It only took Epic three years of R&D to add the single most basic ecommerce feature of all to their digital store front. Mazel tov, Tim Sweeney! You did it!
the fact that the EGS finally got its long-delayed shopping cart, just days after I'd finally resigned myself to the fact that it wasn't ever going to happen;
the fact that it look Epic Games three years to get this done; or
the fact that they're shouting it to the whole world on YouTube, instead of burying it in a blog post, or something.
No, really, who at Epic thought this YouTube video was a good idea? Are really they so out of touch that they think this is some of flex? They even call this a "giant leap" for Epic Games! The shopping cart itself seems to have been a "Friday night news dump" situation, because it wasn't there on Thursday; why drop the feature in the dead of night on a weekend, only to then make a point of drawing attention to its existence?
BTW, the like:dislike ratio on that video is currently sitting at 68:400 -- that won't be visible for too much longer, though, because YouTube, so clearly what Epic should have done is hold this announcement until YouTube removed the dislike count for them, to at least avoid the public humiliation of being so brutally, publicly ratioed. Why drop the video now?
Also, the comment section of the video is amazeballs:
Seriously, though, knowing that I can finally add both free games of the week to a cart, and then "buy" them with one transaction rather than two, is one for the win column, as far as I'm concerned. All I need now is for Epic to release a Linux-native client, complete with (Valve's) Proton compatibility layer, so that I can actually run some of those free games on my Pop!_OS PC, and I'll finally be able to play some of those games that I've payed absolutely nothing for, and didn't care about enough to buy on Steam.
I still have zero intention of paying money for anything on the EGS, incidentally. With Valve releasing their own Linux-based gaming system next year, and Epic only just having barely managed to add a feature to their store that's been standard on web stores since the 1990s (seriously, the 1990s), I somehow don't think that Valve are checking their rear view for EGS.
Sleep easy, GabeN. You're still definitely winning this one.
Where to start? How about with the fact that YouTube's mobile app hasn't been exhibiting this behaviour for mere weeks. YouTube has been pissing me off with this bullshit for months. Or with the fact that feeling like making users feel they "should pay $11.99 a month to subscribe to YouTube Premium just to get rid of the annoying pop-ups"is the entire fucking point of the pop-ups.
I tripped over this video on YouTube, and couldn't help but think of the recent Epic/Valve drama. The video, by Dan Olson a.k.a. Folding Ideas, was all about aspiring YouTube competitor VidMe, but made some pretty salient points about how a young, growing platform needs small content creators in order to add content and value to their platform, but that the interests of those small content creators diverge from the interests of the platform owners as the platform's popularity grows.
I couldn't help but think of Epic Games' pitch to indie developers, with revolves entirely around giving them a bigger cut of revenue, but proposes nothing by way of structural codification of those developers' actual needs vis-à-vis better long-term discoverability and promotion of their games. Epic Games are doing for video games exactly what VidMe was attempting in the online video hosting space: it's effectively providing a clone of Steam with no additional functional or structural improvements beyond, effectively, a tip jar.
The fact that Epic are already struggling with customer service, refunds, and other basic functions that any online competitor to a well-established digital storefront is expected to have in place at launch is...a bad sign, frankly. To paraphrase Olson's video, the most charitable reading is that Epic are unprepared, which is already not a good look.
Less charitably, it makes Epic look like grifters, deliberately exploiting vulnerable indie developers to grow their own market presence, all the while knowing full well that the promises of better discoverability and long-term partnership are hollow, since Epic's storefront isn't going to be any more beholden to any single indie developer than Valve's is, or Nintendo's.
Taking a break from their security- and privacy-related legal woes, Facebook is taking some time to relax, unwind, and be sued for basically fraud instead. Mazel tov!
Facebook's watch-time shenanigans were something that I'd actually heard about before; among other things, YouTubers have been complaining that Facebook does nothing to prevent videos from being ripped from YouTube and uploaded to Facebook, fully monetized, by parties other than the original creators; that Facebook counts as playtime videos that have automatically started, and been playing silently off to the side, from the moment the page can load them, whether you've paid any attention to them or not; and so on. This isn't #lyingwithstatisics; this is just plain lying.
I hadn't paid much attention to the issue until now, but it seems that others have finally taken notice. And not just YouTube creators, either, who have been relatively powerless until now to do anything which would influence Facebook's behaviour; the two platforms are rivals, after all, and FB have proven pretty conclusively that they don't care at all how much harm they do, as long as they prosper in the process. Even Google hadn't been able to do much to curb FB 's obvious bad-faith "efforts" to address the issue, which basically amounted to them saying that they'd look into it, and the doing not much of anything to actually address the problems.
One of my favourite YouTubers is a charming chap named Tom Scott.
Tom Scott has been, among other things, the UK organizer of International Talk Like a Pirate Day (as "Mad Cap'n Tom"), student union president at the University of York (as "Mad Cap'n Tom"), a prospective parliamentary candidate (also as "Mad Cap'n Tom"), and a TV presenter (not as "Mad Cap'n Tom," but alongside Colin Furze, who might just be slightly mad).
It's on YouTube, however, that he's really hit his stride, and my favourite video of his may well be this one, about the time be built an Emoji Keyboard. Yes, really:
At one point in this video, Tom is describing his approach to solving a thorny technical problem which might involve doing a bunch of research and then writing (and thus debugging) his own code, when he stops himself. "No," he says. "I run Windows. Someone will have done this before."
Sure enough, they had, and the resulting adventures in marrying AutoHotKey (a Windows program) with LuaMacros (an obscure scripting language used by hard-core flight simmers) is highly entertaining. It also serves to illustrate the true strength of Windows, and the reason that it's so dominant in the OS marketplace.
Windows has been the operating system, with at least an 85% share of the OS market, and sometimes as much as 95%, for decades. Basically, everybody runs Windows. No matter what you need to do, there's an app for that... or, to be more precise, there's a Win32 executable for any task you need to tackle.
This makes Windows enormously useful, because you can use it for anything. If you can imagine it, someone, somewhere, will have done it already; you don't have to reinvent the wheel, you just need to figure out what wheel they used, and then tweak it slightly to fit.
Windows 10's Universal Windows Platform has none of these advantages.
This is, I think, why Microsoft's push to freeze out Win32 applications, and limit Windows 10 users to UWP apps purchased only through the Windows 10 Store, is fundamentally doomed. Windows' legendary backwards-compatibility and enormous catalogue of existing applications is the platform's single biggest strength, and Microsoft is doing their level best to throw it all away, apparently in the hope of monetizing a user base who won't have a compelling reason anymore to run Windows. They're discarding their greatest competitive strength, and replacing it with advertising.
I get that Microsoft want to be Google, or Apple, or both, but their attempts to emulate their competitors aren't just inept -- they're fundamentally wrong-headed. Microsoft clearly have no idea how to be Google or Apple, and crucially, they're also forgetting how to be Microsoft in the process. The loss of their customers' trust and goodwill is problem enough, but this loss of identity may well prove to be more crippling. Windows without Windows' back-catalogue... just isn't Windows, anymore. Not really. Strip away Windows' huge library of existing applications, and it may as well be Linux.
Which is one reason why I'm seriously considering switching from Windows 7 to Linux, when the time comes. I'm still hoping that I don't have to, and I'm lazy enough to not want to, but I will, if Microsoft succeeds in stripping Windows of everything that makes it worth using. Because, at that point, we all may as well be running Linux.
