“Ok, Tim, so how exactly do you make money for your company, then? Because giving away all the free stuff seems like awfully bad business.
I think you're missing the point that Epic's store is only not profitable at their margins because of scale. If they had even half of Steam's user base they would be profitable. Their problem is that gamers insist on backing Valve's monopoly because it's what other gamers tell them to do online.
And Epic provides Unreal Engine, the gaming engine that powers the majority of modern games, with free and extremely cheap tiers for indie devs, and they provide explicit Linux support for their engine and dev environment. They've also used a substantial amount of their Fortnite money to break up app store monopolies on Android and iOS.
They are not the villain that the gaming community thinks they are.
You seem to be operating under some notion that particular work deserves a particular amount of pay. That's backwards. People pay for what they get, not for what the seller's cost of goods.
You seem to be operating with no knowledge of how capitalism is supposed to work. In the long run competition amongst consumer options forces companies to drive prices down to ~ costs + a reasonable margin.
Where that doesn't happen is in cases of monopolies, monopsonies, oligopolies, and generally in areas where there is a lack of competition.
Like in the case of Valve's effective PC gaming monopoly and gamer's dumbass insistence on defending it.
We know that Larian is doing very well financially. Their devs are happy and well paid.
So the fuck what? You think every developer is? You think Larian wouldn't appreciate 30% of all of their sales money not going straight to Valve for doing jack shit?
You seem to have completely missed the point that Valve does not deserve 1/3 of all gaming revenue for running an automated digital store.
And, as a developer, I really don't care how much companies pay to marketing vendors. Developer pay is generally negotiated when you're hired. I haven't worked in B2C but, as I understand it, they usually pay bonuses on sales volume rather than profits.
Honestly what are you even trying to say here? That because you write B2B software on a salaried basis, that that means that an indie game dev doesn't care whether or not Valve takes 30% of all of their revenue?
Like no shit sherlock, thats a matter of you being a salaried employee. If you owned your own company you would very much care about a middle man taking 30% off the top.
The story of Wiarton Willie dates back to 1956. A Wiarton resident named Mac McKenzie wanted to showcase his childhood home to his many friends, so he sent out invitations for a "Groundhog Day" gathering. One of these invitations fell into the hands of a Toronto Star reporter. The reporter travelled to Wiarton looking for the Groundhog Day event. None of the townspeople knew about a festival, but one suggested he check at the Arlington Hotel, the local watering hole. There the reporter found McKenzie and his friends partying and was invited to join them. The next day, the reporter lamented to McKenzie that he needed some kind of story to take back to justify his expenses. So McKenzie grabbed his wife's fur hat, which had a large button on the front, went out to the parking lot, dug a burrow in the snow and pronounced a prognostication (which no one remembers). The picture of Mac and the hat ran in the February 3, 1956 edition of the Toronto Star. A year later, about 50 people arrived for the festival.
Because it's enriching millionaires and billionaires for not doing shit, at the expense of gamers who are overpaying, and/or game developers who are losing out on revenue they can use to pay the people actually making games.
Every single indie dev who spent 5 years of their life crafting a game, suddenly has to give 30% of all of their revenue to Valve for maintaining a largely automated storefront. That's fucked.
And it extra pisses me off because gamers act like billionaire-Gabe is a saint, and billionaire-Sweeney is the devil, when Gabe has ripped everyone off for decades, and Tim Sweeney just paid developers for exclusive game rights to try and launch a competitor store. Like omg so evil of them to offer to pay for development of a game in a situation where the developer has zero obligation or pressure to take the deal. What monsters.
Tim Sweeney has also risked a significant chunk of Epic's Fortnite fortune on lawsuits that have fundamentally changed and broken the app store monopolies, and he's spent much of his personal fortune on buying up land for nature conservation.
The idea that Gabe and Valve are saints and Tim and Epic are the devil is fucking dumb.
The main benefit of a desktop is the price / performance ratio which is higher because you're trading space and portability for easier thermal management and bigger components.
You're just going to link to an unrelated article?
Literally all that says is that the Larian Publishing Lead doesn't like Epic buying exclusive game rights. It says literally nothing about their thoughts on Steam's 30% of revenue fee.
Vale literally and probably does and has. 30% of revenue is not a reasonable fee for basically anything. That's a Mafia markup.
Like lmfao, it takes dozens to hundred of devs like 5-7 years to make a game like Baldur's Gate, and you think that Valve deserves 30% of all of their sales for managing the same basic storefront they built 20 years ago.
Someone who wants to be able to see the screen during the day when there's sunlight in the room, or someone who wants to be able to see the full spectrum of visual fidelity during a movie.
Its not like you're going to have a blank white image on screen all day, but if you want to accurately portray the contrast between say, the shadow of the jungle, and the bright colours of a bird that has sunlight glinting off it, then you need to be able to have the brightest parts be very bright and the darkest parts be very dark, because that's what reality looks like, the outdoors gets brighter then 100 nits.
Honestly, we have way more work to do when it comes to brightness, contrast, and colour.
I'd rather a 1080p screen that has OLED infinite contrast and over 1000 nits of sustained brightness to be fully viewable during the day, over a resolution bump.
Yup, and they're still hard to find a reasonable priced replacement for, so still go for like double their original price on marketplace.
The only downside to them is that they struggle a little bit to playback lossless audio. So you can't play Spotify lossless off them and I found that they would occasionally crash when streaming Tidal / Quobuz lossless. I'm pretty sure this is just a thermal constraint though and you can fix it by taking off their case (some people even add heatsinks to them).
I bought the 2019 one and ended up selling it for this reason.
Have never had CEC compatibility issues with anything else. I've rotated through Samsung and TCL TVs, Roku Boxes, Google TV Boxes, Chromecasts, Switches, Xboxes, Yamaha and Denon Amps, and Vizio Sound Bars, but the only showstopping CEC issue I've ever had was with the shield.
I think you're missing the point that Epic's store is only not profitable at their margins because of scale. If they had even half of Steam's user base they would be profitable. Their problem is that gamers insist on backing Valve's monopoly because it's what other gamers tell them to do online.
And Epic provides Unreal Engine, the gaming engine that powers the majority of modern games, with free and extremely cheap tiers for indie devs, and they provide explicit Linux support for their engine and dev environment. They've also used a substantial amount of their Fortnite money to break up app store monopolies on Android and iOS.
They are not the villain that the gaming community thinks they are.