[HN Gopher] Epic spent $444M to secure exclusive games for their...
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Epic spent $444M to secure exclusive games for their store in 2020
Author : Flollop
Score : 20 points
Date : 2021-04-12 19:38 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.rockpapershotgun.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.rockpapershotgun.com)
| Ecstatify wrote:
| If Google could get their act together with Stadia they could
| really capture a nice chunk of the casual gamer market. Games are
| becoming the next streaming wars, having to switch between
| several services to get what you want is becoming a pain.
| erhk wrote:
| The free market provides but not well
| atat7024 wrote:
| Google can't even do PR in the dev community, you want them to
| solve latency!?
| void_mint wrote:
| I may get downvoted, but this was my biggest complaint about
| the "Apple needs many app stores" arguments being made against
| their monopoly. I'm not really interested in having to swap
| between many different service-hubs to use individual products
| offered by those hubs. Much like how we now have shows being
| offered on Hulu, Prime, Netflix, Apple TV, whatever-the-office-
| is-on-now, and games on Steam, Epic, Origin, etc. Once products
| are not bound to a monopoly, everyone wants to become a player
| in that space, which almost means every product you want is
| sold out of its own store.
|
| It feels kind of like a lose-lose from a consumer perspective.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > is sold out of its own store
|
| Lose-lose because you have to do a TINY bit more work to find
| product, while taking advantage of potentially better pricing
| and knowing more of the profit is going to creators instead
| of middlemen?
|
| I love the fact that I have access to Netflix, Hulu, Disney+,
| and HBO Max and can cancel/renew individual services pretty
| much without friction or anything more than a month-to-month
| contract. It's not any more work to install an app, than it
| used to be to call your cable companies customer service to
| change services.
|
| Similarly, I have Steam, EA Desktop, GOG, Epic Games, and a
| few other game clients installed. Many games can be found
| across all of them, while others are exclusive. In these
| cases, it isn't any more effort to remember which app I need
| to use as it was what channel I need to swap to when watching
| TV.
|
| I just don't see where customers are losing out, when it's
| the best we've ever had it.
| void_mint wrote:
| > Lose-lose because you have to do a TINY bit more work to
| find product, while taking advantage of potentially better
| pricing and knowing more of the profit is going to creators
| instead of middlemen?
|
| My priority is my time and effort. To say its a tiny bit
| more work handwaves any argument behind your individual
| value-metric. To you it's a tiny bit more work, to me it is
| an amount of friction I'm usually not interested in dealing
| with. I don't want to maintain an account with every
| service provider. I don't want to provide my email address
| and credit card number to anybody who asks. Much less, I
| don't want to have to search and find what market I can
| purchase content on.
|
| > I love the fact that I have access to Netflix, Hulu,
| Disney+, and HBO Max and can cancel/renew individual
| services pretty much without friction or anything more than
| a month-to-month contract. It's not any more work to
| install an app, than it used to be to call your cable
| companies customer service to change services.
|
| It is matter-of-factly more work than having content
| centralized, which was the origin of the parent comment and
| my statement. Multiple app stores are the decentralization
| of content, by definition.
|
| > Similarly, I have Steam, EA Desktop, GOG, Epic Games, and
| a few other game clients installed. Many games can be found
| across all of them, while others are exclusive. In these
| cases, it isn't any more effort to remember which app I
| need to use as it was what channel I need to swap to when
| watching TV.
|
| You're welcome to decide that this is fine for you. My
| point is that it is not fine for me. More garbage to
| configure to get the same end result is, to me (a
| consumer), a net negative.
|
| _edit_ I 'll also add that your entire comment totally
| ignores those that aren't very tech literate. I love that
| my mom has a single app store to use, and doesn't have to
| juggle multiple different providers to maintain the things
| she uses.
| postalrat wrote:
| Good for game developers who are getting awarded for their
| efforts.
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