Adalast,

Wait, this is unpopular? Well shit, I’m right there with you. I was already not liking Epic for many reasons, but the Satisfactory exclusivity deal seared them to a cinder for me. At least Valve is not publicly traded and the owner never has any intent on doing so. He is able to base his decisions on what he wants and is able to treat employees, customers, and content creators more fairly, even if it hurts his bottom line. Honestly, that is all I need to know about the man. He could go public and make billions, but he doesn’t. He wants the control and wants the closed company. In the modern world it is rare and, to me, laudable.

can,

He’s already a billionaire

Adalast,

This is quite true, though, unlike most of his cohort, he seems content with making more of them slowly over decades than trying to cash out asap.

GodofGrunts,

Imagine thinking that Valve has a monopoly.

Monopoly doesn’t mean “Largest market share”. It’s a real term with a real meaning.

Monopoly:

the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service.

What, exactly, does Valve control? They don’t require exclusivity, they don’t require their DRM, they don’t require the use of their network system. Hell, they don’t even require you to to give them 30% if you sell your own key.

Valve is also not a publicly traded company, while this doesn’t mean you can fully trust them it does mean they aren’t required to seek profit at all costs. This allows then to do things like, support Linux, make their own hardware (twice after their first attempt was a failure), work on Proton, develope games that make them no money, etc.

Itch.io, GOG, EA, Epic, Windows Store, Game Pass, Humble Bundle, personal websites. These are all examples of places you can buy video games on computers.

Timmy Tencent’s propaganda is working on you if you think Valve is any sort of monopoly.

merc,

Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a “monopolist” is a firm with significant and durable market power.

www.ftc.gov/…/monopolization-defined

Rolder,

I don’t think Steam qualifies still. There are still plenty of competitors such as GOG, Green Man Gaming, itch.io, Epic, Humble Store, Microsoft Store, and so on.

merc,

Steam accounts for 50% to 70% of all PC game downloads around the world.

enterpriseappstoday.com/…/steam-statistics.html

Rolder,

It being popular doesn’t mean it’s a monopoly…

GodofGrunts,

The “significant durable market power” part is why I went on to explain how they don’t lock you into their ecosystem. How can Valve raise prices or exclude their competitors when they literally do not have any mechanisms in place to do any of those things?

GenBlob,

I will always support valve because of their amazing Linux support but if GOG finally made a client for Linux then I would try to use that more. I wish Epic would also support Linux but with massive douchebag Tim Sweeney running the company, that will never happen.

kadu,
@kadu@lemmy.world avatar

If these platforms supported Linux, they’d be able to compete with Steam… 15 years ago.

Nowadays Steam offers so many solutions to PC gaming that other clients simply would take ages to copy. Steam Input, cloud saves that actually work, Steam Link, Remote Play Together, etc

Paranomaly,
@Paranomaly@sh.itjust.works avatar

There are so many companies that have all the pieces to make good competition to Steam but their greed gets in the way. Microsoft in particular should have been a shoe-in for it, but GFWL was an embarrassing failure, the WIndows store is rubbish and insists on a new file format that (at least in the past) caused all kinds of issues for games, and now their Game Pass service has no focus on a buying element. This is without going into both Amazon and Google tripping on the starting line when it comes to getting in the gaming space. A launcher that was tied in with Amazon’s web store would be a really quick way to get a lot of people in naturally.

I really wish more people used GoG to where it could be a competitor. Unfortunately the game selection is much lower due to companies turning their noses up at no DRM. Also, I will admit that I tend to buy things on Steam in favor of GoG due to a lot of the features Steam has.

Saneless,

I’ll never buy another game on Microsoft’s store ever again. And this is AFTER all that GFWL bs. Bought Forza 7 and it refuses to install. It did once before but now it says it’s done immediately and is nowhere to be found. I’ve tried everything short of a reinstal, which I will not do

Paranomaly,
@Paranomaly@sh.itjust.works avatar

I have a lot of problems with them too. I gave Game Pass an honest shot once, but could never get any games to run or install properly. Can’t imagine the normal store front is any better.

woodenskewer,
@woodenskewer@lemmy.world avatar

Sometimes, I just forget to use GoG. Like Balder’s gate 3, I realized after purchasing on steam, fuck, why didn’t I buy this on GoG.

Paranomaly,
@Paranomaly@sh.itjust.works avatar

Honestly, I can be the same.

EmperorHenry,
@EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Fuck epic games!

Gabu,

This opinion is in no way unpopular. Valve is privately owned and headed by a single individual with tremendous purpose of will, which is how they’ve done so many great things for the gaming industry. The issue lies with said leadership vacating their role (GabeN is getting old) and some greedy bastard taking the company in a wholy different direction. tl;dr: we need a strong competitor, but not now, and ABSOLUTELY not Epic.

blind3rdeye,

I personally get most of my games from GOG and itch.io these days. And I’ve never bought anything from the Epic store whatsoever.

I will say though that I find it kind of weird how much hate Epic gets for their store. Like, I understand that someone prefers Steam, or doesn’t want to buy stuff from Epic etc. - but what we see goes way beyond that. Epic has people actively campaigning against it, as if its mere existence is insulting. I don’t really get why.

As for the 30% cut… Developers will try to price their games competitively, and within customer expectations. So with or without Steam’s 30% cut, you can expect games to be similarly priced. The large 30% cut from Steam is basically coming out of the developer’s revenue rather than from your pocket. (I’m under the impression that GOG also has a similar 30% fee. Epic has a lower fee. And on itch.io the seller gets to choose how money goes to itch.io anywhere from 0% to 100%. So itch.io is the best deal for developers in terms of fees.)

Gabu,

The reason people hate Epic is fairly obvious – they don’t give a shit about the gaming industry nor about players. At some point their client contained literal spyware, they tried to brute force market share via sleazy exclusivity contracts, their software doesn’t have one tenth of the features Steam has, their CEO is a piece of shit, etc.

blind3rdeye,

The reason people hate Epic is fairly obvious – they don’t give a shit about the gaming industry nor about players.

What do you mean by that? For developers, they take a much smaller fee than Steam or GOG, and for players they’re constantly giving away free games.

At some point their client contained literal spyware.

That sounds like a decent reason to campaign against them. I haven’t heard anything about that before. What was the story behind that? (As in, when / why / how / what? Perhaps you have a link or something.)

brute force market share via sleazy exclusivity contracts

I’ve heard people talk a lot about exclusivity contracts… but can you name even a single game that has such a contract? When people have discussed this the past, the relevant developers basically said “there is no contract”. But maybe there is some different case I don’t know about. In any case, that personally doesn’t bother me anyway. If some developer wants to take money to be on one store rather than another, they can do that at their own peril. As for customers, we’re only talking about a store. It’s not like anyone is in danger of not being able to buy / play their favourite games. So it seems like a bit of a nothing-burger to me. Like, is there actually something bad happening here? Or are people just speculating that something bad might one-day happen if Epic got bigger?

their software doesn’t have one tenth of the features Steam has,

Steam has more features, yeah. Steam is very good. But Steam has been around for some 20 years. It’s hard to catch up with that so quickly. In any case, although missing features is a good reason to prefer Steam, it certainly isn’t a reason to campaign against Epic.

… So from your list, I’ll keep the spyware thing and the CEO complaint. I don’t know enough about either of those to say much though. I don’t recall who the CEO of Epic is right now, so I won’t say whether or not I think that’s a good reason. And the spyware… I take that kind of stuff seriously. Right now I’m posting this from Linux - because I’m fed-up with Windows spyware. But as I said, I’ve not heard any details about any Epic spyware thing.

Incidentally, I’ve found that Steam is very good for Linux gaming. … But obviously that doesn’t mean that I’m going to start making posts trash-talking Epic. I don’t find it weird that people prefer Steam. I just find it weird that people put so much energy into attacking Epic.

derpgon,

As for the games that were Epic exclusive for a year: Borderlands 3, Satisfactory, Darksiders 3, Hitman 3, Dead Island 2, Borderlands TTW to name a few. They have a year exclusivity deal with Epic - we know how annoying exclusivity deals are on consoles.

About the features, it’s quite tricky. Epic rather spends thousands on exclusivity deals rather than invest into a launcher to have a working basket.

It’s super obvious where Epic’s priorities are, and it’s not the gamers. How are they able to dedicate so much work on Unreal, but now on a launcher? They try to substitute a half-assed launcher with exclusivity deals, because they know nobody would use it willingly.

geophysicist,

3rd result on Google for “epic games exclusive contracts”

theverge.com/…/epic-games-store-first-run-develop…

4th result on Google is the epic games CEO stating they use exclusive contracts

pcgamer.com/epic-isnt-done-with-epic-games-store-…

Kaijobu,

It takes quite a lot of time to repeat all the wrong doings of Epic and it’s CEO Tim.

Thus, I can only relay to the collected information of bad old Reddit, if you want to (I’m intentionally not linking, you can search it up easily). r/fuckepic has a lot of collected information on their side page.

In short, biggest issue for me exclusivity contracts with games advertised on Steam, then as a bait and switch removed from the store page and their physical copies getting a sticker on top of the Steam logo, so a last minute deal, for Metro Exodus. And then they continued their exclusivity hunt for games, they didn’t even helped to develop. Nothing against self-made or published games to be limited time exclusive in my perspective, but not second hand bought (out).

The other about their CEO, r/timcritizisestim He’s… a douche. Using kids with the free games to bait them to his store, using them against Apple’s store rules like a little army… he is a bad person with too much money and luck to have build the Epic engine with Fortnite…

azthec,

Also adding to other people, they “poached” games from other platforms.

eg they wanted Rocket League, which I have on Steam and am happy to continue using there, to be completely removed from my account and available through the epic launcher some 3(?) years after I first bought it. Eventually they backpedaled, only due to community backlash, people that owned it on steam can still play it there.

If you’re serious about not knowing about all this stuff take a look at steamcommunity.com/groups/…/1796278072844560561/Obviously Steam biased, but a very good index

blind3rdeye,

Are you saying that Rocket League was removed from the Steam accounts of the people who already owned it? That sounds like a big deal, and surely must be illegal. But I didn’t see mention of that in the link you posted. Most of the things in the list seemed to be just saying that they didn’t think the Epic store is high quality. (eg. prices too high, not enough features, difficult to use return policy, etc.) Those are all fair complaints, and good reasons to not use the store - but again, they are only good reasons to not use the store. They aren’t really good reasons to crusade against it. There are heaps of crap online stores, and generally people just ignore them.

The Rocket League thing you mentioned would be a good reason to get upset at Epic beyond just not wanting to buy from them. So I’m kind of surprised to see it missing from such a comprehensive list of grievances.

Others have mentioned spyware, and like I said, I care about that. That’s a big red flag. But I looked at the links in the post you gave, and as far as I could tell they were all speculation. Things like Tencent owns 40% of Epic, and Tencent is bad - so Epic is probably bad. … Which is quite possibly true! I certainly wouldn’t want to trust Epic with my personal info. But it’s still a big step away from them having spyware built in.

I personally think that many gamers put up with too much privacy invasion and ‘telemetry’ in the form of online accounts and especially ‘anti-cheat’ software. The “anti cheat” software that some games require explicitly demand access to see every program you have installed, every program you have running, and in some cases even read RAM outside of what the game is allocated. That’s an enormous security risk and privacy breach… but people install that crap all the time with barely a whisper - but then complain about the risk the Epic will share its telemetry data with Tencent. I’m certain that some of Epic’s online games have software like that, but that wasn’t mentioned in thread you linked to.


Maybe I just don’t care about the same things that other people care about. Like, if Epic has a crap store… I just don’t care. It makes no difference to me how crap it is. It makes to difference if they say it is going to be great, and it falls short of what they said. I’m not going to go around telling people how crap it is, because I don’t think it matters. I don’t intend to use the store anyway; and if other people like the store for some reason, then fine. I don’t think it matters. They can like it, and I won’t try to convince them otherwise. But if they are somehow removing games you’ve already bought elsewhere - then that’s a big deal. That would be worth telling people about. I hope you can see what I mean.

JackbyDev,

Anno 1800 was available for purchase on Steam prior to release but at some point they made a deal with Epic to sell it there for a year. Then it was removed from Steam. If you already bought it you could use it on Steam but everyone else had to wait. You could also directly buy it from Ubisoft’s own store Uplay so in the most strict sense it was not an exclusive contract but pretty damn close. Also it wasn’t a secret. The company talked about it. They had to, because it was literally available for pre purchase on Steam and then suddenly wasn’t.

Gabu,

For developers, they take a much smaller fee than Steam or GOG, and for players they’re constantly giving away free games.

“Free stuff, pl0x” isn’t an indicator of supporting the industry or players. That’s a business tactic for clawing market share away from their competitors by attracting people without the means to buy games and devs desperate for funding. Also, if parity is your worry, many games on Steam go free or effectively free (<1 USD) all the time.

That sounds like a decent reason to campaign against them. I haven’t heard anything about that before. What was the story behind that? (As in, when / why / how / what? Perhaps you have a link or something.)

With Reddit going tits up and a coverup operation by Epic throwing a bunch of garbage info around, it’s been difficult to find the exact sources (why I’ve been taking so long to reply). If I find the actual articles/posts I’ll link them, but in summary:

  • EGS bypassed many APIs, such as Steam’s API, to data mine your usage statistics of their competitors, including friends and games played - they didn’t ask for your consent nor Steam’s.
  • Some major red flags with memory manipulation and internet traffic obfuscation.
  • They “apologized” about it, citing some bullshit reasons for that behavior. Suspiciously, behavior changed.

I’ve heard people talk a lot about exclusivity contracts… but can you name even a single game that has such a contract? […] Like, is there actually something bad happening here? Or are people just speculating that something bad might one-day happen if Epic got bigger?

There are loads of games in my “do not buy unless heavily discounted” list precisely for taking exclusivity deals. Hitman 3, Darkest Dungeon 2, Hades, Satisfactory, among others. The danger, beyond rewarding shitty behavior, shutting out large portions of the community, and limiting consumers’ options, is the same as always - you’re effectively telling companies that whoever has the biggest pocket gets to dictate what the entire industry has to do.

But Steam has been around for some 20 years. It’s hard to catch up with that so quickly. In any case, although missing features is a good reason to prefer Steam, it certainly isn’t a reason to campaign against Epic.

It wouldn’t be if Epic had shown any intention of eventually having parity. It’s been however many years since they released, with the immense advantage of seeing what works for Steam so they could copy it, and yet their client remains just as bad. It clearly shows that their focus in on getting market share to exploit gamers and devs, not on making the best platform possible.

Atomic,

Steam can also leverage their insanely huge userbase. Even with the 30% cut, a company will probably see more profits if they use steam and give up 30% than trying to launch it outside.

At this point. The 30% is just the cost of doing business

Saneless,

Higher fee but significantly many more multiples of customers on steam who see and buy the game.

Just like I could sell on Etsy for a massive margin or I could sell it to Walmart at a smaller margin but make 100x the sales.

You’re paying for the customer base

Phen,

Steam doesn’t let you sell the game for cheaper prices in other stores.

DingoBilly,

Eh, more competition is good. This opinion is pretty basic.

From memory Epic has improved rates for developers/publishers - why the fuck wouldn’t you want that/just be ok with a base 30% cut because of some shitty ideal?

Gabu,

Epic also tried to datamine their users with literal spyware, their store is shit with no features, they gained market share via exclusivity deals (I shouldn’t need to explain why this is bad, yeah?), their CEO is a POS with horrible takes, Tencent has a large stake in the company… If anything, your opinion is shallow.

DingoBilly,

Ahh, so you can only have good competitors? It’s either a monopoly (which is only as good as the CEO in charge, and with time will go to shit), or competitors which do the same stuff and play nice?

This is reality. And you get good competition, you get bad, but in general it’s good for the consumer to have options. Fuck it, I’m actually completely happy using Valve for most things and then getting free games from Epic.

The view that a monopoly is better is just extremely short-sighted and naive. Similar to a “We should just have a dictator! This one guy is really good now, what could go wrong in the future?” type thinking.

Gabu,

Do you seriously not see your own hypocrisy?

Hurr durr, a monopoly is bad because the person in charge could become bad, so I’ll actively help this KNOWN bad actor to get a foothold in the market. I am very smart

DingoBilly,

So you’re making some false assumptions here:

  1. That a new person to Valve would be equal to Epic, as opposed to massively running Steam into the ground in a significantly worse way. It’d be easy for some dumbass to suggest a subscription service is needed for Steam for example, you need to may $10 a month to support it. Whelp, Steam is now shit.
  2. You assume I’m helping Epic whatsoever. I get free games, that only costs Epic… So yes, this is helping me and costing Epic. Net win for consumers.
  3. If a developer/publisher wants the choice to pay lower fees they can do so via Epic. It’s great they have the choice, I support devs being able to do what works best for them.

There’s no hypocrisy there - it’s just logical that it’s a good outcome to have competition.

Perhaps I should turn the argument around - why is a monopoly by Steam a good thing? Long-term it’s completely unsustainable and they will do bad things, so why would you support that?

Gabu,

I’m not assuming jack shit. I’m factually stating Valve/Steam are currently great for the gaming industry and Epic is toxic refuse.

This opinion is in no way unpopular. Valve is privately owned and headed by a single individual with tremendous purpose of will, which is how they’ve done so many great things for the gaming industry. The issue lies with said leadership vacating their role (GabeN is getting old) and some greedy bastard taking the company in a wholy different direction. tl;dr: we need a strong competitor, but not now, and ABSOLUTELY not Epic.

Are my exact words from this very thread.

You assume I’m helping Epic whatsoever. I get free games, that only costs Epic… So yes, this is helping me and costing Epic. Net win for consumers.

Did you think Epic’s financial department had an extended vacation or something? They don’t give a shit that you downloaded the game they made available for free, that was the whole point of their stunt and they were prepared to use money in order to claw some market share.

If a developer/publisher wants the choice to pay lower fees they can do so via Epic. It’s great they have the choice, I support devs being able to do what works best for them.

And I boycott devs who sell their souls for a quick buck. Darkest Dungeon is one of my favorite games of all time - I still haven’t bought DD2, even though it was made available on Steam after the period of exclusivity elapsed.

it’s just logical that it’s a good outcome to have competition.

Except it isn’t. It’s only good to have good faith competition of well behaved market players - Epic does not qualify.

why is a monopoly by Steam a good thing? Long-term it’s completely unsustainable and they will do bad things, so why would you support that?

Again a horrible question. Something doesn’t have to be perfect in order to be markedly better than something else. Steam is, right now, no questions asked, infinitely better than Epic. Why support a shitty company that would happily bring everything crumbling down if it meant a quick buck?

DingoBilly,

I don’t understand.

Valve is good now so it doesn’t need a competitor? And only when it goes bad should another company exist as competitor? This makes no sense… It’s just not how the world works. Once you have a monopoly it typically stays a monopoly. Look at any of the current monopolies - many are going to shit like Google but there’s no real competition regardless.

You’re also discounting the fact the opposite fact - Epic might be terrible now, but change leadership and its now amazing.

You’re buying way into a very specific case of looking at where things are at now and making a judgement VS. Thinking of longer term ideas like competition is good.

Also, is steam infinitely better than Epic? That’s very debatable, I have no issues with either. To be honest, they’re much of a muchness. You may just be too heavily emotionally invested in these companies. Realistically, they are both just trying to make as much money out of you as they can. For instance, Steams use of their market and giving out digital cards to collect and level up is very predatory.

Gabu,

I get it, you’re a concern troll shilling for EGS. How much are you being paid?

DingoBilly,

If you don’t have an argument attack the person. I’ll take the point cheers.

Gabu,

I’m under no obligation to debate with a moron who can’t even follow the conversation, and behaves like a kid, looking for “scoring points”.

amos,

What spyware? The CEO has been a big advocate for lowering store prices (including Google and Apple stores) to help smaller developers. Their exclusive deals have also helped a lot of developers get their games made. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a game developed these days. Xbox, Sony, Nintendo all have exclusives.

I would say your take is a bit, shallow.

Gabu,

How much are you being paid to shill?

As an indie gamedev, yes, I DO know how hard it is to make a game – I also don’t think getting funding is worth selling your soul for.

They don’t want to lower percentages and prices to “help smaller developers”, but to gain market share. Your brainless whataboutism on consoles is also irrelevant – it’s bad there too. The only acceptable exclusivity is when the company behind the market also happens to develop (not fund) the game.

stillwater,

Look up the concept of loss leading. Do you think Epic are really just doing this for the benefit of developers or are they after something more insidious?

DingoBilly,

Yeah sure, Epic wants more market share.

But that’s ok - this is why competition is good. Devs make some more money, consumers get some free games.

Even if Epic ends up only matching Steam then this is a net win for people.

Asking for a monopoly is just short-sighted. Gabe leaves and then the next person in line is some $-hungry mofo who makes terrible decisions and you end up with a shit system. You need competition to keep things in check.

obinice,
@obinice@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t see what people have against Epic, they’re just another company running a storefront, right? Or are they union busters or something?

Any competition that can take on Stream’s monopoly is good, it’s been a long time coming.

You might think Steam are the good guys because they don’t abuse their customers yet, but all good things come to an end, eventually. A company with their level of monopolistic grasp doesn’t remain benign forever.

nanoUFO,
@nanoUFO@sh.itjust.works avatar

Valve is a private company so Gabe doesn’t have anyone breathing down his neck to grow endlessly not matter the costs. Also epic refuses to add any half decent consumer features along with buying exclusivity to their platform. Sweeney is also extremely anti linux so why would I give him money.

blind3rdeye,

Steam is pretty good, in many ways. … … There is a little bit of customer abuse creeping in though. It annoys me that I can’t turn off the “what’s new” panel. It’s nothing more than an advertisement panel, and the only options are to say ‘show less’ for individual games, one by one (and even then, it doesn’t stop showing advertisements related to those games).

In any case, I don’t use Epic’s launcher at all; so I won’t try to comment on which is better. I just think it’s good to point out that Steam isn’t perfect, and I agree that competition probably does them some good.

ICastFist,
@ICastFist@programming.dev avatar

The funny thing is that Valve kickstarted the digital sales with Half Life 2 back in 2004. Steam was an utter piece of shit for, what, some 6 years? It took them a lot of time to make it bearable, then good.

That the EGS launcher is a fucking Unreal app, needlessly bloated as fuck and with barely working UI shows their complete disregard for what is supposed to be their “money givers” (us, customers) and, like every other stupid company with their own launcher which manages to be worse than their fucking website, shows they refuse to learn the obvious.

I hope GOG never goes the enshitification path.

Honytawk,

I fucking hated Valve for making me buy a physical CD of Portal, only to get a CD with the Steam Installer and a code to download the game on their store.

Ironfacebuster,

Same thing happened to me but with portal 2. I had DSL at the time and it barely hit 10 Mbps on a good day which was great because I thought the disk had the game on it. Despite all of the pain I still love steam to this day lol (and I’ve gotten better Internet)

reagansrottencorpse,

I remember when steam first came out and I was like…I need this extra program to play counter strike now ?!

Evil_Shrubbery,

Needs more GOG

790,

I absolutely love their client and prefer GOG over Steam. I remember how their client GOG Galaxy is highly praised in the developer community, because it is so well designed and runs so performant. It also allows you to play any previous versions of games you own.

https://lemmy.sdf.org/pictrs/image/3c34d2ef-24d5-4fa5-be65-fbaf5dbd9092.png

reddit.com/…/what_was_gog_galaxy_20_made_with/

Evil_Shrubbery,

Also DRM free.

At some point we could also perhaps resell the games, maybe (not sure where the proof per license would be tho).

worldofgeese,
@worldofgeese@lemmy.world avatar

What has GOG done for Linux? I care about OSS and companies supporting my preferred OSS operating system. To that end, Valve continues to be a steward without peer.

yumcake,

I buy all my games on Epic Games Launcher becomes it has less DRM than steam. If you have kids, they can’t play 2 completely different games on two different computers.

It’s like your kid not being able to play Mario kart on her switch because her brother is playing Halo on Xbox in another room. Steam doesn’t support that. Epic games doesn’t have a problem with you having 2 different games being played on 2 different computers, so I buy my games there whenever I have the choice because it’s the more consumer-friendly platform.

Tranus,

Not to justify it, but you can work around this with offline mode.

n3m37h,

Family mode too

ParsnipWitch, (edited )

Family shared libraries can also ever only be used by one person. Or what do you mean with family mode?

n3m37h,

Ah didn’t known that tidbit

Kolanaki, (edited )
!deleted6508 avatar

If you have kids, they can’t play 2 completely different games on two different computers.

Steam does support that tho. That’s what Family Sharing is. And it works really well.

Now, if you wanted to play the same game at the same time, that’s on a single Steam account, that you can’t do. But I’m pretty sure you can’t do that on EGS, either. Not without 2 accounts and 2 copies of the game.

yumcake,

No, it explicitly does not work that way. If you share a game to another family member, and that family member plays that game, you are not allowed to play any other game at all on steam.

“A Steam library can only be used by one user at a time to play one game at a time. The same is true if that library is being accessed by another user via Family Sharing.”

help.steampowered.com/en/…/57A7-503C-991F-E9A8#:~….

Kolanaki, (edited )
!deleted6508 avatar

I know the wording there is fucked up, but have you used it? Because you can play two separate games at the same time with it, but you can’t play the same exact game as each other. I use it all the time to play stuff my sister has that I don’t, while she plays something else.

Jakeroxs,

Unless you’ve got some weird special option, they’re right, as soon as you launch a game in your library, it becomes unusable to family sharing, my wife and I use it but it’s very limiting in that aspect.

It even notifies you when the “family library” becomes available.

huskypenguin,

Two DIFFERENT games will work. Playing the SAME game SIMULTANEOUSLY will not work.

JokeDeity,

Valve may not be the cheapest by any means, but that’s because they’re offering a product 30x as valuable. The other launchers companies have are shit, across the board, nothing but shit. It’s not even in the same continent. If any one of these companies actually wants to ever see this change, they are going to have to set their greed aside. That’s impossible for CEOs in this day and age, so I don’t see Steam ever losing their stranglehold unless they do an about-face from everything they’ve done so far. In the grand scheme of things, Valve is one of the most customer friendly companies on the face of the Earth and they continue to be innovative and supportive to users. Epic on the other hand is everything wrong with capitalism, and much the same can be said for any of the other companies with competing launchers/game stores.

crab,

What’s so wrong with Epic? I prefer Steam but Epics client has a better UI, I haven’t found any problems, and deals seem better than Steam, especially with free games.

natryamar,

No communities, no guides, no VR , no game streaming, annoying download manager, annoying friends tab, no steam deck, no game collections AFAIK. When Fall Guys came out for free I gave the Epic launcher a real chance and it was incredibly limited in it functionality and frustrating to use compared to Steam.

Steam is shaping up to be your all in one library for anything games be it PC, VR or portable. The Switch, Quest, Playstation, Xbox and Epic launcher all offer a piece of that experience but having a unified platform that syncs your saves and doesn’t nickel and dime you for features and accessories is why Steam is more popular.

I haven’t been using Epic enough to really compare with Steam sales but stuff gets really cheap on steam really fast. I would also gladly buy my games for money on Steam just to be able to play them easily on my Steam Deck. Also Epic is only doing the free games because they have unreal and Fortnite money, there’s no telling when the free games will stop.

crab,

You’re right about most things, and Linux/VR support is often a deal breaker for me so I rarely use Epic. But you really think its that unusable? I’ve heard mostly positive things from my friends. I don’t care how or why they’re giving out free games but its a huge plus. I just really don’t understand all the hate.

natryamar,

I remembered some more stuff epic doesn’t have. Steam input and launch option customization. I can play Civ 6, a game meant for kbm, on my steam deck with the controller buttons. Epic obscures their exe files to make it hard to know which to add as a non steam game to steam.

It was annoying to go from steam with it’s deep and helpful functionality to epic with what essentially just feels like the iOS appstore. I especially hate being forced to use epic online services on a game I bought ON STEAM. I couldn’t play the sackboy game with a friend on steam deck because something along the way broke and epic services wouldn’t let me. This game is P2P there’s definitely no servers being involved so why the heck can’t they just use steamworks?

Epic being unusable is a bit of an exaggeration but in terms of the platform they offer it is inferior to steam in every single way and they have done almost zero to make up the gap. Instead they pay money to keep games away from steam and force you to use their launcher in the most annoying and inconvenient way. That’s why they get so much hate from people.

Gabu,

Adding to what Natryamar said, epic once bundled actual malware with their client and is partially owned by Tencent, the chinese company known for turning games into garbage.

Colorcodedresistor,

We are just now getting out of the bullshit days of 40 game launchers. The Big Industry morons like Ubi, Ea and Bliz are crumbling. Indie devs are being celebrated and releasing titles now more than ever before. We are in a ‘quiet’ time of gaming. i believe. not a dark time. If the mainstream industry can get back to more honest and longevity based projects then we will in the next 5-10 years see another golden age (think 2007 or 2017 release titles) and of course year over year everyone can point to one or two games worth playing for the whole year or two till the next one.

chiliedogg,

2023 is one of the best years in the history of gaming. So, so many many great titles, large and small, have been released this year.

terny,

I don’t keep up as much as I used to, what are great small games that have released this year?

greenkarmic,

Halls of Torment is pretty good

chiliedogg,

Sea of Stars is spectacular so far.

Trainguyrom,

So there’s this guy named notch who’s making a funky indie title in Java…

I kid but my wife and I have banked so many hours playing Minecraft together in the last 2 weeks

Jakeroxs,

BG3, Larian wasn’t exactly a powerhouse of gaming prior to it

LUHG_HANI,
@LUHG_HANI@lemmy.world avatar

I hope ubisoft go bankrupt. Everything is pile of hot scamming garbage.

Trainguyrom,

think 2007 or 2017 release titles

Remember, Skyrim was released closer to the first year you listed than the second one and the sequel is still quite a ways out. There are entire release day players of Elder Scrolls 6 who were not yet born when 5 came out.

Jakeroxs,

What’s your point? They released Fallout 4, Skyrim Special Edition, VR editions of both, Fallout 76 and Starfield since then

The worst out of the list being FO76

ILikeBoobies,

I just hope Steam can be broken up

Make the workshop and community their own company

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