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Gearbox founder says Epic Games Store hopes were “misplaced or overly optimistic” (arstechnica.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The Epic Games Launcher is so far behind on features compared to Steam it's not even funny. Epic chose not to try and compete with Steam on that front and to try and force users onto the platform with exclusivity deals and sweeten the deal with free games.

The one user-centric killer feature Epic has in their stack IMHO is the built-in multiplayer crossplay. Except it's not even exclusive to their store ironically (you do need an Epic account for it though).

[–] Giooschi 17 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Epic chose not to try and compete with Steam on that front

Forget competing, they lack even the basics.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (3 children)

What do you consider basic that it's still missing? To be honest I've felt content with it as a game launcher for a while now, but I admittedly don't use it that often either.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Linux support.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I kinda understand it not being a priority; even if they dedicated the resources to both create and adequately maintain Linux support, I imagine very few of the games on the platform have native support anyway. Sure, many would work (to varying degrees) with the various bags of tricks available, but it's still an extra step of compatibility that's sort of beyond their immediate control.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Fuck off. They paid to remove support for Linux from Rocket League because their launcher doesn't support it.

Existing games that had Linux support already.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago

Thanks for so politely and cordially sharing that information

edit: I would be even more appreciative if it were true: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/rocket-league-ending-mac-and-linux-support-because-they-represent-less-than-0-3-of-active-players

Quoting their statement:

Regarding our decision to end support for macOS and Linux:

Rocket League is an evolving game, and part of that evolution is keeping our game client up to date with modern features. As part of that evolution, we'll be updating our Windows version from 32-bit to 64-bit later this year, as well as updating to DirectX 11 from DirectX 9.

There are multiple reasons for this change, but the primary one is that there are new types of content and features we'd like to develop, but cannot support on DirectX 9. This means when we fully release DX11 on Windows, we'll no longer support DX9 as it will be incompatible with future content.

Unfortunately, our macOS and Linux native clients depend on our DX9 implementation for their OpenGL renderer to function. When we stop supporting DX9, those clients stop working. To keep these versions functional, we would need to invest significant additional time and resources in a replacement rendering pipeline such as Metal on macOS or Vulkan/OpenGL4 on Linux. We'd also need to invest perpetual support to ensure new content and releases work as intended on those replacement pipelines.

The number of active players on macOS and Linux combined represents less than 0.3% of our active player base. Given that, we cannot justify the additional and ongoing investment in developing native clients for those platforms, especially when viable workarounds exist like Bootcamp or Wine to keep those users playing.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

For me it's the inability to set my status to "invisible".

It's not that I don't want to game with people, but sometimes I want to practice alone without being bombarded by invites.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Fair enough! I barely use its social side since most of the games I've played on there are singleplayer titles - honestly didn't even know that wasn't there yet!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Remote play together, local network streaming, etc.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I guess our opinions differ, because I don't consider either of those to be "basics". They're nice features for e.g., Steam to have, sure, but they're not "game launcher 101" imo.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

That's a fair take. We all have different priorities.

We use in home streaming nearly every day now, so it's a must have for me. Remote play together is critical for certain games as well.