3 years later ends up buying out indie games and puts them behind exclusivity on the Epic Store
On Linux gaming "The real enemy of Linux are these trolls who try to overrun social media channels to make claims in bad faith and attempt to harass developers into compliance. They’re scaring lots of good game developers away." https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/115052159963387494...
Could you elaborate? I've seen a lot of arguments along those lines, but none were willing to actually explain what it is exactly they're doing that is wrong.
For some reason Valve seems to have a lot of very rabid fans on Reddit, from many many years. Valve gets a free pass for showing annoying ads on every Steam update while being a paid service and also for their forced 30% cut and essentially being a monopoly. All the while barely improving the product for years while making billions from the cash cow.
When I saw Epic was jumping into the fray I figured there'd be vicious backlash and handwringing from the community for minor things and wasn't surprised at all.
The short version is pretty simple. Epic has been paying developers a whole shit-ton of money for an exclusive release on their storefront and launcher, and a lot of PC gamers do not like exclusive releases or having additional launchers.
That's not such a big deal though, the real problem is that they did this with games that were in development for years with Kickstarter-style backing that had up until that point explicitly targeted other storefronts. To many this seems like a betrayal by the developer and Epic's behavior is making the market worse.
Those last two quotes sound consistent to me. If Valve could operate on a 12% cut without exclusives, that would prove him was wrong that it's impossible, thus he would change his position if they did so.
The Epic store thing would be analogous if Epic made Windows, which they don't - there isn't a contradiction in Sweeney's position here whatever one might think of the merits of the Epic store.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/04/microsoft...
3 years later ends up buying out indie games and puts them behind exclusivity on the Epic Store
On Linux gaming "The real enemy of Linux are these trolls who try to overrun social media channels to make claims in bad faith and attempt to harass developers into compliance. They’re scaring lots of good game developers away." https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/115052159963387494...
About dev cuts:
In January "This is the only practicable way to operate a 12% fee store in developing countries." https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/109102593910919987...
5 months later: “If Valve commits to a permanent 88% revenue share, we’ll stop making new exclusive deals” https://www.dsogaming.com/news/tim-sweeney-if-valve-commits-...
etc.
Tim Sweeney is an interesting person, like a weathervane