What's up with Epic Games?

Submitted ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨games@lemmy.world⁩

I can’t seem to find that one comment explaining the issue with them…

But for the sake of promoting conversation on Lemmy, what’s the issue with Epic, and why should I go for Steam or GoG?

Note: Piracy is not an answer. I understand why, and do agree to a certain extent… But sometimes, the happiness gained by playing something from a legitimate source is far greater 🥹… coming from someone who could never ever afford to purchase games, nor could my parents… Hence I’ve always played bootleg, or pirated games.

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UprisingVoltage@feddit.it ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Epic cons:

Filled to the brim with DRM, at the point where you can’t even launch many**** singleplayer games offline

Actively against linux, for some fucking reason

Bad launcher (but this one is no biggie, you can and should use Heroic launcher instead of the official one) -Bad store in general compared to steam

Epic pros:

Free games

With coupons prices can get VERY low

When it opened I heard the percent they take from game devs was lower than the other stores (not sure if it’s still the case and tbh if it ever was)

Steam pros:

Pushing linux gaming like their life depends on it

Generally correct towards the consumer

Huge store and many information, from the game store pages to the workshop

During sales prices are good

Steam cons:

Drm

Bad official app Ux and messy ui

Gog

I don’t know anything besides the fact that it has drm-free games and that it’s owned by CDPR (the guys who developed the witcher series and cyberpunk)

I personally purchase my games on steam, since I think their contribution to linux gaming is crucial for linux to go mainstream

Choose what you will knowing this. If someone else wants to add something to this list you’re welcome to do so.
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- Alto@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Valve is what happens when someone who's not just outright fucking evil invents a money printing machine
  
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  - MudMan@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yeah, and somehow they managed to invent like 90% of all "evil" MTX and DRM in the process, take a bigger cut than competitors and actively reject having a returns policy until pushed by regulators and competitors, all the while being super not evil.
    
    It's a fine line to walk, that.
    
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- ono@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  Epic cons
  
  Let’s also acknowledge that Epic has already been caught scanning and collecting data from files on people’s hard drives that are totally unrelated to Epic or its games.
  
  Ties with Tencent (super anti-consumer chinese state-owned megacorp)
  
  To be more clear about it, Tencent is Epic’s largest investor, so they obviously have a great deal of influence over and access to anything they want from Epic.
  
  Steam cons: Drm
  
  Given that DRM on Steam is entirely up to the game publisher, I don’t think that’s appropriate to list that under “Steam cons”. I’m not even sure that any of my Steam games have DRM.
  
  If you mean that most Steam games expect to find an instance of Steam running, you should know that is not DRM. Also, it’s trivially replaced with the open-source Goldberg Emulator or a similar tool.
  
  Gog I don’t know anything besides the fact that it has drm-free games
  
  Another plus for GOG is that they let you download games with a web browser. No special app required.
  
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  - Kecessa@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Epic was scanning your Steam friends and play history
    
    Valve was scanning your DNS cache
    
    So… Maybe we shouldn’t forget to mention the second one if we’re going to bring up the first one
    
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- Hubi@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Don’t forget that Epic buys up existing licenses to sell them as exclusives. They even pulled Rocket League from Steam after buying the studio.
  
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  - Rose@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Rocket League is fully playable on Steam.
    
    The story of most of Valve’s games is finding a mod, hiring the modder, then making the game exclusive to Steam.
    
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  - hh93@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Let’s also not forget that game developers have no choice but to release on steam if they want to have any chance on breaking even since they have that huge of a market share and that Epic challenging that already lead to better deals for developers since Valve hat virtually free reign before
    
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- MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  A con for GOG is their site is slow as fuck. And good forbid you want to go back to a previous page, you’ll likely lose where you were looking 9 times out of ten. Especially so on mobile.
  
  Pros: Can be the only place you can get old games that would’ve been unavailable otherwise The older games are often really really cheap, especially during sales
  
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  - cottonmon@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Another con is that GOG versions are usually not updated as much as other versions are. It’s a shame, because I’d prefer to use GOG when possible.
    
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  - Grass@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Gog also seemingly no 2fa other than an faq page with instructions that cannot be followed.
    
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  - SomethingBurger@jlai.lu ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Steam’s, Epic’s, Ubisoft’s, Battle.net’s and whatever-EA’s-thing-is-called-now’s sites are also slow as shit. What is it with these platforms which prevent them from loading a webpage in less than 10 seconds?
    
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- Glide@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I want to note that Steam isn’t inherently a DRM platform, as there are many games on Steam which are DRM free.. Even ones that require the Steam backend can be bundled with Steamworks, serving all the same backend requirements without Steam needing to be installed on the machine.
  
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  - ares35@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    yea, they steam has some drm-free games available... but steam is a drm platform.. one that also helped normalize one-time-use codes and tying 'purchases' to a non-transferable online account. valve did more to shred the used pc game market than any other company.
    
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  - Kecessa@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games
    
    The Origin store proportionally has more DRM free games than Steam…
    
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  - Rose@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Epic has a significantly higher percentage of games confirmed to be DRM-free.
    
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- JimmyMcGill@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Steam UI is messy but they have a ton of functionality in their store/system. Epic took ages to even get a functioning cart, Steam has tons of features which are not even tied to the games in their store like remote play and Steam VR. Family sharing is also really cool for example. Also Steam basically killed piracy for a long time due to amazing Steam sales + convenience of use.
  
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  - Killer@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Steam ui might be messy but you can get custom skins for it.
    
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- ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Didn’t know about heroic… Gonna check that out.
  
  Also, wow. You’re the dude that appears in comment sections with well-formatted paragraphs 💯.
  
  Appreciate your service.
  
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- wooki@lemmynsfw.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Steam cons
  
  You don’t own the games, they are leased, like Sony
  
  store costs to developers/publishers are insanely high for a digital distribution platform
  
  early access games have very high volume of abandonware
  
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  - mcforest@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    store costs to developers/publishers are insanely high for a digital distribution platform
    
    Isn't the 30% cut what basically everyone takes? AFAIK GOG, Ubisoft, EA and all three console manufacturers take the same share.
    
    Besides Epic only itch.io with their choose your share system and Discord (do they even still sell games?) take/took less.
    
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- darth_helmet@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Another Epic con: they bribe devs to not launch their games on Steam and GoG, because their store isn’t good.
  
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- MeanEYE@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Steam DRM is optional, it depends on developers to implement it.
  
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- Radicaldog@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Your first line is straight up misinformation. Epic has remarkably few games with DRM, mostly from big publishers implementing their own. I’ve yet to find an indie that can’t be launched directly as an .exe. Same with Cyberpunk 2077, launches directly without issue.
  
  The only singleplayer game I can’t play offline is Hitman, just like on Steam, because their publisher sucks.
  
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- Kecessa@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Eh… A whole bunch of games on Epic are DRM free, more than there are on Steam in fact…
  
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Ganbat@lemmyonline.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Well, I have four big ones:

System scanning: EGS is known to automatically scan your system and send your data back to them. While this seems to be the same type of analytics Steam does occasionally, in Steam’s case, it’s opt-in, and done with full, informed consent.

Paid exclusives: Epic has been known to pay publishers to make their games artificially exclusive to their own store. They regularly claim this money is to support the development of the games in question, but this is easily disproven, as they’ve been seen buying games known to be complete more than once. Additionally, this has resulted in bait-and-switch-like situations, where users would prepurchase Steam copies of games, only to be informed that they wouldn’t be getting them.

Publisher-centric behavior: Another user here claimed that EGS is pro-developer and anti-consumer, but this is only half true. This only rings true in the case of self-published games. There have been cases of developers getting unwarranted backlash after aforementioned bait-and-switches, when they were just as surprised to learn about all the “development support” they received as anyone.

Tim Sweeney: Time Sweeney, the CEO of Epic, is an asshole. A giant, narcissistic, hateful shitbag. Just look at his Twitter, the dudes a giant POS.
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cottonmon@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I posted about this in another thread, but Epic also bought exclusivity for games that were crowd-funded then had the option to have the game on Steam removed or you’d get the Steam key after the exclusivity period expired. This pissed off a lot of people.

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- ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Wow. That’s understandably frustrating.
  
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  - cottonmon@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yeah, this caused A LOT of controversy back then. As far as I know, Epic has stopped doing this and has pivoted a bit more into funding game development (i.e Alan Wake 2.) That being said, that gave Epic have a terrible reputation when they initially launched EGS.
    
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yamanii@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Epic’s CEO has a hateboner for everything Linux.

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DumbAceDragon@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
No linux support. Actually, in the case of games like rocket league, they REMOVED linux support.

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Veritrax@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I personally don’t like Epic for paying developers for exclusivity deals, keeping games off other PC platforms for a year or more. Artificial scarcity is bad for consumers.

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- pivot_root@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Killer@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Don’t forget them being hypocritical again for shing google/apple for being monopolistic because they don’t want to have to go through them for payment.
    
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- ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Definitely a terrible idea.
  
  Using money to jump ahead in the line is a terrible mindset. Provide good features, you’ll get your recognition.
  
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  - JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Which they don’t do. Their platform has very few features, and doesn’t even have a cart. (Well last time I bootee EGS like a years ago).
    
    They have almost no features and of the features they do provide, none of them are great. Their only “feature” is operating at a loss, subsidized by megacorps, for many years like Amazon to gain a bunch of market share.
    
    Luckily for gamers, steam already existed so they couldn’t corner the market and enshittify the entire industry like amazon did.
    
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  - hh93@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    No it won’t - people are lazy
    
    Even CDProjekt sold many more copies on steam than GOG when you
    
    Actually own the ge there instead of renting a licence for it.
    
    Know that 100% of your money go to the game developers.
    
    Get many additional goodies for free
    
    Don’t tell me people are choosing the better deal when it’s all just steam having the might of “I have most of my games there already” on their side…
    
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- Kecessa@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Why not say fuck the developers instead? They’re the ones accepting guaranteed income in exchange for exclusivity, maybe you should be mad at then for not taking a chance at the “influencer making your game popular enough that you recoup your cost” lottery.
  
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  - CileTheSane@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Por que no dos?
    
    If I’m not buying anything on Epic then I’m also not buying from developers that agree to Epic’s exclusivity. Two birds, one stone.
    
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- MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It doesn’t really bother me since it’s still on pc anyway, it doesn’t matter massively where you get a game from (unless you specifically want drm free copies).
  
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  - GeneralEmergency@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Especially when Epic is funding development with those deals.
    
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BaardFigur@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Tencent (aka basically the chinese government) having 40% ownership is a major red flag for me.
Don’t really have that much more to say about them, since I don’t play their games. Unreal Engine is really impressive so it’s a shame

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- CosmoNova@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  While this is a concern I generally share, I doubt the overwhelming majority of players even give it a single thought. Most don‘t care about things like human rights when the product is nice. Only once did I hear someone bring up Tencent owning 30% of Larian (Baldur‘s Gate 3) for example. The masses really don‘t even want to hear it.
  
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darganon@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The multi-billionaire owner with the backing of the Chinese government is claiming that he’s the underdog against a popular company/piece of software/GabeN. He’s made some poor choices interacting with the community.

Yes, it’s probably nice for a publisher to have a guaranteed income, which is why they sell exclusivity. It leaves a sour taste in my mouth, so I choose not to support it.

The rest about the launcher being bad sounds unhinged to me, but some people are really into that.

They bought Rocket League and actively made it worse.

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- Sylvartas@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I don’t disagree with everything you said here but come on, Steam is basically a privately owned PC games store monopoly that has now been going on for 25 years. Since it’s not public we can’t really know for sure but there’s a very real possibility that Epic is the underdog here
  
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  - darganon@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I don’t think steam has any anti-competitive behavior that I’m aware of.
    
    Fortnite has roughly 100 million more monthly active users than steam, to say nothing of every piece of software running Unreal Engine, Epic is huge.
    
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- Rose@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  The multi-billionaire owner with the backing of the Chinese government
  
  Who cares about the backing if it has no effect on anything? I’m more concerned about Valve having a separate Steam client for China, censoring their games specifically for China and even reportedly banning for bringing up Winnie the Pooh.
  
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  - test113@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    lol XD, let me tell you, if someone is financing something like that, they sure as heck expect something in exchange someday.
    
    So, you believe a government powerful enough to make unaffiliated companies bow to their liking won’t leverage their investment?
    
    Why do you think they invested? Just for fun?
    
    You invest to gain influence, not to have less influence.
    
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  - darganon@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    Who cares about the backing if it has no effect on anything?
    
    It’s more illustrating that Epic isn’t underfunded. I don’t know anything about steam in China.
    
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rdri@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Pretty much every single decision you can see from their history since the inception of EGS is either stupid or blatantly destructive to gaming industry. Just some examples: better revenue shares for developers? Sure but this translates into worse platform. Money bonuses for exclusivity is great for developers? Sure but the game is then stuck at the platform that gives no means for users to interact and let developers know how they could improve their product. Cross platform multiplayer platform that works? Sure but then we have to deal with stupid requirements like having an account on additional platforms we may not want to use, even to play single player modes sometimes.

You can also check Tim’s Twitter and see how ignorant and hypocritical he is. I wouldn’t mind it but his decisions seem to actually affect the whole platform and therefore the industry so… too bad.

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- Kbin_space_program@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Don't forget how he abandoned PC gaming when Unreal Tournament 3 bombed after they released shitty mid tools and the modding community they built up over UT 2k3 and 2k4 dissolved.
  
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- resketreke@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  better revenue shares for developers?
  Money bonuses for exclusivity is great for developers?
  
  It actually goes to publishers, so the only way devs see that extra cut is by self-publishing. So I guess for smaller indie devs it can be a good deal.
  
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  - rdri@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It is. Doesn’t save those games from being forgotten faster than they release elsewhere though. Only a few managed to overcome this effect somewhat.
    
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bouh@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Epic is the worst of the 3 platforms for a user. It is a drm like steam, but with less games on it, and even less optimized (so even more wasted resources and time loading useless advertising).

Steam has it that is makes game run on Linux smoothly, and the biggest library of games. Gog is drm free. Epic has absolutely nothing a user may want, except for free games so that you are now captive of their shitty platform.

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- AustralianSimon@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  This. Steam also offers reviews, achievements, workshop, communities, groups, streaming, etc, etc
  
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  - Chriswild@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Epic doesn’t have to be as good as Steam; it has to be better than Steam. People don’t up and leave platforms they like for new platforms for no reason. Epic can take a smaller cut on games but if that doesn’t carry to the end user why should I care.
    
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- deafboy@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I have zero experience with epic or gog, but steam got incredibly bad lately. It’s not uncomon for it to consume 2 entire CPU cores just by animating some store page background.
  
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  - bouh@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Steam has always been rather bad on performances, but epic somehow managed to do worse.
    
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MeanEYE@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
In short, Epic is anti-consumer. They claim better support for developers, but in reality consumers are the one paying for that. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but you the consumer have no choice in it. You are forced through exclusives and other limitations to use inferior service for the same price. Even free games they give are there to drag you into their ecosystem and abuse.

This is why Valve doesn’t feel threatened, I assume, and is not likely to feel the pressure from Epic anytime soon. For that to happen, Epic would have to get on par with features and customer benefits equal or better than Steam and that’s not happening anytime soon. Epic would rather throw hundreds of millions on exclusive deal with some developer and force you the consumer to buy the game on EGS than actually improve the service.

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HexesofVexes@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
No support for Linux - steam has it built in and the DRM free nature of gog games means that they’re not too tough to get running via wine.

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- Pirky@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I think Tim Sweeney is actually anti-linux for the consumer. Since the Deck runs on Linux, he has basically negative incentive for any of their games to run on it.
  
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  - spikederailed@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    which I hate considering UT2003/2004 had native Linux support.
    
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Battle_Masker@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
aside from what everyone else said, they killed the beloved Unreal Tournament series, which is a huge sour spot for older gamers who fondly remember those. Then there’s the excessive microtransaction demand inside Fortnite, a game with a large playerbase under the age of 18. That alone led to two major lawsuits that they both lost

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- glitches_brew@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  They are killing rocket league too
  
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  - TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I quit playing Rocket League the moment it was announced that it was going to be Epic exclusive available only on Windows.
    
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- EtherealMoon@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Aside from TF2–and even that I got a bit bored with–most all of my interest in multiplayer FPS died along with Unreal Tournament. Doesn’t feel like having fun is the goal anymore.
  
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HonorIsDead@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Instead of offering anything to be a better platform they are burning money on the platform in hopes they can pay their way to dominac by paid exclusivivity and giving away games. One of those isn’t bad for users. Now consider what Epic offers beyond being able to buy and download a game. Nothing. Epic is only a storefront and they’ve had years to work on this at this point. Steam has gained dominance and maintains it in no small part due to all the additional features available to everyone. Do you use the steam workshop for any of your games? Have you use the steam community forums to troubleshoot a problem? Do you use big picture mode for a more console like experience? Do you customize your controller settings with the pretty expensive controller support built into system? The overlay? How about the custom profiles and badges and trading cards? Epic is only a storefront. That’s it. That’s all that’s on offer. So they supplement it with bribing devs to be exclusive to their store and giving away games to try and attract users.

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- Aussiemandeus@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I love the steam chat, as someone who doesn’t use discord very often at all. Having the chat is an easy to too flick a message off to someone while i play
  
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- silentknyght@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  These are true criticisms, but I’m not sure if they’re fair. To the best of my recollection, Steam had none of those things in 2008, either, about the time they were the age of the EGS, now.
  
  You could say they should (be able to) compete on the merits alone, without free games or paid exclusivity, but that argument wouldn’t reflect reality: you need a hefty carrot to lure people away from their comfort zone.
  
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  - Strepto@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    Steam had none of those things in 2008
    
    Yes, true. But it’s not 2008 anymore. It makes no sense for companies to compete based on features and functionality equivalent to their age.
    
    If someone starts a company today offering only old 1960 color TVs, I’m not going to say “Well they’re new, and that’s what TV manufacturers would have had at the time”. That makes zero sense.
    
    If Epic wants to compete with steam they need to actually compete. They offer nothing of value presently. They have the money and the technical talent to make a good launcher. They just appear to choose not to.
    
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- SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Not only that, the storefront runs atrociously slow and the privacy policy is invasive.
  
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Mini_Moonpie@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Epic doesn’t see gamers as their customer - they see developers as their customer and shape the customer experience around that. For example, Epic said that if/when they add reviews, developers could choose to opt their games out of reviews. That’s very pro-developer, but very anti-consumer, whatever you might think of the value of reviews. Informed customers can rattle off a long list of reasons they don’t like Epic and why they’re bad, but they are a small minority of PC gamers. The “silent majority” doesn’t keep up with this kind of stuff or really care about it, so they are literally judging stores on their merits and Epic is a bare bones platform that doesn’t offer customers a good reason to spend money in their store because they don’t think they need to.

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swordsmanluke@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m pretty pragmatic. While I appreciate what Valve has done for PC gaming, I like the idea of them having some legit competition in the space. So when the Epic store started, I bought a bunch of games there to give it a shot. Outer Worlds, Control… And of course I grabbed up a bunch of free games, too!

…and then, over time, I’ve repurchased all of the games I liked on steam anyway.

Make of that what you will.

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1rre@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
One reason is that Epic are very dismissive of Linux, while Steam go out of their way to be supportive and GOG are supportive when it’s convenient

Another is trying to lock games into exclusives with them, which other distribution platforms don’t do so much

That said, if you don’t play games without cross platform multiplayer and don’t care about Linux support or see yourself caring any time soon, there’s not a huge reason to push you towards steam and away from epic. GOG is more of an anti-DRM thing, however barring sales the price and the cut for the devs is identical on all of them and it’s the same game aside from DRM.

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gerryflap@feddit.nl ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Personally my main gripe is their aggressive strategies to force people into their garbage-tier launcher. Compared to Steam it’s just miles behind, and it’s yet another app to run on your PC. All my friends are also on Steam, and Steam had Linux support. However, if all you want to do is launch singleplayer games, you don’t mind the Epic launcher, and you get a good deal, then do whatever you want to.

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Viper_NZ@lemmy.nz ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Paid exclusives locking content away from other online stores. Basically trying to force me to use it is a sure fire way of making me refuse.

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Krudler@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
For me it’s entirely self-centered and I’m dispensing with all the aspirational and political feelings that people have about the way businesses operate.

Quite simply I recommend Steam because it is a product with so many killer features, it’s really hard to take anybody else seriously.

It’s just shy of 2024, and Epic is still a non-realized alpha product. Their website, store, and launcher/library is a perfunctory effort at best. The most recent feature they added that I even consider to be an improvement would be the ability to look at my own games library - that should sound like a pretty funny joke but it’s said deadpan. They don’t even have proper controller support for PC, whereas Steam for example recognizes that PC gamers come with a variety of input hardware.

I mean it’s so simply that steam is such a mature product that offers so much to the gamer, and epic just wants money and they’re not really doing anything to compel me to want to use that platform.

GOG is great, it’s a simple system that gives you the power to own your own games and I very much appreciate that. Personally I don’t like to splinter my collection across different services so I’m mostly avoid them but I can’t say anything really negative.

Anyways this is just my opinion, I feel like steam has tons of killer features, the otherS simply don’t. There’s lots of valid discussion in other areas about ethics and things like that but really I’m just looking at it from the perspective of what do I want from my money. Steam gives me the most, and the others don’t even hold a candle.

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tiredofsametab@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Exclusives suck for everyone. Especially when Epic started out, they only had payment processors in certain countries. This meant that some people literally had no legal way to play the Epic exclusives. I'm not sure where they stand today, but that annoyed me enough, along with other shenanigans by Epic and Sweeny, that I avoid the whole ecosystem.

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Smokeless7048@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
For me it’s simply EGS paying developers to lock games only their store.

If they were just competing, trying to deliver a better product I would massively support them, similar to how I support GOG, however when you start locking content to your storez you end up with “PlayStation vs Xbox” devision of content.

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Nanomerce@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Aside from the other scumbaggery that Epic does, if you do wanna play their free games then atleast use heroic so you don’t use the wasteheap that is the epic games launcher.

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actionjbone@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I don’t like when huge, rich corporations pretend that they are an underdog.

On top of that, I don’t like when a platform bribes developers to limit their game to one platform.

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Rakonat@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
For starters: complete lack of features and user support. EGS gives you the game and basically no way to interact with the community around that game. They don’t support Linux, which is huge for some people, but also makes some peripherals like Steamdeck that operate on Linux entirely incompatible.

Because their user support is so bad, nobody really chooses EGS to buy/play games from, so Epic tries to take that choice away buy giving payouts to publishers to only let the game be on their store for six months or longer, meaning anyone who wants to play such a game has to come to them. This is also why you see a lot of free games, EGS trying to lure people to their “service”.

Which is where the real big problem comes in. Instead of user beneficial features, most of the storefront and game launcher is bloat ware that would rather show you more and more ads for other products on their store than let you get into the game you want to play. And if reports are true, advertising games already in your library. So they aren’t even trying to tailor a custom user experience, they are just blasting you with a bunch of shit till something sticks (or you uninstall)

There have also been allegations of EGS scanning personal computer files outside of its install directory, which is scummy enough on its own but its also transmitting that data back to their central server, which gets handed off to Tencent, the Chinese owned company that is a big investor in Epic and has their own history of scandal and anti consumer behavior. So if this all is happening, its hard to say just what data on your computer is behind handed off to Tencent and the Chinise Government because you wanted to play a silly game on an inferior game service.

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Red_October@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
One of my biggest complaints with the EGS is their anti-competitive actions. Rather than try to out compete, rather than try to be the better choice, they pay developers to only release games on their platform, flat out barring them from releasing on any other store. They don’t try to win your favor, they don’t try to be a pleasant experience, they just shortcut their way to being the only option, without a care for improving any of the other faults or shortcomings.

My next complaint is that Tencent has a 40% ownership share in Epic Games, and I make active efforts to not give them a dime.

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tvbusy@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Epic wanted exclusives by pulling games from other platforms. I will never spend a single cent on Epic Games. I’m happy to spend it on Steam, especially games that I have pirated before (Commandos series for example) or indie games (Banished anyone?).

For bigger games such as Civilians, I’ll purchase it on Steam and then pirate so I don’t need to run Steam. I am a big fan of patches to remove the intro screen.

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ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Epic gives better cuts to devs and games have to opt into DRM

Enjoy the free games if you cant afford them

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Aurix@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Epic Games paid big money to make some games platform exclusive.

Their launcher is, just like Origin and Ubisoft’s one, features wise vastly inferior to Steam.

Smaller indie level multiplayer games do not have crossplatform play with Steam, or other issues like DNF duel breaking player room ping indicators.

None of these explain the amount of frequency of anemosity towards Epic for their store. It seems some are in a parasocial relationship with their Steam launcher. A bit like console fanboy wars. And for some reason they prefer a monopoly without alternatives than one with alternatives. Perhaps some see the installation of another program as an intrusion to to their private comfort. Not rationally like Microsoft’s ill willed ~~spying~~ telemetry, but emotionally led. I encountered a few people who just don’t want to install new programs and perhaps see Epic a threat to their habits.

But I dislike them for dropping Unreal Tournament.
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Draedron@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I like the way steam looks better and try to avoid spending money on software belonging to chinese companies like Tencent.

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