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Disney invests $1.5bn in Epic Games and announces major Fortnite partnership
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
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Disney in Fortnite, that sounds right. :D You can say about Fortnite what you want, I'm still jealous about the content, support and update they get.
It's a tale of two halves, literally.
(edit: crash course for the uninitiated: Fortnite was a great game, until it launched it's Battle Royale mode - Fortnite then effectively became this game mode, whereas the base game was left to die as Save The World.)
It's a mode that people paid money for, and Epic treat it as a second rate game even though without it, there wouldn't even be this behemoth that Fortnite has become.
Epic have come a long way from Epic MegaGames, and it isn't always a fairytale story I suppose.
Someone here on Lemmy highlighted that quite nicely when Valve dropped their Half Life documentary. Valve embraces their past. They cherish it. They still maintain their old games to honor their success.
Epic on the other hand completely wiped old Unreal titles from the relevant stores and don't give a fuck about supporting any of them. Which is a shame. Also I admire the tech behind of modern Unreal engines, so there are still geniuses at work who are likely passionate. Too bad they essentially only ride the Fortnite train outside their engine development.
That's a shame. I can sort of understand taking Unreal and RtNP from the storefronts from a financial perspective as a remaster is rumoured to be in the works, but UT99 - along with Quake III Arena - was probably influential in taking online multiplayer from the discrete deathmatch or capture the flag maps into what would be eSports and games as a service... as much as that makes me almost barf to say.
I've always quite liked Sweeney for being "old school" in his approach to game design and company direction, even if I didn't necessarily like how he went about it, but it has really pulled a hair out of my arse how he's gone off the rails in the last 6-12 months - complaining about needing more linux devs one month, and binning off hundreds off staff a few weeks later even though they're proper rinsing the Fortnite cash cow.
Great nod to the Valve documentary though, I enjoyed that far more than I should have.
It's also ironic in light of his history of loudly bashing linux and linux game development.
I can't think of anything good to say about Tim Sweeney.
Epic will never see greater heights than One Must Fall 2097
Ah, man of culture.
Omf2097 was the dopest thing ever to grace my 486 back in the day.
Battlegrounds later on tho... Yikes.
Which was only published by them.
OK, just the mention of the name and the main theme is now playing in my head, awesome 😄
Just in response to your edit, Fortnite was interesting on release but was likely never going to see vast popularity. The release of BR was really the only reason sales picked up, and at that point it makes sense to focus on the mode that’s vastly more popular.
I get that it sucks, but if it wasn’t for the pivot to BR full time, STW would likely still be where it is now, only in a dying game.
I know what you mean. I play rocket league and they sidelined our devs from working on updates for a whole year (without communication) which left the community thinking it was a UE5 sequel in the works... and then it turned out they were just making a kart style racing game to add to fortnite.
In the mean time, smurfs and bugs are rampant and they've started removing game modes and other features like item trading. -_-
But hey, at least I can make my car look like the mandalorian... if I pay for it.
similar things for fall guys
I don't even know which specific part MT went on to do. All I know is Epic decided to nuke nearly 3/4 of our levels because they couldn't fix playstation bugs or something (proceeds to fire 3/4 of mediatonic, including the guy who made the acclaimed promotional renders) and then canceled seasons. at least they're still working on creative and cosmetics
Talking about Rocket League, I'm still mad that the first thing Epic did after buying it was removing Linux support
Iirc they did make changes to the engine, which would have required paying an external developer to port it again. It's sad to see but it's the reality of native games without a Linux dev in-house.
What I'm more angry about is how they didn't make the proton version default, instead they kept the useless offline Linux native port. I've read too many comments thinking Rocket League online doesn't work on Linux.
But doesn't Unreal Engine have the option to compile a Linux version? Isn't that just a few clicks?
Yes, but especially for 3D games this often leads to worse performance and bugs, since the developer still has to be able to test the build. The big reason proton is so great is that Valve is responsible for fixing games on proton, while the dev just has to support a single (Windows) build.
Obviously some devs also fix a bug only found with proton, but it's something they optionally do, without taking responsibility for fixing all bugs.
If it was so simple for a game studio to release on all platforms, we'd have macOS x86 & macOS ARM builds too.
I get your point but at the same time it would also be easy for Epic to turn on AntiCheat support for Linux in Fortnite but they still don't for whatever reason
Iirc they also use BattleEye in addition to EAC, so depending on their implementation it might not be as simple (unless they put in some work).
Epic talks about anti-cheat on Linux not being good enough for them since they aren't kernel level. Which might be fair since Fortnite is big, altough most people probably won't change their OS while cheats are also available on Windows anyway. At the end of the day Fortnite is only one of many games which don't support anti cheat on Linux for whatever reason.
still waiting on when they add EAC to Rocket League randomly without proton support