I wonder how much Epic games makes at the end of the day. most companies that do stuff like this operate at a huge loss, functioning only through investment capital until they starve out their competition and become the head of a monopoly at which point their investors become even more pointlessly wealthy. However I believe this works so often because those competitors are also operating off of investor capital and eventually their investors decide to sell out and switch teams to get some of their investment back. How does this work with Valve? Unlike companies previously discussed Valve is a privately held company and has control over their own company, as evidenced by the fact that they seem to make discissions in favor of long term goals instead of short term profits, a concept that has grown foreign to the US market. On top of the fact they are currently the leader in online game sales, I’m unsure how epic can justify, what i would assume, is a huge sum of money constantly paying for exclusives. Maybe im wrong and the pie is so large Epic is currently operating financially soundly. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Regardless we should all be happy that this market is not a clear cut monopoly, competition is a consumer win.
Yeah, and it’s a nightmare to use with Steam link. The last epic exclusive I bought was The Expanse, but adding it as a non-Steam game to play with the link app completely screwed up the license check and locked you out of everything but the first episode.
I tried GTA5 when I made an account there. The game was given free. Didn’t play for long though, and I dislike the idea of having more than Steam. (I have GOG for Sims but I don’t use that either)
I tried Rocket League at work. It is fun and I’d like to continue at home…but opening up that Epic Store kinda is a turn-off for the deal.
Man, i kinda hate the epic games launcher, it is really crap; but for me games being on epic is not problem, i just use heroic instead, it’s MUCH faster than epic’s slop; what i don’t like is games that for some reason just refuse to work on heroic despite EOS being installed
I say this every time Epic comes up but it remains the same.
Steam is the pro-consumer storefront. Epic is the pro-developer storefront. What Epic seems to fail to understand is that by being so staunchly pro-developer, they effectively become anti-consumer. And as a consumer, I’m just not going to spend money on an anti-consumer marketplace.
When Epic considers adding necessary pro-consumer measures like actual user reviews so I can hear how a game actual performs from real end users, then and only then will I consider Epic a real storefront viable for consumers.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. Epic’s main selling point was it’s lower storefront fee (15% vs 30%, if I recall). It didn’t offer any other benefits for consumers and I think Epic realised rather quickly that the people who are actually supposed to be paying money for all of this are the buyers and not the sellers, and thus they’ve resorted to strategies like making games “exclusive” or trying to bribe players with free games.
I understand that they are pro-developers, like, they only tale 15% of the sales etc. But why are they anti-consumers?
I use Heroic Games Launcher on Nobara Linux and my experience is more seamless than buying and installing games from Steam. I don’t have to bother with Epic Games Launcher, I just download a game and run via proton or wine.
I gave what I see as a significant example in my original comment. Not being able to see comments or reviews from those who have purchased games through the storefront is a problem for me. If a game has a bug or problem, especially if it is one that could potentially be tied to or unique to the EGS version, I would like to know about it. That EGS currently doesn’t provide readily available user feedback when it frankly has been the standard as defined by steam, just doesn’t for me.
So you have to ask yourself why they wouldn’t include such a simple a rudimentary feature - the only result I can come up with is to appease developers who want to prevent being negatively impacted by bad reviews. Thus what we have is prioritizing the wants of developers at the expense of features which benefit consumers.
The fact that you can’t use the Epic games launcher on Linux should be telling you what you need to know.
How is their 12 foot interface these days?
How is their position on running things via wine? Tim the bellend has generally been telling Linux users to use wine, but at the same time been generally hostile to it.
I agree they don’t have to be anti-consumer to be pro-developer, but my point is that that is how they are approaching being pro-developer - by limiting pro-consumer features at the behest of developers. Or perhaps I should be saying more actively publishers, to be fair.
For there to be competition, there have to be some features. Epic just uses exclusivity deals as an alternative to features.
I am not sure what that is, but there is no competition.
There are so many games that I don’t even care about all the games available on Steam (that I’d be willing to play). We have so many games coming out that I’d have to play game for a living to play all the games I want to play, and even then I’m not 100% sure I’d be able to play everything I’d be open to play. I have multiple games that I’ve purchased and installed thinking “I’ll get to them soon enough” and they’re just taking drive space. I also have multiple games on my wishlist that are “waiting for a discount” but I’m probably never going to pick them up because actually they’re waiting for my backlog to clear and it will never clear.
Does it suck that Alan Wake is Epic exclusive. Sure. Does it really matter to me? Not really because I’m oversaturated with games I want to play. Missing one great game doesn’t matter when I already have a backlog of great games I won’t purchase because I have a backlog of great games I’ve purchased that I won’t play because I have a backlog of great games I really want to play.
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