Yeah. I don’t have a lot of negative things to say about Steam, and there’s a lot of high-value stuff. The mod workshop is great. Linux support is top-tier. There’s a lot of good stuff. The only major bad thing from my point of view is lock-in. Having a vast library of games tied to one account isn’t great. And having publishers and mod-makers etc essentially forced to rely on that platform is not good. Steam itself is good - but consolidation of power is generally a bad thing.
For that reason, most of my new games have been coming from GOG over the last couple of years. GOG’s DRM free policy means there’s basically no lock-in effect. That’s a major strength, even if some of their other features aren’t as strong as Steam.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
So today Unity announced changes in how they are going to monetize their game engine, and it is, rightfully might I add, poorly recievedHere is how much youtuber Dani would have to pay unity if they consider his games to gain over $200k in revenue Dani’s hypothetical unity payments...
I haven’t pirated a game for a very long time. Indie games are very very cheap; and AAA games don’t interest me anyway.
So I’m not really looking at this change from a piracy point of view. For me, the big message here is (once again) don’t trust big corps. People who put their trust in Unity are now getting stabbed in the back. They’re now have to either pay up big, or do a huge amount of additional work to write their stuff using a different engine. And this could easily happen again, and again, and with other engines… … So its best not to rely on big corps.
This is a reason why I’m not on any private tracker. When there are 200 seeds all with better connection than me, then my ratio isn’t going anywhere. It creates this weird dynamic where you’re sometimes wishing people would stop seeding stuff; and that is clearly counter-productive.
Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Dusk: Unpopular opinion: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly (twitter.com) angielski
So, Unity is charging game developers per video game install now... (blog.unity.com) angielski
So today Unity announced changes in how they are going to monetize their game engine, and it is, rightfully might I add, poorly recievedHere is how much youtuber Dani would have to pay unity if they consider his games to gain over $200k in revenue Dani’s hypothetical unity payments...
Pirate Pro (lemmy.ml) angielski