verdigris

UFO50 just came out and is wonderful.

I agree that the exclusivity is a bummer, but on the other hand multiple games exist today that would not without Epic's funding. I just don't buy games on the Epic store (everything I own on there was from a free giveaway). When they come to Steam, I get to buy them on my platform of choice, and the injection of capital means they're much further along than they would be otherwise, if they would even exist without the funding. I just think of it as an Early Access period.

Yes, from an objective standpoint I would of course prefer an open cross-platform standard, but while it's the sort of thing I could see Steam adopting and even contributing to, Epic definitely wants the lock-in. And while Epic would obviously love to be a monopoly, as long as they have less market share than Steam, they're an anti-monopolistic force as a direct competitor to Steam.

In this scenario, boycotting games that include the EOS SDK is a pointless gesture and the only reason to do so is if you're worried about the telemetry in the SDK, which from the documentation and from Satisfactory dedicated server logs is pretty minimal unless you log into Epic through the game. It sounds like your main issue is the exclusivity, which has nothing to do with the SDK, and would be effectively "voted against with your wallet" by just not spending money on the Epic store. But as long as Epic keeps offering significant chunks of cash for timed exclusivity, it will remain an extremely attractive deal for any game without significant pre-relrase hype.

But... you're basically arguing for more exclusivity by effectively boycotting the majority of products that choose to release on the Epic store, as most of them will include EOS functionality. Why is steamworks fine?

I'm a valve fanboy but they're only company that's even got a prayer of monopolizing the PC games market. Epic is if anything an anti-monopolistic force here -- the Unreal Engine is the Epic product that's threatening market dominance.

DLLs are libraries that get called by the binary. So deleting the DLL stops any calls from executing, but the code still contains calls to the SDK.

Go ahead and boycott any game that uses EOS, but it's a weird hill to die on.

RoR is likely turning off some of the functionality but the EOS SDK is still used in the binary. I'm assuming here, I don't know the specific implementation, but if there's a check box and you don't need to restart the whole game after checking it, there's no way it's somehow removing EOS from the program. It likely just disables various functionality, but I bet it's still making a couple calls to verify the existence of the EOS network, just like Satisfactory does.

Games (and programs in general) have to be built with support for any environments they want to run on. If you want to release your game on multiple storefronts and take advantage of their built in social functions, you need to build in support for those functions, even if they won't be used in some cases.

I mean if you don't log in, at least the dedicated server only makes two calls to EOS. The SDK is in the game, sure, but if you're not logging in to Epic then I don't really see the threat. It seems like classic sinophobia to be totally blasé about any data Steam (or Coffee Stain) want to collect, but to avoid the entire product because Tencent might be able to associate your IP with the fact that you own the game.

I mean, it's there so the game can utilize Epic's online services, like achievements. Doing so requires the use of the EOS SDK. So it's not like they can just include a check box to disable the functionality; that would require an entirely separate release of the game. It's already not doing anything besides making sure the EOS server exists unless you're engaging with Epic systems. At least that's the case for dedicated servers, but I would assume that it's the same if you only select Steam multiplayer (or single player mode).

You don't have to install the launcher to play games that use EOS. You don't have to make an account unless you want to log into Epic, which is not necessary to play the game (unless of course you bought it on the epic store).

The only arguably bad thing about EOS' inclusion is that it can collect some telemetry about you, which Epic currently claims to be pretty sparse.

You don't have to log in to Epic unless you want to play with Epic users.

But... Why? I don't understand why you would be okay with using a company's engine but not their online services. Is it a privacy issue? You don't even have to log in to Epic unless you want cross platform play.

They're both Epic, my guy -- do you just specifically dislike one of the engineers working on EOS or what?

I dislike Sweeny et al more than most, but do you boycott all UE games?