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.
Comment on Fallout 3: GOTY Edition is free to keep for the next 24 hours on the Epic Games Store
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months agoThere really isn’t.
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:
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
cottonmon@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Squid@leminal.space 10 months ago
Heard this had even killed projects
otp@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Do you really want to support a company
I don’t think getting freebies from them counts as supporting them
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
You have to create an account to get them.
If you don’t think data harvesting to sell the data isn’t part of that equation, you’re just a little bit naive.
otp@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Of course it’s part of the equation.
It’s part of the equation on Steam and GOG, too.
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.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
Yeah, but the argument was “does taking a free game help them or not” not shifting goalposts to whether Valve does it, too.
ono@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
I don’t think getting freebies from them counts as supporting them
I do. Some examples off the top of my head:
- giving them access to your stored data, both through account creation and by letting their code execute on your computer
- giving them access to your system fingerprints, through the same
- giving them access to your behavioral data, through the same
- giving them legal influence over you, by agreeing to their terms
- giving their legal arguments greater weight by increasing their market share
- giving them greater sway with publishers by bolstering their user count
There are probably other ways in which it supports them. Those are just the first ones to come to mind.
otp@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Ok, but they give free games so it’s cool. They’ll surely make a lot of money off of my “never pays us” behavioural data
Mojojojo1993@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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
otp@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
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.
bridge_too_close@kbin.social 10 months ago
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.
Mojojojo1993@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
Squid@leminal.space 10 months ago
Found an interesting post from steam steam support stating contingency plan for users ive also seen another post that was in a discussion outlining the same contingency plan
Lmaydev@programming.dev 10 months ago
I totally disagree with the exclusives point.
So, so many games can only be brought on steam. It’s always been that way.
brawleryukon@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Please stop with this. 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.
Voyajer@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Which games did valve pay to be exclusive to steam?
brawleryukon@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Darwinia.
And before you even go there, yes, it was a long time ago, no, they haven’t really done it since then. But the discussion here is about whether or not Epic did it first, which they did not. By about a decade and a half.
Voyajer@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Darwinia still sold copies through their site. Steam didn’t even support macos or linux back then yet the game did and that was how you got those versions. It wasn’t exclusive.
finishsneezing@discuss.tchncs.de 10 months ago
Since you are really nitpicky here: The people you replied to did say „exclusives“ and „games“, so…
Deceptichum@kbin.social 10 months ago
Show one Valve exclusive.
Lmaydev@programming.dev 10 months ago
A large chunk of steam games can’t be brought elsewhere.
Voyajer@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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?
Deceptichum@kbin.social 10 months ago
That’s not an exclusivity deal.
brawleryukon@lemmy.world 10 months ago
forums.introversion.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=40203
What do I win?
rambaroo@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.