this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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Google is ‘crooked’ and a bully, CEO of Fortnite-maker Epic Games testifies in Play Store trial::Epic alleges that Google has been engaged in illegal price-gouging by collecting commissions ranging from 15% to 30% on in-app digital transactions.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (29 children)
[–] [email protected] 64 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (21 children)

They tried to beat Steam at their own game by paying studios a massive amount to release games exclusively on their platform. They brought "console exclusives" to fucking PC gaming and they can fuck off and eat shit for that.

They tried to entice gamers by giving them free copies of these games. They never, not once, tried to improve the quality of their application or give basic features that Steam has had for literally a decade. They don't actually care about customer satisfaction or good quality of service. They went on a stupid spree of buying game studios and basically killing them, just like EA used to do.

(A good example is when they bought Rocket League, which had a perfectly functional Linux-native version, but when they bought it they were like "FUCK LINUX" and literally removed the existing Linux-native version of Rocket League. That's when I stopped playing.)

They were in it to spend as much money as possible in an attempt to extract as much money as possible in a vain attempt to dominate the market. They failed at that miserably because these stupid chucklefucks don't actually know how to run a successful business by being good to their customers. Being good to your customer categorically is not just giving away free shit.

And if that shitty narcissistic bullshit wasn't enough, they also did dumb shit like buying the music site Bandcamp, doing literally fucking nothing with it for two years, and then selling it to fucking ad-men who immediately fired half the staff and started hollowing out the company.

I will never forgive them for killing bandcamp. The last place you could make sure a musician got 100% of the proceeds of buying their music (as opposed to Spotify which pays... $0.003 cents per stream. Also Bandcamp offered DRM-free fully lossless audio files (FLAC). There literally was not a better music service if you cared about 1. Paying artists fairly 2. Getting good quality audio and 3. Real ownership of the music itself where it can't be taken from you by changing licensing deals.

Tim Sweeney can go die in a fucking fire and I hope that same fire burns down Epic headquarters with all the C-Suite inside. They've always been a shitty company who cared about money first, and customers and their employees dead last. That's proof enough with their fucking idiotic spending spree followed up with selling stuff like Bandcamp and laying people off. They don't even have sound business strategy, a bunch of fucking loser ass morons who failed upward.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Still nothing compared to what valve did. People here are either young or naive.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago

Let's see, popularised always online drm, loot boxes, gambling in video games, supported money laundering, established the 30% cut and more.

Unironically all that is wrong with modern gaming.

And hey, epic sucks ass but they haven't damaged the gaming industry as much as steam, not even close.

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