The Epic Brutality Of Unchecked Capitalism (The Jimquisition)
Epic Games has not slowed down its sniping of PC games, acquiring an almost ridiculous number of exclusive releases. It threatens to starve the PC digital distribution market with remarkable aggression.
At the same time, the company has been accused of abusing its own workers, with people coming forward to speak of horrendously coerced overtime.
Epic is showing an ugly side lately, even as it provides a genuinely good deal to game studios. An under CAAApitalism, it's all perfectly allowable.
The Epic Brutality Of Unchecked Capitalism (The Jimquisition) (YouTube)
Comments (12)
Jim, FYI in Finland, ur vids have ads on them
Part of the reason I'm concerned about Tencent is that Steam is currently operating in a "gray area" within China, neither officially sanctioned nor officially banned. A company that had ties to the Chinese government could hypothetically get Steam kicked out of the "Great Firewall" almost immediately. As gamers, we have the capability to change the legal but unethical behavior of companies that we dislike. We are still their business, not their investors, try as they might to sideline us and cut off avenues of communication. But first, we'd need to show enough of an attention span to hold them accountable for longer than it takes for some new DLC or petty controversy or gaffe to steal our attention.
I'm of the opinion it's about time we built some guillotines. Figuratively.
...Jim is that a fuckin' Lift Off image at the 6:00 mark?
I think one thing that a lot of people don't seem to talk about is although the Epic Stores marketplace isn't organized very well, at least it's not filled with shovel-ware like steam's is. I really think all of these asset flip games have really hurt Steam's reputation since that's been the only news Valve and Steam have had recently
Jim more or less mentioned that in the video on how indie devs who give a damn about making good games do not want to compete with the voluminous shovelware that Steam has. It is the same reason why some indie devs release their games on the Nintendo Switch for it does not have that problem.
You can literally insert any giant corporation into this video and it would all apply the same. That's the real sad thing about this.
I seriously can see a worker at these abusive employment conditions, going postal. Shitike this happened to post workers in like the 90s because of similar abuses, and suddenly a worker snapped and shot up their work place. Someone's going to swan dive off a game dev's roof in front of everyone, or attack ppl with a weapon. The only thing that solved the "going postal" situation was better working conditions
Addressing the outro: Valve has created an exclusives in the past mainly for improving the attractiveness of steam. That game was Dota 2. It has been at the top of the steam charts for most of its lifetime and has been a crucial factor in Steams adoption in Southeast Asian and Chinese markets. Hopefully they use this approach for competing with Epic games in western markets as well.
Welcome to Rapture.
And I used to love Epic for games like Infinity Blade 1 and 2. What happened...
They've come a long way since Jazz Jackrabbit.