EPIC DENIES AN 'OVERWHELMINGLY POSITIVE' STEAM GAME RELEASE ON THEIR STORE

Sorry for caps, couldn't be arsed re-typing it out again or doing anything.

EPIC DENIES AN 'OVERWHELMINGLY POSITIVE' STEAM GAME RELEASE ON THEIR STORE

Assault Android Cactus is a top-down shooter that's got an 'overwhelmingly positive' review rating on Steam, but as it turns out, this is not nearly enough for the game to get accepted for release on Epic Games Store.

Developer Sanatana Mishra, the author of Assault Android Cactus, has decried Epic Games' decision not to feature their game on Epic Games Store via Twitter, saying that "they weren't interested when I filled out their questionnaire and suggested I get back to them in a year or something.

According to Mishra, Epic Games is now taking the very same stance that Valve used to take with Steam way back when, in 2003, with them creating a walled garden sort of experience: "I guess it is sort of appropriate that Epic are taking the exact same view Valve had in 2003 when they launched Steam, since the EGS has about that level of Steam's feature set."

"I'm not sure people understand how insanely stressful life was when Steam had the same approach to curation that Epic has now," said Mishra, adding that it was an incredible achievement for them to have been granted access to Steam for the first time ever.

"My biggest EGS gripe is that they don't seem to have a plan beyond Steam 2003,"concluded Mishra, who is obviously not particularly keen on Epic Games Store nowadays.

Epic and their store suck, in other news water is wet.

I fail to understand why some people want more and more curation in their shops. Is this what they are looking for?

Freedom, and not seeing any product you dislike are two things that don't go hand in hand. Steam or the Epic game store are not your friends or your personal store. So you are effectively asking choice to be taken from you, and for them to determine what you like and what you don't. You would need some seriously good filters to make freedom and personalization work well together... and you then create a weird sort of echo store where you won't even know what exists outside of what the algorithm thinks you like. Is that really preferable to just having everything available for purchase? What is so painful about having products available that you don't like?

I am personally fine with how Steam does things: There is an algorithm for personalization of the store front, but you can still find everything on the store, and they tend to allow anything on the store.

@KungfuKitten: it goes like "something something indie trash something something viruses something tentacle porn"

@KungfuKitten: It isn't just consumers but also indie devs as some of them want less games on a store just so theirs can be more discoverable. While it is true that a massive library makes you harder to be discovered on the other hand some indie devs won't just accept that their games are mediocre or painfully average and think that just cause they're not an unreal/unity asset flip they should get big time success and blame too many of other peoples games on a store for them not getting it or flopping.

For example an upcoming indie game called Dangerous Driving is going to be completely Epic Store exclusive the devs claimed that Steam isn't a viable platform for them. Just taking a look at their history of games you'll see that they've nothing but mediocre games with metacritic scores ranging from 50 to 64 with one of them only getting 2 professional reviews because they're just that unexceptional.

@KungfuKitten: For some reason I can't see whatever it is replied with even though your comment is still listed as the most recent one

@NoodleFighter: that's former criterion, makers of burnout so it does seem they are right to be epic exclusive when you discredit them like this.

I love steam

To be fair Epic have no obligation to sell your stuff for you, you have other choices like Steam 2019.

But I guess they just wanted some of that free money they are chucking around.

Take a look at a previous game they made under their new developer studio. Dangerous Golf which holds a metacritic score of 54 on PC and PS4 which has the most reviews a 56. This game was even played by NerdCubed with a video getting over 300,000 views yet its Steam page only has 110 reviews. People pointed out the novelty of destroying stuff in the game gets old really quick so how it stands out from other golf games isn't much. The Danger Zone games just take the crash mode of Burnout and are barebones and short. Also despite being former Criterion devs their games never really built up an audience behind them even when mainstream gaming journalist such as IGN and GameInformer did videos on them.

Does this honestly look like a game suffering severe injustice of not selling hundreds of thousands of copies?

I'd love it even more if Valve stopped being lazy as all hell and actually started to create some games again.

Yet another reason Valve and Steam are so very, very good; and yet another reason why Tencent-Epic are so very, very terrible.

Even if Valve had a monopoly or was a big, publicly traded company (they don't, and they aren't), the way Tencent-Epic is going about trying to get into the business of game selling is completely wrong.

I'd love some more Valve games, too, but I am happy with them working on infrastructure and hardware. Concerning the big picture, I'd rather have Valve blaze the trails of how we distribute games, download them, and so forth than, say, EA or Ubisoft.

@R4gn4r0k: Very true, but there are so many great games these days that I don't mind.

@mrbojangles25: People say steam had a monopoly but all things considered Valve was excellent (offering full refunds and not interfering with consumers).

Only after they got slammed with lawsuits by governments for being anti consumer which resulted in them screwing people over as much as they possible could do by making games rents instead of actaully owned so they could dodge the being able to trade your games department.

Sorry but the only reason you got refunds is because they where forced too.

Gimme a break, steam is a joke.

And for the other guy thinking this guy needs 4 billion every year with 100's of employee's to run that trash can shop of there's that doesn't even have a half functional forum for games. Yea gg.

What a joke.

That dude really just went out and leveled exactly what the Epic storefront is... Brilliant.

@Gatygun: The forums and the store work well. Not sure what the problem is there.

I didn't follow that case at the time so I am not aware of its implications. I'm talking on the basis of steam today.

@NoodleFighter: so, since they suck, they don't deserve to rip off epic for the exclusive money so they can make a game that can make an odience and be reviewed by ign and cubed whatever can get a million views and steam to take 30% off them? Or is it to put the guy having an issue that epic doesn't want his stupid game in a good light? Or put steam in a good light cause that is even more stupid.

Except the game wouldn't be on Steam at all since the devs stated it will be completely exclusive to Epic Store. We were not even talking about them using Epic's money to make a better game we were talking about how the devs are putting all the blame on Steam for their games not selling instead of just admitting and acknowledging that the titles they released were not up to snuff to any sort of big traction.

Wish we could actually read the rejection notice to attempt to discern the reasoning, but the source suggests it's due to Epic's efforts to curate their content offerings.

Not sure that makes much sense seeing the Assault Android Cactus is actually a great game. I believe there is something else beyond "we don't want your game on our store." Were I to wager, my instinct is Epic has bitten off more than they can handle given their current staffing and resources to manage the amount of developer interest they're receiving and have to build up their operation before they can afford to spare the attention.

I rate this thread overwhelmingly negative.

Why would they? you hermits have shown Gabe that he can get your money without even making games lol.

75% of Steam is pure gutter trash, and this is me being optimistic. I don't blame Epic for wanting to be different. I get the impression that that while almost everyone criticized Steam they want Epic to be just like Steam.

Oh so your problem is Valve's 30% cut. Where can I see all the outrage over Sony's/MS/Nintendo's 30% cut even though none of the companies provide free online, dedicated servers and plenty of features Valve do.

@NoodleFighter: they say that, but it will come to steam, much like how Microsoft is bending over and giving MCC to it. You don't see how steam doesn't say a thing about this cause they know their fans will do the work for them. Review bombs on the old metro games, how childish can that be over a free launcher?

I love epic game store threads.

They pop the corn.

@Ant_17: A kick in the butt is also free, does that mean that you should like it?

meanwhile reset era threaten people not to speak against epic games

https://www.resetera.com/threads/borderlands-3-is-coming-to-the-epic-games-store-exclusivity-unknown-read-staff-post.108956/

By surfing Resetera who give them hits and actively support them my friend.

they have fastest news. thats why. but its so stupid to banned people who talk against epic store. i mean seriously.

they banned people for not liking battlefield v but now not liking epic store.

@ghosts4ever: If you want to link to something on there but don't want to give them the satisfaction you can use a site like http://www.freezepage.com/ to create a link to a frozen (archived) version of the page that doesn't get them clicks. Or in other instances you can just repeat their news without mentioning them as a source.

If you want to discuss on that site without moderators being able to silence you, use a free-speech plugin called Dissenter.

Most of the hate is from people that really want L4D3 or HL3 or whatever since clearly having the best service is irrelevant in the face of "but they don't make games and make a bunch of money!"

I always think it's funny when people act like Valve is a terrible company but the worst they can say about them is that they don't make games or they're lazy about curating the Steam store. Pretty much every AAA publisher is razing the video game market and defecating on their own customers to make a quick buck.

@davillain-: Couldn't have said it better myself ;)

On the one hand I like a free market where obscure games can make it to the front and maybe get some sales they wouldn't have otherwise.

On the other hand, Steam is a dumpster fire of reskins, blatantly offensive shit just for the sake of it, games with no executable file, and dubiously legal porn. It's virtually impossible to browse upcoming games for anything but big budget preorders.

Indie developers have mentioned time and time again, especially since the Switch came out, that Steam is no longer the indie darling storefront it once was. No curation has lead to oversaturation, which leads to poor sales, which leads to less decent games making it to the service.

And lets also not forget Steam has allowed outright illegal, malware spamming games onto it's service because of lack of curation.

Curation is not a binary, all or nothing option. You can curate just enough to not allow the worst of the worst to flood your store and potentially drown the content people actually might want.

To put it another way, if my supermarket sells 10 piles of unpackaged poop for every one quality food product, technically yes they still sell good food, but I probably wouldn't return to that store on account of having to walk past a mountain of poop every time I browse. We can probably agree that a good store would not stock poop in the first place, and would otherwise stock a wide variety of new and desirable items.

@Vaasman: The thing is you'll never see games with malware or barely illegal content or any of that, because Steam doesn't recommend those games. And I don't think users do, either. So they're not there unless you go out of your way to find them. It's just that if you want barely legal content, you can find it.

Then again, I don't have a problem with having barely legal or offensive material in a store, and it seems like you do have a problem with that. So I think that's why we look at it a little differently. I consider offensive material to be a boon to our society, a sign of our liberty and tolerance to people who have unpopular ideas or make mistakes. In a supermarket our health is involved and the products have a physical presence that can be overbearing. I wouldn't mind barely legal or offensive material to be featured in a supermarket, but if it is illegal or very unhealthy or misleading in terms of how unhealthy a product is, that goes too far for me personally. And I think something like news sites should be looked at more critically than entertainment as well. That's why I can be pretty intolerant of journalists making factual mistakes or of journalists trying to determine for us what is right and wrong. Because with their job description comes an expected level of expertise and objectivity that doesn't really exist in entertainment, plus unprecedented power over the ability of others to take part in online discussions and presentations. (A responsibility that I don't think some journalists or outlets are capable of handling and shouldn't be in their hands in the first place.)

What you get with a more heavily curated store is ultimately the same deal, just with less rights and freedom for the developers and the users, right? It's just that instead of users or personal preferences entered into an algorithm pointing you in the right direction, it's a random person at Valve or Epic not just telling you what's good or not, but deciding whether or not you even get the chance to try something out. Are those terrible games that you describe somehow an obstruction to good indie games on Steam? Maybe... When it comes to garnering initial attention? That's the only problem I can see, but even on a more curated store you would have the same problem of almost the same magnitude, because it's not just Steam being oversaturated, it's the good game section being oversaturated.

I do see the problem that reviewers receive multiple emails per day asking them to try out an indie game. Like too many. And they get all these codes and download links for different store fronts or even private sites, and they don't know which ones to pay any attention to. But I don't think that reviewers should look at random employees of stores to solve that problem for them. They should solve that problem themselves because it's their job to. And if they can't figure that out, they have a problem that does carry over to the performance of indie titles that are good but ignored. That is why I have asked several outlets: why are you only reviewing games that all the other outlets are also reviewing? I can see streamers and YouTubers halfway solving that problem in that we now have thousands of new critics online, some of whom diversify because of the saturation of critics, and try out more obscure games looking for those hidden gems. So I wonder if that problem isn't solving itself already by the sea of new critics making reviewers who stick to their usual reviews less important, and stores/users already filtering the content they show to you?

By the way I'm not telling you that I'm right or anything. I could be completely wrong about this, but to me it doesn't seem like the Switch's eShop is providing indie developers with much better prospects than Steam for instance. Of course there are people buying Switches just to play indie titles on the go, so if your indie game is known and it already sold well it's going to do amazing on the Switch. I do think that while it is curated to some degree, that it is also saturated. 95% of the indie games on the eShop you will never hear about, and most of them are at least OK. In quality they are probably all in the top 10% of indie titles that come to Steam. Yet if you don't get picked by Nintendo to be in one of their Directs, I don't know (maybe someone knows) that your prospects as an indie developer are that much better on the Switch than on Steam. I'd think you still need a streamer or YouTube critic to pick up on your game in order to get the word out. And if you make a game that some Nintendo employee finds bad, offensive or borderline illegal (not necessarily predictable) you may not even get a spot in the eShop at all. And then we don't even get the chance to decide that.