Tim Sweeney hates linux so that’s why I prefer Steam over it. Even though Epic gives people free games, the games were always free anyway (unless you want multiplayer), I know you said piracy isn’t an answer though.
One reason is that Epic are very dismissive of Linux, while Steam go out of their way to be supportive and GOG are supportive when it’s convenient
Another is trying to lock games into exclusives with them, which other distribution platforms don’t do so much
That said, if you don’t play games without cross platform multiplayer and don’t care about Linux support or see yourself caring any time soon, there’s not a huge reason to push you towards steam and away from epic. GOG is more of an anti-DRM thing, however barring sales the price and the cut for the devs is identical on all of them and it’s the same game aside from DRM.
for sure! steam liberated my machine from a windows dual boot partition. and made me go 100% linux all the time. gratitude is not really strong enough. it is more like when you have been captured, and then set free.
Only buy a couple or so games a year these days, been really enjoying an arena fighting game I came across a little while ago. Only just started putting a few hours into it but always appreciate a game that makes you have to work on skill to progress.
I wouldn’t say there’s much in the way of management, its short fights mostly. Something I like about it are the fairly strong modifiers for each character type and how it pushes you into using them all so you get forced into different types of play.
I’m also trying to mainly support small dev team games these days and I think this made by one person which I find super impressive. You die and restart a lot, which I also enjoy
As someone who seldom plays with friends (I have very few who want to play online), I just pick the store where the games are the cheapest or there’s a sale or something. It doesn’t really affect me that much.
But if all your friends are on steam, then check before getting a game on Epic, sometimes they don’t let you play together. Most of the time they do, though.
I just finished The Invincible. Runs like dogshit on my system (i5-9600 16Gb/RX6650XT 8Gb), but very engaging for a walking simulator. About ten hours long and very little replay value unless you’re a completionist. Recommended if that sounds like your cup of tea, but don’t pay full price.
Such a good game. It’s mind-blowing how much personality and character development they give a bunch of quadrilaterals. The wiring and narration are fantastic.
Epic is the worst of the 3 platforms for a user. It is a drm like steam, but with less games on it, and even less optimized (so even more wasted resources and time loading useless advertising).
Steam has it that is makes game run on Linux smoothly, and the biggest library of games. Gog is drm free. Epic has absolutely nothing a user may want, except for free games so that you are now captive of their shitty platform.
Epic doesn’t have to be as good as Steam; it has to be better than Steam. People don’t up and leave platforms they like for new platforms for no reason. Epic can take a smaller cut on games but if that doesn’t carry to the end user why should I care.
At this point, I don’t know if Epic can get better than Steam in the ways that matter simply because they are clearly trying very hard to gain a dominant market position in ways that make it seem like they would abuse such a position, while Valve has had that dominant position for decades without abusing it. Valve is one of the few companies I trust these days. That trust is Valve’s to lose, not any other competitor’s to gain, though I am open to other adjacent providers (like I’ve got an xbox game pass sub, a ps5, and switch).
I have zero experience with epic or gog, but steam got incredibly bad lately. It’s not uncomon for it to consume 2 entire CPU cores just by animating some store page background.
There’s not really a good answer other than convenience. Folks view Steam as the benevolent convenient monopoly. They want it to be their store for everything, their launcher for everything, their friends and social networks for all gaming on PC and what not. Epic is behind on feature parity and function, but even if it did have parity, I think gamers still want the convenience of one store/library/friends list.
Unfortunately I’ve heard the new skate has forgotten what it set out to do with an over emphasis on off board mechanics. Man you should really check out skater XL or Session though. In my opinion they’re then natural evolution of the genre.
I tried one of those and I thought it was way too bland. I think it was Skater XL? Session looks neat but I’ve heard it’s way too hard and I’m not really looking for a challenge
And idk what you mean by “off board mechanics”? Hall of meat or…?
Yeah the mechanics of skater XL are good but there’s no story or anything. I don’t think session is any harder than skater XL and it does have a story mode.
Yeah, off board like hall of meats, parkor, building, etc.
Ah, yeah for me it’s all about the skateboarding and now that I’m used to the 2 stick trick system I don’t think I can go back to the skate 1 & 2 style.
Im still excited to check out skate 3 and I hope it does well. Just feels like I’m not the target audience anymore.
For starters: complete lack of features and user support. EGS gives you the game and basically no way to interact with the community around that game. They don’t support Linux, which is huge for some people, but also makes some peripherals like Steamdeck that operate on Linux entirely incompatible.
Because their user support is so bad, nobody really chooses EGS to buy/play games from, so Epic tries to take that choice away buy giving payouts to publishers to only let the game be on their store for six months or longer, meaning anyone who wants to play such a game has to come to them. This is also why you see a lot of free games, EGS trying to lure people to their “service”.
Which is where the real big problem comes in. Instead of user beneficial features, most of the storefront and game launcher is bloat ware that would rather show you more and more ads for other products on their store than let you get into the game you want to play. And if reports are true, advertising games already in your library. So they aren’t even trying to tailor a custom user experience, they are just blasting you with a bunch of shit till something sticks (or you uninstall)
There have also been allegations of EGS scanning personal computer files outside of its install directory, which is scummy enough on its own but its also transmitting that data back to their central server, which gets handed off to Tencent, the Chinese owned company that is a big investor in Epic and has their own history of scandal and anti consumer behavior. So if this all is happening, its hard to say just what data on your computer is behind handed off to Tencent and the Chinise Government because you wanted to play a silly game on an inferior game service.
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