Fuck Microsoft. I recently updated Windows and had to go through an unskippable ad for Edge. After the ad, I had to go through an unskippable setup process for Edge, even though I don't use it. After I got through that, I had to tell Edge not to make itself the default browser, unpin it from my start menu, where it was added by Windows, then remove it from desktop, where it was added by Windows. I'm a paying customer, and they're plastering their shit all over my computer, just like they did in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Don't be a fool and think Microsoft has changed because they give away VSCode and have added features to Github. This isn't a goodwill measure, it's a lock in measure. They're quietly trying to lock in engineers into their platform, just like they're trying to keep gamers locked in to their platform.
They're trying to look like the scrappy little guy competing against Apple, but this only after their Windows App store has failed to do anything. They wait until their hand busts before tattling - if the Windows store succeeds, they happily go along with it. If it fails, they talk about how great a tragedy it is for the American consumer.
Exactly, people forget that Valve developed SteamOS after Microsoft's shenanigans, when they tried to lockout 3rd party programs i.e. build it's own "app store"
They have a huge marketshare, but I don't see how they have a monopoly. For example, some of the largest games in the world don't go through Steam (Fortnite, Overwatch, LoL) and the indie scene outside of Steam is popular and successful through DRM free or 3rd party sources such as GoG, Humble, and itch.io. I can download a .exe from a publisher's website if I really want to. How is that "almost ... a monopoly"?
It's worth noting that Epic Games isn't really making headway into the market by providing innovation. They're just dumping money into it, making everything worse for Linux users.
With its drive for fragmentation, even with a gaming distribution like SteamOS, Linux gaming community keeps changing between 1 and 2%.
No one is betting their business in such tiny communities, while having exponential costs in development and dealing with very vocal and entitled gamers.
So naturally a couple of studios test waters, and then they just target Android instead.
Do you have a source for Linux users being "very vocal and entitled"? Someone linked this Twitter thread here and, while they ultimately chose to stop supporting Linux, the picture painted of Linux users is very different from what you describe. https://twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760
Really? I've had pretty much no issues playing video games on Linux for the past 2 years. At least not any more than I did when I used Windows.
Steam has been providing support for the Linux community for years, through native ports of their games, explicitly selling Linux ports on their store, and just making sure their client works on Linux as well. This isn't to mention their actual innovations such as the Steam Controller, Steam In-home Streaming, Steam Remote Play, and even Proton.
In contrast, we have Epic Games who, besides adding nothing to the market besides a bunch of free games (which is likely going to end when/if they feel like they have a good enough share), actively killed the Linux version of Rocket League when they purchased the game.
I appreciate Epic Games for the Unreal engine, but if this is how they want to get a share of the PC game store market, they're not getting a dime from me.
> In contrast, we have Epic Games who, besides adding nothing to the market besides a bunch of free games
You shouldn't talk about things you don't know about...
- Millions in grants for developers
- Unlimited free backend services for game developers, the same the power one of the most successful games in recent history (and the first serious offer for this caliber of service outside of Steam despite AAA publishers having stores for years)
- Millions invested in arguably one of the most technologically advanced game engines freely available
- Thousands of dollars in free content to help developers kickstart their projects
- Finally moving the needle for developer revenue splits after years of stagnation
- No built-in DRM (Games can still optionally include their own DRM, but there's no Steamworks-style DRM options)
- Built a publishing house with a blanket deal for studios which is very competitive, (50/50 split of all profit)
- _Retroactively_ waived fees for any game that made under 1 million dollars running on Unreal.
Say you didn't care about anything Epic did besides release a few free games, they did plenty more than that
Can't reply to your comment directly but for a reply...
How is massively supporting the game industry and providing a real competitor in a the market not doing anything for the end-user?
You realize the games the end-user plays benefit from literally every single thing I mentioned right?
Nothing of that is directly impactful like the features I listed about Steam. I'm not arguing for Epic Games being an "evil corporation", they just don't do anything to the end-user except for a couple free games.
I'm speaking explicitly as an end user here, and from my point of view the Epic Store is a straight downgrade from Steam in almost every aspect.
> Really? I've had pretty much no issues playing video games on Linux for the past 2 years.
Yes, really. This just sounds like the standard Linux Desktop evangelist "Works for me! (TM)". Take this case [0], where in it is claimed that support requests for Linux were vastly disproportionate to the number of Linux users.
Linux has huge problems as a platform due to its fragmentary and ever-changing nature combined with its near-total disregard (in userland) for backwards compatibility. People have been screaming this at the community for the better part of a decade and a half (including Linus himself!) and mostly falling on deaf ears.
Which is not to say that one should support Epic if you do happen to care about gaming on Linux. Quite the opposite, as Valve has done more than anyone[1] to try and make it work.
I agree. Linux definitely has a long way before it's usable for the majority of the public for gaming. I only wanted to point that out because the myth that Linux can't play games still exists for some reason, while I'm sitting here playing every game that I want (except for those with rootkit anti-cheats. I have a VM for them).
It's ironic to watch non-technical gamers hoot and holler about how evil Epic is while they pour millions into a world class engine for devs, and build out the first "full house" competitor to Steam (meaning they include free unlimited backend services in addition to the store front)
> pour millions into a world class engine for devs
That developers pay millions to license and use. This isn't charity work.
> build out the first "full house" competitor to Steam
So they can control the market as a replacement for Steam, a superior platform that has (a) an instant return policy [1], (b) the ability to emulate input for any game for the disabled[2], and (c) the ability to share your entire game library with family without having to share accounts and save files.
[1]: Obviously hasn't always been the case.
[2]: Via Big Picture Mode, which allows you to use any controller for any game and remap inputs for games that have no such settings. A total blessing for anyone disabled or with a preference for different controls.
> That developers pay millions to license and use. This isn't charity work.
They retroactively waived licensing fees for any game that made under 1 million dollars in revenue going back years!
But, ah yes, you got them! They're a company in a capitalist society trying to make money, what crooks!
>So they can control the market as a replacement for Steam
I don't know how you can say this with a straight face. By that logic anyone who makes any store that isn't Steam is just trying to control the market.
Anyone who makes anything that isn't the current incumbent in a monopolized industry is just trying to become the new monopoly!
And the rest of your points are in the worst faith.
Epic games is how old? You're complaining that a new player hasn't matched every feature of a decades old incumbent?
Not to mention, Epic games has instant-refunds on some games (developers can disable this, also yeah, bringing up Steam in a conversation about refunds is a joke, you knew that enough that you had to pre-emptively footnote it)
And Steam was an accessibility NIGHTMARE until very recently, to the point that I had seen petitions come out against it! Not to mention accessibility in games is largely on a game-by-game basis, acting like Big Picture was made to improve accessibility is laughable when it launched without the ability to even change text sizes for years.
As I understand it, people were mad at Epic when many game projects on Kickstarter, formerly announced and crowd-sponsored as multi-platform, were suddenly funded by Epic and changed to be exclusives on Epic. Many people viewed this as a breach of trust by the projects, and as even worse done by Epic, by prompting and encouraging this.
I think more competition in this space is great, and overall we'll all benefit. However, notice that when you open up Steam, the default view is your library of games, whereas when you open the Epic Games Launcher, your default view is the store. This suggests to me that BD folks are running the show, rather than folks who are interested in games. Valve has spent the better part of the last 20 years proving that they generally make decisions for Steam that put gamers first- enough so to convince me, a dedicated FOSS and free culture supporter to pay for DRMed games. I've also purchased a game from the Epic Game Store, and while the experience wasn't as good (the Epic Games Launcher is pretty half-baked software), I expect them to iterate and improve it, unlike EA's Origin software which is almost comically broken.
There has been controversy around them paying third party developers to release their game exclusively through Epic Games Store. From what I recall these are timed exclusives so the games do eventually end up on other store fronts but people seem to be really up in arms about it.
Some of the complaints are about Epic's lack of any interest in the minefields of Linux and macOS support. It's not a PC gaming store, it's emphatically a Windows gaming store. (Some of those complainants seem to overlook how long Steam was Windows-only or how much of the Steam catalog will likely remain Windows-only.)
Most of the rest of the arguments seem to revolve around Epic doing paid (timed) exclusive deals with an interesting cross-section of developers. (Using the weight of their Unreal engine licensing fees to sweeten the pot of what they could offer in some cases.) It's something common to console games, but some PC gamers seemed disturbed to see it on the PC. It also seems to betray a short-term memory with respect to Steam, as Steam also bootstrapped on exclusives such as Half-Life 2. (Half-Life 2 wasn't even a timed exclusive as most of Epic's have been, HL2 still requires Steam in 2020, whether or not you bought it or The Orange Box on a physical disc from a retail store back in the early oughts. Which leaves prevarication room for some Steam fans because Valve did allow multiple stores to sell the game even if it was a platform exclusive to play the game; but it still ignores the historic controversy when Steam did that in the first place and many gamers at the time called it a mistake and the death of PC gaming.)
(ETA: Also, Epic did do one sleazy/evil thing early in the EGS: it scraped private Steam files for friends lists, rather than using documented APIs, to try to bootstrap its social network.)
While it's true that Steam has a lot of critical mass, there are several viable alternatives for distribution in a vacuum (whether publishers and developers use them or not doesn't mean they aren't there). In addition to the EGS and Itch you also have GOG (which has a huge catalogue and is highly curated), and the Humble Store is still around even though sadly it has mostly become a Steam storefront these days. Add to that other publisher-specific distribution platforms and the landscape is hardly as bereft of choice as the smartphone/tablet app distribution ecossystem.
Note: I do wish all of these people's official clients supported Linux.
In a vacuum - sure. You have to stop viewing everything through the eyes of a technical user, they have literally billions of end-users. All of them know "internet explorer" which MS is desperately trying to get rid of. It makes absolute perfect sense to walk users through Edge when they're getting rid of the default browser that billions of people expect to be there.
Were you expecting them to just get rid of the old browser and leave users in a lurch? You'd be on here blowing them up for "taking away a browser without any instructions so my grandma is calling me now" instead of whining that they made you actually acknowledge the change.
Not sure if you have experience the unskippable ad but it was egregious. I force quit edge from task manager before it finished but I cannot uninstall Edge from the add or remove programs.
I'm with you, launch a guide on how to use edge as soon as they click on the Internet Explorer icon. Please do not unset my preference of default browser, please do not make me crash your program to avoid your ad... in general why does my start bar get worse every time it changes as it lurches towards an ad display vector.
You're overestimating the technical aptitude of the average person. If it's not a URL or in an app store, it basically doesn't exist for a lot of people.
This may be very true for the generations born with tablets, but I'd expect the average layperson to be accustomed to 30 years of installing software or moving things via floppy drives or USB drives, but be wary of getting something from the Internet as it always was the source of malware.
Gates is the living proof you can still buy indulgences in these times. Watch out for Zuckerberg, Bezos and similar people becoming saints in 20-30 years.
I mean, the good he does in his later years is far disproportionate to the harm he did before, so that's how it should work right? No one's all good or all bad, you take the bad with the good. In the case of Bill Gates I would hope for a lot more like him which is what I hope people will one day say of me...
Highly debatable, maybe you are very young and dont recall how Microsoft absolutely attempting to crush any competing tool, company, framework or standard with absolutely 0 remorse. Hell, they even financed the ludicrous litigation of SCO against Linux. Cool than now Gates and his partner can promote great social campaigns, with all the good-willing, free publicity and tax benefits it generates, but let's not forget there is a long trail of pain and misery behind it.
Not saying he wasn't very bad, and it's true I wasn't around for the worst of it. But it's almost impossible to believe that it's not outweighed by the good he has done in the last couple decades, the sheer scale of which is hard to wrap my head around.
The damages they made by forcing to install that crap that is Windows, are still here and ongoing. I don’t think the costs of that monopoly is even calculable.
Don’t forget “developing countries” too: a brasilian friend was running a copy of windows “licensed” for poor people. Wtf.
The glorification of Gates nowadays still worries me.
(To not talk about their server and enterprise monopoly)
While he is doing a lot of good work, even today's Gates is not a saint. He has investments in shitty companies like Monsanto. There have been reports about bullying people who speak against his foundation. He has used his enormous money and power to go against the will of voters on education, at least once. And so on.
I am coding since 1986, so old enough to remember those days.
Apparently there is this revisionism where Microsoft was doing Mafia style visits to everyone, giving advices at gun point that accidents happen.
It is incredible how there is this culture that only the man is to blame, while those taking the money couldn't be helped to do otherwise, those pour souls.
Please. Crushing competition in the software field hardly compares to saving lives. Some estimates put the number of lives saved at over 100 million. Hell, saving one life would make up for all the business hurts Microsoft caused and more. One has to be exceptionally callous to consider businesses going out of business greater than human lives.
> Some estimates put the number of lives saved at over 100 million
I want a source on that, because even Gates in this absolutely self-serving report(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/14/bill-gates-phi...) did explicitly not claim he or his foundation is responsible for the 123 million estimated reduction in infant mortality since the year 2000 . As important as vaccination is, child mortality has decreased by many many reasons, including rising standard of economic conditions,decreased world fertility, an accelerated movement to urban life and widely distributed medical care. To attribute this complex and global set of conditions to just one individual is beyond sycophantic.
> One has to be exceptionally callous to consider businesses going out of business greater than human lives.
Spare me this sanctimonious take. So Gates used some part of the money he extracted in monopolistic and quasi-criminal practices to buy children vaccines and now he cannot be criticized because "can somebody please think of children?
By the way many of those countries who receive vaccines from the Gates foundations had to pay exorbitant license fees to use monopolistic MS products.
Feel free to criticize. All I said is comparing lives saved to businesses destroyed is ridiculous and stupid as a criticism. Even one life saved is greater than all businesses destroyed, but that's just my opinion. You seem to think losing businesses is worse than losing lives. That's an opinion I call callous. But the reality is, it's stupid to compare the two in the first place.
the good he does is questionable. he's paying for drugs from us big pharma for a few years to destroy any competition from cheaper indian drugs, then they let the poor African countries caught in dilemma : continue paying for the costly treatment of their citizens or let them die. I call that an elaborate corruption scheme. I wouldn't be surprised if some american politicians were involved
Devil's advocate but is that really so bad? You see it as plastering unwanted Microsoft Edge everywhere, where my grandparents are just glad to have a modern browser that's easy to find.
And none of these lock-in measures mean shit. If Microsoft is providing a service that people want/need then why is that bad? They can't lock anybody in if nobody switches. People switch since they provide value.
well, on Mac Safari comes pre-installed, so it's not like there's a good alternative out there. You should remember it's in their interest to shove their own browsers down your throat.
Funny enough, I guess they would get less criticism if Edge just came preinstalled like Mac does with safari.
There's still a full screen unskippable ad post-update, and an Edge setup process, and then additional reminders that you might want to make Edge your default browser.
The prevalence of popups and other notifications in Windows designed to drive user engagement with a specific product / feature / team has been increasingly noticeable lately, while actual productivity features like searching your local files and applications have been gummed up by web results instead.
I still use Windows on a daily basis since Visual Studio is the best tool for the work I do and Windows is the best platform for PC games, but they do plenty to exercise their leverage as the platform owner.
Don't be a fool and think Microsoft has changed because they give away VSCode and have added features to Github. This isn't a goodwill measure, it's a lock in measure. They're quietly trying to lock in engineers into their platform, just like they're trying to keep gamers locked in to their platform.
They're trying to look like the scrappy little guy competing against Apple, but this only after their Windows App store has failed to do anything. They wait until their hand busts before tattling - if the Windows store succeeds, they happily go along with it. If it fails, they talk about how great a tragedy it is for the American consumer.