Epic kills Online service for all Unreal Tournament games next month :(

[indigotyrian]

1 hour ago, Graf Zahl said:

No big surprise here, neither on the gaming nor the movie side. This all plays out the way it had to be. Everybody wanted to have their cake and eat it, too, and now the costs are exploding. Even though I have little sympathies for Steam, things were better before both game and movie studios got carried away by dreams of endless supplies of money(TM) from launching their own services, just having one or two independent ones, keeping the costs in check.

 

Now we got the same amount of content but 5-10 times the cost - and the inevitable result is removing titles from the library that take up space but don't bring in much revenue.

 

Keeping the games up for sale on Steam and GoG would've cost Epic nothing. Keeping the games up for sale on EGS would've cost Epic a pittance. Keeping a few Windows VMs up for the Unreal list servers would've been a rounding error compared to Fortnite money. This isn't about cost, this is a deliberate and ongoing attempt by media corporations (not just Epic, this is across the board, see Disney and Nintendo too) to kill access to old media to lock consumers into constantly consuming new media. In other words, harebrained attempts to make Line Go Up.

Edited June 7, 2023 by segfault

[roadworx]

51 minutes ago, Azuris said:

Discs are now also coming to a point, where the earliest one will start to die through Disc Rott.

Also even Games on the Switch are often worthless on a Cartdridge, as they got a day one Patch or you need a Download to get the full Game

heh, rott. like rise of the triad. hee hoo.

 

in all seriousness, if you're storing your discs well, then they're not gonna rot. at least, not for long-ass time.

Edited June 7, 2023 by roadworx

[Graf Zahl]

 

16 minutes ago, segfault said:

 

Keeping the games up for sale on Steam and GoG would've cost Epic nothing. Keeping the games up for sale on EGS would've cost Epic a pittance. Keeping a few Windows VMs up for the Unreal list servers would've been a rounding error compared to Fortnite money.

 

That's not how bean counters think. If keeping the games up they generate some cost, even if it's just tech support. And these types never like that, they are virtually incapable of factoring in secondary effects.

 

16 minutes ago, segfault said:

This isn't about cost, this is a deliberate and ongoing attempt by media corporations (not just Epic, this is across the board, see Disney and Nintendo too) to kill access to old media to lock consumers into constantly consuming new media.

 

This makes no sense at all in the movie business. A streaming service lives from a wide offering - narrow it down and you WILL lose customers and their revenue. So, since this harms their product, there must have been some costs involved that are higher than the projected losses from the diminished offering.

 

Quote

 

In other words, harebrained attempts to make Line Go Up.

 

Well, that it definitely is, no matter what precisely the motivation is, but I doubt it will work.
The negative PR from these actions will also cause some long term damage that needs to be factored in.

 

Edited June 7, 2023 by Graf Zahl

[Redneckerz]

No surprise that UT3X got canned - But it is games week, so chances are it gets a proper introduction. And if its FTP, sure, why not. Ill install it. I have a copy of the game on X360 and enjoyed it.

 

16 hours ago, Kinsie said:

Counterpoint: fucking look at it

 

 

It's a pile of half-preheated leftovers from Gears 1 development superglued together in a weekend to fulfil contractual obligations with a dying publisher.

I remember UT3 being a poster child for UE3 visuals being a relative early title for it - Was it not the first that did DX10 support? I remember a interview where they said this.

 

Anyway. It was good fun. Not as good as UT2K4 or UT99, but it was fine for me.

 

2 hours ago, Captain red pants said:

If this is a politics free zone then that means anti-woke culture war shit should go to.

Can we just leave that out of here?

[indigotyrian]

If I'm gonna be brutally honest I'm not going to touch UT3X even if it's completely free and available on Steam. I'm not giving Timmy Tencent any of my further coin, time, or attention.

Edited June 7, 2023 by segfault

[Murdoch]

The bottom line is, all online games have an expiration date. Sooner or later, player interest will dwindle, and servers will go offline. Just because you have a long running game like UT doesn't mean it's going to be online and available forever. It's good that community master servers stepped in for UT and UT2004, but I checked the latter last weekend and found almost nobody playing on any mode. Possibly cause I was checking at my midnight and there's no NZ servers and like one Aussie DM server. 20 year old online games are not likely to attract significant new players, so little really was lost from that perspective.

BUT, from a historical preservation perspective they should have been kept them for sale and Unreal, UT99 and I think even UT2004 has/had plenty of SP content that suitably interested people can look into. But again, anyone inclined to do so likely has their copies so arguably little was lost here too. Still, I would definitely have preferred they stayed available. As @segfault said, the cost of doing so would have been minimal, and let the community fill the blanks on server support which they already have. It would have been a simple and nice gesture for Epic to broadcast how to use these new community servers.

 

Ultimately it's an issue of conflicting perspectives. Most businesses ultimately see bottom lines, and care little for preservation. If it were not for the efforts of dedicated fans, so much gaming history like early console and arcade games would be forever lost. We're a bunch of guys and ladies play a 30 year old game still. We see the value in preservation. Epic, as an entity, doesn't, and probably nor do most gamers. We're in the minority. Most people who play get sick of a game and move on.

Edited June 7, 2023 by Murdoch

[indigotyrian]

I think it's worth noting that for Unreal specifically the thing they shut down were list servers, which are really just frontends that collate data from the actual community-run game servers to provide a central place to get server info for easy connecting. Running these is undoubtedly not as heavy as running an actual game server because you're not actually running a game, just keeping a list alive. Especially given the fact that these games are mostly forgotten about the list of servers is pretty small. These three games could've had their list servers running on a single AWS instance paid in full ten times over solely by a single fortnite whale.

Edited June 7, 2023 by segfault

[Redneckerz]

55 minutes ago, segfault said:

If I'm gonna be brutally honest I'm not going to touch UT3X even if it's completely free and available on Steam. I'm not giving Timmy Tencent any of my further coin, time, or attention.

They already got your attention by you posting how you aren't going to give them attention.

[Professor Hastig]

If I had to take a guess, the primary cost driver with such old games would be tech support.

The original Unreal engine has never been the most stable thing around. The game was originally released for 3dfx's Glide API, D3D and OpenGL were mostly an afterthought and at least in the early days did not work that well.

 

Last time I installed Unreal on a more modern system I had to fiddle quite a bit and even pull an unofficial update to get it to work right - where 'right' is still relative.

 

I have also heard that the engine is really built like a house of cards from people more familiar with the technical aspects, so a proper remaster sounds economically unfeasible.

 

Do the math on all that and delisting these games suddenly makes sense. If a large percentage of buyers needs help to get the games running the cost for that assistance may quickly eat up the generated revenue.

 

 

[Dark Pulse]

18 hours ago, Azuris said:

Pah, it was so much fun!

And all those great Gameplay Modes!

And you can easily just activate some Modifier to change it more to your Liking.

I liked Assault in 2k4, Onslaught, VCTF, and that was really about it. Double Domination was vastly inferior to original UT99 Domination, nobody played Bombing Run, and vanilla DM/TDM/CTF was ruined by that fucked weapon balance. Invasion was "okay" but there was a mod for UT99, Tally-Ho, that IMO did it better. I did admittedly have some fun with UT2004RPG, but that was a mod. There was also CTF4, but I'm a bit biased because I was part of that dev team and did like 2/3rds of the map conversions for it. :)

 

You can say I could activate some mutators, but that was up to the server - and the one I played week in, week out, did not have anything like that and was absolutely loaded with people who were just able to shut down entire matches because they had amazing hitscan skill. Again: If you can't get close enough to hit them in the first place, your Rockets and Flak Cannon shots literally do not matter, when they can just hit you with a Shock Rifle primary shot in midair that will not only damage you for 45(!) health, it will actually knock you back. Usually into a follow-up shot, because the rate of fire on it was way beefed up compared to UT99.

 

Throw in the fast weapon switching, and if you had good aim, you could do a Shock -> Lightning Gun swap in about a second and have a freshly spawned player dead in two hits, while keeping them all at a distance that would force them to have to be also a good hitscanner to really have a chance.

 

Sorry, but I simply had way more fun with UT99 and UT3. And it's not like I didn't play a lot of UT2004 - I put over two years into it. I gave it thousands of hours of my life, and that's still how I feel.

 

8 hours ago, segfault said:

If I'm gonna be brutally honest I'm not going to touch UT3X even if it's completely free and available on Steam. I'm not giving Timmy Tencent any of my further coin, time, or attention.

It's been pulled from Steam, so either it's not going to exist, or they're going to have it be an EGS exclusive.

 

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/6/23751392/epic-unreal-tournament-3-x-steam-removed-listings

Edited June 8, 2023 by Dark Pulse

[Captain red pants]

21 minutes ago, Professor Hastig said:

If I had to take a guess, the primary cost driver with such old games would be tech support.

The original Unreal engine has never been the most stable thing around. The game was originally released for 3dfx's Glide API, D3D and OpenGL were mostly an afterthought and at least in the early days did not work that well.

 

Last time I installed Unreal on a more modern system I had to fiddle quite a bit and even pull an unofficial update to get it to work right - where 'right' is still relative.

I'm not the most hardcore Unreal player but I've run it on a few different computers and OS's over the years and don't remember having much trouble. I think the most I had to do was grab the latest d3d11drv.zip from moddb and select the relevant files.
Not to get all "it worked fine on MY machine" or anything, but this is the first I'm hearing of unreal having a reputation for being hard to run on modern machines.

I don't think epic was supporting the game directly for years even when it was listed ether.

Edited June 8, 2023 by Captain red pants

[Professor Hastig]

I wouldn't say "hard to run" as in "does not work" but more like "does not work right".

For me it was the gamma correction not working with a fresh install and everything being far too dark.

 

I had to google for a solution and was pointed to the unofficial update which I installed, and afterward the problem went away.

Rest assured, though, that such a problem will prompt a good quantity of customers to either return the game for a refund or call tech support.

 

Needless to say, I have seen far worse, but Epic strikes me as the kind of company which values short term profit above everything else and rather delists an old game instead of investing a bit of work to make it viable again.

 

33 minutes ago, Captain red pants said:

I don't think epic was supporting the game directly for years even when it was listed ether.

 

It doesn't work like that. Some countries require you to provide support if you sell something.

 

[Captain red pants]

4 minutes ago, Professor Hastig said:

It doesn't work like that. Some countries require you to provide support if you sell something.

*sigh*

 

you know, stuff like this wouldn't even make the top 100 for 'problems our current system has' but the absurdity of sensible consumer protection insuring media like unreal unable to be brought with money because it may possibility some circumstances cause shareholders to earn $0.000001 less on their next quarterly review... it makes me tired.

[ReaperAA]

20 minutes ago, Professor Hastig said:

I wouldn't say "hard to run" as in "does not work" but more like "does not work right".

For me it was the gamma correction not working with a fresh install and everything being far too dark.

 

I had to google for a solution and was pointed to the unofficial update which I installed, and afterward the problem went away.

Rest assured, though, that such a problem will prompt a good quantity of customers to either return the game for a refund or call tech support.

 

Stuff like gamma looking wrong or other visual/compatibility issues which require community/unofficial patches to fix, is a common scenario with old games that don't have remastered versions.

 

And in case of Unreal and UT99, there are the OldUnreal patches (227 patch for Unreal and 469 patch for UT99) which should fix pretty much all the issues.

 

The problem isn't the cost of tech support afaik. If I remember right, Epic was sued by some regulatory body for having predatory practices in their games and/or games being marketed for children or something (again don't quote me for exact details). For some related reason, this made Epic remove Unreal games from digital platforms.... but not Fortnite -_-. I don't know why.

[Professor Hastig]

10 minutes ago, ReaperAA said:

The problem isn't the cost of tech support afaik. If I remember right, Epic was sued by some regulatory body for having predatory practices in their games and/or games being marketed for children or something (again don't quote me for exact details). For some related reason, this made Epic remove Unreal games from digital platforms.... but not Fortnite -_-. I don't know why.

 

That one's hard to assess - maybe it was just a pretext to remove unprofitable content. Or making the needed changes was considered viable for Fortnite but not for the Unreal games. With these companies it is often hard to understand how the decision making works and what kind of collateral damage they deem acceptable

[Azuris]

12 hours ago, roadworx said:

heh, rott. like rise of the triad. hee hoo.

 

in all seriousness, if you're storing your discs well, then they're not gonna rot. at least, not for long-ass time.

 

Yep, you are right.
But it is still a bit of an Gamble when you buy used Discs, as you don't know where they stored it.
I am also not sure if the Production has the same Quality as on its High, from my Experience, newer Floppies die faster than older ones, same with burned Discs i have around.
Netherless, i think i'll face the first commercial Discs die in my Life Time... but than i'll not care about... or i'll think about this Post as an old ass Man and curse myself haha
 

[No-Man Baugh]

1 hour ago, Azuris said:

 

Yep, you are right.
But it is still a bit of an Gamble when you buy used Discs, as you don't know where they stored it.
I am also not sure if the Production has the same Quality as on its High, from my Experience, newer Floppies die faster than older ones, same with burned Discs i have around.
Netherless, i think i'll face the first commercial Discs die in my Life Time... but than i'll not care about... or i'll think about this Post as an old ass Man and curse myself haha
 

I am mostly talking from a music CD perspective, but there's one real big advantage to optical discs; and that's ripping! (or "dumping" if it's a game)

 

While you'll need to invest in some extra storage, but that investment is worth it to me since not only do I get a backup of the music I bought, but I also get the convenience of putting that backup in anything I damn well please!

 

And all media is vulnerable in their own ways: the grooves of a vinyl can wear, the tape of a cassette can demag, even PCBs can suffer from trace rot, it's all a matter of entropy and the heat death of the universe. And don't get me wrong I love records and cassettes as much as the next guy (got the copy of Stairway to Gilligan's Isle to prove it), but even with those I would still like to invest in a analog-to-digital converter and backup those pieces too!

 

I'm sure that through enough transfers from SD card to SSD to flashdrive to m2 card the bit loss will come by the thousandth transfer; but by that point I would be be dead in the ground and it would be my great-great-grandnephew's problem. And I hope that we can all agree; you'd rather have the option to do this rather than forced to sit there while a company takes away many people's life work and with one-fell-swoop of the delete key SONY!!!

Edited June 8, 2023 by No-Man Baugh

[indigotyrian]

14 hours ago, Professor Hastig said:

That one's hard to assess - maybe it was just a pretext to remove unprofitable content. Or making the needed changes was considered viable for Fortnite but not for the Unreal games. With these companies it is often hard to understand how the decision making works and what kind of collateral damage they deem acceptable

 

I think it's pretty easy to understand personally -- media corporations (like all other corporations) don't want you to buy things, they want you to rent them, because that makes more money more stably. Unreal isn't a live service they can aggressively monetize and charge you for monthly access to, but Fortnite is.

Edited June 8, 2023 by segfault

[Sokoro]

21 hours ago, segfault said:

 

I think it's pretty easy to understand personally -- media corporations (like all other corporations) don't want you to buy things, they want you to rent them, because that makes more money more stably. Unreal isn't a live service they can aggressively monetize and charge you for monthly access to, but Fortnite is.

Exactly, reminds me of a similiarity with houses and many other things...