What smaller company, exactly? Every launcher on PC is backed by a big player in the gaming industry. The ones that weren't quickly failed.
Tim Sweeney has himself Tweeted that the current revenue split will not be sustainable for all regions and is likely to be raised in the future. I'm not great with Twitter so I can't find exactly the Tweet I'm looking for. The only way I can see it being sustainable in any region is if EGS continues to offer zero real benefits to either customers or developers.
If that's all customers expected of their launcher, Origin, uPlay and Battle.net would all have a much larger market share by now. Why should anyone use a service that doesn't provide any benefit over piracy?
Not game launchers. Some of the data backup and CDN services charge far less for far more. I also had a quick snout at what colo locations charge for data and even assuming epic didn't have a full sysadmin/storage type team already on the books then spinning such a thing up is nothing too drastic. It is a slightly different setup (no real uploads, different sizes, different storage requirements) to the one I back of the enveloped for Nintendo's online charging the other month but I am not predicting the end result to be that much different, and probably still a rounding error for Epic. Or alternatively if Valve is positively swimming in the money doing what they do (Steam is pretty much their main income at this point) then there seems to be a nice bit of margin there.
If a company wants to act as infrastructure and leave other people to fill in the gaps then I am OK with that.
I don't see it. Having some incentive for people to use your platform seems like a pretty sound plan. If you can't make enough games for it to be that then buying some in also works.
Oh, so the other criticisms didn't bother you? At least add a shopping cart, is it really that big of a deal to program a simple sodding shopping cart? I mean, this is 2019, get with the times, Epic. Also doesn't help that the program was accused of using spyware to track people playing games on Steam, yeah, totally not a dick thing to do, but I digress. Expect nothing less from a numskull CEO.
Is it that big a deal not to have one for a games service? As far as end results are concerned I am probably only marginally more concerned about this one than I am about them not having a guestbook.
As for the other things I covered a few already in an earlier post. Every CEO I have ever seen or met for a vaguely big company are cunts. It is pretty much part of the requirements. This one seems about in line with standard and has not done anything too outrageous -- boo hoo some game devs were asked to work long hours, because that has not been standard for decades, especially among the top tier devs, and they could not have taken a job at a thousand other tech firms or industries with better conditions.
Overzealous fraud detection. Hope they get it sorted. If I did not change my bank when their fraud department declared that me buying online using their secure portal as part of it, from a massive electronics vendor that I have ordered from dozens of times before (I also order electronics a lot with it being part of what I do), to be delivered to my house (the same one I was listed at in their systems) and blocked my card then I am not going to lose too much sleep over this, or at least I can declare it a good faith effort. I also don't know what the numbers involved in this example were. I am assuming if it was something ridiculously low like 3 then I would have heard that when the potential complaint was noted.
The spying with consent thing was a dick move. If they apologised and removed it then I can chalk it up to a youthful indiscretion. No great harm done in the long run from what I can see -- we have seen something vaguely similar before when skype and MSN/hotmail all but tricked people into merging accounts which caused some fun and games, or when some of the film rental companies and IMDB or something merged and inadvertently outed a few people that had left reviews, but nobody has really made a case here as to what might have been bad beyond the general invasion of a bit of privacy thing.
Edit.
Don't bother mate. Had this song and dance with him before in the last epic topic. Everything epic is missing is just handwaved as not a big deal. Waste of your time to go through it.
For what it is worth I like neither. Quite looking forward to one or both going pop -- whoever loses we all win. Don't see either as contributing anything of substance to games, however I really really dislike Steam's position on the market, attitude and approach to the world, and have done from the start and throughout it all whenever things have come to light or been attempted so when something is taking a convincing run at it then some things can be overlooked. Especially when most of what they are doing is standard business (if you can't build something in house or it costs too much money/time then buy it in), costs nobody much of anything* (other than the paltry offerings on linux that will be no more, or no more for a little while nobody really loses anything -- the exact same PC will still run the game, the same card will be able to buy the game, and I can still sit here in my boxers and buy it trivially either way...) and the client program lacks a few programs that are done better outside it for the most part or have been done for years outside it just fine.
*if Ford buys up a bunch of patents such that Vauxhall can't use them then that could be annoying. This is not that though as again the same PC will play the same game.
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