Google is ‘crooked’ and a bully, CEO of Fortnite-maker Epic Games testifies in Play Store trial::Epic alleges that Google has been engaged in illegal price-gouging by collecting commissions ranging from 15% to 30% on in-app digital transactions.
I mean, he’s not incorrect, but there’s that saying about rocks and glass houses.
That’s right.
“Don’t decorate your glass house with polished rocks” or something.
Yes thats part of it. The full saying is “Don’t throw glass at your rock house, unless you want a glass moat.”
Oh no! One terrible corporation is saying the other terrible corporation is terrible!
Let me play a very sad tune on this really tiny violin I found.
You might think Epic is a terrible corporation. But their ability to affect meaningful change on your daily life is effectively non-existent. Unless you are making a living being a Steam evangelist or something.
But Google has a massive amount of control over the internet. Between search, Android, Maps, ads, Gmail, etc. The level of “terribleness” they can approach vastly overshadows even the most evil stances Epic could take.
So, this “both sides are bad” take is a bit ridiculous.
Pot calls kettle black.
I’m against epic. Fuck them, hope they lose the lawsuit.
You know a company sucks when the public decides to side with fucking Google instead of them.
Seriously, I actually agree with what they’re arguing in the lawsuit, but it’s one of those “worst person you know manages to make a good point” situations. You don’t want to actually agree with them, because you understand they have ulterior motives for having that position.
Despite Google being the bad guy in this, I certainly do not fucking want a shit-ass company like Epic to fucking win.
Actually Google wasn’t that bad in the past. They did a lot of good, open sourced a lot of projects, made a lot of Linux contributions, gave us AOSP, Kubernetes, Golang, Tensor Flow, etc.
They even had a moonshot program, working on a lot of emerging technologies, and were in general pretty cool. I think things started to go downhill when they announced Alphabet, back then they started to optimize their operations by minimising the costs and maximizing their profits. In general this made their shareholders pretty happy and the rest pretty sour.
So… When the name Google started only referring to the actual web services instead of everything the parent company was doing. Those types of things are still there, they’re just part of Alphabet (literally the old Google), which the media doesn’t really talk about anymore because the average person has no idea what that means, but they know Google.
They tried to beat Steam at their own game by paying studios a massive amount to release games exclusively on their platform. They brought “console exclusives” to fucking PC gaming and they can fuck off and eat shit for that.
They tried to entice gamers by giving them free copies of these games. They never, not once, tried to improve the quality of their application or give basic features that Steam has had for literally a decade. They don’t actually care about customer satisfaction or good quality of service. They went on a stupid spree of buying game studios and basically killing them, just like EA used to do.
(A good example is when they bought Rocket League, which had a perfectly functional Linux-native version, but when they bought it they were like “FUCK LINUX” and literally removed the existing Linux-native version of Rocket League. That’s when I stopped playing.)
They were in it to spend as much money as possible in an attempt to extract as much money as possible in a vain attempt to dominate the market. They failed at that miserably because these stupid chucklefucks don’t actually know how to run a successful business by being good to their customers. Being good to your customer categorically is not just giving away free shit.
And if that shitty narcissistic bullshit wasn’t enough, they also did dumb shit like buying the music site Bandcamp, doing literally fucking nothing with it for two years, and then selling it to fucking ad-men who immediately fired half the staff and started hollowing out the company.
I will never forgive them for killing bandcamp. The last place you could make sure a musician got 100% of the proceeds of buying their music (as opposed to Spotify which pays… $0.003 cents per stream. Also Bandcamp offered DRM-free fully lossless audio files (FLAC). There literally was not a better music service if you cared about 1. Paying artists fairly 2. Getting good quality audio and 3. Real ownership of the music itself where it can’t be taken from you by changing licensing deals.
Tim Sweeney can go die in a fucking fire and I hope that same fire burns down Epic headquarters with all the C-Suite inside. They’ve always been a shitty company who cared about money first, and customers and their employees dead last. That’s proof enough with their fucking idiotic spending spree followed up with selling stuff like Bandcamp and laying people off. They don’t even have sound business strategy, a bunch of fucking loser ass morons who failed upward.
don’t forget, devs from the rocket league also got laid off a few weeks ago
they bought a brazilian game company that made a very fun game and now they only do fortnite skins, they can just explode and the world could be a better place
edit:horizon chase turbo is the game, piracy it and play, it’s really fun, just don’t give them more money
I will never forgive them for killing bandcamp.
It ain’t dead yet, but it’s not looking good. I second this sentiment, however. I love Bandcamp and was so pissed when they bought it, only to be more pissed when they basically threw it away like a used napkin. Fuck Timmy Tencent.
$0.003 cents per stream.
So… #verizonmath means I have to ask: Is this supposed to be 3/1000ths of a penny per stream? Or 3/10ths of a penny per stream? You labeled the amount with both dollars and cents :(
They brought “console exclusives” to fucking PC gaming and they can fuck off and eat shit for that.
Honest question, why is this bad? I don’t understand.
Still nothing compared to what valve did. People here are either young or naive.
paying studios a massive amount to release games *exclusively* on their platform
Hate the studios then, no one forced them to sell on EGS but it looks like guaranteed income and bigger share of sales in exchange for timed exclusivity is a good deal compared taking a chance to have more sales on Steam… One in the hand beats two in the bush, you know?
They tried to entice gamers by giving them free copies of these games. They never, not once, tried to improve the quality of their application or give basic features that Steam has had for literally a decade.
Cut the crap, they have most of Steam’s actually useful features now, keep your opinion to yourself if you can only base it on your experience from years ago.
They don't actually care about customer satisfaction or good quality of service.
Valve doesn’t either unless they’re legally forced to.
They went on a stupid spree of buying game studios and basically killing them, just like EA used to do.
Eh… Valve does that too? Tons of devs see their creativity become useless when their studio gets bought by the big unorganized mess that is Valve. They release one game they were already working on and that’s the end of it.
but when they bought it they were like "FUCK LINUX" and literally *removed* the existing Linux-native version of Rocket League
Oh no, they didn’t want to waste resources maintaining a version of the game that less than 1% of players were playing on 😢 How dare they make a good business decision.
Being good to your customer categorically *is not* just giving away free shit.
They’re spending what would have otherwise been their marketing budget and it works, proof is you’re talking about it and that’s still publicity.
I will *never* forgive them for killing bandcamp. The *last* place you could make sure a musician got 100% of the proceeds of buying their music (as opposed to Spotify which pays... $0.003 cents per stream.
Funny how you care about proceeds split for musicians but you never mentioned that they take half the proceeds on games that Valve takes…
They've always been a shitty company who cared about money first
Yeah so… That’s what companies do, welcome to the real world kiddo, the alternatives are no different.
They dared shake the cage to take some market shares from Gaben and some people are angry.
Projection is a thing Epic. Be less Republican.
