Epic Games is useful for the free games they giveaway every week, some weeks better than others. And I know the topic of ownership of these “free games” is another conversation, but I’ll take advantage of it while it’s there and also while giving them little to no money.
Generally the only games that are de facto exclusive to Nintendo are the ones they make themselves or those that choose to stay on Nintendo (I haven't heard of exclusivity deals, but I won't discount the possibility).
A better comparison might be Sony with Playstation (and maybe Microsoft with Xbox, though I haven't heard of as much from them on that) paying for exclusivity for a limited time.
Epic, on the other hand decided, at least at the start, to buy out almost finished games (some of which even had pre-orders on other storefronts) to have on their platform for at least a year. Then decided to try and play the victim, claiming that they had to do it to gain market share. Then claimed they were morally superior because they didn't charge as much to publishers for putting games on their storefront. While also charging just as much for the games to the consumers.
Sony have very, very few straight exclusivity deals these days, they have a super robust first party network. Nintendo and them are very comparable, in fact. Especially in that Nintendo works with more third parties or partially owned "second parties" than you'd think, since people presume anything using their IP is their game, even when it's not.
In any case, they're both as not-comparable, in that Epic games run on the same hardware and platform as Steam games, Linux compatibility aside. You don't have to pay any extra money to switch back and forth.
Epic legitimately hasn't done anything Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft haven't done on the regular. In fact, the current "boo, we hate non-Steam PC launchers" trend overlaps with the old "boo, we're pissed that former console exclusive X is going multiplatform", which was a surreal few years there.
Also, hell yeah, it's morally superior to give more of the money to the dev while charging the same up front to consumers. 100%. Every time. Epic is not doing it because they're nice, they're doing it to attract talent to their platform, which is exactly why you want competition between multiple storefronts instead of a monopoly. But that doesn't take it away from them, that's the better answer.
Fuck Nintendo to death, after listening to the abominations they committed in the Team Xecuter episode of Darknet Diaries I’m never giving them another cent.
Luckily, Yuzu runs games infinitely better than my switch anyway, so that’s awesome.
Anyone that follows the homebrew and CFW scene knows that Xecuter repeatedly and unapologetically ripped off the GPL-licensed components in Atmosphere and its various bootloader stages. On top of violating the licenses of and stealing from the homebrew community, they also added console-bricking DRM to their CFW. They’re not heroes supporting the ideological cause of piracy; just shitbags trying to profit off of it.
Oh yeah, he was totally the fall guy and had his life ruined over it. He was made an example out of, while the rest and worst of them made bank and got away with it.
Absolute bullshit. But you’re totally right, Xecutor was mostly corrupt and shitty. I forgot about the switch bricking thing, what fuckery to do to people.
Oh, there's a ton to say about why Disney get a reputation for being a litigious nightmare but Nintendo gets more of a connection to beloved franchises in a lot of the gaming community, but that's precisely why they're a good counterexample to Steam when you're talking about branding associations.
@stella może China Miéville? Czytałem tylko Żelazną Radę dawno temu, ale były pociągi i związki zawodowe ;) Ogółem kojarzę że koleś ma lewicowe poglądy.
China Miéville? Wydaje go u nas np. Zysk i S-Ka. Najpopularniejsza jest chyba “Ambasadoria”, podobnie ceni się u nas “Miasto i Miasto”. Wydano w Polsce też całą tzw trylogię New Crobuzon, czyli trzy powieści dziejące się w tym samym settingu, ale niezwiązane fabułą (“Dworzec Perdido”, “Blizna”, “Żelazna Rada”).
Od razu mówię tylko, że Miéville jest mocno osadzony w nurcie new weird i jego powieści zawierają masę dziwaczności (nie-antropomorficzni bohaterowie, osobliwe prawa fizyki, równoległe rzeczywistości istniejące tuż obok siebie, języki czy neologizmy nietrzymające się typowych dla fantastyki kanonów itp), więc jeśli kogoś to odrzuca, może nie być łatwo przekonany.
Książka Miéville’a October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, próba niby-dokumentalnego przedstawienia wydarzeń rewolucji październikowej, nie była jednak przetłumaczona na polski, tak jak jego eseje dotyczące marksizmu.
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.
Epic’s customer service sucks. Consider my last experience from a prior xmas sale:
had multiple games in the cart with discounts applied, checked out with paypal, but for whatever reason the communication broke and didn’t go through
my cart then got stuck in a limbo where I couldn’t check out with any method to receive the discounts, everything was full price again
opened a customer support ticket to get the problem resolved, then went through 3 days of back and forth, explaining the situation over and over because
each of your replies are handled by whoever the next agent is
who apparently don’t read any history of the ticket, so they provide feedback or advice that already didn’t work
and it can take a full 24 hours or more to get a reply that ignores all previous replies
by the time the error was resolved by a competent person, the sale was over by only a few hours
despite the fact that I only missed the sale window because their reps were incompetent, they refused to make any exceptions to apply the sale prices I had been trying to checkout for 3 days
So, fuck them. I only claim free games from them now.
And I concur with problems other people have mentioned.
each of your replies are handled by whoever the next agent is
The names of their support agents is truly odd. I’ve seen people post complaints about their support that is little more than this:
Hi, this is Charlie Uniform November Tango here to help.
After receiving all the information that you sent us that we requested, we sadly can’t help because reasons.
Thanks for being an epic gamer.
I don’t game much anymore, but I have been fascinates by city sims recently. Last year I got sucked into Tropico (again). This year it’s City Skylines (1) and all the DLC
I guess so… Unless a company is objectively terrible, I guess it does end up being “subjective”.
For example, I like the idea of Linux, but am happy that things work on Windows. And MacOS is too restrictive for my tastes.
Now, surely there are objective reasons for why Linux is better than the others. But the entry point issue for me is that each distro is different, and while I love customisability, I cannot expend energy on setting up my distro at the moment… (Soon.)
Plus, games work on Windows. I do plan to dual boot when I get a better PC, but not yet.
And fuck Apple (subjective, but I don’t wike em). So, yeah 🫡.
The good clearly are the free games and that some games go cheaper there, they have better sales sometimes. The bad is that the store is badly optimized. The UI is annoying, no cloud saves for a lot of games. As of recently there were no achievements or even a cart, but they have that now which is good. The friends tab is bare bones still. They have aggressive DRM. For some reason it’s a pain in the ass to log in, but that might be just on my end.
Now with GOG, you don’t have DRM, you can integrate all launchers so you can launch all the games from one, which for me, is pretty useful. GOG has great deals. The bad is that the ui as well is kind of bare bones, but i don’t know, they are not trying to take over the market and their store works very well.
As of steam i don’t need to say anything, everything is in there. If you play on linux you basically will get every game from steam. They have the most robust launcher with the most options, etc.
That said, personally I use the three of them. Gog primarily since i can launch everything from there and if i find a game in there, i’d rather get it from them. But i’ve found sales on epic too good to let go so i play those games there. For me it depends on what they’re offering, but for some reason i really dislike Epic’s layout and ui, i feel like it is very annoying and that it is missing a lot.
Before I go into this I want to preface that I love Sea of Thieves (SoT) and it is almost definitely my most played game.
It’s funny that SoT is a culmination of pretty much all of the worst parts of gaming business culture lately and is still a great game. It’s a game as a service, has a cosmetic micro transaction store, premium currency, predatory micro transactions (change character appearance or ship name), released with bare bones features and constantly introducing bugs with every update. And yet it’s also one of the biggest success stories using all of those components. It wasn’t abandoned like some games as a service cash-grabs, the game has quadrupled in features and content, the cosmetics are (mostly) kept well on-brand for the universe and the team regularly communicates regarding both success and failures.
With all of that in mind; ever since I started playing SoT (a week after release RIP Day 1 eye patch) I’ve had a few mates, who’ve never played SoT, tell me it’s a shit game and that Skull and Bones will be a much better game in a month year when it comes out.
I’m always excited to see good games produced even when I’m not intending to play them but Skull and Bones certainly seems like it’ll be another cookie cutter POS game shat out to claim tax on the loss and shut down some time after. Thank goodness we have at least one good pirate game that’s still going strong.
Exclusives suck for everyone. Especially when Epic started out, they only had payment processors in certain countries. This meant that some people literally had no legal way to play the Epic exclusives. I'm not sure where they stand today, but that annoyed me enough, along with other shenanigans by Epic and Sweeny, that I avoid the whole ecosystem.
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