Support NeoGAF

[memoryman3]

Care to explain how it's good for gamers?

Right now Steam places a massive 30% tariff for nearly all transactions on their store (yes, i'm referring to it as a tariff), regardless of whether the developer can provide their own payment processing. It also has weak built in DRM. Microsoft and Epic's 12% cut would be much healthier for developers, and for bigger AAA releases, this could be the difference maker for $70 prices, or $80+ prices. Valve don't make games or innovate on hardware at nearly the pace of Sony, Microsoft or even Nintendo, so they essentially pocket billions from developers for doing almost nothing but maintaining a decent store, and with favoured status in Google Search, alternative storefronts don't have a fighting chance.

From a consumer standpoint, a unified interface that organises a user's entire game collection would massively help adoption of these alternative storefronts. Steam has a decent library front-end, but it's only really helpful for it's own games. If Epic matched them it wouldn't matter, but Microsoft/Xbox could integrate it at the operating system level and make library management much less of a headache.

 

[DeepEnigma]

 

[Miyazaki’s Slave]

MS Games will be fine…they have so much IP they can release and just take in those engagement dollars.

Xbox is cooked…but it's death will be a fantastic write down.

 

[asdasdasdbb]

Right now Steam places a massive 30% tariff for nearly all transactions on their store (yes, i'm referring to it as a tariff), regardless of whether the developer can provide their own payment processing.

Valve lets publishers sell keys for free. And who knows what Valve lets the Shady Key Sites get away with.

 

[Topher]

Right now Steam places a massive 30% tariff for nearly all transactions on their store (yes, i'm referring to it as a tariff),

You are just admitting how disingenoous your posts are with this nonsense. It's just trolling at this point and you know it

 

[mckmas8808]

Right now Steam places a massive 30% tariff for nearly all transactions on their store (yes, i'm referring to it as a tariff), regardless of whether the developer can provide their own payment processing. It also has weak built in DRM. Microsoft and Epic's 12% cut would be much healthier for developers, and for bigger AAA releases, this could be the difference maker for $70 prices, or $80+ prices. Valve don't make games or innovate on hardware at nearly the pace of Sony, Microsoft or even Nintendo, so they essentially pocket billions from developers for doing almost nothing but maintaining a decent store, and with favoured status in Google Search, alternative storefronts don't have a fighting chance.

From a consumer standpoint, a unified interface that organises a user's entire game collection would massively help adoption of these alternative storefronts. Steam has a decent library front-end, but it's only really helpful for it's own games. If Epic matched them it wouldn't matter, but Microsoft/Xbox could integrate it at the operating system level and make library management much less of a headache.

So why can't Microsoft and Epic team up and do that themselves WITHOUT going to courts and suing to force it to happen? If gamers and devs agreed with you, couldn't they do that now?

 

[diffusionx]

Right now Steam places a massive 30% tariff for nearly all transactions on their store (yes, i'm referring to it as a tariff), regardless of whether the developer can provide their own payment processing. It also has weak built in DRM. Microsoft and Epic's 12% cut would be much healthier for developers, and for bigger AAA releases, this could be the difference maker for $70 prices, or $80+ prices. Valve don't make games or innovate on hardware at nearly the pace of Sony, Microsoft or even Nintendo, so they essentially pocket billions from developers for doing almost nothing but maintaining a decent store, and with favoured status in Google Search, alternative storefronts don't have a fighting chance.

Nobody cares. Tim Epic tried making all these arguments and claiming his cut would be the differentiator, because all the games would go there, but nobody wants to go live in a barren wasteland because it's cheap. There is a reason why people pay more to live in New York City or Miami, it's where the action is. The higher cut is the price of accessing tens or hundreds of millions of potential customers. And it's not akshully 30%, especially for the games we are talking about, it goes down to 20% over $50M in revenue.

From a consumer standpoint, a unified interface that organises a user's entire game collection would massively help adoption of these alternative storefronts. Steam has a decent library front-end, but it's only really helpful for it's own games. If Epic matched them it wouldn't matter, but Microsoft/Xbox could integrate it at the operating system level and make library management much less of a headache.

What you do not seem to understand is people already have a unified interface, it's called Steam. For most gamers, these other platforms for all intents and purposes do not exist and will never exist.

We've been through this nonsense already. We have seen where people would rather not buy a game than buy it over EGS or Xbox. People will wait a year to buy it on Steam. Steam is the only PC game platform for the majority of PC gamers.

 

[DeepEnigma]

So why can't Microsoft and Epic team up and do that themselves WITHOUT going to courts and suing to force it to happen? If gamers and devs agreed with you, couldn't they do that now?

It's about weakening their competition with enrichment to themselves.

In the guise of false virtue and altruism they PR to their evangelical true believers and retards of the internets.

 

[Sooner]

Keeping COD multiplatform (for X years at least) was a requirement for the ActiBlizzKing acquisition in many regions, so MS really didn't have a choice there.

If Microsoft had made Call of Duty Xbox exclusive, it wouldn't have killed PlayStation. It would have killed Call of Duty and propelled Battlefield to overtake it.

 

[saintjules]

What race when they bowed out some time ago already?

 

[mckmas8808]

It's about weakening their competition with enrichment to themselves.

In the guise of false virtue and altruism they PR to their evangelical true believers and retards of the internets.

The bolded seems to be the biggest supporters of this.

 

[jasondefaoite]

My theory is that Papa Phils plan could have worked, but the top brass got scared of the spend and snuffed it out.

If they locked down exclusives from their newly purchased studios (even COD), and those exclusives happened to be hits, things could have been a lot different.

When companies come under the Microsoft umbrella, they seem to start churning out weak shit. Maybe they're too relaxed because a gigacorp is funding them.

(new Indiana Jones was a welcome exception)

Could. If. Happened to be. Could. The tagline for Xbox.

As bad as Phil is ... Bond will be worse.

 

[jasondefaoite]

What Microsoft shoud've done is pivot the other way. Focus on hardware and exit the dev business. License their IPs (there's like 2) to other publishers.

Exit the part of the business which can make money to focus on the part that can't. Smart. Driving the final nail in the coffin.

 

[Ass of Can Whooping]

Care to explain how this Xbox/Epic partnership is bad for gamers?

Nothing positive has ever come from two retards joining hands

 

[Plague Doctor]

All I know is I want to have the optimistism and endless devotion in anything as an Xbox fan in 2025.

A thread could be Microsoft formerly announces Xbox is a failure and ending the hardware in no uncertain details and notherfuckers will come up how it is a positive and everything is going along to the plan to dominate gaming.

My cynical ass envies that kind of optimism. I genuinely do.

 

[The Mad Draklor]

Right now Steam places a massive 30% tariff

Look, ma! I can do a buzzwords!

 

[Zacfoldor]

I'm bullish on the Xbox/Epic Games Store partnership myself.





Can Xbox and Epic dismantle the PlayStation/Steam oligopoly and establish a vibrant, open PC platform that benefits small and large developers?

This gif was desperately needed but I can see I'm far too late.