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.