Epic Games General Thread - Its time to talk about what the AAA gaming industry does not understand about the PC console.

[Pope Negro Joe the XIIIth]

It was a walking simulator, but the issues went deeper than that. The hilarious part was that you were a maid in a South American country as it started to slide into a full on civil war... but you never actually encountered any of that. Despite the fact that would've made an interesting story.

And then Sunset had the amazingly karmic bad luck to roll out right after Valve had instituted a refunds policy on Steam. Womp womp.

And couldn't it be finished within the refund time as well?

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

And couldn't it be finished within the refund time as well?

That's what I've been told. I never played it myself.

 

[YourMommasBackstory]

As for Ooblets, i just think that at this time there are a lot of people who get money for their ~~~ a r t ~~~. Kickstarter, patreon, donations, etc. It is not a bad thing, when creators are talanted and have interesting project, it is great that consumers can help this people to make something cool. But at the same time there are much more people who see that someone don't need to do 9-5 job and spent time on their hobby, and they became jealous. "Support black trans disabled womyn", "support indie devs, it is so hard for them to make a living!".
People forgot that gamedev is still a business and noone owes you a good living for being creative. If you don't have a budget - go earn it or find an investor. If you take money before game launch, and say that you feel secure now and X amount of copies are prepayed by Epic so you don't need to care about sales, i just think that you do not trust in your product. If you don't trust in it, why should we buy it?
Business is unstable and sales might not cover development? Color me surprised, business is risky, whats next, water is wet?
Anyway, those devs better send their money to charity, because, you know, climat change and human right abuse are much bigger problems then some gamedev stuff.
Edit: It was so sad to see what happened to Tale of Tales! When they developed The Path, game journals described them as passionate art-house studio, and it is dissapointing to see theid dickish behaviour on twitter.

 

[ZehnBoat]

View attachment 876313

G A M E R S™

THANKS FOR DUH FREE ADVERTISEMENT

okay, just start making fake ads saying "ooblets, the official game of nazis"
"ooblets, endorsed by the kkk"
see how long they change their tune

 

[Oh Shit I'm Sorry]

It was a walking simulator, but the issues went deeper than that. The hilarious part was that you were a maid in a South American country as it started to slide into a full on civil war... but you never actually encountered any of that. Despite the fact that would've made an interesting story.

And then Sunset had the amazingly karmic bad luck to roll out right after Valve had instituted a refunds policy on Steam. Womp womp.

Mandatory BroTeam vid:

 

[ZehnBoat]

Mandatory BroTeam vid:

*art of war*
*pretty thick book*

man, someone has never read the art of war
it's actually rather short

 

[AZ 594]

It was a walking simulator, but the issues went deeper than that. The hilarious part was that you were a maid in a South American country as it started to slide into a full on civil war... but you never actually encountered any of that. Despite the fact that would've made an interesting story.

That sounds very similar to the netflix film Roma, only that movie got genuine acclaim and actually showed a massacre taking place. Wonder how the devs feel about their idea being done better both artistically and financially.

 

[KanaPostsonKiwi]

Man, as a longer time developer watching these coddled obnoxious upper middle-classers who never knew the prospect of going hungry or having even minor financial troubles acting like they're the real adults™, because they've made babby's first game project with nothing even remotely new or exciting that looks like dime a dozen free unity game. Mmm. That's what gives me life force.

Oh. They have a patreon? With over 1000 backers?

 

[A.Shitposter]

The difference between the Ooblets devs and literally everyone else who also accepted the fortnite money is that buying the rights to the games for a year makes people salty but ultimately understanding because it's fucking money and they're an indie studio but buying them off and then the devs acting like shitheads about it and intentionally being antagonistic towards fans makes everyone actually mad. Unless this artsy farming-rpg lite game is 10/10 their company is going to fail. Nobody knows how long Sweeney will have all this money and if Ooblets isn't good Sweeney won't give them a payout again.

 

[KanaPostsonKiwi]

Unless this artsy farming-rpg lite game is 10/10 their company is going to fail.

According to the horse's mouth, the minimum sale guarantee from Epic already covers their projected sales figures to make the game profitable. That means 2 possible, but not mutually exclusive things.
1. Mommy and daddy are bankrolling the project behind the scenes in a major fashion.
2. They already milked their patreons to the degree that the profits from the game aren't so much necessary.

Now, i do assume the minimum sales guarantee is not fixed, but it's difficult to pin down. The figures roll anywhere between 500k$ to 1.5M. (That 2M figure counts in the backers for Phoenix point). If you're running minimum wage (and these guys aren't) the cost to the company for an employee after all is said and done in the US is about 7-8K$. Salary is less than half of it. That makes the burn rate 160-190k annually.

If they really have managed to waste 4 years of their life on what amounts to Unity Asset store's free products stuck together, with a loose string of scripts on top, that'd mean the exclusivity deal in the range of 1.4M would be the minimum acceptable outcome for the studio to stay afloat. That is an extreme highball on something that's barely a blip on the radar until the devs out themseves as insufferable people that they've always been... which leads me to believe they have other, significant revenue streams to keep them afloat, and while Patreon of 1k people can significantly stem the leak of money that the company has, it can't be the only one. Unless, of course, a significant amount of those backers are dropping $100 a month.

 

[A.Shitposter]

According to the horse's mouth, the minimum sale guarantee from Epic already covers their projected sales figures to make the game profitable. That means 2 possible, but not mutually exclusive things.
1. Mommy and daddy are bankrolling the project behind the scenes in a major fashion.
2. They already milked their patreons to the degree that the profits from the game aren't so much necessary.

Now, i do assume the minimum sales guarantee is not fixed, but it's difficult to pin down. The figures roll anywhere between 500k$ to 1.5M. (That 2M figure counts in the backers for Phoenix point). If you're running minimum wage (and these guys aren't) the cost to the company for an employee after all is said and done in the US is about 7-8K$. Salary is less than half of it. That makes the burn rate 160-190k annually.

If they really have managed to waste 4 years of their life on what amounts to Unity Asset store's free products stuck together, with a loose string of scripts on top, that'd mean the exclusivity deal in the range of 1.4M would be the minimum acceptable outcome for the studio to stay afloat. That is an extreme highball on something that's barely a blip on the radar until the devs out themseves as insufferable people that they've always been... which leads me to believe they have other, significant revenue streams to keep them afloat, and while Patreon of 1k people can significantly stem the leak of money that the company has, it can't be the only one. Unless, of course, a significant amount of those backers are dropping $100 a month.

They had 1,175 backers on Patreon donating from $1-$100 each, I don't know if they live together or at home with family or whatever but even bad games take time to make.

What I meant was that if Ooblets isn't at least good, the company has no future because all the good will that was built up is gone, and Sweeney has gone on record saying he doesn't want shit games on his platform and who knows if Epic will still have the money to buy them out the next time they put out a game and save them from going bankrupt.

 

[Rotalleb]

this epic shit keeps getting better. they're literally just saying "the millions of users who have a problem here are wrong. devs please take our money so that more tards use our store"

pretty sure the fake screenshots stuff is that one photoshop of the ooblets announcement.

"devs pls"
they aren't even trying to say they'll do more for users, all they want are devs to use the store because they assume that'll just bring in more people
(sauce)

 

[Dave.]

https://boards.fireden.net/v/thread/472875445/#472885076 http://archive.li/yRJhH
View attachment 875236

https://files.catbox.moe/hatoh5.mkv

View attachment 875257

[Warning: the following post contains autism]

Hey guys, first time posting here. I've found this entire ooblets debacle fascinating, in particular the controversy surrounding this gas chamber comment.
Is it real? Is it fake?

To be quite honest I'd probably hedge my bets on fake. The devs post a lot of shit but this seems a little outlandish even for them.
With that said, after reviewing that video carefully I've yet to find anything in it that shows it to be faked.
I'm familiar enough with browser dev tools and the old inspect element tricks, and judging by some of the tweets about this subject so are some other people:

https://twitter.com/alexgrist/status/1158112496345108481

https://twitter.com/alexgrist/status/1158102627516895232

The second video is basically nothing, they're not even editing the right website.
The first video is a bit more interesting, demonstrating realtime edits of a discord post. However this is an edit made after the post was posted, you can see him scrolling up and down a chat history, he isn't witnessing posts being created anew.

So okay, we've seen it's easy enough to edit the webapp version of discord, but that doesn't guarantee the video is fake. Instead we should be looking for flaws in the video itself which prove without a doubt that someone crafted it.

The first point of interest is the timeline here.
There was originally the following screenshot of discord posted, and then maybe half a day or so later the video (https://files.catbox.moe/hatoh5.mkv) followed:
View attachment 876100

If you compare the timestamps you see one is 12 hour clock format and the other is 24 hour format.
I'm not familiar enough with discord to know how this might come about, but looking through the app settings menu I can't see any indication of being able to freely change it.
So does this mean that these two posts were indeed posted by two different people?
Is it just one person, taking the care to edit the timestamps one of the times to be a different format?
And then the timelapse between posting - if you were able to fake the video, why not start with that instead of a screenshot?

Let's move on and talk about something that I've not seen mentioned anywhere else yet:
If you enter the discord server now and look back at this section of post history it turns out the dev's gas chamber post isn't the only one that's shown in the video that is missing from what you can see right now.
Just before his comment is a post made by LyndonHolland:
View attachment 876101
If you search for posts by that user you can't find any, but considering how frequently the moderators there have been deleting posts that's not too surprising.

Now, this server has posts a message for every user that first joins it. Scroll back far enough in the introduce-yourself channel and you see this:
View attachment 876103
Clicking on those names brings up their profile, and clicking on the mutual servers tab indicates that they're no longer present in this server.
The mass of posts by the same user (a bot) means we can't see the exact timestamp they arrived, but we can see that it was after 11:29 (easy for me, I share the same timezone as the vid does).
Scroll down a ways and you find the first post by a different user to have a timestamp of 13:11:
View attachment 876105
So we can establish from what discord shows us right now that these two users were present in this server prior to the alleged gas chamber post made at 13:46

So what does this mean?
I'm honestly not sure what the significance of the LyndonHolland post is.
I can think of no reason for someone to fake its existence, but equally if it was deleted it was presumably deleted pretty quickly since it was posted whilst the dev was active in the same channel.
If it was posted pretty quickly, then the person faking this footage was presumably recording at the time events unfolded?
But if they created their fake video at the time, why did it take that much longer for the video to be posted after the screenshot?
Conversely, if the video was faked some time after the posts had been made, why would the faker have put that post in? How would they have known they should do so?

Let's move on and take a look at the history pane on the right of the video:
View attachment 876107
The timestamps on it have timestamps from before the posts shown to be made in the video, so no contradiction there.
Discord searches don't update automatically so this can be achieved by searching for the dev's posts some time in the past and not being updated since, and of course the entire lot can be faked by editing the HTML too.
Suppose you were to go about faking it: you'd probably do the search, then navigate through the results until you found an entry before the supposed time the posts in the video are being made.
Having the scrollbar halfway down would be a bit suspicious, so you'd delete any entries that were too recent until your desired result is at the top.
Then maybe add some padding to the bottom to get that search bar to be a plausible length again.
But would you think to edit the result count?

At the time of writing this if I do a search for posts by perplamps it reports 8246 results.
I have to navigate to page 5 of the results, and on that page there are 12 results that come before the one shown at the top of the history in the video.
The pages each have 25 results, so if we do some math we can deduce that there are right now ((4 * 25) + 12)=112 results before you reach the result shown in the video.
If you subtract 112 from 8246 you get 8134 - which happens to be the results count displayed in the video.

From this was can deduce that whoever faked this video is at least as autistic as me right now or they used a completely legitimate search result when faking it.
It being a legitimate search result once again clashes somewhat with the fact this video was posted so much later on though.

A few more offhand observations:
The server now has a rules channel. The dev announced its creation at 18:46 on the same day the gas chamber post is supposedly made, and the video does not display this channel. Easy to fake mind you.

The video contains the new discord account tutorial tips animating throughout (the flashing yellow circle things) and the "several people are typing..." animated dots too.
It's not impossible somebody spliced together fragments of footage but it does mean it's more technically demanding than simply making a bunch of edited screenshots and making a slideshow.

There's a faint semi-transparent black line that sits at the top of the chat pane and overlays the posts as they scroll out of sight at the top.
As far as I can tell the video doesn't show any sign of this faint overlay looking wrong at any point.
This makes it unlikely that whoever made the video recorded some natural footage and then simply edited a small segment by moving some posts up and inserting the gas chamber one briefly, as this would fuck with the narrow overlay.

Okay, let's step this up a notch:

Here's a rough compilation of some of the posts surrounding the gas chamber one showing their timestamp in the video, and some caps of chrome dev tools indicating where to look for the exact timestamp discord has recorded for them:
View attachment 876108

This image is just to give you a rough idea of what you're looking for if you want to verify the following claims I make:

The video displays the posts being made at:
00:05 - "but I recognize that-"
01:25 - "Am I allowed to post-"
01:49 - "I think it shows the-"
01:59 - "Dude... Some of those-"
02:23 - "@perplamps a few people-"

The time intervals between these are as follows:
80 seconds
24 seconds
10 seconds
24 seconds

The timestamps associated with these posts, derived from the page HTML, are as follows:
1564836260246
1564836339918
1564836364708
1564836373934
1564836398273

The difference between each of these, which is the time interval between these posts in milliseconds, are as follows:
79672 ms
24790 ms
9226 ms
24339 ms

Divide those by 1000 to bring them back to seconds...
79.6 seconds
24.7 seconds
9.2 seconds
24.3 seconds

We can see that the post time intervals in the video line up with what is observable to anyone who enters the discord right now.

So what does this all mean?

Throughout the above analysis we find the following inferences:
1. Even when examining the video in minute detail there are no apparent flaws
2. The video would be much easier to fake if it was recorded whilst the posts shown in it were actually made for real, with some trick somehow used to insert the gas chamber post
3. The video requires significantly more attention to detail and chronology if it was to be faked some time after the events shown in it transpired

If we return to one of the tweets at the start I linked where someone is claiming it is simple to insert a fake post HTML in realtime, let's consider the ins and outs of this:
- you get your fake post HTML ready
- you get the dev tools to navigated to the right elements where you need to insert your fake post
- you've got the cam rolling, HTML on the clipboard
- your moment comes, you edit the HTML and insert your fake post, causing it to appear on screen
- bingo!

Only, not quite:
- the video is of discord running in a variant of chrome
- the bar along the top of the chrome window changes colour when it loses focus, vice versa when it regains focus (if you alt tab it looks different)
- if you're not focused on discord then when a new message is posted it inserts that red line indicating which messages are new
- if you're not focused on discord then the "users are typing" animation doesn't animate

So much for that theory then.

In conclusion:
I'm still not sure the video is real.
I've yet to find anything that proves it is fake.
That guy on twitter hasn't thought this through.
If this video is fake it is most likely meticulously spliced together footage, which would also explain why it was posted much later than the screenshot.
(...but if it was made later then what about that LyndonHolland post..?)

What do you guys make of it?

There was video by sidalpha where he goes over why the video may be fake. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QFhfWRiHHY I don't know if you guys would believe him or not.

**EDIT:** Already been posted my bad.

 

[Slap47]

I'm pretty sure this Ooblets thing was intentional. Piss off gamers -> Garner sympathy bucks.

 

[WhoBusTank69]

I'm pretty sure this Ooblets thing was intentional. Piss off gamers -> Garner sympathy bucks.

It's certainly helping journalists write articles, that's for sure. And after they say gamers are violent psychopaths they have to turn around and fight Drumpf by saying videogames don't make people violent psychopaths.

 

[KanaPostsonKiwi]

According to Gamesindustry.biz the developer has been "crying 2 days non stop". That surely does it, all you gamer(tm)s are the worstest humans on earth, you made someone cry over words on the internet, because that surely means something other than a total lack of self control and growth as a person.

Let's just not in any way consider that the harm is completely self inflicted.

It's not that the Epic exclusive deal is always a bad one, that does deserve some ire and critique.
It's that the guy specifically is clearly showing himself as an awful human being and deserves every single iota of hate coming to him, because you reap what you sow.

At this point i don't care one bit if the gas chamber comment is fake. It makes no difference at all on the situation, and that red herring has been brought up as if it's an important piece. Sure, it'd be another piece on the wall of endless victimbuck$ lies if it were proven he said that, but that wall is already so large Trump is considering using it as a significant portion of the borderwall.

 

[OmnipotentStupidity]

Valve has now implemented a new system regarding changing release dates on its platform for any type of product being sold there, be they video games, mods, or hardware.

Finally the end of Release Date abuse in Steam : Steam

archived 7 Aug 2019 13:48:03 UTC

archive.fo

https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/cmb8vs/finally_the_end_of_release_date_abuse_in_steam/

In other news, if you like this news, then congratulations! You're apparently an entitled man-baby gamer who likes to send death threats to people you don't like like an absolute re.tard! You're also Satan incarnate for using another launcher, and you deserve to be burned for insulting those poor innocent developers now where's my check, Missah Sween

Epic Store Rage Has Gotten Out Of Hand

archived 7 Aug 2019 00:49:07 UTC

archive.fo

Epic Store Rage Has Gotten Out Of Hand

The developers of cutesy Animal Crossing-Pokemon mashup Ooblets just had a weekend from hell. After trying to preempt a tidal wave of rage over their newly announced Epic Games Store exclusivity, they got hit with a swirling tsunami of foaming-at-the-mouth anger, up to and including death...

kotaku.com

 

[Safir]

Valve has now implemented a new system regarding changing release dates on its platform for any type of product being sold there, be they video games, mods, or hardware.

Finally the end of Release Date abuse in Steam : Steam

archived 7 Aug 2019 13:48:03 UTC

archive.fo

https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/cmb8vs/finally_the_end_of_release_date_abuse_in_steam/

View attachment 879301
In other news, if you like this news, then congratulations! You're apparently an entitled man-baby gamer who likes to send death threats to people you don't like like an absolute re.tard! You're also Satan incarnate for using another launcher, and you deserve to be burned for insulting those poor innocent developers now where's my check, Missah Sween

Epic Store Rage Has Gotten Out Of Hand

archived 7 Aug 2019 00:49:07 UTC

archive.fo

Epic Store Rage Has Gotten Out Of Hand

The developers of cutesy Animal Crossing-Pokemon mashup Ooblets just had a weekend from hell. After trying to preempt a tidal wave of rage over their newly announced Epic Games Store exclusivity, they got hit with a swirling tsunami of foaming-at-the-mouth anger, up to and including death...

kotaku.com

But they need to actually click the Release button after the scheduled release date, no? What's stopping a dev from just plain not clicking it? Is there an exposure penalty, like not showing up in New Releases if RELEASE_DATE isn't anywhere close to NOW()?

 

[OmnipotentStupidity]

But they need to actually click the Release button after the scheduled release date, no? What's stopping a dev from just plain not clicking it? Is there an exposure penalty, like not showing up in New Releases if RELEASE_DATE isn't anywhere close to NOW()?

No they don't actually. Or, well, didn't. ...Okay, to answer your questions: this is supposed to act as a stopgap for two things.

1.) Developers constantly taking their games off of Steam. If they decide to move over, they'll now have to contact Valve to set the Steam release date as indefinite and weed out anyone moving to Epic. If they don't do that, Steamwork's backend won't work right and start sending e-mails/release news on the day it was set to release without it actually releasing (causing bad PR for both the developers and, up until today, Steam). And if they can't give a good enough reason/they tell them nothing, the game's now liable for removal from the storefront (meaning no more using and abusing Steam's features in the absence of Epic's, and no more free marketing via Steam without a good reason).

2.) People who abuse the New and Trending Tab/the Steam algorithm. Now you can't constantly change the release dates to abuse the algorithm every month, You need to contact Valve first, and you need to give them and the Steam staff directly a reason as to why you keep shifting release goalposts. So yes, now there's an exposure penalty.

Kills two birds with one stone.

 

[YourMommasBackstory]

can't wait when game journos will say that new steam thing is anti-dev, and poor indie devs can't use steam to promote their games here before moving to epic store