Oh that’s another really good point: Epic trained the consumers to open Epic weekly to get free games, then close it again. It’s a weird thing to be known for.
Sure, had them cornering the sellers market worked out - unrealistic as it was in hindsight - then having the buyers already all have the store installed for the free games would have been a genius way of getting more and more people onto the store. But it did not, and now it has just cemented the Epic store as a place you do not spend money on!
We are just now getting out of the bullshit days of 40 game launchers. The Big Industry morons like Ubi, Ea and Bliz are crumbling. Indie devs are being celebrated and releasing titles now more than ever before. We are in a ‘quiet’ time of gaming. i believe. not a dark time. If the mainstream industry can get back to more honest and longevity based projects then we will in the next 5-10 years see another golden age (think 2007 or 2017 release titles) and of course year over year everyone can point to one or two games worth playing for the whole year or two till the next one.
Remember, Skyrim was released closer to the first year you listed than the second one and the sequel is still quite a ways out. There are entire release day players of Elder Scrolls 6 who were not yet born when 5 came out.
Valve may not be the cheapest by any means, but that’s because they’re offering a product 30x as valuable. The other launchers companies have are shit, across the board, nothing but shit. It’s not even in the same continent. If any one of these companies actually wants to ever see this change, they are going to have to set their greed aside. That’s impossible for CEOs in this day and age, so I don’t see Steam ever losing their stranglehold unless they do an about-face from everything they’ve done so far. In the grand scheme of things, Valve is one of the most customer friendly companies on the face of the Earth and they continue to be innovative and supportive to users. Epic on the other hand is everything wrong with capitalism, and much the same can be said for any of the other companies with competing launchers/game stores.
What’s so wrong with Epic? I prefer Steam but Epics client has a better UI, I haven’t found any problems, and deals seem better than Steam, especially with free games.
No communities, no guides, no VR , no game streaming, annoying download manager, annoying friends tab, no steam deck, no game collections AFAIK. When Fall Guys came out for free I gave the Epic launcher a real chance and it was incredibly limited in it functionality and frustrating to use compared to Steam.
Steam is shaping up to be your all in one library for anything games be it PC, VR or portable. The Switch, Quest, Playstation, Xbox and Epic launcher all offer a piece of that experience but having a unified platform that syncs your saves and doesn’t nickel and dime you for features and accessories is why Steam is more popular.
I haven’t been using Epic enough to really compare with Steam sales but stuff gets really cheap on steam really fast. I would also gladly buy my games for money on Steam just to be able to play them easily on my Steam Deck. Also Epic is only doing the free games because they have unreal and Fortnite money, there’s no telling when the free games will stop.
You’re right about most things, and Linux/VR support is often a deal breaker for me so I rarely use Epic. But you really think its that unusable? I’ve heard mostly positive things from my friends. I don’t care how or why they’re giving out free games but its a huge plus. I just really don’t understand all the hate.
I remembered some more stuff epic doesn’t have. Steam input and launch option customization. I can play Civ 6, a game meant for kbm, on my steam deck with the controller buttons. Epic obscures their exe files to make it hard to know which to add as a non steam game to steam.
It was annoying to go from steam with it’s deep and helpful functionality to epic with what essentially just feels like the iOS appstore. I especially hate being forced to use epic online services on a game I bought ON STEAM. I couldn’t play the sackboy game with a friend on steam deck because something along the way broke and epic services wouldn’t let me. This game is P2P there’s definitely no servers being involved so why the heck can’t they just use steamworks?
Epic being unusable is a bit of an exaggeration but in terms of the platform they offer it is inferior to steam in every single way and they have done almost zero to make up the gap. Instead they pay money to keep games away from steam and force you to use their launcher in the most annoying and inconvenient way. That’s why they get so much hate from people.
Adding to what Natryamar said, epic once bundled actual malware with their client and is partially owned by Tencent, the chinese company known for turning games into garbage.
I absolutely love their client and prefer GOG over Steam. I remember how their client GOG Galaxy is highly praised in the developer community, because it is so well designed and runs so performant. It also allows you to play any previous versions of games you own.
What has GOG done for Linux? I care about OSS and companies supporting my preferred OSS operating system. To that end, Valve continues to be a steward without peer.
This opinion is in no way unpopular. Valve is privately owned and headed by a single individual with tremendous purpose of will, which is how they’ve done so many great things for the gaming industry. The issue lies with said leadership vacating their role (GabeN is getting old) and some greedy bastard taking the company in a wholy different direction. tl;dr: we need a strong competitor, but not now, and ABSOLUTELY not Epic.
I dreamt once that there was a reliable, non-profit yet well funded community that hosted and distributed games with minimal take in an effort to spread gaming as art and history. They even kept a system agnostic achievement system that retroactively added steam, PlayStation and Xbox achievements in one place with community features.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I have weird dreams, y’all!
I don’t see what people have against Epic, they’re just another company running a storefront, right? Or are they union busters or something?
Any competition that can take on Stream’s monopoly is good, it’s been a long time coming.
You might think Steam are the good guys because they don’t abuse their customers yet, but all good things come to an end, eventually. A company with their level of monopolistic grasp doesn’t remain benign forever.
Valve is a private company so Gabe doesn’t have anyone breathing down his neck to grow endlessly not matter the costs. Also epic refuses to add any half decent consumer features along with buying exclusivity to their platform. Sweeney is also extremely anti linux so why would I give him money.
Steam is pretty good, in many ways. … … There is a little bit of customer abuse creeping in though. It annoys me that I can’t turn off the “what’s new” panel. It’s nothing more than an advertisement panel, and the only options are to say ‘show less’ for individual games, one by one (and even then, it doesn’t stop showing advertisements related to those games).
In any case, I don’t use Epic’s launcher at all; so I won’t try to comment on which is better. I just think it’s good to point out that Steam isn’t perfect, and I agree that competition probably does them some good.
It’s incredibly frustrating from an ideological perspective that the whole PC gaming industry runs on a benevolent dictatorship by Valve.
I mean they have near total control not just over sales, but over the gaming software installed on our PCs. They have the power to do whatever, whenever, to whoever.
But at the same time, they’re cool people with good products who have good stewardship of this role.
The day Gabe dies and pathetic bastards with business degrees take over and ruin everything that’s made Steam great for all these years, is the day I begin pirating everything.
Exactly. Steam is a load-bearing member. After seeing what happened to Twitter, Reddit, Unity, Wikia, etc. it’s reasonable to think ahead. If Valve gets enshittified that’s basically the end of PC gaming.
I don’t even play games that have Denuvo. But I’m happy to see many of them remove it after a few years because they can’t afford to keep paying for their game to literally be worse and several had been cracked (although it’s my understanding that only one person was cracking those games).
…but… Literally, benevolent, sectionalized dictatorship is the only response to the Tragedy of the Commons.
…that is to say, individual responsibility and exercise of power. Work primarily on responsibility until you’ve got one area covered - then expand your power. Know your limits, and don’t try to expand your power beyond what you’re capable of handling responsibly. Encourage others to do likewise. Steam is good because they haven’t sold out, but are managed by people who have genuine interest in the industry, and who are willing to exercise power responsibly.
Actual unpopular opinion: I don’t give a fuck, I want my launcher to launch my games, all of them do it, Steam just comes with a shit load of extra stuff I don’t care about. I buy my games where they’re the cheapest and with all the free games on Epic I rarely use Steam anymore. If they’re the same price I’ll go with the platform that give the devs the biggest share of the profit and that’s not Steam.
Based on how you completely changed what your point from one comment to the other, it seems you realized you had to have something more interesting to opine.
I really hope they patch some of the bugs then because otherwise it's gonna be unplayable. I have to use the remove glitch mod since my save got bugged after the glitch effect got stuck permanently on my character after a convo with Johnny.
No they don’t lol. GOG doesn’t even have a client, you have to use Lutris or Heroic Launcher that support it.
Itch has a half implemented Linux client that they gave up years ago and is straight up unusable/broken. The client is worse then a web wrapper and nas no support for Wine, so if the game doesn’t have native Linux support, it just won’t run through the client. It will download exe’s that won’t actually run and silently fail, and doesn’t have any wine support.
They don’t have a client but both allow you to just download the game and run it from a .sh that installs it in the local folder. That’s enough for me but I agree it may not be for everyone.
Lol, Epic cut Linux support when it bought Rocket League.
But you are right, no one even tries. Everyone wants to have Valve’s income, but no one wants to do the legwork of innovation that Valve does. If someone would compete with Valve where they don’t already have a massive foothold, there might be some better results. For example, Linux. If any of these funding-gorged companies were to put serious money into competing with Valve in the Linux space, it’d be a real competition. Then you could leverage your stake in that to compete in different sectors. But the Linux market is small, and averse to paying for things (userwise) so not much to gain. But Valve understands that if gaming parity with Windows happens, then it will have a compounding effect. It would unshackle the PC market from Microsoft. It would make spending funding on a gaming device that DOESN’T have to have Windows involved a much more appealing prospect. Hell, the phone gaming market. No need for these re-skinned Skinner boxes when you can have the actual PC version on your phone. Whole new market, right there.
The companies that innovate tend to lead. And those who follow the coin and not the music, do not.
That honestly sounds reasonable. It’ll be impossible to troubleshoot legitimate issues when they can’t even determine if the issues are being caused by a mod that the user installed years ago and hasn’t touched since.
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