Core keeper, Webfishing, Helldivers 2, and powerwashing simulator. I’ve been in a very chill gaming mood aside from the hectic fire fights of helldivers.
I absolutely love Doom Eternal, it’s my favorite shooter of all time by a landslide.
Dark Ages still hasn’t sold me, parries are the last thing I ever wanted from a Doom game and they seem to be the game’s main focus.
I can respect Id Software for trying new things with every game, but taking away movement and focusing on parry mechanics isn’t really innovative to me.
The 80 euro price tag doesn’t help, there is no way in hell I’m paying that much for a game.
IMHO he’s pretty good to watch. “LGR” stands for “lazy game reviews,” which I guess is how he started, but these days he mainly talks about retro hardware with an occasional game review (such as the one above). He gained popularity recently after being impacted by a weather event that unfortunately damaged a lot of rare hardware he was storing.
I’m loving it. But most of the people I talk to were put off by eternal. It’s more of that Soni can get people not picking it up for it’s very expensive cost currently.
Once I got adjusted to the difficulty of eternal I fell in love with it, once you realize you have to constantly stay moving and adjust on the fly it just became awesome. Still feel like the music is disjointed.
First, the EGS software is really bad. It’s slow, clunky, a pain to navigate, and is missing loads of basic features that Steam has had for decades.
Second, rather than improving their offering to make it more competitive and appealing to consumers, they’ve utilized coercive tactics like exclusivity to force adoption rather than earning it on merits.
My dislike of epic is that they seem to be buying their way into competing, instead of actually competing on features.
Free games sounds good now, but what happens when the fortnite gravy train runs out, and epic needs to start making a profit? They’ll likely have to enshittify fast.
Steam at least has a solid history of being generally good. But who knows what will happen if Gaben ever ascends.
No, EGS is plenty shitty now; what they’re saying is that EGS’s one singular saving grace - the free games they give away - likely won’t last for the reason they outlined.
While I'd like to see more advanced features in other launchers (or, ideally, at the OS level in both Windows and Linux), I don't think it's realistic to expect new competitors to get to that level of support with 80% of the market fossilized around Steam.
They have a twenty year head start and a ridiculously dominant position. You're not going to get a proprietary controller translation layer or a full on video capture software right off the bat. It makes sense to focus investment on getting content first, since Steam gets all content by default by having an iron grip on the marketplace, and for business reasons other launchers prioritize multiplayer features first.
To be clear, I'd agree that the prioritization by a bunch of competitors has been wonky, but Steam ONLY does client. They are a very lean company that actively builds stuff to be hands-off and has stepped away from focusing heavily on game development for a while.
Could Epic invest more heavily in their client as opposed to spending all that money on giving away free games and acquiring content? I bet. I also bet if they looked at GoG building a whole interoperable client and getting nothing in return or some of the work EA wasted on their version (twice!) for also nothing in return, then prioritizing redundant features that Microsoft provides at the OS level seems like a worse investment. Particularly when the store loses money and they could be spending that on Fortnite content or Unreal features or whatever else.
Steam is a weird outlier in that their ultimate goal has been to ditch Windows/MS for a while, so their whole consolized controller-based UI, the controller layer, the background recording, the overengineered chat all make sense in the context of SteamOS having been in development for a decade. For everybody else it's a leap of faith.
Do I think it would have been a better choice for Epic? If it was up to me I'd have given it a shot, I think. But let me be clear: I'd have done that in the understanding that the minute you match a Steam feature the cult of Gaben shall move on to a different shortcoming as the justification for their adhesion. When Steam was behind on their refund policy nobody raged against them and nobody stopped raging against EA Origin depite offering no-questions-asked refunds. Now you hear about it as a differentiator. When Epic didn't have a perisistent shopping cart that was the dealbreaker for a while, when they implemented it's their store design or the library paging or whatever. Nobody complains about games only being available on Steam when they aren't elsewhere, but Epic exclusives are a travesty. This is not about the feature set or policy.
But starting to match the feature set at least would take a talking point off the table and offer a selling point.
Did I give your trolly post way too much credit and took it too seriously? Yes. Is that an apt metaphor for this entire conversation? Absolutely.
You’re unironically defending EGS and calling me a troll. If you think that’s how a store with 7 years and a billion dollars invested (Sweeney’s words, not mine) should look like, that’s fine, that’s your opinion and you’re free to use it. Personally I’m not a fan.
I'm not "defending" anybody. I'm not taking sides at all. The only reason I even jump into these is that the absolutely cult-like zeal grown-ass men deploy in defending large corporations over each other is both some Sega-vs-Nintendo console war crap I wish we could get over and not particularly good if you want a PC market not dominated by a single player.
I don't know what percentage of the Epic Store's funding goes to feature work versus other areas. I can guess Epic is investing very heavily on content, and I can guess that's because it'd be really hard to meet Steam on content when every developer of any size is effectively forced to be on Steam first and everything else if and when. I don't know how much funding that leaves for client development.
Like I said, I'd probably have refocused on client features a bit further, but I'll also acknowledge they probably wouldn't see that much tangible return from that investment, given that Steam fanboys already don't give them enough credit for the very noticeable improvements they've actually made and they have no effective means to run PR against Steam.
Hell, if you look at it objectively they'd probably be better off focusing on their legal fights with Apple and Google and on having a decent mobile client, which Steam very much doesn't. Maybe there's a path forward there. I don't have enough of an inside view to know.
How come gog doesn’t get the same hate if it’s all steam fanboys and it’s all so unwarranted? How come it’s all focused at EGS? Are you sure it’s not because you’re mistaken? Maybe you’ve got a rage boner for Steam and you can’t see past it.
Well, for one thing the "GoG doesn't support Linux" narrative runs strong (I believe it made at least one appearance in this thread), so there is that.
For another, GoG doesn't get the same hate for the same reason in Sega vs Nintendo the Turbografx or the Neo Geo didn't get the same hate. They are simply not in the same race.
Ubisoft's platform does get the hate, though. And EA's. And Acti/Blizzard's. And Microsoft's. Gamers love a good narrative, though, so EGS took over when Origin stopped being the bad guy du jour. Ubi had a brief period in the spotlight, though.
So after some soul searching I'm going to say I absolutely don't have a rage boner for Steam (considering my Steam library is in the thousands and I own both iterations of the Steam Deck and a Vive that'd be a very confused boner anyway).
Your not wrong, but I just dont get the feeling that epic is going to transition towards actually being a competitive store. This is entirely my own myopic gut feel, not based on any facts.
Honestly, I agree, unless steam aggressively enshittifies themselves, I dont see any rivals catching up either. They are so far ahead, and so far, haven’t started screwing their customers.
And gog selling out to climb doesn’t really solve anything.
People are going to list all the features Steam has over Epic, ignoring that Steam has had ~22 years to get to where it is. The original Steam experience was garbage, and lots of us older gamers knew what would happen and hated that Steam would be the primary catalyst to killing off physical media for PC games back in the mid-2000s, especially as broadband internet access was becoming far more accessible.
Don’t get me wrong, Valve has done alright so far in terms of game ownership, but once Gabe dies/retires, it’s only a matter of time before some greedy fucks force Valve to go public and the pure enshittification process begins.
People are going to list all the features Steam has over Epic, ignoring that Steam has had ~22 years to get to where it is.
And then there are people talking about how steam has had those 22 years, while completely ignoring how epic could just copy how steam did things and work from there.
Sure, they can’t see what happens in the back end, but I somehow doubt that valve is doing anything ground breaking there that others can’t think of.
Okay, but have EGS really improved in any significant way in the 7 years they’ve been up? I don’t see it. Plus, a smart competitor would absolutely look at Steam’s history and learn from it; they don’t seem to have done that at all.
If they had spent the same amount of money on developing the storefront that they have on exclusivity deals, EGS could have been a worthy competitor.
I don’t disagree that Epic could definitely be doing better with their storefront. They have made improvements, albeit at a glacial pace. They’ve added achievements and reviews, but it’s still a pale comparison to what Steam offers. That being said, no one seems to dig at GoG’s shitty storefront and app nearly to the same degree. Luckily, GOG allows third-party access, so you can at least replace their app with other alternatives.
Regardless, I’m not defending Epic, I was simply trying to avoid doing the mindless “fuck Epic” and offer some counterargument. Epic is a shitty company, but some competition is better than zero competition. Yes, GOG exists, but they hardly have any marketshare at all and if CDPR ever stops supporting it as much as they have been, their future likely isn’t looking so great. It’s like AMD vs Nvidia. Both companies aren’t great, but I’d rather both exist than only Nvidia and/or AMD; and of course, even more competition would be even better.
Lol, no one is listing steam features. Epic is perfectly capable of being pieces of shit and a garbage company without needing comparison.
EGS is today as old as steam was in 2010. Yet it is still behind 2010 steam’s features. All that on top of all the unethical and shady stuff they have done and the many different ways they make gaming worse for everyone.
Their Guides feature didn’t come out until 2012sh, same with workshop. The only thing Steam had in 2010 that Epic doesn’t have right now is Community, which launched around 2007sh.
Like I said, Steam was not that good for a long time.
Not sure what qualifies as small-medium. I have appreciated Let’s Game It Out (6.02M subs), ymfah (1.19M subs), Tech Rules (432K subs), MartSnacks (80.1K subs). All focusing on cool gaming content, no being A YouTube Personality who shows their face and tries to form a parasocial relationship with you.
Let’s Game It Out seems to focus on !tycoon type games, maybe !citybuilders and tries to mess with or break the game. ymfah takes on some interesting self-imposed challenges in FromSoftware and Bethesda games and I think some of them are really well-put-together and funny, particularly Skyrim No Walking which comes with narrative arcs. Tech Rules explains stuff, kind of a video essay thing. MartSnacks basically has three videos of self-imposed challenges with Pokémon and does not seem to upload too often.
I am lucky I was able to give you what I did. Not a big video watcher. Sorry I couldn’t be more help. Have been meaning to get into RTS more but I have not actually played that many and have seen 0 videos about them, so I’m doubly unqualified to help you with that.
The YouTube algorithm is helpful to me because it knows I only click on gaming videos amongst a few other things. I just never ever clicked the annoying Person SLAMS Person outrage bait type stuff, and I also never clicked Not Interested on them (not sure if YouTube would actually listen, or if it would know by me bothering with “Not Interested” that topic pisses me off to see in recommends and thus it would conclude it ought to show it to me more), so it was forced to only show me the only stuff I engaged with at all: stuff I liked. So sometimes it feeds me nice niche gaming videos. I don’t watch frequently enough to exhaust its recommendations into being repeats of stuff I’ve already seen. It might (not sure) help that I also stuff gaming videos into my Watch Later playlist. This is what I did and I am not entirely sure it will work for you, but hey, it’s how I found literally all of these videos. Eventually sometimes it shows me cool stuff by the same person.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne