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.
This seems like a smart play and necessary if they're going to take Steam/Vive head on in VR.
That said they really need to catch up with the Rift - maybe their focus on the lower end of the market with Gear VR will save them, but outside of this the Rift is pretty disappointing.
Steam game support for games that run on both the Rift and Vive make it stupid to buy games on the Oculus store, but worse than that once you've played with the touch controls and room scale that the Vive offers it's clear the Rift just does not compare.
The Vive is heavier, it's hardware is not as aesthetically pleasing and it's clunkier (more wires, bigger pain to set up). Other than that though it's categorically better - if Oculus doesn't ship some touch controllers and room scale sensors soon I think they'll lose the high end market (unless they're able to power through on brand alone). The Vive also has an interesting front facing camera and doesn't let light in through the nose.
I've been seeing people on Craigslist selling their Rift and keeping their Vive - not a good sign for Oculus.
Well, they're doing a very poor job with the Oculus store, why would this one be any different?
I'm not saying they don't have the money or technical talent, but clearly the politics of Facebook are morally onerous to gamers. Everything about the Rift should have been a slam dunk. It had the mindshare, pr, capital, early adopter advantage, etc. Hell they even have John Carmack.
Now its the red headed stepchild of the VR wars. Oculus went from a gamer friendly company to what seems to be something run by a bunch of milquetoast MBA's with zero interest or experience in gaming. Cut-throat deals like exclusives, contradictory and anti-consumer policies, confusing PR (why is Luckey yelling at people on reddit?), inability to catch up (no motion controls yet?), etc have hurt the brand and the Vive seems like the go-to for VR right now. In a couple months the PSVR will be out, with motion controls. Where exactly does that leave Oculus? As the has-been of the industry?
I can't see Facebook winning over the PC gamer crowd. Casuals have mobile, they're not installing this thing. Beating Steam means beating Steams street cred which its been carefully building for over a decade. I just don't think companies like Facebook have the culture to win here. The types of people who can work a monopoly well in the social media space are pretty much the worst kinds of people you want in the gaming industry, and Oculus's failures are proof of that.
This. Facebook as a company has no idea what it's doing when it comes to gaming. Remember when Farmville was king and social gaming on Facebook was going to be the future?
Facebook is a platform for advertisers, but users are the ones who buy games.
> Oculus went from a gamer friendly company to what seems to be something run by a bunch of milquetoast MBA's with zero interest or experience in gaming
Oculus isn't a gaming company and Facebook didn't buy it for it to be one. Facebook sees VR as the next big social platform.
> Oculus's failures are proof of that
The Rift has outsold the Vive 10 to 1. And the Gear has sold over a million units.
Unlikely. All the numbers I can find suggest Rift and Vive within 50% of each other - either way, depending who you ask.
Is anyone really interested in social VR? Converge crashed and burned, and competitors like vTime are more or less just Second Life without the building.
FB thinks having immediate access to the social graph will change that. I'm not convinced - because it's hard to make Avatars that don't look comically uncool, and to be compelling, the interaction needs to offer a lot more than Facetime/Skype++ in some fake locations.
It's sort of like Facebook's face-plant with their Facebook phone and Android launcher.
Facebook could have been the built-in contact list that updated itself (a huge feature for even a basic phone), and combined with FB messenger and photos, could have done 90% of what many of it's users (e.g. my wife) would want.
They completely failed then walked it all back.
Remember when Zuck declared that Android was their main OS [1]? How's that working out?
Wouldn't that have required people putting their phone number on Facebook? This is something basically nobody I know does other than me. I'm not sure why - seems like an obviously useful thing. Is this where people arbitrarily decide to draw their privacy line?
I think most people knew something along these lines would happen when Facebook bought Oculus. This doesn't at all surprise me and I fully expect it to get worse. What's frustrating is when people would say anything negative about the aquisition on HN you'd get the usual downvotes for saying something negative and speculative.
> Steam game support for games that run on both the Rift and Vive make it stupid to buy games on the Oculus store, but worse than that once you've played with the touch controls and room scale that the Vive offers it's clear the Rift just does not compare.
Except that there are barely any VR games worth playing. When Oculus ships Touch later this year it will ship with 30+ games that support it. People have been complaining about Oculus exclusives, but without incentives it makes no financial sense for developers to invest in AAA VR games when the install base is so small.
The best recent point of comparison I know of is EA's Origin app which is...just the worst thing I have currently installed. It's just God-awful.
Steam was that way for a very long time, and the bodies of it's various issues are what it's currently built upon. Companies should just get on the Steam train, take advantage of that platform and stop trying to invent a new Steam.
And as things are, there is no way they can get it.
One day Valve will stumble, but I don't think that the spoils will go to one of those who made fools of themselves while Valve didn't.
Ambition is a hindrance to trust, that's why from the current crop, the only plausible candidate for a Steam successor is GoG. They give a believable impression of keeping up their business as long as they at least keep a certain niche of the market, while everything else looks like projects of the "displace Steam within x years or be shelved" kind.
Plus, having more than one of these clients is exactly the kind of problem Steam came on the scene to solve in the first place (i.e. inconvenient distribution). Steam has won this for the time being, and shows no signs of slowing down. It's foolish to fight it over NIH syndrome.
Steam has been a godsend to indie developers. It can be a great partner for AAA ones as well.
It seems pretty clear Oculus is going to announce the ship date on the touch controllers at Oculus Connect (in October) and there are games launching that use them in November/December, so it seems safe to assume it is happening in the next few months.
Carmack worked on the Rift while an employee of ZeniMax. A ZeniMax, Facebook, Rift share split then blew up, leaving ZeniMax with nothing, despite the fact that Carmack and ZeniMax were instrumental in the development of the Rift. Carmack then left ZeniMax for Facebook.
I'm beginning to get sick of the Unity monoculture. All their games have the same feel to them, which I can only describe as 'sluggish'. Truly ambitious games built with Unity inevitably wind up buggy as well, since doing anything outside the box requires hacks and workarounds.
The nature of Unity makes huge amounts of mediocre games done by inexperienced devs inevitable, but i don't think it is a problem of Unity specifically. There are amazing games done on the platform like Firewatch, Cities Skylines, Monument Valley, Ori and the Blindforest etc
Yep, if there was ever a game that deserved a custom game engine, it would be Kerbal Space Program. The version of Unity that they used constrained them to 3.5 gb, and 32 bit floating point coordinates, in a game that deserves a true scale solar system.
I keep hearing that double precision floats for coordinates are unrealistic because of the optimisations that are available only for 32 bit floats, but I am willing to make serious sacrifices to free myself from the Spheres of Influence and the Orbital Railroad of Destiny; the real solar system mod forces a full scale environment, and even though the visual geometry is off by roughly a metre from the physical geometry, I still consider it to be an improvement.
The engine itself can only do so much, if you don't want to write a whole new graphics library too.
This post by the Outerra dev on planetary scale precision issues and on how to circumvent some issues by implementing custom log scale depth buffers offers a good introduction.
> 32 bit floating point coordinates, in a game that deserves a true scale solar system.
How are 32 bit addresses inadequate? Just have a multi-level addressing system and you're done. You're going to have a Level of Detail system anyway, right? This seems like a non-issue.
It's not like you need to do math on grains of sand spread across multiple galaxies.
I don't know where you're hearing that double precision is unrealistic. You can operate on half as many at a time, and some of the operations are slower, and some GPUs have no support for it—but if you're not using GPU acceleration, it should be possible.
Do Limbo, Inside, Monument Valley, or Ori, feel slow or buggy to you?
There's a lot of bad stuff out there, since Unity has a low entry point. But Unity is not inherently bad; it's just that some developers lack the chops to do it well.
The issue is is that if a game is subpar, or even par, it's really, really obvious it's made with unity. All the best games you can't tell, but unity seems to have a sort of unique feel to it that you can pick out pretty easily, which gives it a bad name.
It's not the engine, it's the devs. Unity is head and shoulders above UE4 nowadays. The problem is that it has made developing games so dead simple that anyone in their bedroom can release a game on Steam these days, and as a result there's a lot of garbage.
This is demonstrably not true. Just look at the limitations of the standard shader to see where Unity falls apart. Or hell input handling or any number of features for which UE4 has a better solution (or at least a path towards a better solution since you have the source code).
As I understand it, Unity's big PR problem is that they require the Unity logo on games made with the free version, but not with the paid version. So you see lots of cheap/dodgy Unity-branded games, and never realize how many top-shelf games are also made in Unity.
While I agree most of the time, there are still great games made with Unity. I think the problem is more around the ease of use for developers. They might not make performance or "feel" a priority when it's so easy to make a game that's "good enough".
Inside was a Unity game, and it was a dream to play from a technical perspective.
Unity is a fantastic tech for its proper use case. As a Unity dev, I have a lot of grievances against them — but the problems you're describing come not from the tech, but from completely inexperienced developers for whom their Unity projects are first software projects ever. For better or for worse, the whole Unity dev culture is centered on amateurs: on one hand, it leads to a lot of game designers and artists starting to write code for the first time in their life, but on another, it leads to horrible architecture and complete disregard for good development practices. Unity asset store, for example, is full of awfully written code, bit it doesn't stop heaps of developers around the world from using it in their projects and create amazing stories and visual experiences woth it.
Valve/Steam solved a problem that the PC gaming community faced in late 2003, namely streamlined distribution of online content. Now there seem to be countless fighters in the ring; I can only see this experiment ending in either a small fandom based on exclusivity deals or smoldering out quickly.
Consumers don't really need multiple steam-like platforms either. I don't see the market supporting more than a couple. It's a steep hill to climb for anyone who want's to compete with Steam.
Steam, and GoG are the only companies who seem to make it stick.
On paper, GoG isn't doing things that differently than EA and Ubisoft (just the no-DRM bit, which is admittedly a pretty great selling point), but I think EA and Ubisoft's brands are just so toxic that people are loathe to use them for anything they aren't forced to use them for. I think Facebook runs into much the same problem nowadays. Their brand is just increasingly toxic outside their core business, and the network effect is strong enough that people don't really have much of a choice there.
Blizzard is also a player, but like EA and Ubi they only sell their own products through it.
Aside: EA has effectively wiped most knowledge of its existence from the Internet, but I remember when EA launched its first Origin platform back around the 2006 era, and then discontinued it a couple years later. I lost all my Battlefield 2 expansions, and I've been incredibly gunshy about them ever since.
There's actually lots of Ubisoft games on Origin.[0] I've also seen The Witcher and lots of indie games on there, too. I poked around Uplay a bit, but that appears to be 100% their own.
you know as much as a like competition in the market. Ive yet to have an issue with Steam, it works well, when I need service I can get it. thx Gaben&team if you read this.
I feel like if this Steam-clone were called 'Oculus Play' or some other name more-distanced from 'Facebook', I'd be less uneasy with it. I know in all likelihood it's an irrelevant distinction from a data harvesting standpoint, but the implied expansion of the 'Facebook' brand from its original locus of a yearbook-style personal page makes me uncomfortable.
I'm not (entirely) opposed to social integration of my gaming. But if a compelling gaming portal introduces social network integration, I'm more amenable to it than going the other direction, when a social network makes me download another desktop app.
It's also somewhat contrary to Facebook's established practice of having distinct brands (albeit as a result of acquisitions); a brand that appeals to a different demographic. Instagram appeals to a different kind of person than Facebook; WhatsApp appeals to a different kind of person than Messenger, and the like.
As seen in the comments here there's a strong reaction of "why would I ever use this instead of Steam?" from the existing gamer crowd. Yet from Facebook's perspective even if _not one_ Steam user jumps ship, they could theoretically still grow their platform to 10x the size of Steam based off just their existing Facebook userbase. That's tremendous upside and seems completely worth the risk.
I have to agree, the sheer numbers of people Facebook has access to could crush Steam in terms of active users. I love Steam and think Facebook has enough of my information as it is but you can't ignore these numbers.
Why can't you ignore them? The Catholic church also has a very high number of users and you surely ignore those wrt competing with Steam. The Vatican is certainly in an even worse position to convert users to game shoppers, but I don't think that Facebook is that far ahead in this. People have pretty much stabilised in how they expect their relationship with Facebook to be and any offers to extend it to new grounds are likely to be ignored. When Farmville happened, Facebook users were a lot more experimental.
This is going to end up being the junk shed of game distribution. In everything it does, it seems FB's mediocre content curation/distribution is 'good enough' for its users. It's the fast food of the Internet, after all.
That said, I assume it will be successful and I'm a fan of the idea. It'll help bridge that gap from a casual browser-flash gamer to start installing clients and move onto more serious entertainment.
I'm confident this WILL remain a tool for strictly casual gamers, though. Discerning/younger audiences only use FB for event invites at this point.
Steam rules the space because it has fought for credibility in the gamer community. Facebook on the other hand caused so much hate/drama when they bought Oculus.
I REALLY do not see Facebook getting the killer app like Half Life 2, or Battlefield like mentioned below on Origin. Besides, that was a completely different time, before anything even existed. Steam didn't pull users away from the number one software distributor, to become number one. It was more of a killer app, just to adopt the concept.
Further segmenting your software between services, is exactly what people use Steam to AVOID. The fact that everything is in one place, no lost keys, no lost disc, is its selling point. It's bad enough I have to also use Origin to play some key games. So I'm certainly not going to further dilute my libraries.
> I REALLY do not see Facebook getting the killer app
Between Carmack and Facebook's ability to buy any developer who is on the market I think they can put up a solid contender at launch.
Probably won't be enough though; I see this more as a Tidal or Apple Music kind of move--existing major player enters the market with desirable exclusives or platform integration but fails to break out of the middle of the pack.
So you're guessing they'll end up like Microsoft's Xbox division - spending billions to place a solid constant 2nd place, and still not being net revenue positive after a decade.
Maybe my experience is different from the real data, but I seem to remember people originally hating Steam when it just had Half Life 2 and a handful of other Valve things. It was more or less useless (and sometimes actively harmful) until the store was opened up for 3rd party devs, a critical mass of titles was reached, and most of the early bugs were worked out. Half Life 2 was the first game to require Steam, but I wouldn't really give it much credit for the success of the platform.
This may or may not work. Ubisoft, EA, Blizzard and CD Projekt Red all have their own stores, not to mention Microsoft. I think the market is pretty saturated.
I agree, but Steam could really optimize its clients. They're incredibly slow to load and are not at all compatible with the UI themes of Windows and macOS.
If there's one thing I want, it's my wife's friends getting spammed with Facebook notifications about the fact that I got the Monster Kill achievement in Hello Kitty Island Adventure.
Those "rules" came from Gaia Online, not 4chan. They didn't want anyone talking about /b/. Some anon adopted them, if mainly for Rules 34 and 35, and the fact that all /i/nvasion threads were compatible with the first two rules (all raids were credited to eBaumsWorld).
On a related note, why doesn't steam install into android?
It seems to me like there are hundreds of dozens of android games on steam(literal ports from android to PC/MAC) but there is no way for the player to install the android version on their phones, unless if they also buy from Playstore the games they already have on Steam.
1) Owning a Windows/Mac/Linux copy of a game does not mean you implicitly have a license to the Android version, even if it's a "literal port".
2) It's not really in Steam's interest to give you that license for free for games you already own, or to set up some kind of cross-buy where you automatically get it if you buy a PC copy. It'd cost them a ton of money and they have no reason to promote Android as a gaming platform alternative to PCs.
3) The juicy market on mobile isn't selling premium games like on Steam, it's selling in-app purchases in freemium games. I don't have an Android device handy but the first paid game on my iPhone's "Top Grossing Games" list is Minecraft at #44. The only other one in the top 150 is Reigns at #106. The premium game market on mobile is just not profitable enough to make a huge loss-leader like 2) above viable.
I think many developers would opt into giving Android versions of their game to owners on Steam if they have an Android port. If this wasn't the case then something like the Humble Mobile Bundle, which regularly gives you DRM free PC\Mac\Linux + Steam keys + Android APKs would not exist. At this point I think there is a large backlog of titles on Steam that have Android ports, and like with Mac and Linux developers would add those to Steam to make their older titles more attractive to new buyers.
This feature would be more of a value add to Steam making the platform more attractive. If Steam on Android was big enough Valve could capture some of the free to play market as well, you're forgetting that even though Steam sells a lot of premium titles many of the most popular games are F2P already, roughly 20 of the top 100 player count games on Steam are F2P. Valve knows how many people have the Steam app installed on Android and it's fully possible that they don't consider the effort worth it for them. For me it'd be a nice way to manage updates for games that I already own on Steam, have APKs for (via Humble Bundle), but don't want to re-buy on Google Play just for automatic updates.
I imagine it could be a myriad of things: legal reasons having to do with uploading an Android game to the Play store as well as another marketplace, Valve not wanting to fragment their product/software, Valve not wanting to have to support an entirely new OS, etc.
It would also be a popular move for those who want to stream their games to Android devices that don't have an Nvidia card on Windows. GameStream(and Moonlight) work pretty well, but the fact that Steam streaming can work from a Linux machine with AMD graphics is pretty nice.
Steam is an awesome plaform that doesn't try to piss the user off (looking at you EA Origin and UBI Play). I don't think anyone can outdo this right now (at least on PC). This FB portal will probably also require a FB? Another fail if this is the case.
You mean Facebook want to get into game distribution business? The last thing we need, is another DRM ridden distributor that also pushes for distributor lock-in features (like they did with Oculus initially). I buy my games through GOG.
Well said! Haha yeah, you've got the two most bloated proprietary apps working together. Woooo!!
Some men just want to watch the world burn!
These softwares are so terrible for the world.
Terrible for any person trying to make a living programming and terrible for education.
I only realized recently how easy* it is to create realistic graphics using libre software.
(I believe this is what draws most people to Unity - forget that it's hard to replicate their demos)
Implement the features I want
Forget about all the bloat I don't want
Get all the benefits of my custom software, favorite os and editor.
Unity games are not going to strongly compete with Steam. Unity engine just isn't performant enough. I think this is more for mobile-style casual games: think flash games with 3D instead of 2D graphics. Will probably make a chunk of change from bored homemakers, but it isn't going to pull marketshare from 'PC master race'-type Steam gamers.
>I was under the impression that Unity and Unreal were basically comparable engines - is this not the case?
I'm not 100% intune with game dev, but I always thought Unity was more indy-focused while Unreal was more big boy focused. I know off the back of my head that Unreal powers games like Street Fighter and Bioshock.
I can't really find any other $100MM+ budget games developed with Unity.
Like any engine, Unity has its unique advantages and drawbacks. A small dev team can cover a lot of ground using Unity, and some programming tasks are actually quite pleasant with it. Some people have asserted in this thread that Unity's performance is deficient, but it's easy to write games that run smoothly on a large gamut of devices, whereas UnrealEngine's IDE and even almost empty scenes made with it run at 5fps on my maxed-out 2012 iMac. It might scale better, but Unity beats it handsdown in most low and medium complexity workloads.
These are reasons why Unity is well liked among indies, and not necessarily only among non-technical people either. But if you have many millions to burn, other engines give you more room for customization, have more high-class sales teams, and have a workflow that is optimized to be familiar to artists with a AAA background.
I've been developing a game using UE4 on a 2012 iMac for the past year and I get about 60fps@1080p in the editor on the highest settings. I can comfortably run DS+2 Clients to test multiplayer when I scale it down to Low. The only really slow thing is DebugDraw calls, which I haven't found to be a blocking issue, though it it certainly annoying.
I was amazed to discover that Firewatch (Unity) was pretty playable on my 2013 MacBook Air. I'm wondering though if that's a property of Unity itself, or more of a cultural thing. Could it be that those who use UnrealEngine just focus more on high-end games?
I've used both extensively, and I don't think so. Unity is a fine engine and you can do quality work with it, but Unreal is quite a lot more powerful out of the box.
I've tried Firewatch on both PC and PS4 and never gone through a playthrough that didn't have lag/performance issues even after the patches.
While Firewatch is often cited for what can be accomplished with Unity I don't think it's the gem to show the power of the engine when it can't even support the artistic vision the developers - they certainly know this engine well judging from talks they have given on the engine - tried to inject into it.
I love firewatch but if that's your reference game for technical power it's a really bad sign. Compare that to Paragon or Street Fighter V on Unreal 4. The difference is massive and growing. UE4 is a real deal AAA professional tool set. Unity is great for indies and mobile game devs but has yet to produce anything as technically advanced as UE4.
Certainly doesn't mean that all the UE4 games are better in anyway, I loved Firewatch but it's not a crowning technical achievement.
Unity Engine did displaced the existing market leader by offering a very permissive licensing scheme in comparison. And had already C# as the main programming language, which is miles more accessible than C/C++ for any beginner.
The features are slowly getting on par, but Unreal does offer numerous add-on to the engine to optimise the game (one that caught my eye was a world map analysis).
Unity Engine is definitely performant enough. Unity's low barrier to entry is likely why there are so many low-quality, poorly developed games using the engine.
I'm sorry, but do you really know what you're talking about? Unity is head and shoulders above UE4 these days, especially when it comes to lighting. For VR it's really not even a question that Unity is the only solid choice right now. Valve built the entire "The Lab" experience in Unity which is widely regarded as the finest VR experience thus far.
That sounds like a better business to me - there are a lot more bored housemakers than hardcode gamers. In the future, it might balance out, but for now, getting spare change from a large chunk of the adult population is nothing to sneer at.
Performance isn't really an issue with Unity although I suspect on average Unity games may be less optimized due to the relatively small or inexperienced developers that are the engine's bread and butter. (I'll admit this is a sweeping generalization though.)
Going based on what Will Smith (the guy who runs The Foo Show) has said on various podcasts, a heavily stylized, low-poly look works well for VR since there isn't as much of an uncanny valley and it substantially lowers the hardware requirements. Superhot, Firewatch, etc., are good examples there, and can be tuned to require less processing power to run.
Remember, there's already GearVR, and that runs off of a mobile phone.
Some have PS4s. That's plenty beefy enough. They might even pay for the VR equipment too if it's cheap enough and becomes a multiplayer experience. Think mario party for the wii, but with VR instead.
Sony has their own competing VR solution, though. That said, I seem to recall some talk about the Xbox One (maybe just their Scorpio refresh?) supporting the Rift, but I can't recall details offhand.
There's been no official announcement about XBox One supporting VR. It's all been speculation. It would make sense for them to wait until the Scorpio refresh though.
By "desktop" do they mean "not mobile", or "not web" for that matter? Unity's support for mobile (and to a lesser extent for WebGL) is certainly one of its major selling points.
The article makes some vague hypothetical referfences to mobile, but doesn't explicitly say if Facebook's "desktop" platform is intended to support mobile devices right out of the gate.
>Meanwhile, these platforms’ support for mobile could allow Facebook to earn taxes on mobile games without owning its own mobile operating system. It once tried a different approach, building an HTML5 mobile web gaming platform called Project Spartan to sidestep the iOS App Store and Android’s Google Play. But developers dismissed it as underpowered compared to the native operating systems.
Wait, so I'm going to see more invitations from friends to games that I have no intention of playing than I already do? I mean, I figure that's kind of part of the business model by now. Some days I miss fragging newbies in Half-Life DM, but when seeing stuff like this, I'm glad I freed up my time to do stuff like mowing the yard and scooping kitty litter, which, strange as it might sound, are on par to me now with achieving victory in an online game.
To me the question is will people be willing to use it? I feel like a lot of people I know are trying to disengage from FB as much as they can while keeping in touch with people. The older generation are not the ones who are going to buy a ton of games through FB and the younger gen seems mostly happy with Steam. Personally I do not see a market for this. We're not talking about web based games like back in the Farmville days.
Nice move from Unity, which has built a great development suite but is hampered by its own success with its very reasonable fixed cost license per seat business model. This partnership allows them to get a revenue cut of its customers' games without alienating them.
I had always expected Unity to build their own steam-like platform, but this short circuits things with an immediate huge userbase. Great move.
i miss being able to install a game without having to install a bunch of associated crap with it.
as much as i love steam it has always been borderline malware imo. sits in my system tray, uses my bandwidth, cpu cycles and memory etc... was even worse back when it refused to let you play your games without an internet connection too. :P
Are they going to have two separate game stores/platforms? Oculus store for VR and a separate one for everything else?
On the one hand it seems redundant, on the other they can at least share a single sign on and friends list for everything they do, being Facebook and all.
Will they have the same sales though? After buying Ryse for $3 and filling my game library for 300+ titles on a very limited budget, I don't think about switching to any other game store.
Unity is a good engine but I've been playing around with libGDX lately, got a first person XP walking around a cube now with a page of code. Easy, I'm not a game dev.
That same code runs unchanged on Android, PC (Windows, Linux, Mac), iOS (I've not tried this) and HTML (using the excellent GWT compiler). I'm using IntelliJ (it works but not as nice as Eclipse, unfortunately Android support seems better now in IntelliJ). Just pick the target and run.
Zuckerberg has a good idea but needs to use libGDX to make it a success. Call all stop and go libGDX. He won't succeed with just Unity.
As a side note, I don't use Facebook, can't stand it.
PS I'm not in favor of Facebook winning on this either, Steam rocks.
Years ago I used to think they would be replaced like everyone before them. But they've reached such a large mass of people, I'm not so sure anymore. It has to happen eventually, but I can't even guess when that would be anymore.
Messenger and Facebook are the two buggiest apps I use most often. For about a week now, the "seen" indicators have been completely broken on all platforms for me and for some of my friends. Before that, somehow my messages got pinned to the top half of the screen for a day, which would be neat as a feature except (1) how is that bug even possible in a sane system (2) its not a feature.
Can't wait to use a gaming platform engineered by the same people. Who cares about bugs in games anyways? Multiplayer gaming is very resilient.
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.