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.
As much as I like using Steam, I’m on Epic’s side here. They sue over anti-competitive practices of other marketplaces that take almost triple the cut that Epic does on game sales.
If I were a developer and one platform took 12% while the other took 30%, I’d push my customers to the 12% option no matter how much better the in-game overlay or whatever was on the other platform. Game studios are closing left and right, and that extra 18% is a big deal when games are struggling to actually profit from the development.
I don’t understand why people are so in love with a Steam monopoly. Steam has a lot of neat features, but the main feature I’m looking for in a game is the game itself, and I’d prefer more of the money to go to the companies making the games.
And maybe if Valve didn’t take home a larger profit from game sales than the developers themselves, they’d go back to being a full-time game studio to make their money.
I might have been on epic’s side if they had delivered a storefront/launcher at least as good as Steam, then found they still weren’t able to compete and only then decided to try the exclusivity crap.
They did not. They have a launcher/store that is far worse than Steam or even GOG (which is an accomplishment; GOG’s isn’t all that good and yet they manage to be worse by a large margin), and they didn’t even attempt to provide a better product/service. Instead they just started throwing money in order to secure exclusivity.
It shows all they want is to muscle into the market, not provide anything better for people.
Is a better launcher really worth 18% of the gross value of a game?
If a developer decided to cut 20% of their content, and their excuse was “we want to use that budget towards a better third-party game launcher instead of using it to develop the game” would you be okay with that?
Because that’s what you’re suggesting they do by choosing Steam over EGS.
The thing is gaming is a weird industry where the consumer price is essentially fixed tegardless of platform/marketplace outside of sales.
Ideally, games would cost more on Steam to make up for the increased fees. That would create a market where Steam would probably have to lower its fees to be competitive. And if Steam did that, EGS would need to improve the quality of its service to remain competitive.
Or maybe Steam could be a boutique marketplace where the games cost more but the UU is better, while EGS is an unholy mess of a UX, but the games cost less.
But what we have right now is neither. With the customers being shielded from the price differences, the negative effects of Steam are invisible to most people and the market doesn’t properly function.
Yeah, they expressed that they wanted to join the online game store scene and the big feature they were offering to draw in users was… anticompetitive exclusivity deals!
Plus the company killed off the unreal tournament franchise because they didn’t want it to compete with fortnite.
I have no interest in supporting a company that thinks removing options is the best way to get users to use their products.
It’s the same shit that has turned streaming services from great back when it was new to now having content spread across many competing services. I’d rather they competed based on their own platform’s features and advantages than the whole “if you want to watch x, you must use service y”. It’s just a series of mini monopolies.
Imagine if they succeed with the exclusivity tactics, how other companies will respond to that? Doing the exactly same thing.
Let some years of exclusivity wars and the PC gaming will look like the streaming, a bunch of storefronts offering the same poor service and the clients doesn’t know where to buy what they want because at any moment another exclusivity deal could be made and the entire library moved to another storefront, just like streaming.
Exactly. Oh and I also just remembered another angle: their anti-linux stance. They used to make games with native Linux support, but as I understand it, they’ve even removed Linux support from some games that already had it, trying to keep the Microsoft monopoly going. I wonder how much money ms is giving epic for that.
Same reason why a lot of the non-steam handhelds are non-starters for me. And yeah, I can live without games that depend on Windows kernel-level anti-cheat.
My backlog is so full I could keep entertained even if I ignore every single game I don’t currently have in my steam library. Hell, I even ignore some that are there when I realized they have denuvo or something like that after buying and the refund window has already passed when I do notice.
They used to make games with native Linux support, but as I understand it, they’ve even removed Linux support from some games that already had it, trying to keep the Microsoft monopoly going. I wonder how much money ms is giving epic for that.
Probably none, the CEO with the small dick energy just hate Steam so if Steam is pro Linux he will do the opposite of it.
Tldr: Kickstarter Game with a lot of interest while in development announces a release date on Steam. After the date announcement they get contacted by Epic saying “we’d love to host your game” for an exclusivity deal.
Dev responds that they would be happy to have their game on Epic but promises were made during crowd funding that it would be available on Steam.
Epic replies that they aren’t interested if it’s not exclusive.
This tells me that
Epic is full of shit. "We’d love to have your game, but only if it’s exclusive.
Epic doesn’t care about being a better service for its customers. Having the game available on Epic as well is strictly better for Epic’s customers and they easily could have done that. They chose not to.
Epic is not interested in actually having to compete with other companies. This would require them to provide a better service in some fashion. They are only interested if they can force people “if you want to purchase this game you have to buy it through us” which is anti-consumer.
Basically watch games being promoted on steam pre-release and when games get popular, reach out to them and offer them money to be exclusive on EGS for a period of time despite all the publicity the game got being on Steam.
Downloading the games does not cost Epic anything. They paid a flat rate to make it free to download, regardless of how many people actually download it.
You signing into the store and claiming the free games provides user metrics that Epic can use to entice investors.
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.
I just recognized the username; it’s the same dude who keeps trying to complain about monetization and wow and all that regularly lol. Seems like he deleted his last post on it? But it’s still in his comment history.
I can’t think of any examples of the top of my head, but aren’t there some games that should have thrived but we’re heals back by launching as Epic exclusives?
The other day I wanted to download it (wink wink) but from the site I checked (popular and recommended, not a shitty one) it required you to login to epic and some other shit. Gave up 3 seconds later, not worth the trouble
Yeah, the repack of that store requires some calls home and fake accounts.
I’ve honestly seen all I really need two of the game by watching a couple of people play it on YouTube. It’s pretty, it’s neat. If it would have came out on steam back in the day I would have bought it without a question.
Ok, weird hill to die on, but I think everyone should be given the right to choose to end their life early, if they wish to, so I support your decision.
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.
For what reason? Why is Epic so bad? I’m not fishing for a reaction. I genuinely don’t know why most people here hate Epic
Edit: ok, so what I gather from the comments is that Epic has a slightly worse service and that you guys are way too invested in a stupid dispute between two companies that only care about your money. Cool 👍
I got exactly one free epic game (subnautica) that I uninstalled and bought immediately the day I couldn’t play the game because I lost Internet and there was no goddamned offline mode.
Epic store is shovelware, and I can’t believe the amount of people who defend a 4th rate store comparing itself to the gold standard that can’t even offer basic functionality expected of a modern platform.
Lol I stayed away because the anticompetitiveness was immediately obvious (they should have opened with the free games but showed their hand early by starting with exclusivity deals), but I’m not surprised it gets even worse.
The Epic Games Store is a user data collection platform first, and a pretty bad game store/client second. It’s slow, buggy, difficult to navigate (though that’s somewhat subjective), and sometimes doesn’t work without an Internet connection, even for games you already have downloaded locally and installed.
Disclaimer: I understand that any games store, including Steam, collects user data. But at least those other stores provide working, user friendly features in exchange for the data collection they do.
Tldr: Kickstarter Game with a lot of interest while in development announces a release date on Steam. After the date announcement they get contacted by Epic saying “we’d love to host your game” for an exclusivity deal.
Dev responds that they would be happy to have their game on Epic but promises were made during crowd funding that it would be available on Steam.
Epic replies that they aren’t interested if it’s not exclusive.
This tells me that
Epic is full of shit. "We’d love to have your game, but only if it’s exclusive.
Epic doesn’t care about being a better service for its customers. Having the game available on Epic as well is strictly better for Epic’s customers and they easily could have done that. They chose not to.
Epic is not interested in actually having to compete with other companies. This would require them to provide a better service in some fashion. They are only interested if they can force people “if you want to purchase this game you have to buy it through us” which is anti-consumer.
If you go to the official website for the game Infinity Nikki, where the pic is taken, and look to the left of what the OP cropped, there is a standalone Windows download. You can just download the game.
The game is F2P so while it’s not some big accomplishment to pirate like you’re implying, it is almost certainly loaded with predatory monetization.
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
lemmy.world
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