Support NeoGAF

[Daneel Elijah]

Nintendo does not care about third party much because their own IPs sell like crazy and they are cheap to produce. How much do you think Animal Crossing cost in comparison to big games like God of War? Nintendo produces a lot of games that does not cost much. And they sell a lot. Nintendo pivoted heavily to first party in their home consoles (at that time) probably after Game Cube. Then they pivoted to hybrid and reigned supreme there for years.


They could have won in USA again, but winning in Europe is not possible. By the time Xbox 360 launched, you basically had two generations of PS consoles dominating Europe - PS1 and PS2. At that time Sega was already in decline and Sony won over Nintendo even at that time. And even Xbox 360 was a product that succeeded only because PS fumbled - otherwise it had no chance at all. And PS4 was not a failure.


They literally left the hardcore home console market with Wii and their had a great position in handheld gaming. Until Switch Pro (allegedly) they did not rely on any big hitters from T2, EA, ABK etc. to sell their consoles. Post GC, Nintendo was basically in a different market. It was proto-mobile market in a sense - mass consumer non-hardcore market.


Where? During Xbox 360 they had to pay in order to get content on the platform, post PS4 it was impossible as the prices to get exclusive games were extremely high. Hell, publishers like ABK started to threaten Microsoft with COD for example. Microsoft decided to pursue acquisitions and Game Pass because they are realized that acquisitions allow to acquire IPs and Game Pass has a potential to become a different independent ecosystem-platform. Because in home console, it was impossible to compete anymore. If Nintendo is unable to win the marketshare from PS, what Xbox can do?


These games don't sell console.

It seems that I failed to explain what I wanted to say about my Xbox/ Nintendo comparison. My bad, let's move on from it.

Sony won because it had a good product. Remember that Xbox too beat the Gamecube so it was possible. I don't think that it was or is impossible for Xbox to get back and win against Playstation. Nintendo did it after all. What hurt Xbox the most was that the One was not what their consumers wanted. It was their choices that lead to Xbox failure and the PS4 could have been a lot less dominant if Xbox continued their early 360 strategy IMHO.

Nintendo choose a way to relevance, and didn't really abandonned their consumers(children and families) to do so. They just stopped playing in Sony hands and it worked. Xbox did have some good points for them in the 360. If they had continued from there, made Halo still the best selling FPS among others things, I am certain that we would not have this conversation. As for the "hardcore" market. Do you consider the NES a console for hardcore gamers? For me, it was Sony that managed to get more teenagers and young adults into gaming than before with good marketing and games and the rest is history. Xbox could have done the same, by making for example a better Steam store than Steam and putting those games on console somehow. I know that this example is not a good one but I hope that you will understand that it is just an idea, not a realistic way for Xbox to change thir history.

For the "where". I don't know. But it was what Sony did to regain market share. They had a hard time with a PS3 taht was late, costly and hard to make games for. They concentrated on frist party games and it worked. Then they continued their strategy on the PS4 and it worked well because the One failed hard in the meantime. If Xbox had done the same, and games like crackdown, recore, scalebound... had been as good as GOW, ratchet and clank, Uncharted... we would not have this discussion, as they would have sold a lot more consoles. And this lead to the last point.

Games like Sifu and Kena don't sell consoles, yes. But they lead to making the ones that have a console happy. And the studio get better and can "maybe" make a best seller game in the future. From software was a small team, and they got their success after a lot of not really great games. Who know what will happen for those studios in the future? Sony won the bidding war for No man sky, and I think that it made everybody concerned happy in the end. Xbxo could have had the same if they wanted to, and back then it was not as bad for them compared to now. Or look at Fall guys. Sony worked with Devolver early in the process, and got a good game for relatively cheap I think. Xbox could have done the same if they wanted. Then Sony failed with Destruction all star, but it could have been the same if the game was better. At least they tried. If you see what I mean.

 

[SmokedMeat]

Second place beating up on third place. What else is new?

 

[Astray]

You're in the minority.

For most people pricing is the same, and in the case of the region where I currently live it's worse. The promise of them taking less of a cut and that "saving" being passed through to consumers is demonstrably false.

In terms of features in general it's still one of the the worst clients available on PC (both EA and Ubisoft's launchers are more feature rich) and lags behind steam by a huge margin.

I think the biggest issue facing the EGS store is that there's really nothing they can truly do to sway consumers from Steam without it seeming artificial (like exclusives) or irrelevant (the cut a dev gets is genuinely not something a gamer should ever worry about on a day-to-day basis). And unlike consoles, where you can innovate on hardware or being serious OS and infrastructure leaps to drive adoption (like Xbox and Live, PS5 and the controllers, Switch with the hybrid form-factor etc), there's no real way to truly differentiate themselves from their competitors.

I also think that a launcher shouldn't really need to "match Steam" to be considered good, there's a lot of superfluous shit in Steam, like I wonder sometimes why I need to have a MySpace-style wall, or what the fuck are those trading cards Steam continues to assume I really care about. Not everything Steam does should be an industry standard imho.

Really? What drastic change has happened to Steam, and what has improved a lot about the Epic store since Metro: Exodus released?

The launcher became far lighter and loads quicker, almost all the basic things are not missing anymore. For me at least, it performs far, far better than EA or UPlay, and sometimes can be far less cumbersome to navigate and get to the shit you want to get to than Steam.

Also they have long had a Trello board where they detail what features are done, what's in dev, and what their plan is long-term.

Trello

Organize anything, together. Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, know what's being worked on, who's working on what, and where something is in a process.

trello.com

 

[Elder Legend]

Xbox has never been popular in Europe. PS has always been a European thing since the early days. Not really a surprise. Xbox caters much more to the US market.

 

[HeWhoWalks]

I think the biggest issue facing the EGS store is that there's really nothing they can truly do to sway consumers from Steam without it seeming artificial (like exclusives) or irrelevant (the cut a dev gets is genuinely not something a gamer should ever worry about on a day-to-day basis). And unlike consoles, where you can innovate on hardware or being serious OS and infrastructure leaps to drive adoption (like Xbox and Live, PS5 and the controllers, Switch with the hybrid form-factor etc), there's no real way to truly differentiate themselves from their competitors.

I also think that a launcher shouldn't really need to "match Steam" to be considered good, there's a lot of superfluous shit in Steam, like I wonder sometimes why I need to have a MySpace-style wall, or what the fuck are those trading cards Steam continues to assume I really care about. Not everything Steam does should be an industry standard imho.


The launcher became far lighter and loads quicker, almost all the basic things are not missing anymore. For me at least, it performs far, far better than EA or UPlay, and sometimes can be far less cumbersome to navigate and get to the shit you want to get to than Steam.

Also they have long had a Trello board where they detail what features are done, what's in dev, and what their plan is long-term.

Trello

Organize anything, together. Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, know what's being worked on, who's working on what, and where something is in a process.

trello.com

It's still missing an fps counter and a simple way to handle screenshots, among other things. Plenty of key improvements it needs still.

That said, it has gotten quicker and isn't cumbersome, so I'll give it that!

 

[Rocco Schiavone]

I'm asking myself what will Phillip W. Spencer III" do about that??

 

[Dr.brain64]

I bet it's like that worldwide.

 

[Zheph]

Xbox has never been popular in Europe. PS has always been a European thing since the early days. Not really a surprise. Xbox caters much more to the US market.

Xbox was plenty popular in France during the 360 era

 

[Killjoy-NL]

MS has already asked itself that and decided that gamepass is their new platform (Phils own leaked words) people just have a hard time coming to terms with that. That the xbox console is not that important to them now. MS' xbox hardware business is going to move more and more towards a cloud connected controller as their moneymaker.

But isn't the majority of GamePass subs on Xbox?
Without a Xbox console, GamePass will take a big hit.

They're digging their own graves deeper with GamePass.

 

[Killjoy-NL]

Xbox was plenty popular in France during the 360 era

Interesting find.

Keep in mind that X360 had 15 months head start:

PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 Lifetimes Sales in 14 European Countries

This capture is taken from a GfK Entertainment report that covers the sales of the first half of 2015 in Europe. It includes cumulative hardware sales for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One as of week 24, 2015, but the most important thing is that also includes what the previous systems had sold. These...

www.installbaseforum.com

 

[JackMcGunns]

Not being in favor of MS =/= Hating America

I didn't say anything about hating America, that was someone else, I'm merely pointing out the console prefence in France has always favored PlayStation.

 

[Astray]

It's still missing an fps counter and a simple way to handle screenshots, among other things. Plenty of key improvements it needs still.

That said, it has gotten quicker and isn't cumbersome, so I'll give it that!

It's getting better and better imo. FPS counters can be implemented via MSI afterburner or other software if it's needed, I personally use Steam's whenever i play my steam games so it's whatever.

Is EGS going to be the leading store in PC? Unlikely imo unless Epic finds another Fortnite-sized megahit. But I think it's a more than ok in that it's not an active impediment to the act of buying games then launching them, which is the bread-and-butter of what a launcher needs to be imo.

 

[Drell]

I didn't say anything about hating America, that was someone else, I'm merely pointing out the console prefence in France has always favored PlayStation.

This is basically what you answered to:

French disdain for America is real

No.

Source: I am French

That wasn't really the subject of their discussion. So it looked like you were making some kind of correlation to me...

 

[HeWhoWalks]

It's getting better and better imo. FPS counters can be implemented via MSI afterburner or other software if it's needed, I personally use Steam's whenever i play my steam games so it's whatever.

Is EGS going to be the leading store in PC? Unlikely imo unless Epic finds another Fortnite-sized megahit. But I think it's a more than ok in that it's not an active impediment to the act of buying games then launching them, which is the bread-and-butter of what a launcher needs to be imo.

Afterburner is a separate program. With Steam, I don't need anything else open. Plus, those features are years old. Epic doesn't have to be Steam, but it helps to add things people are used to, especially after 5 years. This is on top of Big Picture Mode, better controller options, and the list goes on and on.

I'll use Epic when needed, but Steam is head-and-shoulders above it from a feature-rich perspective.

 

[PanzerCute]

That wasn't really the subject of their discussion. So it looked like you were making some kind of correlation to me...

K