Under the continuing fight to make more money from microtransactions, Epic continues to shoot itself in the foot, where at this point Apple is not taking anymore of this to the extent of barring them from any kind of development on their systems, including Unreal Engine. Fortunately for the Epic-purchased Psyonix, they already abandoned MacOS along with Linux, but sometimes developers see the value of other users while using the Unreal Engine and make a version for Mac. I feel like Epic would get along just fine dropping support as well and it wouldn’t look unusual coming from them. While developers often use not the latest version of the engine to make games for the sake of stability, and their ability to export a MacOS or iOS program would probably not be affected from that, it means that they can’t make use of the latest eyelash rendering and excessive motion blur that can’t be turned off. This in turn has the possibility of breaking Apple’s limited gaming userbase as well, but there are other engines, though porting mid-development is a problem.
I can’t really recommend Unreal Engine when there’s alternatives I’d rather use, like Unity or Godot, both perfectly capable of exporting to many platforms and not getting in a war about microtransactions. While I’d love to see Apple being taken down several dozen pegs, Epic also has to fall off their high horse. Epic is taking the stance of a pro-publisher company, that is they want publishers to make money, and whatever happens to developers happens. If a developer happens to also be the publisher, it doesn’t matter to them as long as they’re willing to accept handouts. As far as handouts, I still feel Epic would be fine accepting a waiver on fees that nobody else gets and they’d shut up as soon as that went through.
In the midst of this battle, they really want kids to scream at their parents to possibly write an angry letter at Apple and possibly Google to bring back their game. Or just buy a PS5 and only use it to play said game that won’t be taking advantage of the super raytracing hardware and whatever else. For all we know, Sony is signing something with Epic that we don’t know about. They prepared for this, with all of their ads and documents. They know how to exploit kids and their families, like any other megacorp. It’s time to “make a difference” by obeying the ironic call. They’ll still want the latest iPhone 6000 or whatever anyway, meme game or not. Their target audience is willing to listen to whatever trends are sold on YouTube ads that might somehow be promoting terrorism through some backroom campaigns, that is when they’re not instructing people to install viruses on everything.
It’s a meme game that went on for way too long and probably noticeably damaged the industry as far as integrity. There are better games. Even Fall Guys is better by default, even though it has microtransactions and a seasons system like ever other damn multiplayer these days, where you wouldn’t be faulted for thinking it’s a free-to-play game but it’s an up front initial cost, and I won’t be playing it anytime soon due to how Epic helped ruin the idea of trust in paid multiplayer games, alongside many other cases. I mentioned this last time, but problems in the industry persist and are hard to root out like any other aspect of society or corporate structure.
Even the collapsing Ubisoft, where apparently all of its corporate staff are turning out to be some kind of sex pervert criminals, is the main major player still riding Epic’s gold-plated proverbial phallus. When companies can be more evil than EA, a company still riding on annual sports games that make most of their money somehow through virtual card gambling plus whatever inane $20 and up add-ons they come up with for the Sims, that’s a sign. At the very least EA stopped locking down absolutely everything to their Origin system, but they still might for some games, resulting in that nested launcher thing that Ubisoft is still definitely doing, regardless of who’s paying them to sell their games on a platform. There’s still the idea where they do this to get anyone unwilling to deal with Epic to just buy directly through Uplay, but then you’re still dealing with Ubisoft. Maybe when I get a new computer I don’t care about ruining with 17 layers of DRM or the possibility of viruses stemming from a crack I found somewhere to get an extra 10 FPS, all in the name of playing some games I got from free on Uplay, I’ll install that program. But I still have yet to see actual value in the Epic store, and it’s been about a couple years. I was going to give it about five years to prove itself and not go out of business before then.