort of coping mechanism by people who paid for the game 10 years ago?
… because unless you bought it from GOG over Steam (which is my preferred place to buy digital games, not Epic), you’re in the same boat: Haven’t bought a game, you’ve bought a license. Except with Epic, it’s $0.00 today.
Ultimately, if you want a free game and have no issues with Epic, then hurray, you get a free game. Some of us don’t like Epic and prefer to give them nothing (including our data), even if it means passing up on free games. I have no shortage of games to play, so I won’t be missing a free copy of FO3 or whatever else they decide to offer up.
Mate I got it. I have all the free games from epic.
My point was that it’s not a “game” in the traditional sense. Anything online that requires a launcher is a licence.
Similar to me “purchasing” a film on prime. I don’t actually purchase the film, I purchase a license to access the file solely through their system.
They can revoke or lose that license and I lose access. Different to me buying a DVD and I can use it whenever I want as long as I have a DVD player.
I agree. I was just following on the point from above. It is shit that we can’t buy from company. I bought the game 10 years ago. Bit of double dipping. I’ve rebought a bunch of older games.
It’s definitely a game in the modern sense. If you want games in the traditional sense, your choices are pretty much GOG and physical copies. And even those aren’t a guarantee, with things like…
For a lot of gamers, “licenses to games” or any of the above cases make up the majority of the games they play. Yet we still call them gamers, we still call them games, and we still call it gaming.
Tell me you don’t understand business terms like “license” without telling me you don’t understand business terms like “license.”
Also:
Valve has made clear that if they ever go out of business, they will transfer a copy of each game you have a license for to you (providing they still have distribution rights).
This isn’t even a problem with GOG because they still distribute games in the old way where you can download a standalone installer and keep that copy of the game in perpetuity.
Epic has no such plans or guarantees.
Make of that what you will.
Again I don’t disagree. I think untill gamers or consumers lobby the industry, we will keep getting shafted. None of those things listed help the consumer. Maybe patches and new updates but not if it doesn’t ship with a completely unbroken game
Found an interesting post from steam steam support stating contingency plan for users ive also seen another post that was in a discussion outlining the same contingency plan
That doesn’t seem to be a contingency plan; just a claim that there will be one.
I totally disagree with the exclusives point.
So, so many games can only be brought on steam. It’s always been that way.