Sweeney (the CEO of Epic) says that he wants competition with Steam, but many of his actions point toward that he really just wants to be the guy at the top (ie, he wants to be the monopoly instead of Valve). He’s taken a fair number of anti-consumerist stances, which vary from understandable to clearly anti-competitive.
Epic is known for making exclusivity deals with 3rd party studios in which Epic bribes the studio with money, and in exchange, the studio does not release their game on Steam for 1 year.
At several points, this occurred after a studio already said that they will release on Steam, and the studio would have to walk back and delete their Steam listing.
Iirc, at one point Epic bought out a studio and had them remove the Steam listing for an already-released game, causing the game to be unplayable for people who had already bought the game
Edit: this apparently happened twice (Unreal Tournament and Rocket League), but it appears that the games still work for the people who bought it. I think the concern was actually that Steam players would lose functionality due to not being supported anymore after the unlisting
The Epic Game Store released in a non-functional state, and development on it is extremely slow. The first impression of the broken store likely still influences many people’s impression of the store. But it’s still missing many features that many gamers want to see in a store.
There were various rumors when the store first launched that it contained spyware. My understanding is that those rumors never fully got disproven, especially since some of the claims were supported by at least some evidence
Epic does not support Linux, and Sweeney has openly said that he does not plan to support Linux until it becomes more popular. He did immediately jump on board with supporting Arm though, which caused a lot of Linux gamers to think that he just doesn’t want to support Linux
Sweeney is a pretty abrasive person and iirc he made a lot of concerning statements on his social media. Several of them (as mentioned above) indicate that he wants to dethrone Valve so that he can be the monopoly instead
Overall, many gamers are in support of more competition in the game store space. Unfortunately, many gamers also think that Epic is an untrustworthy competitor, and they believe that Epic has a serious chance of making the gaming industry worse if they become more popular. As a result, many would prefer for Steam remain the monopoly rather than to take a bet on Epic.
It was a while ago, I don’t remember off the top of my head which specific game I’m remembering. Doing a brief search, it appears that this happened to Unreal Tournament and Rocket League, though it appears that the games still work for the people who bought it before the unlisting. I think the concern was losing functionality, especially for server-based or multiplayer games
For unplayable, Rocket League had very good Linux and macos native builds Epic required them to delete support for those operating systems as part of the acquisition of Psyonix
Yeesh I knew Epic was run by dick heads but I didn’t know they were this slimy, I’m glad I’ve only bought one game on their platform (Subnautica below zero), and that’s only because I got the original Subnautica for free from their weekly giveaway and loved it. I’ll continue to get the free games from them as it’s good to take a chance on games that you otherwise might never learn about.
There are a few layers to it. I’ll start with the legit reasons and hope the jackasses don’t read too deep in:
EGS was built around the idea of providing what people need/want rather than EVERYTHING. Some of that was truly asinine (no shopping cart for like 2 years?) and some was a conscious choice based on everyone saying they don’t want their video game store to be a social media network. Unfortunately… people apparently DO want their video game store to be social media.
Every store handles regional pricing and distribution differently and, allegedly, EGS had worse coverage in a few of the countries The Internet actually knows exists.
Tim Sweney is a complete and utter dipshit and always has been and it is REALLY hard to not hate everything he touches.
EGS rapidly entwined itself with Fortnite because Fortnite makes more than the GDP of some small nations. But we are hardcore gamers so we all hate Fortnite.
Sweeney/Epic actually accidentally argued for consumer rights against Apple which, in turn, led to the full force of Apple running smear campaigns against Epic to make sure that we all realized how much we love walled gardens
Sweeney/Epic ALSO kind of picked a fight with Steam by pointing out how little developers get from any given sale. Which… because we all love Valve means that Epic are assholes and developers all actively want to strive to get the negotiating power of a Call of Duty or Rockstar.
Speaking of. EGS isn’t Valve and any alternative is inherently evil because we all love Valve.
So what was a mediocre store with a lot of free games and a tendency to give developers a giant sack of money for one year of exclusivity became The Devil.
no Linux support - Heroic works, why doesn’t Epic do what GOG do and revenue share w/ Heroic?
exclusivity deals, which reduces options outside of EGS
Epic’s anticheat works on Linux, but their own games that use it don’t, that’s a pretty big slap in the face
I certainly want more competition to Steam, but that competition needs to do something other than exist for me to use it. GOG is that, and if they properly supported Linux, they’d get most of my gaming money. But they don’t, so they only get some of it.
Yeah, this probably reads like a Linux fanboy post or something, but I’ve been using Linux longer than Steam supported it with its client, and I’ll still be here if Steam leaves. It’s my platform of choice, and a vendor needs to meet me here if they want my business. Valve did, so they get my money. I honestly don’t need much, I just need games to work properly on my system.
I don’t really know all the details other than Tim Sweeney seeming like a shit head. I just collect my free games sometimes and have never bought a thing on there, I don’t even think I have payment info on there.
It’s very simple, valve is a gamer company. Epic is a money company. Every single thing each respective company does shows that. I’m not a bitch, I’m never going to let those Epic cunts have a penny of my money. Fucking with the games industry, fucking with gamers, locking exclusives, it’s all bullshit & they can suck my cock
Oh so they have no responsibility at all then. Might as well stop checking IDs when people enter casinos or buy alcohol because they’re not supposed to if they’re underaged.
They make a deliberately addictive mechanic that they know ruin peoples’ life, and they also know they have a big young audience, but you think that’s fine? Shame of you, really.
It’s also in TF2 btw
And whatever you say, it’s still exploiting adults. In many countries, like France, casinos are legally obliged to detect addicted people, prevent minors from playing, and let people opt out legally, and never allow them to gamble afterwards. Valve blatantly doesn’t respect this and takes efforts to bypass the law. They got banned in Belgium and France, and used a legal loophole to avoid being banned in France.
You’re acting like a Valve fanboy. Be objective. Apart from that, Valve is an overall good company for the video games industry, but they act like a piece of shit in other places.
I mean… Do you support the recent proposal to ban online porn? How about alcohol?
Valve provides a game, an appropriate age rating, a description of the monetization scheme, and a way for users to freely trade items.
If minors transform that into a gambling addiction, it’s certainly a big problem, but I don’t see how that translates into “Steam bad, Epic Games good”
Do you support the recent proposal to ban online porn?
No, but that’s another subject. Not easy to regulate and is not as life threatening as many other things. We all consumed some when minors and it never was a huge deal for most people. Gambling is much worse imo, as it impacts your finance. Gambling is already banned/regulated and Valve is avoiding the current laws.
How about alcohol?
It’s already pretty well restricted for minors. The world would be better without it, but as nicotine, can’t go back now that people are used to it.
but I don’t see how that translates into “Steam bad, Epic Games good”
Never said that.
I talked about this because the original comment said Valve wasn’t here for money. Why do they push gambling then?
I’m loving it. But most of the people I talk to were put off by eternal. It’s more of that Soni can get people not picking it up for it’s very expensive cost currently.
Once I got adjusted to the difficulty of eternal I fell in love with it, once you realize you have to constantly stay moving and adjust on the fly it just became awesome. Still feel like the music is disjointed.
Thank you for another update. Love the covers. My child is often playing around with my switch boxes. Maybe should look at doing some more boxes because it looks good in the bookshelf.
I’m playing it right now, and ots actually a lot of fun. Exploration feels fun still like doom 2016 and Eternal, and you have different murder mechanics to choose from in the midst of a hundred enemies. I’d say the reviews are right.
Now, that being said, I think i still like 2016 better, but they both have a very different feel from each other.
Did you play the 2016 one or eternal? My first ever game was the first doom. Doom 3 is a great game but it just wasn’t really doom. Getting into the lore was cool though. A roommate forced me to try doom 2016 and it immediately brought back the memories and feelings, they also use and continue the lore in a non invasive way. I haven’t yet played dark ages but the modern ones are very much the successor to the originals.
It’s been I think about 7 years and it’s not feature competitive for end users with 2011 Steam even though they definitely make more money than 2004-2011 Valve and by 2018 had 14 years of history to look at and feature target based off what competition offered
The CEO was regularly on Twitter complaining about Windows but refused to help grow Linux adoption. Valve has been doing that since like 2012. He constantly talks about standing with small developers but then in the Apple court case admits they would have been quiet if Apple gave them a special revenue split deal. He complains about Steam and mobile store cuts but doesn’t complain about consoles having the same.
Exclusive deals in lieu of providing a better experience for the end user. Talked up so much about being superior because they’re developer focused; didn’t have self publishing tools until the end of 2023 - 5 years after EGS launched. It’s been 7 years. They haven’t made PC gaming any better. They made it worse for a time when they were throwing cash at exclusives rather than store platform feature development
Recent example of how bad they are with pushing minimal viable products. EGS mobile store was launched the beginning of this year with no library view. You just scroll up and down, side to side looking for games you own mixed among games you don’t own. Their concept of minimal viable product is insanely mediocre for how vocal the CEO is and how much money they make and their turnaround time on improving these stores is awful.
There are numerous Android storefronts that don’t have Unreal Engine and Fortnite money keeping the companies funded and somehow Epic comes out the gate mediocre again where its marketing is free games but it’s mobile games so what’s available is way less headline worthy. They learned nothing from 2018 about the difference between what they consider a minimal viable product and what the market would consider a market competitive minimal viable product
Years ago Epic put out a kanban board to display a public feature development tracker to assure people they were working on improving the store. They abandoned that quick and I’m pretty sure what few they had on that, most still haven’t been implemented
Their support for handheld is at the level of GOG which barely markets itself and is pretty low revenue as it rarely gets any games that aren’t years old. Whether Windows or Linux, Epic for all their billions haven’t created a gamepad/TV centric interface. EGS is about at the level of GOG Galaxy which because of its DRM free policy will probably never be a big money maker. That’s just insane to me how badly managed EGS is to have so much more money backing it and so little to show for it in the product
The CEO is a regular blowhard virtue signalling about liberty/freedom on Twitter but can’t be bothered to try and pioneer anything for users as a storefront. Since 2018 EGS has been so stagnant while Valve has been expanding Steam as a platform, that EGS is less relevant to me today than when they were throwing out major free games every month. I have no faith in the platform to integrate WINE/Proton, put together a TV/gamepad interface, do something like Steam curators, comparable user review system, crowd sourced game tags - a lot of useless stuff makes it in those but I find them regularly useful at a glance as it’s usually pretty obvious which are probably jokes and which are probably legit, user gamepad mapping repository, I’ve used the guides before. Steam forums are not a place to browse, they’re a place to find when you Google a question and the answer is in a Steam forum thread Google/other shows you
I’d be happy with a suitable competitor. It’s just EGS has been terrible at it. I was sad that GameStop did nothing with Impulse. I had higher expectations for EA Origin. Ubisoft/UPlay was always garbage from day one AC2 always online DRM nonsense. I was hyped on GFWL before I learned they were charging for online multiplayer until that failed, also the install limits GFWL had where you had to call support when you reinstalled the game too many times. I was even excited for Windows 8 store until it was eating up peoples storage only reclaimable with a reformat of the drive
Only GOG exists with a unique selling point, DRM free. Every other competitor has existed just to try and have exclusives to make more money rather than try to attract users with a good service. In the end it turns out there’s so many solid to great games released every year that exclusives aren’t such a great point anymore. There’s not enough of them and exclusives not varied enough to make a storefront platform better than the total Steam package
I find EGS launcher to be incredibly slow, so I don’t even bother claiming their free games using it. I use the browser instead. The annoying part is EGS launcher will prompt my 2FA if I don’t open it at least monthly, which is also too much of a bother.
I’m pretty sure Steam has been able to do that since launch, though I do remember the legendary loading bar that would progress then regress then progress and regress all with the same text message there so it wasn’t perfect in 2003. Roller coaster early on but by like 2007 it was pretty solid
I’m pretty sure EA Origin was able to do that day one or within a year of release. Origin was OK from what I remember just that it took stayed stagnant and I’m guessing onboarding games to the platform being a terrible process considering how sparse releases were on there
Steam is a mature platform. It doesn’t roll out new user facing features often. Yet somehow I think the gap has widened since 2018 vs EGS
And Epic has had a lot more financial resources available when they launched their store. Estimated valuation of $15 billion in 2018, Valve’s was half that in 2022.
I don’t really see an excuse for Epic to have ever had missing features, they entered the market with plenty of templates for what does and doesn’t work
I just went through this yesterday! I did a big upgrade on my wife’s computer, fresh install of Windows on a 2TB NVMe drive replacing the aging 120GB SSD that somehow didn’t completely fill up, etc. Etc. really loved pointing epic at the installs on the secondary drive and it just ignoring them and instead spending 3 hours downloading Fortnite after we just spent 1 hour applying the last update yesterday (and another hour on a different update the day before too!) on the drive that’s RIGHT THERE IN THE COMPUTER!
People are going to list all the features Steam has over Epic, ignoring that Steam has had ~22 years to get to where it is. The original Steam experience was garbage, and lots of us older gamers knew what would happen and hated that Steam would be the primary catalyst to killing off physical media for PC games back in the mid-2000s, especially as broadband internet access was becoming far more accessible.
Don’t get me wrong, Valve has done alright so far in terms of game ownership, but once Gabe dies/retires, it’s only a matter of time before some greedy fucks force Valve to go public and the pure enshittification process begins.
People are going to list all the features Steam has over Epic, ignoring that Steam has had ~22 years to get to where it is.
And then there are people talking about how steam has had those 22 years, while completely ignoring how epic could just copy how steam did things and work from there.
Sure, they can’t see what happens in the back end, but I somehow doubt that valve is doing anything ground breaking there that others can’t think of.
Okay, but have EGS really improved in any significant way in the 7 years they’ve been up? I don’t see it. Plus, a smart competitor would absolutely look at Steam’s history and learn from it; they don’t seem to have done that at all.
If they had spent the same amount of money on developing the storefront that they have on exclusivity deals, EGS could have been a worthy competitor.
I don’t disagree that Epic could definitely be doing better with their storefront. They have made improvements, albeit at a glacial pace. They’ve added achievements and reviews, but it’s still a pale comparison to what Steam offers. That being said, no one seems to dig at GoG’s shitty storefront and app nearly to the same degree. Luckily, GOG allows third-party access, so you can at least replace their app with other alternatives.
Regardless, I’m not defending Epic, I was simply trying to avoid doing the mindless “fuck Epic” and offer some counterargument. Epic is a shitty company, but some competition is better than zero competition. Yes, GOG exists, but they hardly have any marketshare at all and if CDPR ever stops supporting it as much as they have been, their future likely isn’t looking so great. It’s like AMD vs Nvidia. Both companies aren’t great, but I’d rather both exist than only Nvidia and/or AMD; and of course, even more competition would be even better.
Lol, no one is listing steam features. Epic is perfectly capable of being pieces of shit and a garbage company without needing comparison.
EGS is today as old as steam was in 2010. Yet it is still behind 2010 steam’s features. All that on top of all the unethical and shady stuff they have done and the many different ways they make gaming worse for everyone.
Their Guides feature didn’t come out until 2012sh, same with workshop. The only thing Steam had in 2010 that Epic doesn’t have right now is Community, which launched around 2007sh.
Like I said, Steam was not that good for a long time.
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