Epic 2019 Cross-Platform Online Services

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/epic-2019-cross-platform-online-services-roadmap

Epic going to release an asset to use their online services with unity. I assume it could get costly since you would have to be paying epic on top of AWS underneath the covers, even considering they say "Free to all developers". I'm curious is how this will effect unity's multiplayer roadmap.

 

Epic is probably just subsidizing the costs with money from Fortnite and their burgeoning online store in an attempt to generate a public image that will make more people amenable to using their other services.

 

At a glance, this seems pretty neat.

"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product."

In this case, more specifically, I suspect that our players are the product. The first feature on their list is cross-platform login, friends, presence and profile. I suspect that's the same login system as is used for their store... So my guess is that, in essence, they're allowing us to use their multiplayer infrastructure for free so that we attract more customers to their store, directly or indirectly. By logging into my game they get an Epic account, which reduces friction should they ever see something they like on the Epic store.

At the same time, it gets more developers into the Epic ecosystem, which means we're more likely to do paid business with them later. And while this service is free there's nothing to stop them building other things on top of it in the future and charging for those - for instance, in-app purchases aren't mentioned as a part of this specific offering.

Just in case this sounds like I'm being negative, I'm not. The service does sound neat. I would definitely consider using it, and I have no problem with Epic benefiting from that as well, as long as they treat my players well.

 

Seems like a sensible move. Steam already does this. And if they want to compete with Steam, they need to offer a similar service to Steam.

 

I think they're doing one better than Steam with this one. Unity's networking service left me cool to say the least, and Steam's requires you to, well, use Steam. If you wanted a cross-platform multiplayer solution, you quickly had to look into rolling your own or buying into some other software. Hell, they're even promising Unity integration.

Epic is making a series of moves here and it's going to be really interesting to see how they play out.

 

I don't believe so. My understanding is its possible to use SteamWorks without Steam.

Yup.

Reminds me of when they declared they were offering Unreal fully featured for free. I had no intention of using Unreal. But the move forced Unity to up their game as well.

Even if you have no intention leaving Steam, the presence of a competitor will force Steam to improve.

 

I've been working with it experimentally for a few months now. It absolutely is not.

edit: before somebody jumps in with a "well actually," I'm pretty sure bypassing it and using what is functionally a Steam backend emulator is possible, it will probably also get you hella sued.

 

I have players asking me for things like cloud saves and some kind of community play. I found most solutions too complicated for me, but this sounds promising. Adding cross platform makes game dev a lot more complicated than just offline play, so it would have to be lightweight and simple to integrate and manage to work for someone like me.

 

Cloud saves is my #1 favorite feature of Steam so that is a good move. Got a new PC, wiped it out and reinstalled my software and then remembered the new Battletech DLC just launched....are my saved games still there? Phew....cloud save ftw.

 

Those online services all look good on paper, will see how it turns out but Valve must be running meetings daily on what they are going to do with a competitor that realize what they need to do to compete with Steam unlike other publisher client launchers that really just do the basics.. I still say Valve get back to working on a Linux distro to flatten Windows (I mean it's already pretty flat in it garbage ux design) and Steam has always been good with gradients.. yeah make SteamOS not some couch S*** this time Valve, a fully blown desktop OS for the future

 

God, no. First, Valve isn't good enough at software to even make their own distro, as evidenced by their attempt and the fact it hasn't been updated in 11 months but also the garbage quality of the Steam launcher itself. Also, nobody's going to switch from Windows, the thing they know all their stuff works on, to SteamOS, the thing where maybe 10% of their game library will work on. On top of that, nobody's going to switch from the considerably more mature Linux distros out there to SteamOS because they already have an OS they're using.

 

I wouldn't say it's garbage. It's not the most modern piece of software, that's true, it's not the best in UX, that's also true, but the software itself works properly and does what they wanted to do and do it very nicely. Far from garbage.

LOL. Every year since 1992 is the year of the desktop Linux...

 

It does its job to the most bare minimum required. The store browser is so bad that I don't even bother with it, and the launching process itself still has loads of "this game is already running" issues or silent launch failures. It's honestly worse, from a functional standpoint, than Origin or even uPlay.

 

Well, I respectfully disagree then. Admittedly I only have 140 games in my Steam library, but it's working perfectly for me, never froze, I had no silent failures, the shop is good enough to surf through (although it could be better, that's true, but certainly not garbage).

Edit: BTW, I think many people make the same mistake and says Valve cannot make great software. Well they proved it otherwise, multiple times. I think you mix it up with their intention. They're ruling like a business, they're consciously choosing when to upgrade something.
IDK if it's too off-topic here or not, but it worth to watch this video about the mentality of Valve:

 

I find the steam client to be pretty crap. It's still not really clear to me what screen the back/forward buttons will take me to. The infinite scrolling store page never returns to where you have scrolled to when you go back from looking at a game. Odd and meaningless error messages etc.

 

Very interesting talk. I wonder how much Valve is still run like this in 2018? For example some glassdoor reviews make it sound like they don't pay top dollar anymore for employees.

Side note: 4000 LOC per day for one employee is insane!