Just realized that I was a little gaslit there, as Epic has already had bundles since 2019, with one of the most recent being the STALKER bundle that costs less than the individual games combined. Just like a game edition, a bundle can even be wishlisted on Epic, a feature lacking on Steam.

It’s tough to say without having access to the legal documents from the case. When Nacon and Frogwares were in court over The Sinking City, they both made statements suggesting that the court was in their favor.

The Carlson interview was conducted in English, which Durov spoke pretty fluently.

ESU also offers one year of support for non-enterprise users for $30.

4. Has secretly visited Israel multiple times despite claiming otherwise, with one of the trips followed by Israel unblocking the app.

Thank you for hosting this. Many users have alts though. On another note, would you be able to send the gift via email? At least with game gifts, that is possible on Steam.

Happy birthday, .zip!

There’s no disagreement between us on that. Sweeney too tries to use not only Epic’s own products but also others as an example of what can power that, though he calls out Valve’s Steamworks for not being open to other platforms.

A lot of misogynists got to hide behind the fact that it wasn’t a great movie

Always their playbook. There’s a lot of that with video games too, often coming from the same YouTube channels and websites, like Bounding into Comics. If the release is a success, they move on soon enough. If not, they latch onto every legit and made-up problem, sprinkling in the usual anti-woke nonsense.

No, like in Lego Fortnite and the main Fortnite, which involves separate 3D models built around the same concept by separate teams.

I like that it’s done that way rather than by defederating, as it lets each user decide, as opposed to someone having decided for them with no way to change that.

Right, I’m not a fan of the community-made ones either. I do love Lego Fortnite and Rocket Racing though. Festival can be fun as well.

Epic has supported Linux via grants to platforms like Lutris and by promoting the alternative launchers, among other things, so its approach is not that dissimilar to Valve supporting Wine rather than funding or developing native Linux ports. Epic laying people off is very disappointing, but at least not worse compared to the other big corporations having done the same.

On AI, most of the time, yeah, I believe AI is used quite lazily to create soulless assets, especially for asset flips. It wasn’t like that with Vader though, was it? The community mostly loved him and had fun. I typically don’t use my mic when gaming, but him dynamically commenting on the world around him and the players got me to seriously consider connecting a mic. Vader’s voice itself was also used with permission from the copyright holders.

Have you played Fortnite? It’s not just a game anymore. It’s more like a launcher in that it lets you play various games that are very distinct from one another, like Lego Fortnite or Rocket Racing, with the main shared components being the Unreal Engine and the shared economy (e.g. owning a skin for Fortnite Battle Royale granting you a version of the same skin in the Lego games).

I don’t think Sweeney has ever claimed that everything has to happen in Fortnite though. My understanding is that he envisions more cooperation between game creators (similar to Epic’s collaborations with Disney and many others), powered by open systems like EOS, which would allow gamers to interact and carry items over from game to game.

Out of curiosity, is there a way to see the communities included in the default blocks? I must have registered here before those were introduced, as I don’t have them.

The first time I heard about Piefed was in the context of the problematic views of the Lemmy developers, so I would assume the Piefed ones are better in that respect.

Pretty cool that Epic’s tech powers not only games on Unreal Engine but also other games. As shown, Death Stranding 2 is powered by MetaHuman.

The OP says global preloading and gifting are going live soon. Bundles are also on the roadmap. At the end of the day though, what’s the main benefit of a bundle? It’s the discount, right? I’m not sure the discounts offered via bundles on Steam are an overall better deal compared to Epic offering cashback of 5% on everything, sometimes increased to 20% (like now). For some countries, Epic also offers significantly better base prices compared to Steam. It still supports the Turkish and Argentinian currencies and presumably has specific price guidelines for those as well, compared to Steam having removed those options. I also remember Epic talking about supporting more regional currencies compared to Steam. From looking at the documentation now, it’s 37 on Steam and 43 on Epic.

Regarding the app, I disagree. It was very convenient to have everything in one place (which Steam fans should understand, given their reluctance to use a different launcher) and I used the chat feature all the time, but after Valve separated them, I just got tired of switching and ended up not installing the chat app after resetting my phone OS. Sometimes I need to message a friend, but I feel like the effort of installing it and logging in is not worth it for those occasions.

People love to bash Epic and list all the (often redundant) things Steam is ahead in, but nobody mentions the ways in which Epic is ahead. Something as simple as being able to chat with your friends is no longer a feature of the mobile Steam client, but if Epic sticks to the roadmap, their app will allow that. It also makes me think of how despite so many years of existence, Steam still doesn’t allow to add game editions to your wishlist, while Epic has allowed that from the start. It was also the first to introduce a custom value field for downloads throttling, before Steam followed suit.

Feeling insignificant yet?

Anyone who doesn’t feel insignificant doesn’t know about space.

Thanks for the detailed and honest explanation!