The glory days of Epic Games are long gone and Tim Sweeney is a god damn moron.

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[–] 133 points 11 months ago (5 children)

definitely keep doing it then. Sweeney is consistently on the wrong side.

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  • [–] [S] 41 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Bingo! Valve is one hell of a monopoly, but they don't totally fuck their customers. Sweeney has to answer to his shareholders. Those are the real customers; not you and me.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago*

    Both Valve and Epic are private companies and thus have a bit more of a say over what they do than public companies would. Sweeney actually just answers to himself, and I mean that pejoratively, otherwise he would have invested in EGS more to compete with Steam and focused more on Unreal Engine’s near-monopoly in the AAA space.

    Instead, he focused on “owning” the metaverse, and courting crypto. If I were a shareholder, I would say he wasn’t acting in my best interests.

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  • [–] 255 points 11 months ago* (18 children)

    Valve revolutionized Linux gaming; Tim categorically rejects it.
    Valve banned shitcoins and blockchain scams; Tim welcomed them with open arms.
    Valve enforces honesty regarding AI slop; Tim wants to literally deceive people.
    All that on top of what they did with third-party exclusives.

    He's like that annoying kid who didn't get invited to a birthday party and vowed to always do the opposite of what the popular kid does. Petulant fucking overgrown child.

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  • [–] 78 points 11 months ago (16 children)

    Valve banned shitcoins and blockchain scams

    would've been nice if they banned gambling, too, but that's part of their business model unfortunately.

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  • [–] 20 points 11 months ago (7 children)

    I hear people say this sometimes, but I don't know what they mean. Is there part of Valve's system that has a gambling mechanic I've just never engaged with?

    Or is it one of their games that has gambling?

    Because I've been using it for years as basically my sole gaming interface and haven't seen any gambling.

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  • [–] 16 points 11 months ago

    Mainly Team Fortress 2 and Counter Strike GO/2, cuz both of them have cosmetics with rarities obtained via what effectively amounts to lootboxes. In one sense they also have an out-of-game economy around these things where these items are traded for actual money

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  • [–] 47 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 child)

    The short version is that an enormous, multibillion dollar gambling industry has been built around Valve's item marketplace, and in particular around CS:GO skins. If that sounds completely insane and stupid, I'm with you, but it exists. Valve takes their typical cut off of all of these trades, and thus derives massive profits from it.

    Here's the long version: https://peertube.gravitywell.xyz/videos/watch/a8e6d20c-3003-4b14-b9c4-cb6a25b238e7?isPeertubeContent=1

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago

    There is a massive secondary market for in-game items (primarily CS skins) that Valve refuses to combat or even officially acknowledge. Some of it is legitimate, some of it is literal lottery for children. And since every transaction takes place on Steam, they get a cut of that.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago (7 children)

    At least the shit is all cosmetic not like EA sports games with their UT packs I guess. Low bar.

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago* (6 children)

    It might be cosmetic, but it can be sold, which fuels the addiction mechanic. EA is bad, too, but this whataboutism.

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  • [+] 3 points 11 months ago* (5 children)
  • [–] -2 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    The launcher?! This bloatware is the second worst thing about Valve's services right after the gamble mechanics.

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  • [+] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)
  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (2 children)

    I don't want to discredit Steam's features like compatibility layers, but the software itself is a mess. It is an unnessecary RAM-heavy chromium instance, to be fair, just like most other launchers. I replaced it with Playnite which is streamlined, responsive and more feature rich for managing a library (Steam still needs to be installed of course because they don't offer offline installer like GOG). And I'd argue that console user saren't free of launcher, they are locked into a very specific one.

    But as someone who's neither been to Costco nor Walmart, what is the difference?

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    [–] 85 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Of course epic doesn't understand empowering consumers with information. They don't care about consumers. If they did, they'd maybe try adding some long requested features to their storefront.

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  • [–] 85 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    I don't want AI-generated assets in games at the expense of past, present, and future artists -- artists that created all the source material in the first place and had it pirated by corporations who had enough money to ignore all existing IP law globally.

    If Tim Sweeney is fine with pirating other's art, he should be cool with people pirating his games.

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  • [–] 70 points 11 months ago (8 children)

    Beyond just Tim Sweeney sounding dumb, there's something truly evil and malicious about this framing.

    His response was to a tweet that said: Steam and all digital marketplaces need to drop the "Made with AI" label. It doesn't matter anymore. (Emphasis mine)

    All well and good for that guy maybe, but why do they need to drop it and why does Tim Sweeney agree? Why is less information for the people that want to have it a necessity. And WHY does he feel compelled to comment on the behavior of his competitors in this way.

    Fucking ghouls, the whole lot of them. I hope their AI creations destroy them and they suffer even a single moment of hubris.

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  • [–] 17 points 11 months ago (6 children)

    People that are wrong this often and have the amount of power a CEO can exert over their company never ever realize they are wrong.

    Because of this, they never experienced hubris or any kind of personal growth for that matter as long as it's coming from this dumbfuck endstage capitalistic nightmare pipeline.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (5 children)
  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Their point seems to be that you misunderstand the word hubris. Hubris is a negative trait, not a positive one. Maybe you meant humility?

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    My point is that I think we can experience their hubris but they cannot because they don't know it's there. Same would apply to humility

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  • [+] 1 point 11 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

    I don't think what I said needs this level of deciphering

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago

    Agreed. There's probably one big reason he doesn't like this tag and that's money. He probably realizes that people will visit the Steam page for a game to read reviews and discussions even if they might buy it on Epic.

    Dude needs to mind his own business. He just wants his customers to be ignorant.

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  • [–] 67 points 11 months ago

    Tum Sweeney: "Please stop labeling all these turds, because everything will be made with shit at some point"

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  • [–] 43 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Sounds like Epic needs to try to make a online game store to compete with Steam, but filled with AI slopware.

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  • [–] 40 points 11 months ago

    Some of us want quality over mass produced crap stolen from others.

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  • [–] 35 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    His expectations are just Unreal.

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  • [–] 35 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    I like how he's basically admitting that it's a negative that would hurt the game sales. Because consumers don't want it.

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    [–] 35 points 11 months ago

    This is like Jared Leto giving Daniel Day-Lewis acting advice 😂

    Go back in your hole, Tim.

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  • [–] 33 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    I think I just understood why UE5 sucks that much...

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  • [–] -2 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    You are the first person I have ever heard say UE5 sucks. Why?

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    I really am? (no sarcasm here, honest surprise)

    I thought it's widespread knowledge that the "upgrade" to UE5 mainly brought a lot of performance loss compared to UE4 while having a signature blurry (or whatever) style which actually worsens the perceived quality.

    For example expedition 33, while it's style is awesome, it's performance is absolutely not. It should run flawless on ps5 and on superior pcs but still doesn't and the fps range is not in line with the hardware capabilities.

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    I hate to be the one to say it but an ambitious game made by a small team is a shit game to use as an example. They did not have the budget to optimize and the game is full of small technical flaws. Who ever told you that UE4 is better than UE5 is wrong, even without Lumen or Nanite. Also most games in UE4 only used 2k textures and in UE5 8k textures are used. The assets are heavier in general.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    I seem to have struck a nerve there, apologies.

    I don't think it's a shit example. It's the latest I experienced. It's a good game but hampered technically. Nobody needs to tell me, I've been gaming since before dos and grew up with it; I've also been working in it for a few decades.

    Look; you could just have a bigger or more gpus with more ram in a pc but if the end result does not significantly look better the question is for what all the effort is.

    And that's what happened with UE5.

    Yes, maybe in a few years it might look different but it's also been some time and hasn't really been worth any of the performance impact.

    And - as said - I see quality impact in UE5 games which I personally can not comprehend in an supposed upgrade.

    However, feel free to disagree.

    Maybe it's my background in datacenters: of course you can always meet demand with more raw power but it's a losing fight and the intelligent progress is to optimize and use resources in a clever way.

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  • While UE5 is a one size fits all for game dev, it does not mean all games have to try to have the highest quality graphics possible. CO took that route. You can do whatever you want and optimize as much as you can. You are correct, studios are just going ham on the capabilities and not caring about the hardware requirements. Having a min requirements of a 12th Gen intel, 32GB RAM and 3060 is fucked up. And you need 64GB of RAM for good performance. My biggest gripe on the UE4 vs 5 opinion is that you can still make a low-fi game that runs at 200fps. It's a design choice not an engine choice.

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  • [–] 27 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    How does this even make any sense? This guy is an idiot lol.

    src | xcancel

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  • [–] 27 points 11 months ago* (1 child)

    Sweeney has Steam living rent free in his head. Whining about Monopoly

    Meanwhile, Epic Games already has something resembling a monopoly with the unreal engine, its buggy and resource hungry as fuck, and just seems to be getting worse. Necessitating an arms race of computer upgrades just to run the newest games on their obtuse engine thats being used for everything now. Epic certainly isnt doing anything about it. Its just a money printer for Tim's legal battles.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    re: unreal - and unity - have stopped caring about devs and just chase new tech like nanite or new advertising shite.

    godot ftw, they'll never come back and say "hey we're changing the contract now you gotta pay for every install" or "hey everything is AI now".

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  • [–] 25 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Bullshit translator: "I want to sell more AI made games, so i can reduce costs by firing everyone, and being held accountable for using AI is gonna prevent me from bilking idiots to increase my fortunes by another billion or 5"

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  • [–] 23 points 11 months ago

    Anyway, here's a userscript/browser addon to make Steam's AI warnings into a popup: https://github.com/seeeeew/aiwarningforsteam

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  • [–] 46 points 11 months ago*

    Shit like this is why people only use that storefront for the free games. Completely out of touch.

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  • [–] 21 points 11 months ago

    Epic Boss Tim Sweeney can go fuck himself

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  • [–] 18 points 11 months ago

    He doesn't sound very epic to me.

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  • [–] 16 points 11 months ago

    If that actually happens and the label becomes redundant, then we can talk about removing it.

    Or better, inverting it to a "No AI" label for the people like me who will still care.

    Tech bros always act like this : they don't want to actually win by making a good solution. Instead they try to make you feel like their solution is inevitable and they have already won...

    For a group of people who claim to be all about meritocracy and the "marketplace of ideas", they sure like to short circuit those whenever possible...

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  • [–] 16 points 11 months ago

    If Sweeney can read this, I just want to tell him something. As someone who made games with ZZT as a kid and thought it was the best thing ever, you need to understand that no AI could make something like that, even if as a kid using copied and 'inspired' code from other games (and learned how to hexedit out the protections from other ZZT worlds so I can see how they worked) the cycle of just working through a rudimentary coding language was the reward in and of it self even if I never did finish the game I had in mind.

    BTW, that game just involved an adventurer in a kingdom that is being troubled by... Hitler's ghost, and your objective was to send his ass back to hell. I found a boss fight in another ZZT world that I thought was too cool not to reuse for that purpose, too. But sadly it was never finished.

    That being said, we DO need 'AI generated' or 'AI assisted' as a tag. There isn't anything weird or wrong with that. In online art spaces like deviant art you can tag stuff as 'traditional' art (meaning done on paper/canvas with whatever media you used, like pencils, various paints, etc) or digital or a combination thereof, like a hand drawn sketch that was completed and colored with photoshop. Why the fuck would anyone be against telling people what tools were used?

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  • [–] 15 points 11 months ago*

    Funny he thinks that, I think that Tim Sweeny should stfu.

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  • [–] 15 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Nothing epic about the guy or his company.

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  • [–] 30 points 11 months ago

    Worry about your own fucking storefront. There's a lot of worrying that needs to be done.

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  • [+] 14 points 11 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 13 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Headlines where I have to remind myself not to downvote the OP for sharing news even when I despise the person being reported on.

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  • [–] 13 points 11 months ago (6 children)

    I don't know how long it's been since I even bothered claiming the free game of the week. Like a year.

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  • [–] 13 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    And i bet you don't even touch the free game you claimed because Epic launcher take forever to launch.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago

    I’d rather buy a game on Steam than get it for free from Epic. Seriously.

    I claimed the first few games and their launcher was shit. Now, to be fair, Steam wasn’t exactly a pinnacle of achievement when it first came out, either, but it’s been refined and honed to a razor. Epic is just “let’s throw shit at the wall and see what happens”, with no coherent strategy or marketing beyond “we’re not Steam!”. Their client, as I understand it, is still shit, and their CEO is a jackass. Haven’t had it installed in years now. Meanwhile, I have a backlog on Steam of like 1000 games.

    Why would I ever use Epic? It has no value.

    And yes, that goes for games sold on Steam with the “have to use Origin” bullshit, too. I’m not launching Steam to then launch Origin. This is not Inception. Let me play my damn game and stay out of it. Ya know?

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  • [–] 25 points 11 months ago

    "Waaaahhhh! Waaaaahhhh! Why is Steam such a good service? That should be illegal! Tell them they should be worse!"

    That's all I'm hearing from these other corpos.

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  • [–] 12 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    I'm not surprised. People thought he was a good guy because he sued Apple and Google, but he did it for his own profit, not for the principle. And now he wants AI slop games for his own profit, too.

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    [–] 12 points 11 months ago*

    Go ahead and remove it Tim, I already don’t spend money on your platform and I will just continue that.

    The closest I’ve come is when I bought Alan Wake 2 on my PS5.

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  • [–] 11 points 11 months ago

    How do I filter "tim sweeney"?

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