Be Excellent To Each Other

Any one else getting this?

I pre ordered a Steam key for £34.99 with CDKeys, but have since found out that it's not going to Steam and the Epic key is £38.99. I have not had word from CDKeys, so maybe they will honour the sale and send me a Epic key?

Steam are not too happy, but it serves them right IMO.

But yes, back to the niceties. Who else is excited? up for it? pre ordered? waiting?

Wait-and-see. I enjoyed the second game well enough.

How on earth does it serve Steam right?

I think Epic can sod off with this anti-competitive stuff.

I didn’t like Metro: Last Light so I’m suspicious whether this will be any more than a generic shooter.

Because Steam are very greedy, that's why. They take 30% from a big game dev. That's 30% less that goes to the people who actually made the game in the first place to invest back into more development.

This is why (IMO of course) Uplay has really taken off lately. Not only do they get to keep much more of the money the game makes but they then pass that back to the user by letting them earn coins for discounts on new games. Does Steam offer any incentive like that at all? because other than the Steam sales I've never saved a copper coin on there.

I really don't mind having various clients on my PC, especially when it saves me money..



Wow, really? I absolutely loved Last Light, I really think it's top five stuff for sure. I didn't get into 2033 because of the lack of ammo and the fact it was pretty damn hard. Not only that but it felt more like a graphical display than a game. A bit watery? IDK. Last Light though? as soon as I got my "soul"? (I think that is what they were supposed to be, souls of those killed) I had feels like I've never had from a game. I know every one was raving about how good God Of War was because of the companion but Last Light did that ages ago. Plus it wasn't extremely difficult and as long as you made sure you hunted for ammo and replaced your filters it rolled along well. I completed it, probably one of the last games I bothered to complete. I really enjoyed it, scary, harrowing moments and all.

This new one is far more open world. I can't say I am overly enamoured with the sandy sort of level because I prefer the snow etc, but we'll see. It's gotta be better than Fallout 7shit, that's for sure.

Apparently I wrote (about Last Light):



The summary was: terrible story, rubbish shooting where you’d sit in a corner with a shotgun and wait for the queue of people to turn up and get instantly deleted, rubbish waypoints and, worst of all, far far too many scenes where you just follow someone who walks very slowly. Generic FPS. Yawn.

Yet you buy dodgy keys so the devs get less too.

30% is the industry standard. Xbox/PlayStation/Nintendo/Google/Apple all charge 30%.

If 30% on Steam was not "fair", Epic would not need to bribe publishers to put their games exclusively on Epic store.

This deal between Epic and Deep Silver is not going to help the developer at all (and fewer people will play their game because of it) but it will help Deep Silver.

Valve let devs/publishers generate unlimited Steam keys at no charge, which they can sell directly to keep 100% of the purchase price, or sell on other stores (like itch.io who let the dev/publisher set the revenue split). Epic do not do this.

Prior to this deal, you could buy Exodus from Steam, Humble, GMG and many other stores competing on price. Now Epic are the only store in town and are charging £50 for it. How is that saving anyone any money!?

They're not dodgy keys. CDKeys has been around for about six years. I've bought tons of keys from them and never once has one of them been removed because it was dodgy.

I preferred to buy my games on media just to have something other than a code. But that seems to have gone the way of the dinosaurs now. Oddly, games on disc with a key were usually around £35. Now all of a sudden you can't get them on disc any more and they are £50-£60.

That's quite possibly because Steam is the platform for games now, and they are charging 30%. Meaning games have gone up by 30%.

Lewie - that is not standard. PC games have no licensing fees, hence why Microsoft made a console in the first place because they couldn't charge anything. If you mean certain storefronts charge 30%? fine, then why can't I buy my game from a store front who doesn't charge 30%? (which is basically what I am doing by buying from CDKeys).

Whereas when you buy a disk from a shop, the disk manufacturing company, shipping companies, wholesalers, and the shop itself are all working for free.

Well they seemed to do OK when PC games cost £25 on disc whilst console games cost £50. And like you say, they had the cost of the disc, publisher and etc. Now all of a sudden they want £60 for game and air. A game that usually doesn't even work properly or will take hours of fiddling with to make it work.

I never mentioned license fees. Maybe read my post again.

Edit: and again, how is Epic Store charging £50 for Metro Exodus passing any savings on to the customer?

In my experience, standard commission on art galleries is 50%, 30% for such a big audience seems fine.

Are Games art?

*runs*

They are charging the developer less, hence why they have been turned. I didn't say they were passing savings onto the customer fella. However, with any luck they will pass more money back to the developer and we will get better games. Maybe then they'll start doing loyalty discounts? who knows?

Quite simply? it's capitalism. When Epic started firing shots recently there was a war over % and they offered much lower fees.

Hopefully now Gabe can get back to what he does best; making games.

Personally I couldn't care how many store/launchers there are now. I stopped being bothered about that ages ago when I had no choice but to install Uplay, Origin, Battlenet and god knows what else.



Yeah I do agree that the combat was a little repetitive. Once I learned the trick (hiding and popping out) it wasn't too difficult. Did love the exploration though and burning spider webs Maybe I liked it because it was actually easy? I can't do hard games.

They're musicals.

Games aren't being removed from Steam because of the different revenue split, they are being removed from Steam because Epic are paying the publisher to remove their games from Steam. Yes it's capitalism, it is anti-competitive capitalism.

If you care about publishers getting the most money, then:

Valve let devs/publishers generate unlimited Steam keys at no charge, which they can sell directly to keep 100% of the purchase price, or sell on other stores (like itch.io who let the dev/publisher set the revenue split). Epic do not do this.

Erm, doesn’t Steam have a large monopoly on digital distribution?

No they don't. They have a dominant market position. If they had a monopoly, Epic wouldn't be able to launch a competing store.

Epic paying publishers to remove games from all other stores (not just steam, but Humble, GMG, etc) is transparently anti-competitive.

Further to Lewis's answer: what on earth is a "large monopoly"?

I don’t know what Steams market share is but I’d hazard a guess that it’s large indeed. Setting up a rival platform and obtaining exclusivity deals might not suit consumers but it’s hardly anti-competitive.

Just ignore the adjective and the answer will reveal itself to you.

Paying the publisher to remove the game from competing stores like Humble and GMG is clearly anti-competitive. I don't know how else that action can be interpreted.

Presumably you could interpret that as buying exclusivity rights.

Yes, because they want to be the sole digital retailer selling that game on PC, rather than competing with other digital retailers who are also selling it.

It's a timed exclusive, which makes it a lot like MS paying for that one Tomb Raider game to be only on the Xbox for a while. Not that I'm defending that practise, but this is arguably less exclusionary because anyone with a PC can still get it from the Epic store without having to buy new hardware.

Loads of times exclusives happen all the time. Like in food.

Yeah, he’s conflating competition with digital stores and digital goods.

Epic is real competition for Steam. Origin is EA, Uplay is UBI and from what I can garner neither of them publish games from any one else. Bethesda's new launcher is their games too. GOG? sorta competition. They've had a few big games come up like Witcher III.

A few months ago Epic announced it was going to cut the percentage taken from devs. Maybe to entice them over? maybe to do that and then shove the prices up. Who knows?

EA have used their store exclusively of late, with none of their games being made available anywhere else. That is why like I said I've already gotten over having to have multiple apps in my tray. It's a pain, but there's not much I can do about it. Funnily enough I also seem to recall being very irritated by Steam when it first launched, as it meant you had to have an internet connection to get HL2 working. And of course, just my luck, I didn't have one. I had to lug my PC over to my mate's place and do it there, then lug it back home. I have grown to quite like Steam though.

Ed. Oh yeah, Microsoft have been playing the exclusive game with the Winpoo store too. So that's yet another platform you have to use if you want games from there.

Try telling that to China.

There was a major (justifiable) backlash to the Rise of the Tomb Raider deal.

Accessibility of anything in China is a crapshoot anyway due to them being a bunch of clowns so I can't find it in myself to care about Epic choosing not to touch that shitshow. And the Tomb Raider deal was a total pain in the ass; I myself was pretty annoyed about it.

But, it's all just companies does what they've always done and always will: attempting to differentiate themselves from the competition. Epic are trying to spin up a store from pretty much nothing and they've got a lot of ground to gain against the incumbents; Steam most notably. Getting exclusivity on stuff and giving free stuff away is all part of their strategy to get their software onto people's machines and, most importantly, get it's existence into people's brains as a source of games. Striking this deal so late on--at a point when people have already pre-ordered on Steam--is a bit crappy but the overall practise makes sense. Also: people who preorder don't get my sympathy anyway in general.

Did Steam do anything like that, or was that shit not around then?

Steam is fully available in China.

The reason Epic Store is not available in China is because Tencent own a 40% stake in Epic, and don't want it competing with WeGame.

Steam did not prevent any games from coming out on competing services. They just worked to provide the best service they could, consistently added useful features, and developed their own games. Balancing what worked for them, what worked for third party publishers, and what worked for players.

I'd love to see Epic compete by offering the best features, functionality and service, but instead they are just opening up their wallet to sabotage competitors, which does nothing to help players.

At the time everything was disc based so Steam's USP was Valve games; which was actually meaningful in the days of Half Life 2. I remember being really fucking annoyed at having to run something in the background just so I could play stuff and if they didn't have a big title like HL2 to force you to use it I'm not certain it would've taken off as quickly or been such a major player.

There was digital distribution around the same time as Steam launched.

Remember back when you got a finite number of downloads from Direct2Drive?

Valve's internally developed games, plus an extremely customer-centric approach is what earned them their dominant market position.

I hated Steam. I hated it because it was a pain, and all I wanted to do was play the game I had paid $50 for. Instead I had to bugger around installing the Steam app, setting up an account, activating the game over internet (which I did not have) and etc. I only returned to Steam about two years later when I bought The Orange Box so I could play eps 1&2. So at the time? they had a monopoly over their games. Fair enough they were their games, but it was still a massive faff.

They've pretty much dominated ever since. It wasn't until about 2010 that my collection on there started to grow and I somewhat fell in love with it. However, I will say that about 90% of the games I've bought have never even been installed or launched.

I don't mind the competition at all. It was Steam who had to be forced into giving refunds because they didn't before then. They're not this lovely nice company some people make them out to be. Now? well, I had two choices. Either stop gaming or install lots of crap onto my PC and have to go through the faff. I decided on the latter, so I couldn't really care either way now. One app ten apps, it was all a pain.

This is so stupid I almost blacked out.

Don't forget as well -while Steam charges more, it gives the developers a lot for that charge. Online matchmaking servers, mod support in the Workshop, Achievements, free cloud saving, user reviews - Epic has NONE of this.
I feel a large part of the user outrage is more based around the fact Epic has supposedly been working on this for 3 years, but has launched a store with basically no features - many of which are available on Origin, Steam, Xbox, etc

I think the mahoosive install base helps devs with their decisions, too.

'sake

https://kotaku.com/after-epic-store-dea ... 1832209151

So it is cheaper on Epic, yet people are up in arms. I dunno. One minute they are boycotting Valve for having the gall to sell L4D2 (expecting it as a free update) and the next they are boycotting Epic lmao. You couldn't make it up

Funny thing is gamers are addicts. So even if we're really pissed off we end up buying it secretly and playing it any way hahaha (and yes I am being stupid, I'm in a silly mood).

Not sure why, but it could well be my skewed understanding of things yet again. Valve make HL2, you have to have Steam to activate and indeed play it, you can't play it elsewhere nor buy it elsewhere so why would that not be a monopoly?

Sometimes you need to have a clear head and explain things to me, not just call me stupid. I am a person, and I do have feelings somewhere amidst all of the anxiety and depression.

It's like saying McDonald's has a monopoly on selling Big Macs.

OK well that makes sense. Thank you !

It's not cheaper on Epic. It was available for £35-39 prior to postponing the Steam release, now it's £50.

35 is a smaller number than 50.

Anyway. The game looks okay, right?

Not since they lost the trademark

It's cheaper in the USA, 'cause, well? Murica. That said PC games have always been $60 over there, even going back to when they were £20 or so here. So I guess the many will be happy.

Punda - yeah, it seems it is a good game under all of the controversy. Very excited now !

Edit oh yeah, forgot to say. A guy from another forum I go to said he contacted CDKeys and they said they would honour his purchase and send him an Epic key. I've not had time to do that (been too busy being served a Section 21 among god knows what else going on in my life right now) but that's cool. They want £3 more for the Epic key apparently.

I like.

In short if you have not played any of the Metro games then it won't make much sense. It continues straight on from the story of Last Light.

The graphics are absolutely stunning, but it is a "GPU cooker" as Deep Silver called it. I can literally smell my GPU heating up and have to wear headphones to dull the noise (air cooled rig this one). It's worth it though, even if I do have spots on my forehead from it heating up the room. Man, I forgot what that was like ! Sadly I am here at the moment (mum's) so I don't have much choice. I guess I am happy just to be gaming right now and dodging some of the stresses of moving (which is in full swing, I'm just having a couple of down days to rest up...).

I would say in summary (without spoiling anything) that if you were a fan of the other two Metro titles then definitely give this one a go. There are a couple of caveats (because of the late switch to Epic). Firstly you can not run the built in benchmark tool. If you try to launch it it will error out with "You must use Epic game launcher to run this tool" or something. Sadly there is no way to do that (you simply don't have the option) which is bloody annoying. I would have liked to figure out how it ran on which settings before I started playing to avoid the issues I have had. And those are chronic stuttering (which was caused by me running Rivatuner in the background) and one hot GPU. Had I had the option to test the graphics using the benchmark I would have been set. Instead I've had to sort that whilst playing it.

Secondly there is still some stutter, which seems to occur when you load a new scene. I *think* it's because of the hard drive. I would surmise it runs a lot better from a SSD when it comes to stuff like that.

Overall though? a much needed shot in the arm for PC gaming, which was all but dead before. Nothing has appealed to me in ages. It's definitely the visuals which will blow you away though.

Funny old game this.

Looks beaut, sounds fantastic with some lovely atmospheric sounds (two guys talking in a metal shed with all the voices twanging off the metal sheets was awesomely done) but runs sloppily and feels like you’re constantly pushing through treacle.

I wasn’t really enjoying it until I reached the first open world ish area which feels very STALKER-lite. If it would just give me some fucking bullets I’d probably be enjoying it more. It’s just stuck me in a couple of areas with a ton of enemies and nothing to help me get past them. In the end I’ve just ran by everything Benny Hill fashion which doesn’t make a very compelling game at all.

Still, quite an interesting game so far.

It's very slow going really. I like that though. I need to continue playing but the no cloud saves pissed me off. I put in about 8 hours on my second PC at mum's then had to do it all again. The cut scenes do become rather grating if you have to do them all again.

I hear Epic are working on that though, though it's kinda nooby not to have already.