I wouldn’t have much reason not to buy from Epic, but I also wouldn’t have any reason to buy from it either. Other than free games I don’t see why pick Epic over any other place. Steam has more features and GOG is DRM-free, even ItchIO has the benefit of being more supportive of smaller and upcoming game devs. Epic doesn’t do anything but the basic.
Occasionally Epic had better deals on, and if I was a big developer I might be tempted by their lower fees. That would certainly be offset by lower sales though.
The Epic store will probably stop being attractive to anyone as soon as “the kids” swap Fortnite for something else. They’ve basically got $6 billion in spunk money every year to try and make it a good alternative to Steam. When that money dries up, the Epic store isn’t going to make enough money to be worth keeping going. I doubt they’ll go bust, but they won’t be able to just hurl money at it to keep people interested.
There needs to always be multiple game stores to keep prices in check. Steam can not be the only option or prices will skyrocket. See game console stores for reference. I use Playnite to seamlessly bridge my game libraries from Steam, GOG, Epic, Amazon Prime, itch.io etc. This is the way.
For me it’s entirely self-centered and I’m dispensing with all the aspirational and political feelings that people have about the way businesses operate.
Quite simply I recommend Steam because it is a product with so many killer features, it’s really hard to take anybody else seriously.
It’s just shy of 2024, and Epic is still a non-realized alpha product. Their website, store, and launcher/library is a perfunctory effort at best. The most recent feature they added that I even consider to be an improvement would be the ability to look at my own games library - that should sound like a pretty funny joke but it’s said deadpan. They don’t even have proper controller support for PC, whereas Steam for example recognizes that PC gamers come with a variety of input hardware.
I mean it’s so simply that steam is such a mature product that offers so much to the gamer, and epic just wants money and they’re not really doing anything to compel me to want to use that platform.
GOG is great, it’s a simple system that gives you the power to own your own games and I very much appreciate that. Personally I don’t like to splinter my collection across different services so I’m mostly avoid them but I can’t say anything really negative.
Anyways this is just my opinion, I feel like steam has tons of killer features, the otherS simply don’t. There’s lots of valid discussion in other areas about ethics and things like that but really I’m just looking at it from the perspective of what do I want from my money. Steam gives me the most, and the others don’t even hold a candle.
I try so hard to be a rational consumer and not an emotion-driven zealot for any company or product. I just look at Epic and what they tell and show gamers/devs/publishers about who they are as a company. They don’t hide it.
Epic doesn’t seem to add any killer (and at times rudimentary) features while they focus their pitch down to more money for publishers now but we own your soul; By comparison Valve says here’s a robust and trusted, feature-rich platform you can deploy upon and we’re improving it constantly.
Valve engages in continual expansion of their Steam ecosystem (look at the Deck alone and how much value that added overnight); Valve does continual short-lived research projects like the Steam Link / Steam Controller, which don’t survive as stand-alone products but pound one novel killer-feature after the next into the platform; Epic treats their product like an afterthought and their customers as wallets.
This is really what is at the crux of it. I am not sympathetic to Epic’s way of doing business where the customer is last, the developers and their art are the pawns, and publishers are plied with sweet, predictable short-money in exchange for souls.
I’ve seen enough enshittification to know at this point that doing business with a bean-counting, value-wringing company hurts us all, and perhaps I’m out on a limb here but I feel like this sentiment is becoming highly solidified among many.
The whole idea of digital licenses are stupid and risky. If you can find it on GOG, it’s preferable to get it there. The games are DRM-free, and you can directly download the installers and make an offline backup of them.
What if Steam went bankrupt, or start playing less nice?
Thankfully, there’s not too much reason to worry about this yet. Steam is a money-printing machine, and it’s not a public company or beholden to investors who demand increasing profitability every quarter. As long as Gabe Newell is still alive and doesn’t sell out by taking Valve public, things probably won’t change much.
It’s important to note that just because you got it on GOG does not guarantee it is DRM free but they do try. (Unless things have changed since I last looked)
This is where I’m often torn. My sentiments lean fully to the principle of the user owning his/her purchased software.
But I want Valve to have my money and I trust them, because their entire business model is giving me the power to play my games in the most ways possible, and in ways that having the OG installer on my Desktop can’t do.
I can stream my entire 900 game Steam library to my phone and when my Deck gets here I’ll have access to it all there as well. Muahahaha. Take my money. No GOG RAR Installer is going to give me that, ever. This doesn’t seem to get talked about enough. Valve adds so much value, they make it so I don’t even want to pirate.
I’ve found scans of old game guides on archive.org, and you can still check out gamefaqs.gamespot.com for walkthroughs, many of which are just .txt files that you can save and/or print.
Most of the guides I will try to add to my kindle or save on my laptop. Looking for Doom 2016, Doom Eternal, Animal Crossing, Elden Ring, Demons Souls. Thanks for your help, I appreciate it and may make a personal list of all the games and links.
I don’t know of any single site where different game guides are aggregated, at least not the same way they were in the 90s/00s. Most games tend to use their own Wiki/Fandom sites for that sort of thing now.
You’ll probably end up needing to print several different pages and aggregate them together to get a single, offline guide for a game, but certainly possible with prep time.
UBoat - it’s a u boat game / simulator of sorts. Complex, slow game play as you stalk convoys, set up for the ambush, then escape the destroyers hunting your uboat.
Aside from the other scumbaggery that Epic does, if you do wanna play their free games then atleast use heroic so you don’t use the wasteheap that is the epic games launcher.
for me the entire launcher is slow and a massive resource hog. The entire GUI has the same issue I had with windows 8 with everything feeling way too big and a whole lot of form over function.
I mostly game on my Steam Deck and assumed Heroic was only a Linux thing, but recently learned it’s available on Windows too. How’s it do? I’ve been collecting the free games from Epic and Prime Gaming, but barely touch them. Being able to open a single launcher for everything non Steam in Windows sounds amazing!
haven’t tried the other platforms in heroic other than epic, it works 100% except for adding friends. You can add them via the overlay but it’s incredibly janky. Then again, it’s about as janky as it is on the actual launcher. But other than adding friends works great.
I just don’t like the launcher. It’s absurdly slow and bloated even though it doesn’t contain many features. On fast hardware, it takes 30s to open and lags harder than Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. It also eats up my CPU for no reason and has an invasive privacy policy. I try to use the open source Heroic launcher instead, it’s much better.
Although recently Steam has moved from slow to within a stone’s throw of the launching speed of the Epic Games Store. I’m now looking for an alternative to launch my Steam games.
I bought Touhou Artificial Dreams In Arcadia during the October sale and it is a bit of a hidden gem for fans of the old SMT JRPG games on SNES. I also picked up Lunacid but have not got that far in it, but it seems like a strong revival of the classic Kings Field games.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne