Friday, January 11th 2019
The Division 2 Skipping Steam, Available Only on Ubisoft and Epic Stores; System Requirements Outed With Radeon VII
The Epic Games Store with its aggressive developer earnings program is drilling away at Steam's already-installed hegemony as the PC gaming platform of choice. A mere 12% royalty for the storefront means much more money goes back to the developers, and the more copies are sold of a given game, the bigger the profit will become. This is why some games have already even left Steam's shores to find a home on the Epic Games Store, and now, a AAA title in The Division 2 will be skipping Steam entirely. With launches on Ubisoft's own store and an 88% cut on the Epic store, Ubisoft will be looking to maximize their profits.
That part of the story is done; Ubisoft has also outed the system requirements for the PC version of The Division 2, which, for a minimum of 30 FPS at 1080p, will require either an AMD FX-6350 or Intel Core I5-2500K CPU, 8 GB of RAM, and 2 GB of video RAM on an AMD Radeon R9 270 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 670.
For 4K resolution and 60 FPS gameplay, you'll need the best hardware money can buy, naturally: CPUs see a bump to an AMD Ryzen 7 2700X or Intel Core I9-7900X paired with 16 GB of system RAM and a whopping 11 GB of VRAM, paired with the processing chops of either an AMD Radeon VII or Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 TI. I'd say that there's a story here in the making: does Ubisoft know something we don't with these GPU recommendations for 4K gaming? Can Radeon VII really offer a comparable gameplay experience to NVIDIA's RTX 2080 Ti at that resolution, or is the required VRAM memory the only metric that means the Radeon VII is the only actual AMD graphics card that even qualifies for this resolution?
That part of the story is done; Ubisoft has also outed the system requirements for the PC version of The Division 2, which, for a minimum of 30 FPS at 1080p, will require either an AMD FX-6350 or Intel Core I5-2500K CPU, 8 GB of RAM, and 2 GB of video RAM on an AMD Radeon R9 270 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 670.
For High settings and 1440p resolution at 60 FPS, the recommended specs take quite a bump: an AMD Ryzen 7 1700/Intel Core I7-6700K CPU paired with 16 GB of RAM and 8GB of video memory on an AMD RX Vega 56 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070. If you're rocking a 144 Hz screen with that particular resolution, you'll likely need NVIDIA's top of the line RTX 2080 Ti or the upcoming AMD Radeon VII - we'll make sure to try and see whether that is true or not come the games' release.
For 4K resolution and 60 FPS gameplay, you'll need the best hardware money can buy, naturally: CPUs see a bump to an AMD Ryzen 7 2700X or Intel Core I9-7900X paired with 16 GB of system RAM and a whopping 11 GB of VRAM, paired with the processing chops of either an AMD Radeon VII or Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 TI. I'd say that there's a story here in the making: does Ubisoft know something we don't with these GPU recommendations for 4K gaming? Can Radeon VII really offer a comparable gameplay experience to NVIDIA's RTX 2080 Ti at that resolution, or is the required VRAM memory the only metric that means the Radeon VII is the only actual AMD graphics card that even qualifies for this resolution?
62 Comments on The Division 2 Skipping Steam, Available Only on Ubisoft and Epic Stores; System Requirements Outed With Radeon VII
These programs are just ridiculous and growing in numbers. I won't be bothered to run them all.
I guess programs like launch box and the like will end up growing even more popular when these start increasing in even greater numbers.
All I have to said.
Joking aside, launchers is why I was a GOG exclusive when I bought my games.About the same as it cost them to get the "2080Ti or Radeon VII" statement ;)
This would provide cross-store pay OOB and make stores compete to get publishers/titles on board.
I'm personally much more concerned about the game that the devs actually put out. With The Division 2 I want to see how clean it is with the bugs and exploits early on, since that was a major major issue with the first game. I also want to see that they've improved the game over the first and they aren't just cashing in with another game in the same engine that should really just be DLC for The Division, but is sold as The Division 2 as a cash grab. I haven't seen anything pointing to that being the case yet, but I have seen Ubi do it before. So at least for me I might wait wait until a month or so after release to see how these things turn out rather than pre-ordering or jumping on release day. I got my playtime's worth out of The Division (1), but it could have been sooo much better with just a little more work.
You can launch your games from there and it will keep track of how much you have played each one, but I very rarely do/did that.
Long story short, if there has to be a game manager, this is how I believe it should be done - opt-in by default for everything (and yes, that includes cloud saves).
On the other hand, competition is good and may lead to more money ending in the developers' hands, which in turn will hopefully will lead to better, more polished games in the future.
If you're a GOG - only gamer this topic wouldn't even be on your radar, would it? And if you think its smart to be so tied to Steam for your gaming... that is probably even more damaging than having all those storefronts to gaming as a market. Its very healthy that Valve is getting competition in this space. Yes, they are all individual publishers, but what was Valve exactly? Exactly.
One final note, if you're annoyed with tons of icons...
Technically, GOG is also a publisher store for CDPR, in much the same way as Steam is a store for Valve.