Without any flashy marketing campaigns or social media fanfare, Valve rolled out a routine Steam Client update containing a very simple line in the patch notes: “Improved Steam Client startup performance.”

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[–] 3 points 1 day ago (12 children)
  • [–] 18 points 1 day ago (4 children)

    In terms of graphical features, sure, probably. In my (admittedly limited) experience Source games tend to have much better performance and modding, which I find much more important.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Yeah, while the graphics capabilities of Unreal are about a decade ahead with dynamic occlusion culling, hyperrealistic lighting, a very very large set of libraries of 4k and 8k textures, and volumetrics...

    the downside is that Unreal Engine is difficult to optimize and harder to use with low level programming.

    I expect things to get much worse as they continue to slop-ify. They already advertised an "AI-assisted" build when they published the comparison.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago

    IDK about anyone else, but I'm kind of over hyperrealism in games at this point. Facial animations are still uncanny after multiple decades of trying to figure it out, but less realistic styles have looked great that whole time. Hell, I've seen pixel graphics with more expressiveness and emotion than some Unreal engine games. Sure the lighting and set pieces are pretty, but stuff like that doesn't do it for me nearly as much as good animations, good gameplay, and good story.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

    That's up to developers that use it. Though I haven't much experience with Valve's profiling tools it being closed source makes it harder for devs that want to rewrite any given feature

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago

    Yeah but the performance is mostly due to its age. It's much more limited in what you can do. BSPs are great for efficiency, but they're a huge pain to work with when creating a map. Unreal is leagues better to work with in just about every way.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    The licensing for source is better than unreal. Its only stipend it has to be published on steam. (Which you're most likely to do anyway) while unreal requires 5% royalities over 1mil gross revenue (outside of epic store, which lets be real... wont account for much)

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    FWIW Steam takes a 30% cut from sales

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  • [–] 12 points 1 day ago

    And for that cut they provide hosting, cloud saves, promotion, distribution, community support, workshop availability, DLC handling, and a store page. The cut is also much less than what larger publishing companies charge for less service. Self publishing is very feasible on Steam.

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