There are valid reasons to bash Epic. I’ve written about some of them in another comment thread I made on Lemmy, but the overall problem I (and likely many others) have with them is a combination of their CEO’s hypocrisy and the company’s actions.
While both of our claims are anecdotal, I’ve had it cause performance issues. It definitely isn’t the normal behavior for EGS and was probably a bug, but on my system it was sometimes sitting in the tray consuming 10 GB of system memory (and causing excessive swapping due to memory pressure).
The whole idea of digital licenses are stupid and risky. If you can find it on GOG, it’s preferable to get it there. The games are DRM-free, and you can directly download the installers and make an offline backup of them.
What if Steam went bankrupt, or start playing less nice?
Thankfully, there’s not too much reason to worry about this yet. Steam is a money-printing machine, and it’s not a public company or beholden to investors who demand increasing profitability every quarter. As long as Gabe Newell is still alive and doesn’t sell out by taking Valve public, things probably won’t change much.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In my experience, it’s a threefold problem for large-scale games like RPGs or AAA titles.
Playing the game in short bursts isn’t meaningful enough to be enjoyable. While you could do it, it would either be under pressure, or you would have so little time to do anything that it feels like you’ve accomplished nothing.
To get around that, you have to schedule playing the game into your day or carve time around it. It’s often difficult to do so, and games are usually the lowest priority activity for working adults.
When you can’t schedule the game in, you take a break to play a different game with less commitment requirements. Then, after a couple of months have passed, you realize that you have forgotten where you were in the story and what goals you were trying to achieve. That’s super demotivating, and it’s usually just easier to play a new game than try to figure out where you left off.
When you consider that, it kind of makes sense why small games like Vampire Survivors or handheld gaming (where quick suspend is a thing) have taken off in recent years.
buy exclusives or studio? most big publishers do that.
In the case of studios or intellectual property owned by a publisher, you can (unfortunately) expect that to be exclusive to the publisher. When games don’t have the funding to make it past development, taking publishing deals are a necessary evil that often come with similar provisions.
Epic has a habit with inserting itself in projects that don’t need its funding, however. They have a track record of finding indie games that were funded by Kickstarter and offer up a loan in exchange for timed exclusivity to their storefront—backers who already paid for GOG or Steam keys be damned. They even bought out Rocket League and delisted it from Steam, even though it was already published and had been on the platform for years.
I can’t criticize Epic for making their own properties exclusive, but I can absolutely criticize them for being anticompetitive and consumer-unfriendly. Their publishing deals aren’t made in good faith as an investment in the game or future profits, but as a means to remove the consumer’s choice and funnel prospective consumers into their own storefront.
give free games out? It’s consumer friendly.
This is the one thing I will give them credit for, actually. It is an excellent business model for creating growth and getting users invested in their ecosystem, and it doesn’t actually hurt the consumer.
drive Valve or other store front out of business? lol
That would be the goal of a monopoly, yes.
make EGS/EOS so good and free that no one wants to publish on Steam? lol, any advance in that 2 department Steam as platform will respond way before they take foot hold.
Sorry, I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at with this. Are you saying other storefronts/platforms on PC aren’t free, or that Epic Games Store currently does a better job?
Is run by a CEO who sees astroturfing as a legitimate form of speech, and not manipulative marketing. [Source]
Attempts to gain market share by subverting competitors rather than offering a better product. [Source p. 151]
I’m not saying Steam should be the only platform; competition benefits us as consumers. But Epic is shady, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest they aren’t doing what they are doing for the good of anybody but themselves. Any action they take needs to be looked at critically and analyzed for long-term consequences.
With their win against Google, it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that they create an Epic Mobile Games Store to siphon a large chunk of the massive and extremely profitable mobile gaming market. It’s better than Google having 100% of it, but you can be pretty sure that they would try everything in their power to pull the ladder up after they climb it.