Steam has succeeded (I think) because they've managed to walk a thin line w/ drm and not screwing up the user experience too much.
Facebook would be smart to have gaming and social as two separate things with optional integration with Facebook. They'll screw it up because they'll make the optional part super annoying. Because when have they not?
I turned off my Facebook years ago. That works fine for me, but I'm frustrated any time someone uses Facebook to post something I'd like to read (like yann lecun or john carmack) because it's a step backwards. It'd be like Doom being released as an AOL exclusive.
Anyway, my money's on steam and ue4 dominating for years to come, not a new dist platform and not unity.
Facebook's Oculus has already tried to go the way of exclusives and walled gardens so I doubt it will take off. PC gamers are an opinionated noisy bunch and they will cause all kinds of drama for Facebook if they aren't as open as Steam. I don't really get this anyway. Steam works. Origin and Battle.net kinda make sense since those are the publisher's platform, and there's also GoG's Galaxy. There's really not any more room for another competitor.
But does it still provide a great experience for gamers and creators? I'd wager so say they can do a lot better, but they're letting their success stagnate them. Buggy mobile apps, questionable revenue share on Workshop items, no strong answer to the discovery of good games ever since Greenlight came out, IMHO Valve isn't doing enough with their platform on their own. I'd welcome competition to get them to perk up their step a bit.
There already is competition. GoG's Galaxy. It's great. Nobody I know uses it. Not a single streamer on twitch I've ever watch uses it. I'm fine with competition too, but not from Facebook. They've already fucked up with the Oculus store and I don't trust them anyway. Facebook is an unscrupulous advertisement company that turns intimate personal information into pay per click ad dollars.
I'd even go so far as to say Valve not caring is a good thing. They don't try to interfere too much and when they do and it blows up they walk it back.
For this person it's likely that it's not League or HOTS... or to make the standard joke... it's actually challenging and for adults instead of an ez mode toy for kids.
I think Steam's a great experience. It seems leaps and bounds ahead of competition. The coolest thing about it to me is how it keeps expanding in innovative ways. I picked up a Steam Link and Steam Controller last year, and it's really nice to be able to play a PC game in the living room whenever I feel like it. SteamVR is also great.
I guess the mobile app is kind of crappy. I've never really cared as I don't see any reason to use it.
Steam is OK. I agree it's leaps and bounds ahead of competition, but that doesn't make it a "great experience". They can do a lot better, but the lack of real competition isn't pushing them at all.
It's pretty a Awful. I set it up as o was getting nagged about setting up the app as an authenticator, and the next update wouldn't boot. Not a great first experience, considering it's a webview app.
Steam's approach to authentication is annoying. You either get their authenticator app for two-factor authentication, or get demoted to a second-class Steam citizen. Without the authenticator you get nagged frequently to get it, and you cannot buy and sell things on the marketplace normally (every action has to be confirmed via email, and any item you want to sell is placed in escrow for two weeks).
I appreciate Valve pushing for better security, but with the authenticator app the only option this really sucks if you don't have a smartphone, or do have a smartphone, just not with Android, IOS, or Windows Phone on it.
Now I understand this for the interim (people were losing their digital items due to poor security), but it is damn near impossible to contact Steam with suggestions or comments (on the Steam forums your voice is drowned in a sea of despair, and I can't seem to get a hold of anyone with a technical background at Steam's help-desk). Perhaps if someone at Valve is reading HN: please consider using Fido U2F as an alternative to a smartphone app!
You'll never get Valve to change a thing, so just use 3rd party libraries like steam-totp to generate the Auth and market confirmation codes. Alternatively code your own program to do so (as I did in Rust) then run it on any device you'd like.
I think of platforms like Steam as an OS. I don't really want to spend a lot of time there. It is just there to help manage my library, keep the software updated and all that, and just get out of my way. I hear about the games I want to play from other channels, so their substandard discovery doesn't bother me so much. I do miss the days when I'd find a cool game to play on the front page, though.
Some must recall the drama that was the launch of Steam.
If I recall, it was optional for CounterStrike1.4, but then required for CS1.6.
The PC bunch were crying that they'd never use this DRM'd buggy POS.
That must have been 16+ years ago. Steam has come a long way since then, and has been credited [0] with helping reduce PC game piracy over the years. Likely because steam just works for the most part, and is as easy if not easier than the alternative.
I just don't see how Facebook can really disrupt this given Steams head start and positive mind share (not to mention the libraries of games that users have likely accrued over the years)
>...and has been credited [0] with helping reduce PC game piracy over the years.
Their sales definitely had something to do with this as well. Before these kinds of sales, PC games were fixed at a certain price point and would take a long time to see a price drop. Now, I'll see fairly new games that may be marked down anywhere from 10% to 25% and, at least for me, I feel much more inclined to purchase it if I like it.
Granted I have a backlog of games to get through, but still it made purchasing games much more approachable as I know I won't be breaking my wallet over one game.
> If I recall, it was optional for CounterStrike1.4, but then required for CS1.6.
1.6 was the only version on Steam, 1.5 used the WonID servers, which they shut down a few years later.
The largest issue with Steam when it was released was the fact that the client was slow as molasses, and plenty of others had resource issues since you had to also run the client in the background along with whichever game you were playing.
The issue with Steam for CS players was the removal of WoN and needing to re-purchase CS instead of being given a license upon it if you had one on WoN already.
Looking at Steam, there's a huge undercurrent of games that don't get pushed, don't appeal to the hardcore, but that - in aggregate - sell a very noticeable amount.
Hidden object games, educational games for children, iOS and Android ports.
In the case of the former two - with no real marketing, and with a great deal of competition, these still fly off the digital shelves, and are not expensive to produce. There are people who want these games, and Steam honestly is not doing the best job of getting in touch with these people. Integration with the rest of the Facebook ecosystem would really really help push these games towards the people who want to buy them.
For the last option, people often buy these games when they felt good about playing the iOS/Android game and want to continue the experience (or in rare cases, play a more full-featured version - usually the PC port is incomplete, but sometimes it does contain unique bonuses). I imagine Facebook would have a killer app if it could sync your iOS/Android saved games (or even just achievements) to the PC version of the save game.
TL:DR; I think there's a huge opportunity for a major casual gaming platform, and I think Facebook's pretty well placed to be that platform.
Yeah, you'd think they would at least have the common sense to start completely altruistically and gradually boil the frog once they have lock in and a solid moat.
Facebook would be smart to have gaming and social as two separate things with optional integration with Facebook. They'll screw it up because they'll make the optional part super annoying. Because when have they not?
It will be enjoyably ironic when Facebook starts Google-Plussing it's own projects to death!
Agreed. It's really annoying that others use Facebook for auth as well. Want Spotify? Nowadays you better have a Facebook account because that is how you sign in unless you were lucky enough to have acces to their beta prior to the partnership.
Following Unity's growth is like watching again the developers that were trying to create games in "managed languages" (C, Pascal, Modula-2, AMOS,...) slowly wining over the ones writing in pure Assembly.
Yes, there is a lot of of C++ under the hood in Unity, but I also remember the days when writing game engines in C and Pascal dialects actually the majority of the code looked something like:
I was one of those developers. I wrote a game in 93 that used mostly c rather than assembly because I didn't want to write it twice for Amiga and PC. At the time games were mostly assembler and it was felt that c compiled code had too much overhead. It was probably true to an extent for another couple of years.
The next fight was to move from C and C++ to Java and C++. This still hasn't happened in console gaming because the overhead needed for gc is not palatable to aaa developers that have to milk every byte of ram in the machine.
I haven't shipped a game on UE4 yet but in profiling our in-development game I've yet to see Unreal's GC emerge as a performance concern.
The UE4 GC is purpose built, simple (mark and sweep), and limited to only certain objects/allocations. The only time I've seen significant GC times/hitches was related to a bug that resulted in thousands of small allocations every second. I would much prefer if Epic dropped the GC - losing tight control over object lifetimes is as bad or worse than any potential performance overhead issues in my experience - but failing that I don't think its inclusion is a serious concern for shipping on consoles.
I don't know much about Unreal but one difference is that a game engine can use a lot of unmanaged memory for the meat of the application and then provide a managed environment on top of that for writing the game. That way a much smaller portion of the ram usage is using gc
Yes, hence why everyone that doesn't make games is super excited. UE4 is the superior engine, made by a company that actually makes games. Networking, rendering, UI, lots more -- it all comes built-in to ue4 where unity has built this plugins ecosystem that is sort of a mess.
Also, does Unity still not give you the source code? I assume they'll change this soon enough; you get the source code with ue4.
I kind of see it like blender vs maya or something. Lots of people are using blender, and it's very powerful. But industry is using Maya (because it's more powerful), and that won't change for a bit I think (good for autodesk).
> Also, does Unity still not give you the source code?
I believe that the issue isn't that they don't want to share, but that the code is a pile of patchwork that would need to be re-engineered before presenting it to anyone outside the company.
Unity has better marketing. The captured larger audience and thus got more content on their asset market and it has became default engine for beginners (C# seems much easier to learn than C++).
'Seems much easier to learn'? I'd attribute the ability to work with it from a managed language with a large part of its success relative to UE4.
Large swathes of even professional programmers have now come into the industry never having had to really deal with manual memory management. (And I happen to think that's fine.)
Given that, and the rising popularity of indie/amateur games, I fail to see how one couldn't count C/C++ as a negative as far as market penetration is concerned.
Since I started from Assembler, it's hard for me to estimate how hard is C++ to some beginner. Managing memory came as a natural extension of understanding how the computer works.
> I'd attribute the ability to work with it from a managed language with a large part of its success relative to UE4.
You are probably right, but I simply cannot feel it. Thus "seems".
> Given that, and the rising popularity of indie/amateur games
I believe indie games reached their peak in 2011/2012 and got a huge drop in quality/quantity ratio since.
> unity has built this plugins ecosystem that is sort of a mess.
I regret every non-art unity asset store purchase I made. Need behavior trees pick one of 10 crappy maintained assets etc etc. Constantly felt like I needed to purchase something to fill some gap in unity or spend tons of time developing my own solution.
> someone uses Facebook to post something I'd like to read (like yann lecun or john carmack) because it's a step backwards. It'd be like Doom being released as an AOL exclusive.
Worth pointing out that both were employed by Facebook (and AFAICT both are still there). I would genuinely be surprised if they used google+ or some other platform for posts
Steam might lose fight for players in the future, but for sure it will not be to Facebook. Worthy opponent it seems is GOG, they are superb platform with great values behind their offering.
I've only had great experiences with GOG as a platform.
..and I love Steam, too, and both are committed to Linux as a platform for the future. (When is Portal 3 coming?!)
They each have carved out such a great niche and they're each both gamer and developer friendly.. I'm not so sure that FB has demonstrated being either of those things.
> I turned off my Facebook years ago. That works fine for me, but I'm frustrated any time someone uses Facebook to post something I'd like to read (like yann lecun or john carmack) because it's a step backwards. It'd be like Doom being released as an AOL exclusive.
Especially disappointing coming from Carmack who used to be a champion of openness. How has he changed...
Facebook would be smart to have gaming and social as two separate things with optional integration with Facebook.
I don't exactly disagree. Rather, I think the underlying problem is orthogonal to the one you're paying attention to. Facebook's problem is that they let people think of Facebook games as being somehow separate from mobile. The far-seeing move would've been to make Facebook across the desktop, mobile, et al., as views into a single ecosystem.
Anyway, my money's on steam and ue4 dominating for years to come, not a new dist platform and not unity.
I like the sound of this, but what are your reasons for this?
Why UE4 over Unity? I have downloaded both and while both have a steep learning curve the one for UE is steeper, and the initial experience is much worse. Seems they never really tested it on the mac much.
Ya if you are developing for mobile and/or primarily working on a Mac then UE4 is not as good of choice.
I develop on the mac and pc in UE4. On the mac ue4 performance is bad and you need the top of the line mac to deal with it. Personally I just write c++ on the mac and keep the editor closed most of the time until i need to test the code real quick in a very basic level. Then when im on my pc i do the heavy stuff.
I don't know. I did the space shooter tutorial on unity last week and I'm finding it a doddle to make my first 2D game... I'm super impressed, having never done game dev before.
People seem forget that the Friends/Community feature on Steam didn't really work at all for _YEARS_ when the platform launched.
I'd love to take the same bet you do, but if you have a killer product that requires the platform, people will use it. Half Life 2 and Counter Strike 1.6 were the killer products for Steam. Mass Effect 3 and The Old Republic are mostly the only reasons anyone I know installed Origin at first (and I'm sure other games now).
If Facebook finds that app, it won't matter how terrible their platform is.
I'm curious why you think UE4 will dominate. I can think of a lot of reasons why, but many of them depend on the definition of "dominate" (raw users in the ecosystem, number of released games, number of successful titles, number of AAA or high-end indie titles, etc.)
They seem to realize that users don't necessarily want to be linked to a Facebook account. For example: you no longer need a Facebook account in order to use messenger. Hopefully they're smart enough and willing enough to apply that same philosophy to this product.
Facebook would be smart to have gaming and social as two separate things with optional integration with Facebook. They'll screw it up because they'll make the optional part super annoying. Because when have they not?
I turned off my Facebook years ago. That works fine for me, but I'm frustrated any time someone uses Facebook to post something I'd like to read (like yann lecun or john carmack) because it's a step backwards. It'd be like Doom being released as an AOL exclusive.
Anyway, my money's on steam and ue4 dominating for years to come, not a new dist platform and not unity.