Steam v Epic Games Store Furor

[wiser3754]

A thought has crossed my mind in regards to Epic Games pedigree. They've launched an online store for game distribution, they make game engines and also nake games.
What it be smart to suggest it's only a matter of time before Epic releases their own custom built operating system which is designed strictly to video games using their own custom built or  Vulkan as their API?

With kind of OS alot of background tasks wouldn't be running and would free up unnecessary overheads.

[dsmart]

uhm, no. Why on Earth would anyone do that?

[tuberchimpy]

I cracked and bought Anno 1800 :(
Bought it from the Epic Game Store because I think despite all the exclusivity brooha, that I want to give a greater portion of my cash to the devs. I have technical issues with the EGS but I'm sure with how much cash Epic are throwing at this that the EGS will improve.

Anyway clicked install on the EGS windows application for Anno 1800. Chose my SSD OS drive as the install location, boom 25Gb munched up. Went to play the game once it had installed, only to be greeted with a choose install location dialogue. But it's already installed??? Nope it appears not. Had to choose a new drive to install on, not enough space left on my SSD. So did that. Boom another 34Gb of that slow drive chewed up by the actual game file installation. Play after that actually launched the game.

It appears that EGS only downloads a huge chunk of files to install from, it doesn't actually install the game like steam does. Once you "play" those files they then install the game.
No the install files are not cleaned up or removed after install, they just sit there chewing up hard drive space.
This is very sloppy and slapdash. All sorts of Ubisoft crap also gets installed in folders you didn't specify. It's a real mess after the game has finished it's second "install".
Of course the Epic launcher doesn't have a move install location like steam does :(
This isn't impressive, this doesn't even feel vaguely competent, this feels like a whole ton of crap got dumped on my machine :(
If any of you bought Anno 1800 through steam can you confirm or not does it behave the same way?

[tuberchimpy]

Update.
At the location you "install" the game from EGS app, two things are created AFTER you have installed it the second time
- 1 the Anno setup files in a folder called installer
- 2 some uplay launcher bootstrap files
It appears to be safe to delete the "install" folder manually AFTER the second install. Do not delete the uplay bootstrap stuff for what I hope are obvious reasons.

I forgot just how cruddy uplay is, it even makes the EGS look good :(

[wiser3754]

uhm, no. Why on Earth would anyone do that?

Undercutting and cutting out middlemen seems to be the rage nowadays. Why hold yourself to someone else's OS and API when you know you can do better with your own and licence it out to other developers.
Hell, Valve did it . . . . And it was a colossal mess. But when you see the flaws and mistakes in which a company made during development you learn and improve.

[tuberchimpy]

Undercutting and cutting out middlemen seems to be the rage nowadays. Why hold yourself to someone else's OS and API when you know you can do better with your own and licence it out to other developers.

Game devs/publishers/storefronts don't pay Microsoft for the OSes of the customers. There is no middleman to cut out. To develop and worse maintain an OS is a huge undertaking that dwarfs any game's costs by comparison. Why would anyone go to that expense? What's wrong with existing APIs? If you don't like existing APIs just write closer to the metal, which is in itself expensive. Most just use the standard APIs which means no expensive retraining of staff away from industry standards. The whole custom OS thing makes no sense.
The only reason Steam tried it is they were exploring moving into the hardware business and new console hardware ( range? ) needs an OS. Even MS for xbox consoles just forked windows because of the cost and complexity problems a brand new OS would bring, and I bet it was a bloody short meeting with no objections when they made that decision.
The whole new OS thing just makes no sense whatever direction you look at it. Why would game devs want to pay to retrain staff who know APIs for windows and xbox for a brand new way of doing things? There's enough engineering overhead out there already without adding more. The last thing I would want if I was a game dev is yet another different system for my devs to have to have in depth knowledge of to make things work but bring no new revenue with it.

[wiser3754]

Well that shut me up. One of the reasons I wrote that post is because Epic Game's Unreal 4 engine is becoming more pervalent nowadays. If Epic could propel the engine further in terms of performance effeciency and network (such as cloud compute) via a tailor made "mini" OS it could rustle out competitors.

But I'm not a developer. I was mainly thinking along the lines of competition and marketing.

[DemonInvestor]

Well that shut me up. One of the reasons I wrote that post is because Epic Game's Unreal 4 engine is becoming more pervalent nowadays. If Epic could propel the engine further in terms of performance effeciency and network (such as cloud compute) via a tailor made "mini" OS it could rustle out competitors.

But I'm not a developer. I was mainly thinking along the lines of competition and marketing.

Most people buy their OS bundled to some machine be it console, computer or smartphone. Only as few funny ones go the extra mile to install any other OS. Which is why every OS developer is pushing buttons to get their OS bundled to machines. So i don't even see consumers as eager to switch for some possibly minor upsides.