So funny seeing the comments on the GOG article saying how it’s basically Steam’s only competition, and it would be bad if it were to fail, and then come here and see the exact opposite.
I don’t know about that. The whole company is set up in a very unique way, such swift enshittification would probably cause a mutiny.
How well the culture of just making good things is enshrined once Gaben is gone is a different question. I can easily see a slow dissolution of the company as the people who care and the people who can grab power fight.
I also don’t know the internal details of the structure besides that it’s very flat and self-driven. Perhaps Gaben has an apprentice? I can’t imagine him being completely blind to his unique importance, surely they won’t just sell the company or hire a random CEO.
I foresee the only chance steam has of not being immediately enshittified would be for it to be a 100% employee owned company and to stay the f away from ever being listed anywhere.
People don’t have to be forced to use GOG so there’s people that actually like them, and offering DRM free games with offline installers is pretty pro consumer.
From a consumer’s point of view, does it matter if the exclusive is de facto or de jure? If I have no choice but to do business with Valve and Steam to play a game on PC, it seems to me that that game is a Steam exclusive. And there are thousands of Steam exclusives, but only a handful of Epic exclusives.
It doesn’t seem like you’re paying attention… Steam didn’t buy the publisher of a popular game, and have it removed from the Epic game store so that it could be their exclusive. That was Epic and the game was rocket league. If epic wanted to compete “from a consumer’s point of view” they would make a better product than steam, but their store is still missing features
I mean this isn’t ideal, but you can understand why they might make that a lower priority. Probably 90% of my gaming purchases are for 1 item.
And I find it hard to believe that you anti Epic people are arguing in good faith when your first complaint is that you can’t more easily buy multiple games on a platform you seem to dislike so much.
We’re talking about a company that was raking in hundreds of millions of dollars from Fortnite, and buying exclusivity deals for tens of millions of dollars, being unwilling to implement a store feature that would take any half-decent developer a single day to implement.
We bring up this argument because it perfectly highlights how little Epic cares about creating a service that can compete with Steam based on quality. They’d rather ignore the basic functions for years and instead spend orders of magnitude more money on anti-competitive practices like exclusives.
you anti Epic people
And this tells me that also aren’t willing to argue in good faith. You’re disregarding my argument simply because I hate Tim Sweeney and Epic
You don’t like Epic because their store is not fully featured. I understand that. I’m concerned about Valve because, among other things, certain damning allegations made in their recent class action lawsuit.
You can much more easily avoid Epic because of exclusives than I can avoid Steam.
I might be out of the loop, but wasn’t that lawsuit based around publishers not being able to sell steam keys for cheaper than the price on steam? In my mind that seems perfectly reasonable since valve is paying for the steam services that are needed to turn that steam key into a playable game.
It’s hard to have a productive conversation when I bring up a specific example of Epic being scummy, but then you wave vaguely at allegations made in an ongoing lawsuit
If the allegations were just about steam keys, that would be one thing, but it looks like they’re leveraging their large market share to essentially fix prices on other stores, even outside keys. For example, even though Epic charges a much smaller cut, 12% vs Steam’s 30%, publishers are prohibited from selling at a lower price on Epic (or Steam will delist their game, blocking the vast majority of the game’s potential audience).
I personally don’t find buying a publisher to make some game exclusive to be all that scummy. Is it really so different from Warcraft being exclusive to Battle.net ? But I’m not to try to convince you that my reasons are more valid. I respect your reasons, I just ask you to also respect mine.
True, but digital ownership is a fickle thing that depends in large part on how much I trust the seller. Between a >50% discount on Steam and a free game on Epic, I would still choose Steam every time, because I would feel like I “own” that game more than I would on Epic (where I would still hesitate to buy anything more than the 2-3 free games that would interest me there).
Darwinia was eventually released in March 2005, but despite a strong opening weekend, sales soon slipped too low to sustain the company. Within six months, the developers were back on UK government benefits until November, when they contacted Valve “on a whim”[10] to try to set up a digital distribution deal on their Steam platform. Valve responded enthusiastically and, following a 14 December 2005 online launch, digital sales, which exposed the game to a new, global audience, kept the company going through to the release of their third game, DEFCON.
Valve didn’t reach out to Introversion to make demands, they actually saved the company. For a game basically no one had ever heard of and abysmal sales for were about to make the company go bankrupt. Valve didn’t pay for this exclusivity. It is however true that 18 years ago, they had an exclusive game.
This is a big difference compared to Epic paying 2K for exclusive access to Borderlands 3 so they can secure the profits of a huge franchise. Epic pays big companies big money to secure early profits to exclusive titles. Valve may have technically had an exclusive game, but Epic’s business model is literally paying for exclusive access to the biggest games they can get, so they can get the biggest cut of the sales at the highest price point, before discounts.
Only one of these two companies is trying to “Pay 2 Win.”
There really isn’t. This is personal opinion.
Some of us just have issues with Epic Games. Some others have issues with Valve.
No private company is really “good.”
But the argument with Epic is things like:
They brought “exclusives” to PC gaming for the first time. Previously, a PC game was a PC game, and it didn’t matter what storefront you bought it from, because it was available at all storefronts. Epic chose to pay companies to restrict their titles just to Epic, in an attempt to move the market towards them.
In a similar vein, trying to fight Valve’s dominance, they started giving away free games. They have been firing people left and right because their financials are in the toilet, and yet they’re still pissing away money on free games and exclusives to their store.
People who care about access to music and paying artists hate them because they have effectively put a death warrant on Bandcamp, buying them for two years, doing nothing with the product, and then selling it to Hedge Fund fuckies who already shitcanned half the staff and the site is officially on life support. They basically killed the last place you could buy music and make sure all the proceeds went to the artist and not a middle man (Bandcamp Fridays).
During all of this, they refused to spend any money on actually improving their fucking game store. Things that have been staples of Steam for a decade now are still on a waiting list of features to be added. The User Experience for Epic Games Store is just bad, bad, bad, bad. There’s no excuse for it, especially when they chose to piss money away on exclusives and free games instead of paying people to produce a better product than Valve has. They refused to even try to release a better product, believing they could buy their way to dominance.
Do you really want to support a company that doesn’t give a flying fuck about your user experience as a customer and has such bad business plans that they’re letting go tons of staff? It’s bad enough that they had a bad business plan, but it also seems like they’re not very good to their employees, either. Compared to Valve’s “flat” management where there are no managers, or where Newell famously paid the writer for Portal to “be sick” for two years while he had a serious disease. “Your job here at Valve is to get better.” This was before he wrote Portal, no less.
One company clearly cares about the user experience that their users experience, and one clearly cares about using every tool at their disposal to be the top of the market, everything from paying for exclusives and free games to suing in court to try to carve out a niche for yourself where you don’t have to pay vendor fees.
Of course, I also encourage you to do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Valve offers a better product, better user experience, and treats their employees with more respect, but it doesn’t mean Valve hasn’t made their own share of anti-consumer decisions.
So unless you bought a physical copy of this game and kept it off the internet (not sure if anyone is collecting any data through FO3 itself), or got it gifted to you through GOG and you don’t have an account there, you’re in the same boat. Except you paid for the game with money in addition to data.
I was going to say. This is probably the opposite. Unfortunately once epic goes down. Because of their awful launcher you won’t actually be able to use it
It’s not a free game. It’s a license to access a file through the epic launcher. They really shouldn’t be able to sell it as a game. It’s inaccessible without epic.
But it’s not a sale. It’s a game, and it’s provided for free, and as of right now there is no end date where your access to the game will expire. No money leaves your wallet.
I still don’t understand.
Is this some sort of coping mechanism by people who paid for the game 10 years ago?
… because unless you bought it from GOG over Steam (which is my preferred place to buy digital games, not Epic), you’re in the same boat: Haven’t bought a game, you’ve bought a license. Except with Epic, it’s $0.00 today.
Mate I got it. I have all the free games from epic.
My point was that it’s not a “game” in the traditional sense. Anything online that requires a launcher is a licence.
Similar to me “purchasing” a film on prime. I don’t actually purchase the film, I purchase a license to access the file solely through their system.
They can revoke or lose that license and I lose access. Different to me buying a DVD and I can use it whenever I want as long as I have a DVD player.
I agree. I was just following on the point from above. It is shit that we can’t buy from company. I bought the game 10 years ago. Bit of double dipping. I’ve rebought a bunch of older games.
It’s definitely a game in the modern sense. If you want games in the traditional sense, your choices are pretty much GOG and physical copies. And even those aren’t a guarantee, with things like…
“Physical copies” that are really just download codes or a DRM key on a disc
Day one patches
Patches that make the game drastically different than it was on launch, particularly when the game was drastically different (aka. shittier) on its unpatched launch
Games that require proprietary servers to run the game properly, and won’t be kept alive after a certain date because they won’t release the required code for fans to run their own servers
For a lot of gamers, “licenses to games” or any of the above cases make up the majority of the games they play. Yet we still call them gamers, we still call them games, and we still call it gaming.
Tell me you don’t understand business terms like “license” without telling me you don’t understand business terms like “license.”
Also:
Valve has made clear that if they ever go out of business, they will transfer a copy of each game you have a license for to you (providing they still have distribution rights).
This isn’t even a problem with GOG because they still distribute games in the old way where you can download a standalone installer and keep that copy of the game in perpetuity.
Again I don’t disagree. I think untill gamers or consumers lobby the industry, we will keep getting shafted. None of those things listed help the consumer. Maybe patches and new updates but not if it doesn’t ship with a completely unbroken game
Ultimately, if you want a free game and have no issues with Epic, then hurray, you get a free game. Some of us don't like Epic and prefer to give them nothing (including our data), even if it means passing up on free games. I have no shortage of games to play, so I won't be missing a free copy of FO3 or whatever else they decide to offer up.
They brought “exclusives” to PC gaming for the first time.
Please stop with this horseshit. Valve and GOG had both done third-party exclusives before EGS was even a thing. Epic absolutely in no way "brought [them] to PC gaming for the first time.
Yes, they did make them a pillar in their strategy to try to enter a marketplace that was dominated by an 800-pound gorilla - which is a perfectly legitimate approach to take - which neither of the other two did, but they 100% categorically did NOT bring the practice to PC first.
they refused to spend any money on actually improving their fucking game store.
Wow, you’re just full of misinformation on this post. They have constantly been updating their store since day one. No, it’s not on parity with Steam (and it likely never will be), but to just flat out say that they haven’t spent anything on improving it when there has been a steady stream of improvements over the years is ignorant at best and actively disingenuous at worst.
How was it exclusive if it was available to purchase in two separate places? Maybe if your comment had a qualifier like "digital download version exclusive" it could be considered correct
What’s your point though? Every one of Epic’s exclusivity deals is done with the consent of the game publisher. Does it matter who makes the offer? Do we even know that there aren’t cases of publishers reaching out to Epic?
Does anyone know how to permalink a post on Lemmy? Anyway, here’s what Snot said:
Also, to be clear on the differences, Valve didn’t reach out offering to pay for a massively popular upcoming game, which is what Epic does as a business model. They had a company that was about to fail reach out to them, and they made an exclusivity deal with them, but Valve did not pay them for this deal. If you really fail to see the difference between those two things, I don’t know what to tell you.
Are we pretending publishers not bothering putting their games on every storefront is the same as paying publishers to not put those games on competing storefronts?
Steam was literally forced on those who owned a physical copy of Half-Life and wanted to play it. The dominant position has nothing to do with the service offered by Steam. It was dominant when it barely had any features. GOG competing with it on features and in fact offering the bonus of DRM-free games hasn’t improved its market share of about 0.5%.
No one is upset about having to use EGS for Fortnite. Their own games that they develop themselves they can do what they want with.
The issue is when Epic approaches other developers, especially those that have already announced a Steam release, and try to get exclusivity out of them: medium.com/…/why-i-turned-down-exclusivity-deal-f…
Epic: We would love to have you on our service
Dev: I’m not interested in exclusivity
Epic: then we have no interest in having you on our service
Having more options for their customers makes their service better, but Epic isn’t interested in being a better service.
For real, Steam literally took off because they made HL2 exclusive to it. It doesn’t matter that it’s a first party game, the effect and intent was identical. They could’ve made it generally available but chose not to. They forced people to use their proprietary product to install a game.
It’s crazy how many people shill for valve on Reddit and lemmy when they’ve already done most of the shit Epic gets accused of.
An important detail regarding exclusivity. What made a ton of people pissed off (and justifiably so, in my opinion) is that they bought exclusivity for games that were kickstarted which resulted in the option for Steam keys being removed for these games.
I really don’t know what to say about the modern pcgamer, at least the terminally online one like this.
I don’t want to being whataboutism into this, but you likely support many companies that do truly terrible things every day, but this one is a bridge too far? This one? It’s wild.
Eh, you always can. But that’s beside the point. The point I’m making is not that you don’t boycott other things, it’s that this is the only thing you choose to. Which is just a symptom of being online in toxic places waaaay too much. You just shouldn’t care this much about a mostly harmless video game company. It’s super weird.
It’s like when those weirdos keep voting EA as the worst company of the year every year, like EA? Really? Okay, that’s where your priorities are.
But it does. You're still giving them your data, which they can use for all manner of things. If that's something you don't care about, then more power to you - enjoy your free game.
If you really think you’re less clever than an entire industry that has been built up around tracking people and keeping ghost profiles on them, go ahead and keep patting yourself on the back, bud.
They know who you are, that’s not anywhere near as clever as you think.
I guess things like Speech Pattern Analysis don’t exist then, nor has Big Data ever been known to sift through data to connect data points.
Like unless your job is director of IT Security for Microsoft, I doubt you have the credentials to be as anonymous as you think you are.
On top of the fact that most people know that the more you try to anonymize yourself, the more you actually make yourself unique in terms of data because very few people use obfuscation techniques, and those techniques are well known. Thus, if they think you’re obfuscating your identity, you’re now just thrown in the “people who like anonymity” bag of data, which when connected with previously collected data on “people who like anonymity” can be used to create a profile on you, specifically.
If I believed Epic was really that good at making money by secretly collecting data, I don’t know why I’d believe they need me to download their launcher to do it. They’re either cartoon supervillains or they’re not.
They own Easy Anti-Cheat, which has kernel level access and collects data as part of its user agreement but these people keep regurgitating the debunked claim of the launcher being spyware. Occam’s razor, anyone?
Literally the only data they can get is basic hardware info and your e-mail address which is easy to fake. You can even use an alternate launcher like Heroic and give them basically nothing. The point isn’t to “take people’s data”, they give away games to try to generate interest in EGS and get people to download it and spend money on the store. You lose nothing by redeeming the game.
Sure, their primary focus is most likely generating interest and usage of their platform, but they'll also use analytical and statistical information to influence their business decisions.
If that's something you don't care about, then more power to you - enjoy your free game.
On a personal note, I made the decision as a consumer to not interact with them as much as possible. Even when I did have an account to collect free games years ago, the only thing I actually played was a Satisfactory alpha/beta event. I have more than enough games to play, so I am not concerned with collecting their free games.
This is literally a bog standard privacy policy. Any closed source website or app you use will also track analytics and usage, and basic hardware info like I mentioned. You might as well go on a crusade against Steam for doing the same thing. You and people like you making these comments act like Epic, specifically, is bad for privacy as if nobody else has trackers. You’re misleading people.
Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. I am not against Epic because of their privacy policy. I don't like Epic because of their business practices and owners, and don't want to give them anything, even if it's just a bogus email address and a few clicks or whatnot. And no, I never tried to imply other companies don't do the same thing.
Here's the bottom line, as far as I'm concerned:
I don't like Epic, and want nothing to do with them. If others want to interact with them, even if it's just for the free games, that's their decision to make.
You can use legendary worth heroic as a user interface (both open source projects) to download and play games you own on epic, no need to install their software.
Epic games store is honestly quite decent m8 I’ve been using it since 2020. Some of the good things I’ve noticed on epic games is
free games
alot of the sales for games can be cheaper than steam sales
It’s hardly no different to steam gog or any other game launched out there although it lacks official linux support which is a negative in my books when it comes to privacy I’ll argue they’re both as bad as each other if you think your being smart by avoiding epic games because it’s owned by tencent and your concerned for your privacy then you should stop using steam ubisoft ea gog and the many other launchers as well they’re both as invasive when it comes to your privacy as the other plus hear me out… YOUR NOT THAT IMPORTANT I’m not sure the feds are coming after a 32 year old IT tech support worker because he said wrongthink on a tiny social media network
If your still super paranoid first uninstall all your game launchers then maybe pirate and look into foss alternatives or try GOG out you can install games on the Web without a launcher and the games don’t have invasive drm
You’re calling out the wrong people, completely missing the point of everything privacy or why the epic store is a bad thing and being an idiot and asshole.
Bro, if you really want to fuck with Epic, keep downloading all their free games and not buying anything.
In their investor meeting, they will have to reveal that for every 100 people who download a game only 5 people pay for it. This will show they have poor customer conversation capacity. The investors will lose it.
I used to do that. Epic refused to play nice with my VPN forcing me to constantly re login with their crappy fucking captchas. The store was so annoying to use it wasn’t worth dealing with for free games, certainly made sure I’d never spend money there.
This giveaway last time was the reason I installed the epic store. All I can say is that I have no regrets. Control is amazing and it’s absolutely worth swallowing your pride to play this amazing game for free.
In my opinion, Deathloop is a spiritual successor to the OG System Shock as well. System Shock 2 and Prey (2017) both adopt RPG elements which is all well and fine, I adore both those games, but OG doesn’t have them and leans more on the interplay of immersive systems, really giving credence to the immersive simulation labeling that feels a bit more obtuse these days.
In OG System Shock, I really do feel you’re supposed to play with the Mission difficulty maxed so you have a time limit. It’s fine if you don’t, I’ve still never beaten it with the time limit on either Enhanced or Remake, but hear me out. System Shock (especially the REAL OG release) was an older game where you were meant to invest more time into it. You were supposed to do new game runs where you start from scratch, learn the world, learn the systems, and push further every time. It becomes more menacing when SHODAN is a real opponent that you can literally “lose” the game to.
Modern gamers don’t really tolerate that kind of stuff because losing a good run to an 8 (or 10) hour time limit feels like a waste of your time, and I can sympathize with that. That’s why Deathloop pulls the idea of runs into a metacontext where you’re reliving the same day over and over again, learning the layout of the different areas at different times of day, making use of the tools available to you until you’re ready for THE DAY when you do THE RUN and basically speedrun the game.
Part of me wonders what a Deathloop without Wenjie’s preservation mechanic (I forget what it’s called at the moment) would look like where you’re forced to re-gather your favorite weapons from their specific locations each run would look like, too. But I get why it was included and I’m not ready to say it would 100% be a better game without.
Oh and Julianna obviously acts as the SHODAN antagonist stand-in even though I know their personalities and motivations are very different. You get how having an ever present, somewhat omniscient foe hunt you is kinda the same.
There’s more but I won’t ramble any further. I know they’re very different games, but you see the outline, right?
EDIT: Of course there’s copious amounts of Thief and Dishonoured DNA in there, but I’ve actually never played those so I have less to say about it. I promise, I’ll get on it someday, I swear!
Yeah it shares a lot of stuff with Dishonored gameplay wise, but has a roguelike bent to it. It doesn’t compare in terms of world building but it’s still fun, especially for free.
It is quite similar in mechanics. It’s a small sandbox and you also have superpowers just like Dishonored. It’s pretty different in the overall vibe and obviously more gun-focused. I think you’ll enjoy it, and since it’s free it’s easy to try.
I play every Dishonoured game every year, and Deathloop feels similar. It’s more like a new book from your favorite author, but in a different genre than they usually write in. Definitely feels closer to Prey gameplay wise (I also highly recommend Prey).
There is not as much interaction with the story NPCs, and there is less of a focus on stealth. I found myself murdering way more than with Dishonored. That said, I really enjoyed the powers offered in the game, the quick “restarting” of the loop, and the overall story was good.
Interesting. I’m a random Internet stranger and I thought it was boring and not fun. However a lot of people liked it so I’m not saying it’s bad it just wasn’t for me.
Is this now a fight between random internet strangers? Are we supposed to use slurs? (JK, just in case)
Totally fair! Nothing can appeal to everyone, and I would never be accused of having average tastes. Loads of people seem to like Mario Cart Kart, but playing it makes me want to Kyle my way through a wall. I had just played Prey Mooncrash, and was jazzed up on the loop mechanic. If I played again I may feel differently.
My thoughts were not too dissimilar. Definitely with you, fellow internet stranger, on the boring, but I found it to be a mixed bag of fun so never finished the game. Though it’s been some time since I played, I may revisit to see if that has changed over the years.
For anyone wondering if it’s that bad, I played it when I got it on Steam and it ran just fine. Then patched it no problem through the either the Workshop or the Nexus Mods manager like three months later
I’m currently sitting at 306 total Epic titles, out of which I’ve paid for a grand total of 1. Even that was a gigantic mistake.
I’ll continue collecting these, just out of spite to ye old Tim Sweeney, and his bullshit attitude towards the community, purely because he has to pay out of pocket for every license we claim
For what it’s worth there’s an open source launcher that is 100x better than Epic’s official one called Heroic. You can use that if you want to avoid their slow, ad-spamming store.
I’m aware of it. It doesn’t resolve the biggest problems with Epic. In fact, it arguably makes them worse, by encouraging more people to accept Epic’s policies and run their code. (Note that Epic Store games run Epic code regardless of how they’re launched; it’s built in to the executables.)
All signs point to that program being a failure for them, which is why the exclusivity offers and announcements started drying up, but I guess this is them trying a revised strategy.
store.epicgames.com
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