Games > All Gaming Chatter

Steam v Epic Games Store Furor

<< < (8/8)

tuberchimpy:

--- Quote from: wiser3754 on April 16, 2019, 04:40:39 PM ---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.

--- End quote ---

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:

--- Quote from: wiser3754 on April 17, 2019, 03:14:34 AM ---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.

--- End quote ---

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.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page