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.
Having healthy competition is a good thing and I’ve wished for a competitor to Steam for a long time until one day the monkey’s paw curled and we got Epic Game Store. To sum it up:
Epic actively tries to introduce exclusivity deals to PC, something that goes very much against the nature of the platform. It is something we’re supposed to be above on PC and let console players deal with. PC gamers simply don’t want fragmentation in the market. We hate all the different shitty launchers publishers are making for the same reason too.
Epic has a very hostile attitude towards Linux. Their anti cheat for example by default detects the mere fact of using Linux as a hack. For a long time if their anti cheat was included it was an absolute no go on Linux. Their store also works like crap on Linux, if at all.
EGS lacks necessities for then to call themselves a good store like reviews, good support and refund policies, ease of mod support, wishlists, etc.
Their UI is just plain bad.
But the main point is the first one. If they bothered making a good store they wouldn’t need to make most of PC gamers angry by introducing exclusivity deals, but they can’t be bothered to do that, so they go for hostile competition instead at the detriment of the customers.
I couldn’t find reviews. What I did find was a 5 star based rating system which is not the same thing at all. With steam reviews the text is more relevant to me than if they did or did not recommend the game.
Console gamer here as well, though with a PC and redeeming my weekly Epic Games since a few years back. I sometimes play on my PC, but mostly games I don’t have on my console.
Most of what I hear I believe it’s mostly due to the Epic Launcher being quite a bit behind standard, and the store not having great costumer service policies. I think Epic’s games with timed exclusivity don’t garner a lot of respect from the gaming community either, as they rather have freedom of choice to purchase their games on their main storefront.
Now, I think it’ll be obvious, but all of what I mentioned is further impacted by the comparison between Epic (or most other launchers, really) and Steam. Steam might as well be called the “default launcher” at this point, and naturally not everyone can compete (or they don’t want to) with the numerous and consistently good business decisions Steam tends to have, which keeps it in the top.
Not only that, and even though I still benefit from it, I’d say Epic’s strategy of offering weekly free games might feel like a sort of ‘obvious bribe’ to some, a cheap way to try and vainly make gamers turn on their main competitor. Which isn’t really moving the needle that much, because gamers preference for Steam isn’t due to free games, but good and consumer-oriented business practices.
I’m sure from gamer to gamer there’s more depth to this, but I’d say that’s the gist of it.
You’re amazing. Format is great. I just scroll past the stuff that doesn’t interest me, but more often than not something catches my eye and I end up reading stuff I wouldn’t have clicked on (let alone waded through ads for) on a regular gaming site. That’s such a good feeling, and yeah, reminds me of the old days of flipping through gaming mags.
I know these are ‘heavy’, but I try my best to break them into sections (*actually, this time I did not do that - typically they’re broken into themed sections like ‘Switch News’, or ‘GOG News’ etc), and make it a little easier to wade through.
I just love writing them in this way, even if they’re not the most convenient. And I do try to ‘pretty’ them up, too! I’m glad you enjoyed this, there’s plenty I’ve done before it if you’re interested in reading others!
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 don't root for any rich guy over another, but I do think competition is the best way you're going to keep them in check for a commodity market with little regulation, at least.
On that front the cultish adoration of Newell and all the actively rooting for a Steam PC gaming monopoly is... worrying.
It was great when it had its niche, and I still buy games there occasionally, but it has poorer integration with pretty much anything, Galaxy is bloated as hell, and it has explicitly no linux/deck support.
Eta: apparently GOG actively funds Heroic launcher, didn’t know that, thanks for pointing it out to me.
So I learned recently that GOG actively funds Heroic. Which really takes some weight off of Heroic's support for GOG game autopatching and cloud saves, meaning it may be a bit hacky and officially in "beta", but it's very unlikely for GOG to object to its presence.
They may not "officially" support Linux, but they don't "explicitly" lack support.
Also, tip of the hat to Heroic, it works extremely well and very reliably. I was frustrated with Lutris and I am bummed out by how Galaxy didn't quite get there as the one universal support launcher to handle all your libraries, but Heroic is good enough as a replacement I don't mind nearly as much anymore. Even on Windows I'd consider it over Galaxy.
Yep. As I understand it it's via affiliate links, so if you buy GOG games through the storefront in the Heroic UI they get a small cut, but the Heroic devs say they have spoken to GOG reps and they are broadly supportive, so unless that changes I don't think their ability to support GOG features would be compromised any time soon.
Tim Sweeney is an obnoxious hypocritical dickhead who has only gotten worse and stupider and more hostile over the years, he is constantly spouting anti-consumer and anti-common-sense nonsense while acting like he’s saving gamers and nurturing his egotistical martyr complex. He has gotten so bad that he has contradicted his own past self so many times that for awhile there was a literal subreddit “TimCriticizesTim” devoted to it. Also EGS itself is garbage resource-guzzling software that almost nobody actually wants on their computer, most of the people who do use it do it either because they’re forced to so they can play games exclusively available on it, or because Epic bribes them to by giving them free games constantly. It is nasty software that collects way more data than it needs to, spying on your files and possibly other stuff too, and they also lied about it (and as far as I know still do).
Except that’s also a lie. Steam does keep a higher percentage of the sales price for itself than Epic does, but it also allows people to activate game keys without taking any money. Steam only makes money from games sold on Steam itself. So developers can sell games through other stores and even through their own website, and keep up to 100% of the sales price. Effectively, this means that Steam takes roughly the same amount of money that Epic does, or in some cases even less probably.
This isn’t public data unfortunately, devs with a game on both platforms are the only ones who can tell us where they earn more. However, I did once read an article that claimed the effective cut from Steam is about half what it says on the tin IF the devs (or their publisher) put in enough effort themselves. Because that’s who decides this, Steam doesn’t have and doesn’t want any control over this.
Not to mention— the value for that 30% on platform + 0% off platform cut for steam is insane. The payment processing, storage, hosting, worldwide routing and caching, multiplayer sdks and integrations, and dozens of other publisher / developer available tools are worth every single penny to have valve handling for you.
People should like Epic for giving more money to developers than Steam.
They give more money to publishers* That may or may not translate into more money for the developers, but seeing how the industry is going, I’m more inclined to believe devs don’t see a cent from the extra cut in most cases.
I’m loving Doom Dark ages, I’m on about level 8 out of 22. I like that there’s enough room in levels to move around. Movement is awesome, you can just run everywhere. The weapons are extremely effective and your toolkit is reduced so you have shield-block shield-slam shield-throw melee and then guns. It’s pretty easy to remember everything you have and then select an appropriate attack for the situation.
I really love it. Hopefully there aren’t any more Mech-pilot missions because that one sucked. The dragon wasn’t my favorite either but you can make it through without much difficulty and it didn’t take forever.
bin.pol.social
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