• rwhitisissle@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I absolutely hate a company inducing other companies to release only on their software platform.

    On one level I get this, but on another level…the companies themselves agreed to it. Like, everybody gets pissed at Epic for making the offer. Nobody gets pissed at the company that takes it. So weird. It’s almost like your favorite game developer only exists to make money and they got offered more money than what they thought they’d make releasing on Steam.

    • Tak@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I see lots of people complaining towards the company that takes the deal with Epic. It’s just way easier to whine about Epic instead of a specific list of game companies that took the offer for various reasons. Like for indy studios I can totally see why they would take the money instead of risking it while for Ubisoft it’s completely down to more profit.

      Let’s also not conflate “developers” with “companies” Epic will talk about paying developers a better cut but often times it is the publisher not the developer that gets paid. My favorite developers don’t get paid by Epic, they get paid whatever they can scrape together from their boss.

      • rwhitisissle@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Let’s also not conflate “developers” with “companies”

        Development companies, like 4A Games are what people are complaining about when they complain about “Developers.” This is different from the programmers or individual game developers who work on the game as people. The words might be conflated, but the company is what’s being complained about.

        Also, it depends on the game. Metro Exodus was subject to what their publisher wanted to do. The developers behind Phoenix Point, however, received additional funding from Epic to finish their game in exchange for a year of exclusivity. It just depends. Regardless, it kinda just…doesn’t matter, right? I mean, it’s video games. There are people in the United States who can’t afford insulin. A video game being exclusively published for a year via the EGS is, like…the least of our societal problems. And I meant that literally.

        • Tak@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          I think it does matter as I will always encourage a developer to take the money, they gotta get by and I get that but a publisher isn’t going to share that Epic money with the workers.

            • Tak@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              I’ve heard only good things about how Valve treats their employees. Meanwhile Ubisoft who was one of the biggest to go for Epic’s store just had 120 something layoffs.

              • rwhitisissle@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                That’s not really what we were talking about, though. And, to get back on topic, Valve doesn’t engage in profit sharing with its workers. You can like a company as much as you want. It’s still a company and at its foundation it extracts surplus value from its workers. It exists purely to make money. Like any other company. Any positive sentiment towards it that is not purely an evaluation of the quality of its products and services is misguided and largely a product of public relations, rather than any genuine merit of the entity itself.

    • shani66@lemmy.comfysnug.space
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      11 months ago

      I was a backer for Phoenix point, i took my money back and never bought the game when it came out. People are equally pissed off at developers who take the deal.

      Even more so when they release a game that’s not even conceptually on the same level as what they promised, grumble grumble.