"Giving away free games seems counterintuitive as a strategy, but companies spend money to acquire users into games," said Sweeney. "For about a quarter of the price that it costs to acquire users through Facebook ads or Google Search Ads, we can pay a game developer a lot of money for the right to distribute their game to our users, and we can bring in new users to the Epic Games Store at a very economical rate.

Good for Epic.

"And you might think that this would hurt the sales prospects of games on the Epic Game Store, but developers who give away free games actually see an upsurge in the sale of their paid games on the store, just because their free game raises awareness. And it's so much that often developers, when they're about to launch a new game, come with us wanting to work closely on a timed release of a free game, just to drive user awareness of their next game. That's been an awesome thing. And it's been by far the most cost effective aspect of the Epic Games Store."

Good for developers, that have decent enough games.

"We spent a lot of money on exclusives," said Sweeney. "A few of them worked extremely well. A lot of them were not good investments, but the free games program has been just magical."

Exclusives, of course this is the expected result, because that how game publishing/marketing works. People in this thread talking like publishers make a lot of money on 80% of their released games. (<-- it's not, in case you did not get it. ) I think it's just Tim Sweeney's way of saying, we will adjust our approach in the future, like what any publicly traded CEO would do.

very typical for people that never even run or host their own server from data center or even cloud service.

live streaming is worse in bandwidth consumption compare to youtube with same resolution input to output. Like youtube can do whatever they like to keep the outgoing low even if you encode according to spec. But streaming with the demand of like 4~6s delay their 2nd pass to try lower the output bitrate is just not gonna be as good as youtube. That's why twitch still don't have 4k stream, they have new beta programs thanks to newer codec on newer GPU, as otherwise their data center is gonna get crushed hard.

10 non-skippable ads before you play? and stop in middle of boss fight to sell you continues?

The source interview section to the time stamp: https://youtu.be/4b_o5ueZRF0?si=IZzMan9sVQOV4Qq6&amp;t=4797

Main short comings(for the parts I know and working with):

• There are many inter-connected features that works best if you use them together, so for example, if you want to use Lumen but don't want to use Nanite you can, but the performance would be worse since the virtual texture part of rendering lumen scene is a lot more efficient when you use Nanite geo. Similar with VSM.
• If you upgrade project from old UE4, there is A LOT you need to touch on. It's like a ticket generator if you upgrade.(but yeah, do a cross gen engine upgrade would do that for you.)
• TSR(their temporal super resolution upscaler) still not really working out of the box and most I know just use FSR/DLSS/XeSS
• many features are moving target BUT was talking point during recent releases. ie. PCG, Substrate, Smart Object, World Partition(specifically the Data Layer part), even VSM just out of beta since 5.2(most current released UE5 games using version <= 5.1, Immortals of Aveum would be the first to upgrade to 5.2 as far as I know.)
• because of the above point, the CVars to control features can be changed/deprecated when a new release goes out. So you can't "decide" your quality presets if you are still banking on upgrades.

Let me talk about the 2 things you mentioned:

• networking, this part is actually the "better" side, it's a bit harder cause since UE4.26 it gets a lot of Fortnite's improvement into UE-main. So if you are doing shooter even with a lot of players it's actually better than most other engine on the market. But if you want to do things like say, fighting game or decouple input/game thread for lower latency, or if you have your own "space ship battle" with custom physics body not a humanoid capsule. Then you have to implement your stuff.(by ref how CharacterMovementComponent is implemented.)
• Physics, many people talk shit about ChaosPhysics, while it might not be as good as some other current industry standards for single player game, it will change the landscape of multiplayer game once it's performance is up to par. The reason is ChaosPhysics is designed with networking in mind. So, yeah, if your game is player interact destruction heavy(ie. big enough debris don't disappear), you need a more expensive server to run. There are less physics based multiplayer game cause the old implementations are all "bad". (just see what Battlefield or Halo has done for the past 2 decades, the slight desync and player/vehicle fly to the moon is staple of bad implementation.)

Well, I switched to DDG after last time someone said it's doing a much better job then Google's now. So I've switched all my defaults to DDG. On the contrary, users don't mind which search engine, as long as they give proper results efficiently.

Google's search result is honestly worse atm.

With how games work these days, having just the disk is pretty much useless if the publisher decides to delist or discontinue the game from platform, because:

• patches and updates don't come with disk form anymore.
• many games that requires online authentication to play won't be available to keep playing if their account service is down.
• games go on sale with steady rate most of the time(except nintendo), for bargain bin deals you would probably find the game on humble bundle or gog.
• you often have the good games that release "better" remake version over and over anyway. Note, I know people sometimes prefer the original version, but not everyone is on the same page and it hugely depending on the dev/publisher for the newer version.

Now let's describe the cons:

• in many countries, breaking DRM is illegal. So even if all you want to do archive, you can't make a decrypted copy. That's why homebrew etc provides the key/dumper for you to do such at your own risk. IMO, it's safer(INAL) to download pirated iso/rom compare to doing your own dump. And, archiver actually tried to keep a post patch version before store is closed down(see wiiu store close example), the disk version is not a viable option anymore for archiver.
• storage up keep, physical things require storage space. I still have like 3 large shipping box for my older gen(ps3/GC/Wii/X360 games) I will probably donate them to library or something and keep the only ones I wanted to keep.
• console part cost, the BD drives are often first point of failure, then HDMI connectors. Cause well, moving parts are easier to break and harder to QA. PS5's 2 versions gives a good example how the disk affects the look, weight, etc. Not to mention, they are a lot slower then SSD and you are required to install all that anyway.
• developer/publisher/platform see nothing for used game sales. It sounds like huge shill talk but let's be honest, they want to make a living, if you are not supporting your favorite developer they will have to offset the cost by doing shit you all won't like. ie, mtx, subscription service, selling analytic data, selling the studio to shit publisher that push worth practice, platform raise price to meet target projection. Buy/sell used game only helps that service owner(gamestop/ebgame/bestbuy, not the community.)
• did I mention switching disc just to play game is a PITA, and if your case is the modern garbage version, remember those plastic break down more easily and you would have to buy new case to hold your disc.
• environment waste for all the manufacturing, packaging and shipping. It's honestly not worth that in modern era if you give a fuck about how future generation will live.

Master as in the production term like gold master. He stolen the first prints before it hits the shelf, thus a "master" thief.

Can't read if reject all cookies, so I will just skip then.

I don't like the down vote button so I will spare you with that. Yes, they can still put it on their resume but what the employer did is scumbag move cause translation is a hard job to do well and good translator can make good money doing various job. In creative industry, credit listed is a big thing for anyone that starting out. If not so, why does movie, anime, game that have those long scrolling opening/ending credit?( A xxxxx Film, Directed by xxxxx, Produced by xxxxx.) For a video game, there is no "screen time" limit like movie/anime do, so not including the team and only the execs is like slapping those that worked really hard for the project to make it a better game.

Repost my comment why gaming laptop is a scam(can't copy comment link cause the link failed for me):

gaming laptops are pretty much scam anyway, as person "once" fall for such scam.

• they are really heavy, not really good with travel.
• they are also power hungry, might be less than your actual tower rig, but significantly more than common "business laptop"
• the battery won't last with degradation where you constantly plug it in.( to gain the boosted frequency where you can play games at higher settings/frame rate)
• your upgrade path is very limited and they won't have the parts after like 2~3 years.(so anything broken you have to try find it on ebay/amazon/aliexpress)

for portable gaming during travel, your best choice is consoles. So switch, steamdeck, heck, even PS4 slim is better than gaming laptop.(hopefully PS5 pro/slim is made into form for easier box/travel format.)

After reading all the comments, I'm just gonna say that if you don't allow kids to tinker and do their thing, they will learn a lot slower and your "investment" will be left mostly unused. (age range proper hardware/OS of course.) The school policy is not doing the kids a favor, it's a waste of time and tax money that you cultivate a generation of people get used to chrome book and google apps. That's the ultimate purpose for school license being cheaper.

I just cancelled my discord nitro(whatever the previous highest tier annual plans) in May because as a paying subscriber, I still get those intrusive ads that pops above your user corner and won't go away. You are only given options to "try it" "maybe later" and no "not interested", also no button to close it.

The ad client probably pay then significant amount of money that it's worth the risk to piss off paying users.

I sent my support ticket and got lead around the hoops and need to send the request to sort of their internal voting board, which at that point I just gave up and cancel my subscription. If I got spammed more I will probably just go back to web interface and use ublock to start blocking elements. And if I can't I probably just gonna say bye. (the campaign was over, there are no newer spams, but they lost my annual sub pretty much forever as I don't think discord is gonna "be better". )