Sweeney (the CEO of Epic) says that he wants competition with Steam, but many of his actions point toward that he really just wants to be the guy at the top (ie, he wants to be the monopoly instead of Valve). He’s taken a fair number of anti-consumerist stances, which vary from understandable to clearly anti-competitive.
Epic is known for making exclusivity deals with 3rd party studios in which Epic bribes the studio with money, and in exchange, the studio does not release their game on Steam for 1 year.
At several points, this occurred after a studio already said that they will release on Steam, and the studio would have to walk back and delete their Steam listing.
Iirc, at one point Epic bought out a studio and had them remove the Steam listing for an already-released game, causing the game to be unplayable for people who had already bought the game
Edit: this apparently happened twice (Unreal Tournament and Rocket League), but it appears that the games still work for the people who bought it. I think the concern was actually that Steam players would lose functionality due to not being supported anymore after the unlisting
The Epic Game Store released in a non-functional state, and development on it is extremely slow. The first impression of the broken store likely still influences many people’s impression of the store. But it’s still missing many features that many gamers want to see in a store.
There were various rumors when the store first launched that it contained spyware. My understanding is that those rumors never fully got disproven, especially since some of the claims were supported by at least some evidence
Epic does not support Linux, and Sweeney has openly said that he does not plan to support Linux until it becomes more popular. He did immediately jump on board with supporting Arm though, which caused a lot of Linux gamers to think that he just doesn’t want to support Linux
Sweeney is a pretty abrasive person and iirc he made a lot of concerning statements on his social media. Several of them (as mentioned above) indicate that he wants to dethrone Valve so that he can be the monopoly instead
Overall, many gamers are in support of more competition in the game store space. Unfortunately, many gamers also think that Epic is an untrustworthy competitor, and they believe that Epic has a serious chance of making the gaming industry worse if they become more popular. As a result, many would prefer for Steam remain the monopoly rather than to take a bet on Epic.
It was a while ago, I don’t remember off the top of my head which specific game I’m remembering. Doing a brief search, it appears that this happened to Unreal Tournament and Rocket League, though it appears that the games still work for the people who bought it before the unlisting. I think the concern was losing functionality, especially for server-based or multiplayer games
For unplayable, Rocket League had very good Linux and macos native builds Epic required them to delete support for those operating systems as part of the acquisition of Psyonix
Yeesh I knew Epic was run by dick heads but I didn’t know they were this slimy, I’m glad I’ve only bought one game on their platform (Subnautica below zero), and that’s only because I got the original Subnautica for free from their weekly giveaway and loved it. I’ll continue to get the free games from them as it’s good to take a chance on games that you otherwise might never learn about.
I’ve managed to get Cryostasis working, and for a game over a decade old, it’s a lot of fun. Great atmosphere, interesting mechanics, fascinating story, the whole package.
fun fact: this expression comes from the time before alarm clocks (or clocks in general), where towns had someone whose job it was to go round the town and knock on windows and doors in the morning, waking people up. Knocker-uppers.
They would also wait for the men to leave for work and then attempt to seduce the women who stayed behind. It lead to a lot of contention from the resultant pregnancies. This angered a lot of men and women who left for the new world. This is why Americans use the phase to mean something related but functionally different. I made all of that up, but thank you for citing an actual historical fact that added context to my previous comment.
Epic makes their money off microtransaction stores and they bought exclusive rights to a bunch of titles a while back, meaning you could ONLY play them on Epic.
Can anyone weigh in on how well this works on the deck? I know it’s 5 bucks and has a demo, but it would be great to hear from someone who’s played a lot of it
It works beautifully on the deck, it’s primarily how I play this game. I did rebind some controls though. It had reloading the gun set to one of the face buttons, which means you’d need to let go of the joystick to reload. I remapped the reload button to RB (R1) and it’s much better.
If I’m lucky I can find something new to hyperfixate on to get me out of a rut. Old stuff doesn’t do it for me. Discovered my favorite genre this way actually.
Shadow Cities was really fun back in the day. Despite coming out so long ago, I think it was the best location based game. I'm disappointed and a bit surprised that nobody ever recreated it. Niantic tried, but they never really captured the magic of it. Pokemon go was fun for a short time, but got boring fast. I think it was a huge missed opportunity to not have actual Pokemon battles, especially PvP.
They eventually got around to it, but by that time the game was so overmonetized that getting anything good to use in PvP required a bunch of cash or all of your time grinding.
I mostly play on the Xbox, not very often. so when I do, it’s the update game. I play update for a few minutes, get bored then go do something else. By the time I finish there’s no more time to play and I forget until a couple months when I only get to play update again.
“Oh hey, the console doesn’t need to update this time! And this 5-year old game is the one I just updated last month, and there hasn’t been any news or anything about the game.”
needs to update
“Wow, these minor bug fixes are (probably) amazing. Especially when it’s 300MB!”
bin.pol.social
Aktywne