I’ll have to take a look at GoG anyway… I don’t remember but I heard it’s like an aggregator of some sort too, right? Like, you can access games from your steam account too or something?
I don’t remember but I heard it’s like an aggregator of some sort too, right?
GOG the store is just that - a store. They only sell games that have no DRM at all, which means a couple of things. One, they almost never get AAA games at release (the exception being games developed/published by CD Projekt, as CDP owns GOG), and two, there’s a high likelihood that GOG will offer game versions that are out of sync with or missing features from the same game sold on other platforms (for example, if a game uses Steamworks for its multiplayer, many devs will just strip out multiplayer altogether for the GOG version rather than patching something new and store-agnostic in).
What you’re thinking of with the aggregator is GOG Galaxy, which is their (completely un-required) launcher software. Unlike Steam and EGS, GOG’s DRM-free nature means you can just buy games on their site, download the installers directly, and go on about your business. Downloading games, starting games, etc., is all just done manually. If you want a dedicated launcher software similar to the Steam and EGS clients, that’s what GOG Galaxy is for. And as a value-add, they implemented aggregator features where you can have it pull in your library from Steam, EGS, EA/Origin, Ubisoft, etc., and just view and launch everything from the one spot. I’ve generally found Playnite to be a little better at being a one-stop launcher, though everyone’s mileage will vary of course.
It’s the only way they can ensure it works, I suppose. They might need to control specific cookies and reported supposed clients depending on plugins, and so a packaged in-app browser for the login is easiest. Playnite does the same thing.
This is to be expected and don’t let it turn you off using Galaxy. Once set up you can automatically launch (and close) the game and client from here without seeing the other apps.
It does work with Steam, Ubisoft etc but the login will expire every week and need reconnecting.
GOG Galaxy let’s you combine most of your game library in to one but it has it’s issues. GOG, Epic and Microsoft Store all work great but the other clients aren’t officially supported.
GoG isn’t terrible, but is a little bit of a pain with Linux. They don’t have native support with the desktop client. Although, there are things like “Heroic Launcher” and “Lutris” that work well as a substitute. Granted most of my experience with those are on my Steam Deck. And it just caused too much pain to get CP2077 working for me. That I got it again on Steam when it went on sale.
To be clear, it's not less DRM-y, it's straight up DRM-free.
They had a poll at one point asking the community whether they were fine with DRM-enabled games and/or modern releases. As I understand it, the community said yea to modern games, nay to DRM, so now they do games of all ages but only if they're willing to give up on DRM.
I'm amazed they haven't turned back on that, because a couple years ago they were bleeding money and you can tell they really need to cut costs or increase revenue somewhere. But hey, at least you can back up your library.
Personally my main gripe is their aggressive strategies to force people into their garbage-tier launcher. Compared to Steam it’s just miles behind, and it’s yet another app to run on your PC. All my friends are also on Steam, and Steam had Linux support. However, if all you want to do is launch singleplayer games, you don’t mind the Epic launcher, and you get a good deal, then do whatever you want to.
I have never used a launcher before (for obvious reasons as mentioned in my post), so I found the idea of a separate launcher dumb in the first place. I have used it in recent times thanks to Epic’s free games. Finished two of the Tomb Raider trilogy.
Like, I’m fine with a store, but I gotta open the launcher to launch the game? On Windows, with the Tile based Start Menu, I kind of thought it was a terrible idea NGL. I gotta open, wait for it to load, open the library, then click to run, THEN it’ll open…
Plus, if I want to track progress, it’s a hassle because I can’t track without the damn launcher…
I fundamentally have no issue with the Epic Games launcher. Steam needs competition to keep it in check. Without alternatives, Steam can and will strangle Dev profits, which is a problem. But Epic is a mediocre service, another app to be running, and actively going out of their way to prevent games from being on the platform of the consumers choice, which I am not a fan of.
Related note: does Epic have any DRM free games? Even Steam has a fair portion of games that are DRM free and work perfectly well from a flash drive on a computer that doesn’t have Steam installed. As far as I am aware, Epic does not.
There’s just a series of minor ways in which epic is worse, and I don’t like having front-end clients for my games as is, so a second, competing alternative going out of its way to push me into using it rubs me the wrong way.
You don’t need all store fronts running at once on your pc though. Just boot up what you need for the game you want and it’s just six and two threes, whether it’s steam or epic, or any other launcher.
The issue is that I miss features when using Epic. Additionally, games from Epic are not visible in my steam library which leads to me forgetting that they even exist. And also nobody uses it, so there’s no community feeling like I have with all my Steam friends.
I don’t mind it for free games though. If they give me a game for free, they deserve me using their launcher for that game haha.
Pure speculation: of the people who don’t like Epic, maybe 25% are legitimate, principled objections to their business practices. The rest are split evenly between people who just want to manage their entire library on a single platform, and folks just going along for the hate-ride because it seems like the “safe” position to take.
From a technical stance, Steam and GOG are superior platforms (for different reasons). For equal-price purchases, I can’t think of a single reason to choose Epic over other options. But claiming a game for free? That doesn’t make anyone a bad person.
I’ll be honest, I definitely prefer having everything on one platform for convenience. This is in second place; right after letting me play a game directly from the icon without having to open the damn launcher in the first place.
Also, I am not well educated about the technicalities of Steam or GoG, so all I can say is I’m enjoying the cool factor of GoG combining my accounts in one place. Kinda bummed that Epic’s integration doesn’t have game time and achievement sync… But that’s probably an Epic thing.
I guess so… Unless a company is objectively terrible, I guess it does end up being “subjective”.
For example, I like the idea of Linux, but am happy that things work on Windows. And MacOS is too restrictive for my tastes.
Now, surely there are objective reasons for why Linux is better than the others. But the entry point issue for me is that each distro is different, and while I love customisability, I cannot expend energy on setting up my distro at the moment… (Soon.)
Plus, games work on Windows. I do plan to dual boot when I get a better PC, but not yet.
And fuck Apple (subjective, but I don’t wike em). So, yeah 🫡.
Issues I can think of in the order they occur to me. These are off the top of my head refections not researched.
Group think: If I shop where most other people shop I have outsourced research and decision making. Is there a good reason? maybe, maybe not but I’m going to follow the masses because I can’t research everything.
Stability: neither store offers physical assets so if the store shuts down my purchases could also vanish. Steam is a bigger player and appears to be more stable and GOG is DRM free.
3 The shopping experience: I personally find the layout of steam better for discovery and finding reviews. With the current epic coupon available I have looked on epic for games and if you’re just browsing it is not a intuitive experience. GOG similarly has a variety of sorting tools available.
private vs public ownership: Epic is a public for profit company. Over and over I have seen public companies screw there customers in the interest of profit. Valve (I believe, this is really off the top of my head) is privately held and as such can choose to prioritize whatever their leadership wants. They can’t just be bought out and taken in a totally different direction.
This all could be insane ramblings but these are the things that motivate me to spend my money on Gog or steam in general.
I personally don’t like Epic for paying developers for exclusivity deals, keeping games off other PC platforms for a year or more. Artificial scarcity is bad for consumers.
Which they don’t do. Their platform has very few features, and doesn’t even have a cart. (Well last time I booted EGS like a year ago).
They have almost no features and of the features they do provide, none of them are great. Their only “feature” is operating at a loss, subsidized by megacorps, for many years like Amazon to gain a bunch of market share.
Luckily for gamers, steam already existed so they couldn’t corner the market and enshittify the entire industry like amazon did.
It doesn’t really bother me since it’s still on pc anyway, it doesn’t matter massively where you get a game from (unless you specifically want drm free copies).
Even worse is that they do this while trying to paint themselves as the underdog against the Steam monopoly. It’s not only hypocritical, but also deceitful. A new monopoly is not a solution to an existing monopoly, but a solution to investments paying off.
Don’t forget them being hypocritical again for suing google/apple for being monopolistic because they don’t want to have to go through them for payment.
I do know what it is, and I don’t actually think Steam is one. They have a considerable market share, but they are by no means the only way to get games on PC, nor do they exercise their dominance in a way that stifles competition.
I’m pretty sure Tim Sweeny knows this as well, but he still calls it a “monopoly” whenever he has the chance.
They were sued in the EU for violating anti trust laws, lost and decided not to cooperate.
They’re currently getting sued for forcing devs to not sell their games at a lower price on other platforms.
Their marketshare is more than enough to consider them a monopoly, you don’t need 100% of the market to be one, you just need to be so implanted that you become the default solution. Google doesn’t have 100% of the market, it still is considered a monopoly for search engines
Why not say fuck the developers instead? They’re the ones accepting guaranteed income in exchange for exclusivity, maybe you should be mad at then for not taking a chance at the “influencer making your game popular enough that you recoup your cost” lottery.
They got paid for the exclusivity, after that if they don’t sell as much then so be it, but just releasing on Steam is like choosing to play the lottery as a retirement plan and signing an exclusivity deal is like having a job, one might pay tens of millions or nothing, the other you’re sure will let you buy food for the next couple of years.
There’s tons of games on Steam that the devs have put everything they had in it only to never see any success and then you’ve got games like Vampire Survivors where nothing happened for months until suddenly a YouTuber started playing it and it became a major success. And I mean, good for Luca (and eventually for his team), but for every successful small dev there’s tens of unsuccessful ones…
Filled to the brim with DRM, at the point where you can’t even launch many singleplayer games offline
Actively against linux, for some fucking reason
Bad launcher (but this one is no biggie, you can and should use Heroic launcher instead of the official one)
Bad store in general compared to steam
Ties with Tencent (super anti-consumer chinese state-owned megacorp)
Epic pros:
Free games
With coupons prices can get VERY low
When it opened I heard the percent they take from game devs was lower than the other stores (not sure if it’s still the case and tbh if it ever was)
Steam pros:
Pushing linux gaming like their life depends on it
Generally correct towards the consumer
Huge store and many information, from the game store pages to the workshop
During sales prices are good
Steam cons:
Drm
Bad official app Ux and messy ui
Gog
I don’t know anything besides the fact that it has drm-free games and that it’s owned by CDPR (the guys who developed the witcher series and cyberpunk)
I personally purchase my games on steam, since I think their contribution to linux gaming is crucial for linux to go mainstream
Choose what you will knowing this. If someone else wants to add something to this list you’re welcome to do so.
Yeah, and somehow they managed to invent like 90% of all "evil" MTX and DRM in the process, take a bigger cut than competitors and actively reject having a returns policy until pushed by regulators and competitors, all the while being super not evil.
I mean, do you have any good examples though? Because most of those things are blatantly false and/or happened 9+ years ago. If that's that's the worst you've got then Valve is must be amazing.
They straight up don’t want people reselling games they own. They could do it easily, they just don’t want to.
Yeah, Steam does cool things, but the moment you start thinking that very huge corporation somehow cares about you, you’re doomed. Companies don’t care about people, they care about numbers. Especially huge companies like Valve.
I don't know if many companies allow you to resell your digital goods in the first place (other than, funny enough, Valve themselves who let your resell digital Steam assets).
It’s not a trend they abandoned - Counter Strike is still a huge source of deceptive digital item trade. It also spread to Team Fortress 2 in the meantime.
See what I mean? That's nuts. That's a nuts sentence right there. Imagine having a brand so sticky that people go "but did they do something really bad recently?
For the record, Valve's games run loot boxes today. Like, right now you can buy loot boxes from Valve. CS gambling is also still happening, although I'm not into it enough to know how much better it is these days.
They invented the battlepass, too, that's a Dota 2 thing. Hey, remember how people refer to buying cosmetics for games as "buying hats"? That one's from TF2. Oh, and technically the trading cards you get for purchases are NFTs,, since the term doesn't require the tokens to be stored in a blockchain.
And then there's the dev side. Everybody was super pissed with them on that end while they were figuring out greenlight processes, which... I'm not sure if they did or people just kinda got used to what's there. And if you're around devs you'll know that Valve's whole deal is to tell people what to do and give them zero support to do it. And there are other horror stories about shadowbans and Apple-style manual rejections and delistings and stuff, but at that point you're getting more into inside baseball and I wouldn't expect it to be shaping public perception at all.
Well I'm not going to be eternally mad at Coca Cola because they put cocaine in their soda a century ago, there's got to be a cut-off point somewhere. If I'm going to hate them it's because of the things they are doing right now. Valve over the last eight years has been pretty well-behaved considering their market position gives them the capacity to be way worse. There's nothing stopping them from
Oookay, so we're all cool with MTX cosmetics, loot boxes, battlepasses and lacking full ownership or transferability of games, then?
I'm just trying to figure out if the things Valve is doing right now are fine for everybody or just for Valve.
Which again, is my problem. I'll keep saying it, because having to argue for reality makes it sound like I'm a hater. I like Steam, I think Valve games are generally great (and it's a shame they've stopped making them), and I think Valve's management is a good example of many of the pros of a private company (look at Twitter for all the cons).
But holy crap, no, man, they are THE premier name in GaaS. Everybody is taking their cues from Valve, Epic or both in that space. Their entire platform is predicated on doing as little as possible and crowdsourcing as much as possible to keep the money machine churning. Corporations are not your friends.
If he were still alive and running the company I do think that subject would probably come up, yeah.
But honestly, it's not a cutoff problem. Steam changed how games are marketed forever. I don't like the ways that went. I don't like that they killed physical media. I don't like that they killed ownership.
Those things are still happening. It's not over. They are still pushing that process. Today.
And then there's the MTX they're still pushing today. The loot boxes they're selling today. The race-to-the-bottom sales. The UGC nightmare landscape. It´s all in there right now.
And again, I am cool with that being the world we live in. I'm even much more friendly to many of those concepts than the average gamer, I just don't pretend Steam is not doing those things.
I don't hate Steam. But Steam's vision for what gaming looks like is not mine. I don't particularly like it and I absolutely need a viable alternative to exist alongisde them indefinitely.
But what does that have to do with comparing it to epic? Epic isnt giving you a physical market, they are taking the next step towards digital ownership loss. Epic took the idea of loot boxes and gave it hyper cancer in fortnite, and uses that hyper cancer cash to fund giving you free games. The list goes on and on. Epics vision is not to undo the damage steam caused, its to worsen the damage to try and push it further.
If this was about the shit trends steam created, sure ok. But all of these problems with steam are things they did in the past establishing themselves, and are things epic is now actively doing to establish itself while taking each one a step further.
If these are problems for steam to have done, then supporting epic over steam is making the exact same mistake again, yes?
I haven't looked at Fortnite in ages, but I'm pretty sure there aren't any loot boxes in it anymore. They first let you preview them before buying and now I think it's all direct purchases for cosmetics and a battlepass. CS2 launched this year and it's still loot boxes all the way down.
So... how does the statute of limitations work now? Is Fortnite now cool with you but CS2 isn't? Or is it more that whatever Epic does is bad and whatever Valve does is good?
EDIT: Also, add "destroying the previous game to replace it with a fake sequel that is really just a patch" to their list of crimes against gaming. They didn't invent that one, because I see you there in the corner, Activision, we haven't forgotten about you, but it sure does suck.
CS2 is just a bad game tbh, but the loot boxes are still the same as they were when they put them in tf2. Fortnite specifically grinds my gears because of the active pointed targeting of kids. I like gambling, I dont mind adults choosing to gamble. I used to play mtg, the actual inventor of loot boxes. But fortnite wants to be the childrens gaming hub, and also sell loot boxes and battle passes. Thats pushing the line past where it was set.
But, like… Again, valve did these things and then set the line. Epic is pushing that line further. If the conversation was “hey why is valve shitty?” you would have a point. But thats not the convo. The conversation is “why is epic worse than valve?” And the answer is valve set shit standards that it holds to, but epic is trying to take those standards and push them further so it can be valve2, with worse established practices.
Youre saying “well valve made these bad decisions, whats the statute of limitations?” Ok, epic is actively trying to repeat those decisions. Why shouldnt we have learned from history, and not reward them doing the things you wish valve hadnt done?
Or do you prefer we have this same conversation in a decade, about epics decisions in the past tense?
So no, they're not pushing that line further. They were actually relatively early in reacting to regulator pressure by backing off from those. I'm gonna guess because they were caught having poorly designed underage checks and slapped with an exemplary fine, so it's not like they didn't get strong external incentives.
But if your argument is that Epic does it worse on a purely moral standpoint... well, you're objectively wrong and have been for about four years. The more interesting question is why do you not know this?
That's been my point all along. Valve's big win is branding. Their brand is absolute solid gold. They get a crazy amount of free passes no matter what they do. They're not bulletproof against controversy, but they're maybe the closest to that I can think of in the games industry.
Plenty of competitors have been more consumer-friendly than them in specific issues. EA started unconditional refunds when Valve was actively whining about regulators wanting them to do them. Epic backed out from loot boxes while Valve is actively adding them to new games. They are known to be the worst profit sharers, and it gets rougher the smaller a dev is... They're great at features and they do take very compelling stances in specific issues (many of them driven by the lifelong blood feud between Gabe and his former coworkers at Microsoft), but they are disproportionately seen as a league above every other first party regardles of facts.
That the kind of branding work you build a masters around right there. It's nuts.
I’m pissed with ford for single handedle fucking our infrastructure, can’t live without a car now. But anyway things that company’s do 10 years ago or 90 stick around
Technically, Denuvo isn’t DRM, it’s anti-tamper. It protects the actual DRM from being modified or removed. It’s closer to an anticheat, as it ensures the game wasn’t modified.
Fun fact: my autocorrect changes anticheat to Antichrist.
Oh, is that the bar? I hadn't received the memo. That's cool, then, because Activision, Epic, Microsoft and Ubisoft didn't invent Denuvo either, so we're all good.
All their platfomrs support it and sell games with it, though.
Blending the storefront with a DRM solution? No, that was them.
That's their entire call to fame. They first turned their auto-patcher into a DRM service, then they enforced authorization of physical copies through it and eventually it became the storefront bundled with the other two pieces. If somebody did it before them I hadn't heard of it, but I'll happily take proof that I was wrong.
None of the pieces were new, SecuROM and others had been around for years, a few publishers had download and patch managers and I don't remember who did physical auth first, but somebody must have. But bundling the three? That was Steam.
The user is being hyperbolic, but is referring to their substantial role in popularising loot boxes, as well as the marketplace that has spawned a real gambling industry around it. Kids gamble on 3rd party sites for marketplace prizes and Valve does very little to interfere.
Not to mention that Steamworks DRM is practically non-existent anyways (and that it also wasn’t necessary to use, it’s rare, but some games just don’t protect their game with any DRM).
Seriously, why try so hard to go to bat for a brand name? I get that everybody wants to root for something these days, but I'm too old to pick sides between Sega and Nintendo and I'm mature enough to reconcile that Steam can have the best feature set in a launcher and also be a major player in the process of erasing game ownership and the promotion of GaaS.
Since I can almost guarantee you major publishers would not publish on steam without some sort of DRM, yeah Im fine with them having an easily crackable form of DRM. Especially since they're not exactly jumping to prevent people from doing it.
Oh, they are not. Their DRM wiki page for devs goes "this DRM is easily crackable, we really recommend you use secondary DRM on top of it, see how to do that below". I linked to that elsewhere.
Which is... you know, fine, but definitely one of the reasons I always check if a game is on GOG first before buying it on Steam.
Let’s also not forget that game developers have no choice but to release on steam if they want to have any chance on breaking even since they have that huge of a market share and that Epic challenging that already lead to better deals for developers since Valve hat virtually free reign before
The difference between Steam and Epic is that Steam gets modders who mod their Source games. These mods don’t exist outside of Valve games. Valve is paying someone who loves their games and makes content for those games. They are smart in recognizing talent and bringing it to their development teams.
Epic finds existing games with existing communities and build a wall around it so Epic becomes a gatekeeper to the fun. They stop games from working on other storefronts or pay for “exclusivity” which means stopping people from playing the game.
Considering they have bugger all cost with distribution points being hosted for free by service providers it’s an overpriced over glorified website with online payment processing. 30% cut is massively tax for very little
You don’t own the games on any digital platform, neither steam, epic or gog. You’re only being sold a license to use it, and the license can be revoked whenever the company feels like it.
Thisbis actually true for most of the physical media back in the day, the only difference is that they didn’t really have a method to revoke the license… But that nice old cardboard box you have in your attic, with the nice shiny plastic disc… You still don’t legally own the software on it.
You are absolutely correct, but it’s a con for Epic too. Your comment makes it out to look like you don’t own your games on Steam, but by omission you make it seem like you do own your games on Epic.
I just want to make it very clear that you don’t own the games on either platform. But also want to mention that even if you buy a good old CD/DVD with the game on, then you still don’t own the game…
It’s absolutely awful that it’s practically impossible to own a game, and it’s even more awful that the platform can take away a game you paid for, let alone that they don’t even have to refund you for it…
A con for GOG is their site is slow as fuck. And god forbid you want to go back to a previous page, you’ll likely lose where you were looking 9 times out of ten. Especially so on mobile.
Pros: Can be the only place you can get old games that would’ve been unavailable otherwise
The older games are often really really cheap, especially during sales
Steam’s, Epic’s, Ubisoft’s, Battle.net’s and whatever-EA’s-thing-is-called-now’s sites are also slow as shit. What is it with these platforms which prevent them from loading a webpage in less than 10 seconds?
What tracking does Epic need? “According to our analytics, 100% of users scroll to the free games banner on Tuesday at 5pm CEST, then leave and don’t come back for a week. What a mystery!”
In Steam’s case, the slowness looks more like a side effect of it being a Chromium Embedded Framework application (similar to Electron) with a lot of extras bolted on. It’s just not built for efficient use of resources.
Do you remember how to configure it? Last I checked I went through every account and settings page on the store site and seemingly separate customer service log in and no clear way to set it up.
Not a clue sorry. I’m personally not one to go out of my way to set up 2FA even though I know it’s good practice to do so (unless it’s work related, then I do)
Epic has already been caught scanning and collecting data from files on people’s hard drives that are totally unrelated to Epic or its games.
Epic’s habit of interfering with game availability, through exclusivity deals.
Ties with Tencent (super anti-consumer chinese state-owned megacorp)
To be more clear about it, Tencent is Epic’s largest investor, so they obviously have a great deal of influence over and access to anything they want from Epic (likely including user data) and they directly benefit from Epic’s growth.
Steam pros:
Also:
Actively funding and supporting development of linux gaming technologies for more than a few years now, to the point where linux is now very much a viable gaming platform.
Steam cons:
Drm
Given that DRM on Steam is entirely up to each game publisher, I don’t think it’s appropriate to list under “Steam cons”. I’m not even sure that any of my Steam games have DRM.
If you mean that most Steam games expect to find an instance of Steam running, you should know that is not DRM, and it’s trivially replaced with the open-source Goldberg Emulator or a similar tool.
Gog
I don’t know anything besides the fact that it has drm-free games
Another plus for GOG is that they let you download games with a web browser. No special app required. (I think Itch.io does this as well.)
The story I read was that they didn’t collect or report anything, but just flagged a user if the cache contained a known game hack site, and that they stopped doing that years ago.
Not comparable to what Epic was caught doing, IMHO. Still, if there’s an article with more detail, I wouldn’t mind reading it. (Maybe it was part of their anti-cheat system of the time?)
Funny how if it was any other company you would call bs and tell them to fuck off with their “trust me bro” attitude.
To me it’s much worse what Valve did, they have no business looking at my browsing history, that’s much more private than the games I own on Steam or the three friends I’ve got on both platforms anyway.
I want to note that Steam isn’t inherently a DRM platform, as there are many games on Steam which are DRM free. Even ones that require the Steam backend can be bundled with Steamworks, serving all the same backend requirements without Steam needing to be installed on the machine.
So if we just assume this random wiki with no sourcing is correct…
Steam has more games than everyone else, DRM on Steam is the developer/publisher’s choice, Steam still has more DRM-free games than Epic does, and how many of the ones Epic has are exclusives that don’t count?
Many of the articles do have references on the DRM status. Here’s an example indicating verification by a staff member. I personally tested a bunch of the games for DRM and noted it back when I contributed. Until recently, most of the games released on Epic were DRM-free. Even the Sony games were notably DRM-free on Epic before they were released on GOG. Nowadays, it’s more common for the new ones to use EOS and have it function as DRM.
yea, they steam has some drm-free games available... but steam is a drm platform.. one that also helped normalize one-time-use codes and tying 'purchases' to a non-transferable online account. valve did more to shred the used pc game market than any other company.
So if we just assume this random wiki with no sourcing is correct…
Steam has more games than everyone else, DRM on Steam is the developer/publisher’s choice, Steam still has more DRM-free games than Origin does, and how many of the ones Origin has are exclusives that don’t count?
So if we just assume this random wiki with no sourcing is correct…
Steam has more games than everyone else, DRM on Steam is the developer/publisher’s choice, Steam still has more DRM-free games than Origina does, and how many of the ones Origin has are exclusives that don’t count?
Steam UI is messy but they have a ton of functionality in their store/system. Epic took ages to even get a functioning cart, Steam has tons of features which are not even tied to the games in their store like remote play and Steam VR. Family sharing is also really cool for example. Also Steam basically killed piracy for a long time due to amazing Steam sales + convenience of use.
Your first line is straight up misinformation. Epic has remarkably few games with DRM, mostly from big publishers implementing their own. I’ve yet to find an indie that can’t be launched directly as an .exe. Same with Cyberpunk 2077, launches directly without issue.
The only singleplayer game I can’t play offline is Hitman, just like on Steam, because their publisher sucks.
Z tego co pamiętam używałeś Linuksa. Jeśli nadal go używasz, to polecam pakiet ImageMagick i dostarczany przez niego program convert.
Możesz nim pliki zmniejszać co zadanych limitów, np. convert zdjęcie.jpg -scale 512x512 miniatura.jpg lub do jakiegoś procentu oryginału: convert zdjęcie.jpg -scale 25% miniatura.jpg.
Jest to narzędzie linii poleceń i możesz używać go do skalowania wieku plików na raz. Jeśli chcesz pomogę Ci to zautomatyzować.
Generally the only games that are de facto exclusive to Nintendo are the ones they make themselves or those that choose to stay on Nintendo (I haven't heard of exclusivity deals, but I won't discount the possibility).
A better comparison might be Sony with Playstation (and maybe Microsoft with Xbox, though I haven't heard of as much from them on that) paying for exclusivity for a limited time.
Epic, on the other hand decided, at least at the start, to buy out almost finished games (some of which even had pre-orders on other storefronts) to have on their platform for at least a year. Then decided to try and play the victim, claiming that they had to do it to gain market share. Then claimed they were morally superior because they didn't charge as much to publishers for putting games on their storefront. While also charging just as much for the games to the consumers.
Sony have very, very few straight exclusivity deals these days, they have a super robust first party network. Nintendo and them are very comparable, in fact. Especially in that Nintendo works with more third parties or partially owned "second parties" than you'd think, since people presume anything using their IP is their game, even when it's not.
In any case, they're both as not-comparable, in that Epic games run on the same hardware and platform as Steam games, Linux compatibility aside. You don't have to pay any extra money to switch back and forth.
Epic legitimately hasn't done anything Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft haven't done on the regular. In fact, the current "boo, we hate non-Steam PC launchers" trend overlaps with the old "boo, we're pissed that former console exclusive X is going multiplatform", which was a surreal few years there.
Also, hell yeah, it's morally superior to give more of the money to the dev while charging the same up front to consumers. 100%. Every time. Epic is not doing it because they're nice, they're doing it to attract talent to their platform, which is exactly why you want competition between multiple storefronts instead of a monopoly. But that doesn't take it away from them, that's the better answer.
Fuck Nintendo to death, after listening to the abominations they committed in the Team Xecuter episode of Darknet Diaries I’m never giving them another cent.
Luckily, Yuzu runs games infinitely better than my switch anyway, so that’s awesome.
Anyone that follows the homebrew and CFW scene knows that Xecuter repeatedly and unapologetically ripped off the GPL-licensed components in Atmosphere and its various bootloader stages. On top of violating the licenses of and stealing from the homebrew community, they also added console-bricking DRM to their CFW. They’re not heroes supporting the ideological cause of piracy; just shitbags trying to profit off of it.
Oh yeah, he was totally the fall guy and had his life ruined over it. He was made an example out of, while the rest and worst of them made bank and got away with it.
Absolute bullshit. But you’re totally right, Xecutor was mostly corrupt and shitty. I forgot about the switch bricking thing, what fuckery to do to people.
Oh, there's a ton to say about why Disney get a reputation for being a litigious nightmare but Nintendo gets more of a connection to beloved franchises in a lot of the gaming community, but that's precisely why they're a good counterexample to Steam when you're talking about branding associations.
Epic’s customer service sucks. Consider my last experience from a prior xmas sale:
had multiple games in the cart with discounts applied, checked out with paypal, but for whatever reason the communication broke and didn’t go through
my cart then got stuck in a limbo where I couldn’t check out with any method to receive the discounts, everything was full price again
opened a customer support ticket to get the problem resolved, then went through 3 days of back and forth, explaining the situation over and over because
each of your replies are handled by whoever the next agent is
who apparently don’t read any history of the ticket, so they provide feedback or advice that already didn’t work
and it can take a full 24 hours or more to get a reply that ignores all previous replies
by the time the error was resolved by a competent person, the sale was over by only a few hours
despite the fact that I only missed the sale window because their reps were incompetent, they refused to make any exceptions to apply the sale prices I had been trying to checkout for 3 days
So, fuck them. I only claim free games from them now.
And I concur with problems other people have mentioned.
each of your replies are handled by whoever the next agent is
The names of their support agents is truly odd. I’ve seen people post complaints about their support that is little more than this:
Hi, this is Charlie Uniform November Tango here to help.
After receiving all the information that you sent us that we requested, we sadly can’t help because reasons.
Thanks for being an epic gamer.
They do the same thing that the horde of shitty streaming services do: Hold content hostage through exclusivity deals so they can gain market share without actually providing a comparable technology or service as their competitor.
The problem is that without those exclusive deals noone would change
Most people didn’t buy EA games at origin or Ubisoft games at UPlay even though you needed those launchers anyway. They even didn’t buy CDProjekt games at gog despite the games being dem free there.
Excluding deals on sought after games is literally the only way to get a majority of the players moving away from there comfortable “I have ally games and friends there already” position
People are lazy and hate change - without force it’s not going to happen
They don’t even try to be competitive on technology or service though. If they were making a comparable or even superior product and people were sticking with Steam anyway for the network effect I’d agree they’d be justified in doing more to attract customers. But they just want to use their pile of money to buy their way into a market without putting in the work to design and develop a superior product.
I just don't use Epic myself but do use Gog and Steam (with the ultra shitty EA launcher and Ubisoft Connect bundled with some of my games) and Playnite has changed everything unifying it all into that single launcher.
Full screen mode in Playnite works fine on my HTPC and as a launcher it does consolidate all of them into one place easily. Worth trying if you use multiple stores.
As for why I'm not using Epic, the whole paying for exclusivity with third parties really didn't appeal to me at all.
If the free offerings from Epic do appeal to you, or if they do better deals on localised currencies (especially if you do struggle to pay for things), don't worry about using their services. I wouldn't want you to deny yourself some entertainment just because other people have issues with them as a business.
My first purchase when I’m earning enough to spend on entertainment will be a good device. The second will be games that I can either physically keep or digitally store on physical drives.
Gog is the main place for that, since their principal stance is DRM-free downloadable installers. They have a launcher too, but it’s optional and only meant as convenience. Itch.io does DRM-free too, but they’re often more about very indie and often experimental games. They have a few all-time indie classics though.
Steam technically doesn’t require the games to implement DRM, so a part of their library is DRM-free once you’ve passed the installation process (they don’t need steam to be running). This is on a case-by-case basis though. Lots of Steam games use steamworks (Steam’s very own DRM) and a lot more use third party DRMs (and even require external launchers like Ubisoft’s or EA’s).
For years I have been a bit pissed at Steam for opening themselves to all and every shitty fake game/quick buck asset flip there is out there, refusing to do any kind of curation. Instead they opted for letting the almighty Algorithm do that for them. I doesn’t work, their store is a discoverability catastrophe full of shit.
That said, I still buy from them in some cases, and these cases are mostly down to one point : the workshop, the integrated mod and user content interface. It’s for a handful of games that profit a lot from it, but it’s undenyingly convenient.
What I often do if it’s a possibility is buying directly from the developer, which often includes a Steam key. That’s what I did for Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress (through Itch.io). It gives you everything Steam has to offer for the game and usually a DRM-free version too. Only “down point” is that your Steam review doesn’t count for the game’s Steam score when you have activated it from an external key. I don’t care much for that.
In the end at that point you’ve noticed I talked about a lot of different platforms and launchers, and it’s not even all of them. Like the previous poster, I can’t recommend Playnite enough. It’s a meta launcher that makes all of your libraries united in the same place, with a lot of options. You still require all the platforms installed, but you’re not using them directly most of the time.
I’ve got Steam, Gog, Humble, Ubisoft, EA, Amazon, Xbox, Itch.io and yeah, even Epic through it (though I only use EGS to get the free games, I don’t plan on buying anything from there).
Basically Epic like every other publisher has created their own launcher/store.
They aren't trying to compete on features and instead using profits from their franchise to buy market share (e.g. buying store exclusives).
The tone and strategy often comes off as aggressive and hostile.
For example Valve was concerned Microsoft were going to leverage their store to kill Steam. Valve has invested alot in adding windows operability to Linux and ensuring Linux is a good gaming platform. To them this is the hedge against agressive Microsoft business practices.
The Epic CEO thinks Windows is the only operating system and actively prevents Linux support and revoked Linux support from properties they bought.
As a linux user, Valve will keep getting my money and I literally can't give it to Epic because they don't want it.
The good clearly are the free games and that some games go cheaper there, they have better sales sometimes. The bad is that the store is badly optimized. The UI is annoying, no cloud saves for a lot of games. As of recently there were no achievements or even a cart, but they have that now which is good. The friends tab is bare bones still. They have aggressive DRM. For some reason it’s a pain in the ass to log in, but that might be just on my end.
Now with GOG, you don’t have DRM, you can integrate all launchers so you can launch all the games from one, which for me, is pretty useful. GOG has great deals. The bad is that the ui as well is kind of bare bones, but i don’t know, they are not trying to take over the market and their store works very well.
As of steam i don’t need to say anything, everything is in there. If you play on linux you basically will get every game from steam. They have the most robust launcher with the most options, etc.
That said, personally I use the three of them. Gog primarily since i can launch everything from there and if i find a game in there, i’d rather get it from them. But i’ve found sales on epic too good to let go so i play those games there. For me it depends on what they’re offering, but for some reason i really dislike Epic’s layout and ui, i feel like it is very annoying and that it is missing a lot.
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