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.
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.
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 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.
It's a pretty fun rougelike rougelite city builder in a world where it always rains and every few decades a malevolent eldritch storm destroys most of the civilization.
It's a bit pedantic, but I'd call it a rougelite since it has meta-progression. Still they found a way to make a no combat rougelite city builder an amazing game!
This is a great game, especially if you’re the type who thinks the beginning hours of a civ game (before you get bogged down in micromanagement and unit orders) are the best hours. It basically gives you that kind of early-game experience over and over, with plenty of variation. It’s so much better paced than most comparable games as a result. I’m surprised it doesn’t get more buzz.
About the city-builder early game experience - you pretty much nailed my feelings about the game.
I think the weakness of the game is that one needs to experience other strategy games (I played very little of city builders, but a lot of grand strategies and 4X) and have some level of self reflection or meta thinking to be immediately attracted to this concept (without trying out the game first).
Most people who didn't notice that micromanaging already won late game is the bad, tedious part, would be reluctant to accept the inevitable destruction of their cities.
I think that there's an untapped potential in increased complexity of the central City. What I mean is that if there was some metagame city building it would attract a bit more players.
Basically Epic like every other publisher has created their own launcher/store.
They aren't trying to compete on features and instead using profits from their franchise to buy market share (e.g. buying store exclusives).
The tone and strategy often comes off as aggressive and hostile.
For example Valve was concerned Microsoft were going to leverage their store to kill Steam. Valve has invested alot in adding windows operability to Linux and ensuring Linux is a good gaming platform. To them this is the hedge against agressive Microsoft business practices.
The Epic CEO thinks Windows is the only operating system and actively prevents Linux support and revoked Linux support from properties they bought.
As a linux user, Valve will keep getting my money and I literally can't give it to Epic because they don't want it.
Personally my main gripe is their aggressive strategies to force people into their garbage-tier launcher. Compared to Steam it’s just miles behind, and it’s yet another app to run on your PC. All my friends are also on Steam, and Steam had Linux support. However, if all you want to do is launch singleplayer games, you don’t mind the Epic launcher, and you get a good deal, then do whatever you want to.
I have never used a launcher before (for obvious reasons as mentioned in my post), so I found the idea of a separate launcher dumb in the first place. I have used it in recent times thanks to Epic’s free games. Finished two of the Tomb Raider trilogy.
Like, I’m fine with a store, but I gotta open the launcher to launch the game? On Windows, with the Tile based Start Menu, I kind of thought it was a terrible idea NGL. I gotta open, wait for it to load, open the library, then click to run, THEN it’ll open…
Plus, if I want to track progress, it’s a hassle because I can’t track without the damn launcher…
I fundamentally have no issue with the Epic Games launcher. Steam needs competition to keep it in check. Without alternatives, Steam can and will strangle Dev profits, which is a problem. But Epic is a mediocre service, another app to be running, and actively going out of their way to prevent games from being on the platform of the consumers choice, which I am not a fan of.
Related note: does Epic have any DRM free games? Even Steam has a fair portion of games that are DRM free and work perfectly well from a flash drive on a computer that doesn’t have Steam installed. As far as I am aware, Epic does not.
There’s just a series of minor ways in which epic is worse, and I don’t like having front-end clients for my games as is, so a second, competing alternative going out of its way to push me into using it rubs me the wrong way.
You don’t need all store fronts running at once on your pc though. Just boot up what you need for the game you want and it’s just six and two threes, whether it’s steam or epic, or any other launcher.
The issue is that I miss features when using Epic. Additionally, games from Epic are not visible in my steam library which leads to me forgetting that they even exist. And also nobody uses it, so there’s no community feeling like I have with all my Steam friends.
I don’t mind it for free games though. If they give me a game for free, they deserve me using their launcher for that game haha.
I refuse to patronize Epic until they continue working on UT4. I’ve been playing their games for 25 years and they make fortnite then decide to just drop all of their long term fans.
My dad got me that game on his old laptop when I was a kid. It barely ran, but boy was it exciting ❤️.
The Plasma gun was my favourite 🫡. Especially in that space level… The one where you could jump outside the windows.
I have a bone to pick with Epic regarding Unreal Engine as well. Terrible optimisation. Any game I play, if made using UE, is terrible.
I’ve played the first two of the Tomb Raider trilogy on medium on my 4GB GTX 1650, i7 9th Gen, 16GB RAM laptop. This device has pushed me through my engineering and still continues to run most of my work. It also runs Forza Horizon 4 and Red Dead Redemption 2 good enough.
Yet I install Deliver Us Mars, a game with a much smaller scale, and my beautiful beast starts to stutter. 🫠🫠🫠
Yeah. They had an alpha out for a while and just deserted it after fortnite took off. I really enjoyed playing it, too.
The optimization is kind of up to the devs. It’s fairly accessible to all sorts of people with varying levels of skill, but you still have to identify bottlenecks and move to c++ sometimes. Making it easy to implement in the editor means some people will make shit they can’t optimize or support.
Whatever it is, the launcher is just bad in general. May I reccommend Heroic Games Launcher instead? You log in, get authenticated, and then it can download the games directly from the source, without ever having to run this god awful launcher.
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.
I tried to install that ryujin fork but some games (for example “turnip boy commits tax evasion”) don’t recognize it even when emulating xinput (it worked when launched via steam)
Btw it improved a lot since last time I tried ds4windows, maybe a couple reboots would fix the issue (of course no battery and can’t find the micro USB charger)
The most reliable that I’ve found is an Xbox controller connected via the Wireless Xbox Adapter. I’m not sure they make it anymore though. You will probably have to buy a used one (if interested).
My experience with the Bluetooth on PC is that it was a bit flakey. That may have improved in the last few years though. I ran into a couple of games where it wouldn’t work on BT but worked fine via the wireless adapter.
That same e-waste recycler has new boxed Xbox360 wireless controllers for $20 - I almost bought that then I realized that it needs to buy the proprietary battery pack, the proprietary charging cable and the proprietary USB receiver and it will become the same price of the new Xbox bluetooth controller.
I took a gamble and bought the stadia controller for $15, hope I can find time to flash it to the Bluetooth mode before they close the service
I just don't use Epic myself but do use Gog and Steam (with the ultra shitty EA launcher and Ubisoft Connect bundled with some of my games) and Playnite has changed everything unifying it all into that single launcher.
Full screen mode in Playnite works fine on my HTPC and as a launcher it does consolidate all of them into one place easily. Worth trying if you use multiple stores.
As for why I'm not using Epic, the whole paying for exclusivity with third parties really didn't appeal to me at all.
If the free offerings from Epic do appeal to you, or if they do better deals on localised currencies (especially if you do struggle to pay for things), don't worry about using their services. I wouldn't want you to deny yourself some entertainment just because other people have issues with them as a business.
My first purchase when I’m earning enough to spend on entertainment will be a good device. The second will be games that I can either physically keep or digitally store on physical drives.
Gog is the main place for that, since their principal stance is DRM-free downloadable installers. They have a launcher too, but it’s optional and only meant as convenience. Itch.io does DRM-free too, but they’re often more about very indie and often experimental games. They have a few all-time indie classics though.
Steam technically doesn’t require the games to implement DRM, so a part of their library is DRM-free once you’ve passed the installation process (they don’t need steam to be running). This is on a case-by-case basis though. Lots of Steam games use steamworks (Steam’s very own DRM) and a lot more use third party DRMs (and even require external launchers like Ubisoft’s or EA’s).
For years I have been a bit pissed at Steam for opening themselves to all and every shitty fake game/quick buck asset flip there is out there, refusing to do any kind of curation. Instead they opted for letting the almighty Algorithm do that for them. I doesn’t work, their store is a discoverability catastrophe full of shit.
That said, I still buy from them in some cases, and these cases are mostly down to one point : the workshop, the integrated mod and user content interface. It’s for a handful of games that profit a lot from it, but it’s undenyingly convenient.
What I often do if it’s a possibility is buying directly from the developer, which often includes a Steam key. That’s what I did for Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress (through Itch.io). It gives you everything Steam has to offer for the game and usually a DRM-free version too. Only “down point” is that your Steam review doesn’t count for the game’s Steam score when you have activated it from an external key. I don’t care much for that.
In the end at that point you’ve noticed I talked about a lot of different platforms and launchers, and it’s not even all of them. Like the previous poster, I can’t recommend Playnite enough. It’s a meta launcher that makes all of your libraries united in the same place, with a lot of options. You still require all the platforms installed, but you’re not using them directly most of the time.
I’ve got Steam, Gog, Humble, Ubisoft, EA, Amazon, Xbox, Itch.io and yeah, even Epic through it (though I only use EGS to get the free games, I don’t plan on buying anything from there).
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