Reddit – MMO Fallout

Epic Founder Tim Sweeney took to Reddit last week to clarify a few things regarding the Epic Store and what role Tencent has to play in it. The original poster in the thread laid down a number of accusations against Epic and Ubisoft, among others, over questionable practices. Included in the list was the allegation that Epic is collecting data to hand over to its “parent company” Tencent and thus the Chinese government.

“Their TOS states they have the right to monitor you and send the data to their parent company. And who is Epic’s parent company? The Chinese dev that’s known for spying for the Chinese government. Tencent. The same Tencent who’s working hand in hand with the Chinese Government to work on tools to spy on their own citizens. Escentially Epic Games is owned by the Chinese Government.”

Sweeney showed up later in the comments to refute that Tencent is a parent company, as Sweeney himself is the controlling shareholder. Tencent owns a minority investment in Epic Games and does not have access to any customer data. He posted in the same thread responding to a user asking if the Epic store will have an offline mode, confirming that it will be released in “early 2019” for games that are playable offline.

Comment from discussion Ubisoft needs to stop with this Always Online bullshit; Epic Games Store is literal Spyware and worse..

https://www.redditstatic.com/comment-embed.js

Source: Reddit

Sony Accidentally Leaks Game Stats For Top PS4 Titles

Like most digital storefronts, Sony likes to keep its actual sales numbers hidden from the general public. That task became a bit harder this week when a promotion meant to celebrate player achievements in their games accidentally made public more data than was intended.

Sony’s My PS4 Life is a fun way of showing off your achievements on Playstation, it tells you how many hours you’ve invested, your top games, and even your rarest achievement and how many other players have it, among other details. What it also made public, however, was the number of players who had earned certain achievements. Coupled with the factor that Playstation displays the percentage of players who have earned said achievement, and it’s pretty easy to get a rough estimate on the number of people who have purchased/played said game.

The website Gamstat has set up to turn those stats into general figures, and the results aren’t all that surprising. Top played games on the PS4 include Grand Theft Auto V along with the last four iterations of Fifa, Minecraft, Call of Duty, Rocket League, and Fortnite. Fallout 76 has pulled about 407,000 players on the console.

The data isn’t exact science, as PS4 trophy figures around up to the .1%, but it does give a good idea as to how each game sold.

(Source: Reddit)

Runefest 2018: Jagex Cans The RunePass

I talked about the Runepass back in July and at the time I was hesitant to give any score to the feature given it was essentially in the state of a pilot program. While I noted that it did somewhat reduce the Dailyscape issue that plagued prior limited promotions, the pass just wasn’t worth it especially when compared to the competition. The Runepass was $10 and compared to other games that have released such a mechanic, it offered very little not only in rewards but in time, lasting about two weeks when most others run for a couple of months at a time and give a lot more for the same cost, if not cheaper.

The response from the overall community was also pretty negative, with players expressing doubts towards Jagex’s promise that a Runepass would mean less cash shop promotions, with many believing that Jagex would just opt to do both.

Well Jagex promised that they would go back and look at the Runepass before offering an update, and it looks like the Runepass has been shelved along with expansions. In a post on the RuneScape Reddit, Jagex stated that while Runepass was apparently successful commercially, it will not be coming back in the foreseeable future.

Before we try doing RunePass again we need to put a little more time and thought into it. For the time being, at least, those energies are better invested elsewhere, and our focus is better placed on instead ensuring the delivery of great game updates for 2019.

(Source: Reddit)

Valve Terminates Insel Games (Wild Buster) Over Fraudulent Reviews

Valve today announced the immediate termination of its dealings with Insel Games. According to the news post, Valve employees discovered that Insel was using accounts to post fake positive reviews for their titles.

It has been recently reported on Reddit that the publisher for this game, Insel Games Ltd., have been attempting to manipulate the user review score for their titles on Steam. We have investigated these claims, and have identified unacceptable behavior involving multiple Steam accounts controlled by the publisher of this game. The publisher appears to have used multiple Steam accounts to post positive reviews for their own games. This is a clear violation of our review policy and something we take very seriously.

For these reasons, we are ending our business relationship with Insel Games Ltd. and removing their games from our store. If you have previously purchased this game, it will remain accessible in your Steam library.

This affects all of Insel’s titles on Steam, including Wild Buster and Guardians of Ember, as well as The Onion Knights: Definitive Edition. The controversy sparked after an email emerged on Reddit allegedly from the CEO of Insel Games showing the company pressuring its employees to buy the game and leave fake positive reviews.

(Source: Steam)

Paragon Might Be Unsustainable and Fortnite Killed It

There is no doubt that Epic Games has been drawing in the players and the money with the release of their PUBG-esque Fortnite Battle Royale. While Epic refuses to separate the two modes, it did recently announce that Fortnite had drawn in a combined forty million downloads. While Fortnite has been a runaway success, it looks like the game may have sealed the doom of another Epic product.

In an open letter to the Paragon community, Epic admitted that updates have been slow and the title’s inability to draw in players with each new updated has raised cause for concern. The update notes that over the coming weeks it will be looking at Paragon and determining how to move forward with updates.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be figuring out if and how we can evolve Paragon to achieve growth and success, and trying some things internally. In the meantime, Paragon’s release cadence will be slower.

Epic Games admits that a fair number of members of the Paragon team have jumped ship and moved over to Battle Royale and that the title may not reach what Epic considers to be a sustainable game.

Here inside Epic, we’re talking about the future of Paragon in pretty much the same terms as you’re talking about it. The core challenge is that, of new players who try Paragon, only a small number continue to play regularly after a month. Though Paragon has evolved, no iteration has yet achieved that magical combination of ingredients that make for a sustainable game. (As an aside, the problem isn’t marketing or how to make money with Paragon. We have good ideas that would solve those problems if we can find a way to make Paragon grow.)

The entire post can be read at the link below.

(Source: Reddit)

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