I agree entirely. The point I was making is that when stores don’t do this then it doesn’t just result in increased competition, it also results in reduced customer confidence and as a result lower perceived value of being on the store in the first place.
As a concrete example, lets imagine that I want to buy a spanner. I’d be willing to pay a heck of a lot more at Bunnings than I would be willing to pay at, say, The Reject Shop, because where The Reject Shop selects stock based purely on price I know that Bunnings won’t just chuck any ol’ thing on their shelves. The thing is that for all I know both shops sell exactly the same spanners*, but I’d happily pay more at Bunnings for no reason other than confidence.
*Bunnings would have a bigger range, but for all I know the one or two spanners at The Reject Shop are included in that range.
But yeah, I agree with that. And again, I think that the lack of competition makes it less important for Steam to do anything to protect their brand image.
It’s a good point. The better a game is the more likely they won’t show the Unity logo.
But it depends where Unity gets most its money from. AAA companies or amateurs.
If it wants to sell to amateurs then its a good strategy.
Yes there are a few, but UE4 is much harder to deploy something useful with. Unity is proven easier to use, easier to deploy.
I know people get surprised when there’s Blueprint, but Blueprint helps artists and already-competent developers do something. They don’t help the common noob. The common noob cannot operate Blueprints but he can download a giant pack of pirated assets and cobble something together to anger Jim Sterling with.
So as crap will never end, we can expect Jim to keep putting up vids about it. Unity is guilty of the crime of actually living up to it’s core mission of democratising game development. If that’s an image problem, it’s a good one to have in the long term.
What if…
Unity used their cloud system to allow all Unity games to be voted on and then when the Unity Logo pops up it appears with how people have voted on this game. Unity could even have a range of logos to reflect the rating or a dynamic logo, e.g. an outline that fills up to the level of votes.
There isn’t an asset flipped game that has sold any decent amount. Almost nobody ever sees them in the store. The only way you hear about them is if you go looking for exactly that, or you watch bad youtubers who like to make videos to laugh at them. And what kind of idiot buys a game that has only 2 reviews, both negative?
Nobody is getting stung by asset flips or bad games. It’s just a non-issue.
ARK: Survival Evolved. One of the worst games I’ve ever played. In some regulated future fantasy that game might not even be allowed on the store, yet 50k people are happily playing it right now.
ARK reached critical mass of users and income so therefore the ARK games will get better over time, or at least the developer will have decided to hire competent people. It’s a success story that happens, and I think it’s a fair dynamic if a little heavy on the luck side.
I don’t know. Haven’t played it, because it didn’t look like something that would interest me. The same studio also later released a game called “IS defense” which doesn’t even have a wikipedia page. The title might be using Unreal 4 as well.
The thing with bad unreal 4 projects is that they simply die without reaching completion, most of the time.
P.S. And yeah, ARK was widely criticized for having horrible performance.
ARK placed itself well, it filled a survival, creativity and multiplayer gap that a lot of games in the same space were doing very poorly at the time. It’s also pretty easy to roll your own servers and play with some friends. Aside from the insanely bad performance it had early on it did a pretty good job of satisfying users.
It still has serious drawbacks today despite its success. It’s also one of those neverending early access games - they even released DLC while still in EA with glaring gameplay problems still present.
It is a fun game, but I think these games in general produce a toxic community due to their gameplay nature. Rust is it’s direct competition and is made with Unity and wildly successful in all the same ways as ARK. In my mind that basically proves the whole point - put in work, make a good game, and it doesn’t really end up mattering what engine you use in the end.
Jim’s a hypocrite. He hates on people making half-assed games, but isn’t he just a half-assed critic? I’ve only watched a couple of his videos, but clearly he doesn’t have anything very useful to say. An actual, professional critic isn’t somebody who just makes superficial gripes about things nobody would otherwise know existed.
Obviously games like this were made for practice or fun. Maybe Jim just rags on stuff like this for entertainment value. I hope he doesn’t take himself too seriously.
This seems to be his way. I’ve heard other people do the same. We have a radio personality named Angry Patrick who does it. He will latch on to anything and rant wild and angry just for comedy sake.
