I can’t seem to find that one comment explaining the issue with them…
But for the sake of promoting conversation on Lemmy, what’s the issue with Epic, and why should I go for Steam or GoG?
Note: Piracy is not an answer. I understand why, and do agree to a certain extent… But sometimes, the happiness gained by playing something from a legitimate source is far greater 🥹… coming from someone who could never ever afford to purchase games, nor could my parents… Hence I’ve always played bootleg, or pirated games.
TL;DR
What’s wrong?
- Their launcher has a terrible UI AND UX.
- They make exclusive deals with studios to prevent other platforms from getting games. (Someone mentioned that Steam did the same thing in their infancy. Also, I have another question; why is it ok for Sony and Microsoft to make exclusive games for their consoles but not ok for these PC platforms to do so?)
- They have been invested in by a Chinese company, Tencent. (Someone mentioned that it isn’t that big of a deal, but idk.)
- They are actively anti-linux for some reason.
Epic cons:
- Filled to the brim with DRM, at the point where you can’t even launch many singleplayer games offline
- Actively against linux, for some fucking reason
- Bad launcher (but this one is no biggie, you can and should use Heroic launcher instead of the official one)
- Bad store in general compared to steam
- Ties with Tencent (super anti-consumer chinese state-owned megacorp)
Epic pros:
- Free games
- With coupons prices can get VERY low
- When it opened I heard the percent they take from game devs was lower than the other stores (not sure if it’s still the case and tbh if it ever was)
Steam pros:
- Pushing linux gaming like their life depends on it
- Generally correct towards the consumer
- Huge store and many information, from the game store pages to the workshop
- During sales prices are good
Steam cons:
- Drm
- Bad official app Ux and messy ui
Gog
I don’t know anything besides the fact that it has drm-free games and that it’s owned by CDPR (the guys who developed the witcher series and cyberpunk)
I personally purchase my games on steam, since I think their contribution to linux gaming is crucial for linux to go mainstream
Choose what you will knowing this. If someone else wants to add something to this list you’re welcome to do so.
Valve is what happens when someone who’s not just outright fucking evil invents a money printing machine
Yeah, and somehow they managed to invent like 90% of all “evil” MTX and DRM in the process, take a bigger cut than competitors and actively reject having a returns policy until pushed by regulators and competitors, all the while being super not evil.
It’s a fine line to walk, that.
somehow they managed to invent like 90% of all “evil” MTX and DRM in the process
Having worked with DRM systems since long before Valve existed, I’m reasonably certain this is just plain false.
Yeah, and I don’t remember Half-life being the game that introduced the world to horse armor.
The user is being hyperbolic, but is referring to their substantial role in popularising loot boxes, as well as the marketplace that has spawned a real gambling industry around it. Kids gamble on 3rd party sites for marketplace prizes and Valve does very little to interfere.
Not to mention that Steamworks DRM is practically non-existent anyways (and that it also wasn’t necessary to use, it’s rare, but some games just don’t protect their game with any DRM).
Blending the storefront with a DRM solution? No, that was them.
That’s their entire call to fame. They first turned their auto-patcher into a DRM service, then they enforced authorization of physical copies through it and eventually it became the storefront bundled with the other two pieces. If somebody did it before them I hadn’t heard of it, but I’ll happily take proof that I was wrong.
None of the pieces were new, SecuROM and others had been around for years, a few publishers had download and patch managers and I don’t remember who did physical auth first, but somebody must have. But bundling the three? That was Steam.
I said not outright evil, not good.
Hah. Fair enough.
I mean, I’d say that’s probably true of most companies making videogames. People are really hyperbolic about this stuff.
I mean, do you have any good examples though? Because most of those things are blatantly false and/or happened 9+ years ago. If that’s that’s the worst you’ve got then Valve is must be amazing.
Loot boxes were, if not invented by them, definitely popularised.
and/or happened 9+ years ago
That was like 15 years ago hahaha
It’s not a trend they abandoned - Counter Strike is still a huge source of deceptive digital item trade. It also spread to Team Fortress 2 in the meantime.
Didn’t TF2 have it first?
I made soooo much money off’a TF2. Bought an index!
They straight up don’t want people reselling games they own. They could do it easily, they just don’t want to.
Yeah, Steam does cool things, but the moment you start thinking that very huge corporation somehow cares about you, you’re doomed. Companies don’t care about people, they care about numbers. Especially huge companies like Valve.
I don’t know if many companies allow you to resell your digital goods in the first place (other than, funny enough, Valve themselves who let your resell digital Steam assets).
Valve’s DRM prevents the resale of physical PC games, as Steam codes are single-use. They singlehandedly killed the used PC games market.
See what I mean? That’s nuts. That’s a nuts sentence right there. Imagine having a brand so sticky that people go "but did they do something really bad recently?
For the record, Valve’s games run loot boxes today. Like, right now you can buy loot boxes from Valve. CS gambling is also still happening, although I’m not into it enough to know how much better it is these days.
They invented the battlepass, too, that’s a Dota 2 thing. Hey, remember how people refer to buying cosmetics for games as “buying hats”? That one’s from TF2. Oh, and technically the trading cards you get for purchases are NFTs, since the term doesn’t require the tokens to be stored in a blockchain.
And then there’s the dev side. Everybody was super pissed with them on that end while they were figuring out greenlight processes, which… I’m not sure if they did or people just kinda got used to what’s there. And if you’re around devs you’ll know that Valve’s whole deal is to tell people what to do and give them zero support to do it. And there are other horror stories about shadowbans and Apple-style manual rejections and delistings and stuff, but at that point you’re getting more into inside baseball and I wouldn’t expect it to be shaping public perception at all.
Well I’m not going to be eternally mad at Coca Cola because they put cocaine in their soda a century ago, there’s got to be a cut-off point somewhere. If I’m going to hate them it’s because of the things they are doing right now. Valve over the last eight years has been pretty well-behaved considering their market position gives them the capacity to be way worse. There’s nothing stopping them from
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buying up exclusivity contracts
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making a DRM that actually functions
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developing only proprietary software
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making their games pay-to-win
I will be eternally mad at Coca Cola because they took the cocaine out of their soda a century ago.
Oookay, so we’re all cool with MTX cosmetics, loot boxes, battlepasses and lacking full ownership or transferability of games, then?
I’m just trying to figure out if the things Valve is doing right now are fine for everybody or just for Valve.
Which again, is my problem. I’ll keep saying it, because having to argue for reality makes it sound like I’m a hater. I like Steam, I think Valve games are generally great (and it’s a shame they’ve stopped making them), and I think Valve’s management is a good example of many of the pros of a private company (look at Twitter for all the cons).
But holy crap, no, man, they are THE premier name in GaaS. Everybody is taking their cues from Valve, Epic or both in that space. Their entire platform is predicated on doing as little as possible and crowdsourcing as much as possible to keep the money machine churning. Corporations are not your friends.
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There has to be a cut off somewhere. Are you still pissed off at Ford for being pro-Nazi in the 30s?
I’m pissed with ford for single handedle fucking our infrastructure, can’t live without a car now. But anyway things that company’s do 10 years ago or 90 stick around
Does Henry Ford being a nazi impact your purchasing decisions now?
If he were still alive and running the company I do think that subject would probably come up, yeah.
But honestly, it’s not a cutoff problem. Steam changed how games are marketed forever. I don’t like the ways that went. I don’t like that they killed physical media. I don’t like that they killed ownership.
Those things are still happening. It’s not over. They are still pushing that process. Today.
And then there’s the MTX they’re still pushing today. The loot boxes they’re selling today. The race-to-the-bottom sales. The UGC nightmare landscape. It´s all in there right now.
And again, I am cool with that being the world we live in. I’m even much more friendly to many of those concepts than the average gamer, I just don’t pretend Steam is not doing those things.
I don’t hate Steam. But Steam’s vision for what gaming looks like is not mine. I don’t particularly like it and I absolutely need a viable alternative to exist alongisde them indefinitely.
But what does that have to do with comparing it to epic? Epic isnt giving you a physical market, they are taking the next step towards digital ownership loss. Epic took the idea of loot boxes and gave it hyper cancer in fortnite, and uses that hyper cancer cash to fund giving you free games. The list goes on and on. Epics vision is not to undo the damage steam caused, its to worsen the damage to try and push it further.
If this was about the shit trends steam created, sure ok. But all of these problems with steam are things they did in the past establishing themselves, and are things epic is now actively doing to establish itself while taking each one a step further.
If these are problems for steam to have done, then supporting epic over steam is making the exact same mistake again, yes?
Epic has done all of that and more lol
Their DRM is easily bypassable with SteamEmu, as opposed to other inventions like Denuvo
Ah, so if it’s crackable it’s fine?
Somebody tell Denuvo, they’re off the hook.
Seriously, why try so hard to go to bat for a brand name? I get that everybody wants to root for something these days, but I’m too old to pick sides between Sega and Nintendo and I’m mature enough to reconcile that Steam can have the best feature set in a launcher and also be a major player in the process of erasing game ownership and the promotion of GaaS.
Since I can almost guarantee you major publishers would not publish on steam without some sort of DRM, yeah Im fine with them having an easily crackable form of DRM. Especially since they’re not exactly jumping to prevent people from doing it.
Oh, they are not. Their DRM wiki page for devs goes “this DRM is easily crackable, we really recommend you use secondary DRM on top of it, see how to do that below”. I linked to that elsewhere.
Which is… you know, fine, but definitely one of the reasons I always check if a game is on GOG first before buying it on Steam.
They invented Denuvo?
Drm = digital rights protection
Denovo is a form of drm made by iredto
Technically, Denuvo isn’t DRM, it’s anti-tamper. It protects the actual DRM from being modified or removed. It’s closer to an anticheat, as it ensures the game wasn’t modified.
Fun fact: my autocorrect changes anticheat to Antichrist.
… right. And it’s also considered one of the premier “evil” DRMs.
So I ask again… they invented Denuvo?
Oh, is that the bar? I hadn’t received the memo. That’s cool, then, because Activision, Epic, Microsoft and Ubisoft didn’t invent Denuvo either, so we’re all good.
All their platfomrs support it and sell games with it, though.
For the record, Steam actively suggests using multiple online features and multiple layers of DRM to minimize piracy:
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/drm
Epic cons:
Also:
- Epic has already been caught scanning and collecting data from files on people’s hard drives that are totally unrelated to Epic or its games.
- Epic’s habit of interfering with game availability, through exclusivity deals.
Ties with Tencent (super anti-consumer chinese state-owned megacorp)
To be more clear about it, Tencent is Epic’s largest investor, so they obviously have a great deal of influence over and access to anything they want from Epic (likely including user data) and they directly benefit from Epic’s growth.
Steam pros:
Also:
- Actively funding and supporting development of linux gaming technologies for more than a few years now, to the point where linux is now very much a viable gaming platform.
Steam cons:
DrmGiven that DRM on Steam is entirely up to each game publisher, I don’t think it’s appropriate to list under “Steam cons”. I’m not even sure that any of my Steam games have DRM.
If you mean that most Steam games expect to find an instance of Steam running, you should know that is not DRM, and it’s trivially replaced with the open-source Goldberg Emulator or a similar tool.
Gog
I don’t know anything besides the fact that it has drm-free gamesAnother plus for GOG is that they let you download games with a web browser. No special app required. (I think Itch.io does this as well.)
Epic was scanning your Steam friends and play history
Valve was scanning your DNS cache
So… Maybe we shouldn’t forget to mention the second one if we’re going to bring up the first one
Valve was scanning your DNS cache
The story I read was that they didn’t collect or report anything, but just flagged a user if the cache contained a known game hack site, and that they stopped doing that years ago.
Not comparable to what Epic was caught doing, IMHO. Still, if there’s an article with more detail, I wouldn’t mind reading it. (Maybe it was part of their anti-cheat system of the time?)
Funny how if it was any other company you would call bs and tell them to fuck off with their “trust me bro” attitude.
To me it’s much worse what Valve did, they have no business looking at my browsing history, that’s much more private than the games I own on Steam or the three friends I’ve got on both platforms anyway.
Don’t forget that Epic buys up existing licenses to sell them as exclusives. They even pulled Rocket League from Steam after buying the studio.
Let’s also not forget that game developers have no choice but to release on steam if they want to have any chance on breaking even since they have that huge of a market share and that Epic challenging that already lead to better deals for developers since Valve hat virtually free reign before
Rocket League is fully playable on Steam.
The story of most of Valve’s games is finding a mod, hiring the modder, then making the game exclusive to Steam.
You can no longer buy the game on Steam though.
The difference between Steam and Epic is that Steam gets modders who mod their Source games. These mods don’t exist outside of Valve games. Valve is paying someone who loves their games and makes content for those games. They are smart in recognizing talent and bringing it to their development teams.
Epic finds existing games with existing communities and build a wall around it so Epic becomes a gatekeeper to the fun. They stop games from working on other storefronts or pay for “exclusivity” which means stopping people from playing the game.
Steam have DRM free games too, you don’t have to launch them through steam even.
steam drm is so easy to bypass that it almost doesn’t count
A con for GOG is their site is slow as fuck. And god forbid you want to go back to a previous page, you’ll likely lose where you were looking 9 times out of ten. Especially so on mobile.
Pros: Can be the only place you can get old games that would’ve been unavailable otherwise
The older games are often really really cheap, especially during sales
Another con is that GOG versions are usually not updated as much as other versions are. It’s a shame, because I’d prefer to use GOG when possible.
Gog also seemingly no 2fa other than an faq page with instructions that cannot be followed.
I always get 2FA’d on GoG for an emailed code
Do you remember how to configure it? Last I checked I went through every account and settings page on the store site and seemingly separate customer service log in and no clear way to set it up.
Not a clue sorry. I’m personally not one to go out of my way to set up 2FA even though I know it’s good practice to do so (unless it’s work related, then I do)
Steam’s, Epic’s, Ubisoft’s, Battle.net’s and whatever-EA’s-thing-is-called-now’s sites are also slow as shit. What is it with these platforms which prevent them from loading a webpage in less than 10 seconds?
Sadly, it’s likely a lot of tracking. The kind that look where your mouse is and where you scroll and stop etc.
What tracking does Epic need? “According to our analytics, 100% of users scroll to the free games banner on Tuesday at 5pm CEST, then leave and don’t come back for a week. What a mystery!”
Oh thanks for the reminder, I hadn’t opened epic so I can scroll down to the free games banner in a while.
You’d be appalled how much people in corporations earn for making these obvious observations…
In Steam’s case, the slowness looks more like a side effect of it being a Chromium Embedded Framework application (similar to Electron) with a lot of extras bolted on. It’s just not built for efficient use of resources.
The website, outside of the client is still slower than it used to be a good few years ago
By making the entire thing a JavaScript monstrosity with egregious amounts of scripts.
Didn’t know about heroic… Gonna check that out.
Also, wow. You’re the dude that appears in comment sections with well-formatted paragraphs 💯.
Appreciate your service.
Steam UI is messy but they have a ton of functionality in their store/system. Epic took ages to even get a functioning cart, Steam has tons of features which are not even tied to the games in their store like remote play and Steam VR. Family sharing is also really cool for example. Also Steam basically killed piracy for a long time due to amazing Steam sales + convenience of use.
Steam ui might be messy but you can get custom skins for it.
I want to note that Steam isn’t inherently a DRM platform, as there are many games on Steam which are DRM free. Even ones that require the Steam backend can be bundled with Steamworks, serving all the same backend requirements without Steam needing to be installed on the machine.
yea, they steam has some drm-free games available… but steam is a drm platform… one that also helped normalize one-time-use codes and tying ‘purchases’ to a non-transferable online account. valve did more to shred the used pc game market than any other company.
Epic has a significantly higher percentage of games confirmed to be DRM-free.
So if we just assume this random wiki with no sourcing is correct…
Steam has more games than everyone else, DRM on Steam is the developer/publisher’s choice, Steam still has more DRM-free games than Epic does, and how many of the ones Epic has are exclusives that don’t count?
Many of the articles do have references on the DRM status. Here’s an example indicating verification by a staff member. I personally tested a bunch of the games for DRM and noted it back when I contributed. Until recently, most of the games released on Epic were DRM-free. Even the Sony games were notably DRM-free on Epic before they were released on GOG. Nowadays, it’s more common for the new ones to use EOS and have it function as DRM.
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games
The Origin store proportionally has more DRM free games than Steam…
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Do you know what proportions are?
So if we just assume this random wiki with no sourcing is correct…
Steam has more games than everyone else, DRM on Steam is the developer/publisher’s choice, Steam still has more DRM-free games than Origin does, and how many of the ones Origin has are exclusives that don’t count?
Another Epic con: they bribe devs to not launch their games on Steam and GoG, because their store isn’t good.
Steam DRM is optional, it depends on developers to implement it.
Your first line is straight up misinformation. Epic has remarkably few games with DRM, mostly from big publishers implementing their own. I’ve yet to find an indie that can’t be launched directly as an .exe. Same with Cyberpunk 2077, launches directly without issue.
The only singleplayer game I can’t play offline is Hitman, just like on Steam, because their publisher sucks.
Eh… A whole bunch of games on Epic are DRM free, proportionally more than there are on Steam in fact…
Steam cons
- You don’t own the games, they are leased, like Sony
- store costs to developers/publishers are insanely high for a digital distribution platform
- early access games have very high volume of abandonware
store costs to developers/publishers are insanely high for a digital distribution platform
Isn’t the 30% cut what basically everyone takes? AFAIK GOG, Ubisoft, EA and all three console manufacturers take the same share.
Besides Epic only itch.io with their choose your share system and Discord (do they even still sell games?) take/took less.
Considering they have bugger all cost with distribution points being hosted for free by service providers it’s an overpriced over glorified website with online payment processing. 30% cut is massively tax for very little
You don’t own the games on any digital platform, neither steam, epic or gog. You’re only being sold a license to use it, and the license can be revoked whenever the company feels like it.
Thisbis actually true for most of the physical media back in the day, the only difference is that they didn’t really have a method to revoke the license… But that nice old cardboard box you have in your attic, with the nice shiny plastic disc… You still don’t legally own the software on it.
So what. It’s still valid Cons for the platform.
Stop making excuses for scamming one sided purchase agreements.
You are absolutely correct, but it’s a con for Epic too. Your comment makes it out to look like you don’t own your games on Steam, but by omission you make it seem like you do own your games on Epic.
I just want to make it very clear that you don’t own the games on either platform. But also want to mention that even if you buy a good old CD/DVD with the game on, then you still don’t own the game…
It’s absolutely awful that it’s practically impossible to own a game, and it’s even more awful that the platform can take away a game you paid for, let alone that they don’t even have to refund you for it…
Well, I have four big ones:
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System scanning: EGS is known to automatically scan your system and send your data back to them. While this seems to be the same type of analytics Steam does occasionally, in Steam’s case, it’s opt-in, and done with full, informed consent.
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Paid exclusives: Epic has been known to pay publishers to make their games artificially exclusive to their own store. They regularly claim this money is to support the development of the games in question, but this is easily disproven, as they’ve been seen buying games known to be complete more than once. Additionally, this has resulted in bait-and-switch-like situations, where users would prepurchase Steam copies of games, only to be informed that they wouldn’t be getting them.
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Publisher-centric behavior: Another user here claimed that EGS is pro-developer and anti-consumer, but this is only half true. This only rings true in the case of self-published games. There have been cases of developers getting unwarranted backlash after aforementioned bait-and-switches, when they were just as surprised to learn about all the “development support” they received as anyone.
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Tim Sweeney: Tim Weeney, the CEO of Epic, is an asshole. A giant, narcissistic, hateful shitbag. Just look at his Twitter, the dudes a giant POS.
Additionally, this has resulted in bait-and-switch-like situations, where users would prepurchase Steam copies of games, only to be informed that they wouldn’t be getting them.
I didn’t know about this.
It happened to Metro Exodus (great game btw) but iirc all pre orders were honoured and the game was just delisted.
Has it happened after that?
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I posted about this in another thread, but Epic also bought exclusivity for games that were crowd-funded then had the option to have the game on Steam removed or you’d get the Steam key after the exclusivity period expired. This pissed off a lot of people.
Wow. That’s understandably frustrating.
Yeah, this caused A LOT of controversy back then. As far as I know, Epic has stopped doing this and has pivoted a bit more into funding game development (i.e. Alan Wake 2.) That being said, that gave Epic a terrible reputation when they initially launched EGS.
They are still doing it. I’m still waiting for dead island 2 to come to steam because it’s a 1 year timed exclusive on epic
They still sign exclusives, they don’t do it with crowdfunded projects that promised a Steam release anymore.
I meant with crowd funded games. I’m aware that they still buy exclusivity. Though from what I know they pay indies less compared to what they used to pay.
I didn’t know this. Which games did it?
I don’t actually know all the games that did this, but the most famous examples are Phoenix Point and Shenmue 3. I already read that Outer Wilds was another one that took the exclusivity deal.
Epic’s CEO has a hateboner for everything Linux.
No linux support. Actually, in the case of games like rocket league, they REMOVED linux support.
They bought the game and changed out the graphics API to kill the Linux native builds, then after the community got it working via Wine, they added anticheat. Epic went further than incompetence on that one.
I’ve been able to play it in heroic launcher. Didn’t realize it was it was this bad
I personally don’t like Epic for paying developers for exclusivity deals, keeping games off other PC platforms for a year or more. Artificial scarcity is bad for consumers.
Even worse is that they do this while trying to paint themselves as the underdog against the Steam monopoly. It’s not only hypocritical, but also deceitful. A new monopoly is not a solution to an existing monopoly, but a solution to investments paying off.
Don’t forget them being hypocritical again for suing google/apple for being monopolistic because they don’t want to have to go through them for payment.
You guys don’t understand what a monopoly is…
I do know what it is, and I don’t actually think Steam is one. They have a considerable market share, but they are by no means the only way to get games on PC, nor do they exercise their dominance in a way that stifles competition.
I’m pretty sure Tim Sweeny knows this as well, but he still calls it a “monopoly” whenever he has the chance.
They were sued in the EU for violating anti trust laws, lost and decided not to cooperate.
They’re currently getting sued for forcing devs to not sell their games at a lower price on other platforms.
Their marketshare is more than enough to consider them a monopoly, you don’t need 100% of the market to be one, you just need to be so implanted that you become the default solution. Google doesn’t have 100% of the market, it still is considered a monopoly for search engines
Definitely a terrible idea.
Using money to jump ahead in the line is a terrible mindset. Provide good features, you’ll get your recognition.
Which they don’t do. Their platform has very few features, and doesn’t even have a cart. (Well last time I booted EGS like a year ago).
They have almost no features and of the features they do provide, none of them are great. Their only “feature” is operating at a loss, subsidized by megacorps, for many years like Amazon to gain a bunch of market share.
Luckily for gamers, steam already existed so they couldn’t corner the market and enshittify the entire industry like amazon did.
No it won’t - people are lazy
Even CDProjekt sold many more copies on steam than GOG when you
- Actually own the ge there instead of renting a licence for it.
- Know that 100% of your money go to the game developers.
- Get many additional goodies for free
Don’t tell me people are choosing the better deal when it’s all just steam having the might of “I have most of my games there already” on their side…
It doesn’t really bother me since it’s still on pc anyway, it doesn’t matter massively where you get a game from (unless you specifically want drm free copies).
Especially when Epic is funding development with those deals.
Why not say fuck the developers instead? They’re the ones accepting guaranteed income in exchange for exclusivity, maybe you should be mad at then for not taking a chance at the “influencer making your game popular enough that you recoup your cost” lottery.
Por que no dos?
If I’m not buying anything on Epic then I’m also not buying from developers that agree to Epic’s exclusivity. Two birds, one stone.
They got paid for the exclusivity, after that if they don’t sell as much then so be it, but just releasing on Steam is like choosing to play the lottery as a retirement plan and signing an exclusivity deal is like having a job, one might pay tens of millions or nothing, the other you’re sure will let you buy food for the next couple of years.
There’s tons of games on Steam that the devs have put everything they had in it only to never see any success and then you’ve got games like Vampire Survivors where nothing happened for months until suddenly a YouTuber started playing it and it became a major success. And I mean, good for Luca (and eventually for his team), but for every successful small dev there’s tens of unsuccessful ones…
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While this is a concern I generally share, I doubt the overwhelming majority of players even give it a single thought. Most don‘t care about things like human rights when the product is nice. Only once did I hear someone bring up Tencent owning 30% of Larian (Baldur‘s Gate 3) for example. The masses really don‘t even want to hear it.
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Average .ml lemming
The multi-billionaire owner with the backing of the Chinese government is claiming that he’s the underdog against a popular company/piece of software/GabeN. He’s made some poor choices interacting with the community.
Yes, it’s probably nice for a publisher to have a guaranteed income, which is why they sell exclusivity. It leaves a sour taste in my mouth, so I choose not to support it.
The rest about the launcher being bad sounds unhinged to me, but some people are really into that.
They bought Rocket League and actively made it worse.
I don’t disagree with everything you said here but come on, Steam is basically a privately owned PC games store monopoly that has now been going on for 25 years. Since it’s not public we can’t really know for sure but there’s a very real possibility that Epic is the underdog here
The multi-billionaire owner with the backing of the Chinese government
Who cares about the backing if it has no effect on anything? I’m more concerned about Valve having a separate Steam client for China, censoring their games specifically for China and even reportedly banning for bringing up Winnie the Pooh.
lol XD, let me tell you, if someone is financing something like that, they sure as heck expect something in exchange someday.
So, you believe a government powerful enough to make unaffiliated companies bow to their liking won’t leverage their investment?
Why do you think they invested? Just for fun?
You invest to gain influence, not to have less influence.
Who cares about the backing if it has no effect on anything?
It’s more illustrating that Epic isn’t underfunded. I don’t know anything about steam in China.
Epic is the worst of the 3 platforms for a user. It is a drm like steam, but with less games on it, and even less optimized (so even more wasted resources and time loading useless advertising).
Steam has it that is makes game run on Linux smoothly, and the biggest library of games. Gog is drm free. Epic has absolutely nothing a user may want, except for free games so that you are now captive of their shitty platform.
Pretty much every single decision you can see from their history since the inception of EGS is either stupid or blatantly destructive to gaming industry. Just some examples: better revenue shares for developers? Sure but this translates into worse platform. Money bonuses for exclusivity is great for developers? Sure but the game is then stuck at the platform that gives no means for users to interact and let developers know how they could improve their product. Cross platform multiplayer platform that works? Sure but then we have to deal with stupid requirements like having an account on additional platforms we may not want to use, even to play single player modes sometimes.
You can also check Tim’s Twitter and see how ignorant and hypocritical he is. I wouldn’t mind it but his decisions seem to actually affect the whole platform and therefore the industry so… too bad.
Don’t forget how he abandoned PC gaming when Unreal Tournament 3 bombed after they released shitty mid tools and the modding community they built up over UT 2k3 and 2k4 dissolved.
better revenue shares for developers?
Money bonuses for exclusivity is great for developers?It actually goes to publishers, so the only way devs see that extra cut is by self-publishing. So I guess for smaller indie devs it can be a good deal.
It can. Doesn’t save those games from being forgotten faster than they release elsewhere though. Only a few managed to overcome this effect somewhat.
No support for Linux - steam has it built in and the DRM free nature of gog games means that they’re not too tough to get running via wine.
aside from what everyone else said, they killed the beloved Unreal Tournament series, which is a huge sour spot for older gamers who fondly remember those. Then there’s the excessive microtransaction demand inside Fortnite, a game with a large playerbase under the age of 18. That alone led to two major lawsuits that they both lost
Aside from TF2–and even that I got a bit bored with–most all of my interest in multiplayer FPS died along with Unreal Tournament. Doesn’t feel like having fun is the goal anymore.
They are killing rocket league too
I quit playing Rocket League the moment it was announced that it was going to be Epic exclusive available only on Windows.
In short, Epic is anti-consumer. They claim better support for developers, but in reality consumers are the one paying for that. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but you the consumer have no choice in it. You are forced through exclusives and other limitations to use inferior service for the same price. Even free games they give are there to drag you into their ecosystem and abuse.
This is why Valve doesn’t feel threatened, I assume, and is not likely to feel the pressure from Epic anytime soon. For that to happen, Epic would have to get on par with features and customer benefits equal or better than Steam and that’s not happening anytime soon. Epic would rather throw hundreds of millions on exclusive deal with some developer and force you the consumer to buy the game on EGS than actually improve the service.
Epic doesn’t see gamers as their customer - they see developers as their customer and shape the customer experience around that. For example, Epic said that if/when they add reviews, developers could choose to opt their games out of reviews. That’s very pro-developer, but very anti-consumer, whatever you might think of the value of reviews. Informed customers can rattle off a long list of reasons they don’t like Epic and why they’re bad, but they are a small minority of PC gamers. The “silent majority” doesn’t keep up with this kind of stuff or really care about it, so they are literally judging stores on their merits and Epic is a bare bones platform that doesn’t offer customers a good reason to spend money in their store because they don’t think they need to.
Instead of offering anything to be a better platform they are burning money on the platform in hopes they can pay their way to dominance by paid exclusivivity and giving away games. One of those isn’t bad for users. Now consider what Epic offers beyond being able to buy and download a game. Nothing. Epic is only a storefront and they’ve had years to work on this at this point. Steam has gained dominance and maintains it in no small part due to all the additional features available to everyone. Do you use the steam workshop for any of your games? Have you used the steam community forums to troubleshoot a problem? Do you use big picture mode for a more console like experience? Do you customize your controller settings with the pretty expansive controller support built into steam? The overlay? How about the custom profiles and badges and trading cards? Epic is only a storefront. That’s it. That’s all that’s on offer. So they supplement it with bribing devs to be exclusive to their store and giving away games to try and attract users.
I love the steam chat, as someone who doesn’t use discord very often at all. Having the chat is an easy to too flick a message off to someone while i play
Not only that, the storefront runs atrociously slow and the privacy policy is invasive.
These are true criticisms, but I’m not sure if they’re fair. To the best of my recollection, Steam had none of those things in 2008, either, about the time they were the age of the EGS, now.
You could say they should (be able to) compete on the merits alone, without free games or paid exclusivity, but that argument wouldn’t reflect reality: you need a hefty carrot to lure people away from their comfort zone.
Steam had none of those things in 2008
Yes, true. But it’s not 2008 anymore. It makes no sense for companies to compete based on features and functionality equivalent to their age.
If someone starts a company today offering only old 1960 color TVs, I’m not going to say “Well they’re new, and that’s what TV manufacturers would have had at the time”. That makes zero sense.
If Epic wants to compete with steam they need to actually compete. They offer nothing of value presently. They have the money and the technical talent to make a good launcher. They just appear to choose not to.
They have the money and the technical talent to make a good launcher. They just appear to choose not to.
This is completely the case. You can’t tell me the makers of Unreal Engine couldn’t figure out how to replicate at least some of the more commonly used features of Steam. Of course they can do it. Someone somewhere in the corporate ladder decided they don’t need the extra features to compete with steam. Maybe burning money on the exclusivity contracts and game giveaways will work out in the long run, but I doubt that when they flat out said they’re spending more money than they earn in their 800+ person layoff just a few months ago.
