What's up with Epic Games?

Submitted ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨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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daviddd@lemmy.zip ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Tim Sweeney hates linux so that’s why I prefer Steam over it. Even though Epic gives people free games, the games were always free anyway (unless you want multiplayer), I know you said piracy isn’t an answer though.

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mightyfoolish@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Valve is viewed in an extremely favorable light in the PC world (and Valve deserves it). Therefore plenty of gamers take Epic throwing around their Fortnite money to get exclusively for their barebones launcher and game store very personally.

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darthelmet@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
They do the same thing that the horde of shitty streaming services do: Hold content hostage through exclusivity deals so they can gain market share without actually providing a comparable technology or service as their competitor.

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- hh93@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The problem is that without those exclusive deals noone would change
  
  Most people didn’t buy EA games at origin or Ubisoft games at UPlay even though you needed those launchers anyway. They even didn’t buy CDProjekt games at gog despite the games being dem free there.
  
  Excluding deals on sought after games is literally the only way to get a majority of the players moving away from there comfortable “I have ally games and friends there already” position
  
  People are lazy and hate change - without force it’s not going to happen
  
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  - darthelmet@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    They don’t even try to be competitive on technology or service though. If they were making a comparable or even superior product and people were sticking with Steam anyway for the network effect I’d agree they’d be justified in doing more to attract customers. But they just want to use their pile of money to buy their way into a market without putting in the work to design and develop a superior product.
    
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TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I wouldn’t have much reason not to buy from Epic, but I also wouldn’t have any reason to buy from it either. Other than free games I don’t see why pick Epic over any other place. Steam has more features and GOG is DRM-free, even ItchIO has the benefit of being more supportive of smaller and upcoming game devs. Epic doesn’t do anything but the basic.

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- Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Occasionally Epic had better deals on, and if I was a big developer I might be tempted by their lower fees. That would certainly be offset by lower sales though.
  
  The Epic store will probably stop being attractive to anyone as soon as “the kids” swap Fortnite for something else. They’ve basically got $6 billion in spunk money every year to try and make it a good alternative to Steam. When that money dries up, the Epic store isn’t going to make enough money to be worth keeping going. I doubt they’ll go bust, but they won’t be able to just hurl money at it to keep people interested.
  
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JoeKrogan@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Their exclusives , the anti linux stance and the store is crap too

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kingaloo@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The first major issue for me was that the launcher was a crypto miner and they didn’t tell anyone.

Since then, I have 0 trust in them and refuse to install the launcher. I don’t care for the “free games”

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- grayhaze@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Was there any actual proof of this, aside from someone posing the question on Reddit because of high CPU usage? At least give genuine reasons.
  
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- sheogorath@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Is this true? AFAIK the reason sometimes the launcher took a lot of resources to run is because Epic actually uses UE to make EGS.
  
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  - dmrzl@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    No, of course it’s not true. Somehow people still upvote some random conspiracy theory from a fortnite subreddit…
    
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The_Cunt_of_Monte_Cristo@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Epic Client is a spyware.

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- bananabenana@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Hey can you post proof of this please?
  
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  - BlindFrog@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    This is the post that convinced me way back when. It’s been a while; I couldn’t find yet if the egs software has changed since. reddit.com/…/epic_games_spyware_vs_steam_vs_as_co…
    
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bananabenana@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I personally don’t give a shit about whichever store I use for gaming because I have no loyalty to Steam like a lot of the people in this thread. It’s just a store and launcher. I wish people would get a grip.

I buy games where it’s cheapest, whether that’s GoG, Steam or Epic or anywhere else. I use the wishlist functions to make sure I can price compare on sales etc.

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- morriscox@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Do you know about www.isthereanydeal.com ?
  
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  - bananabenana@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Holy crap thank you so much !
    
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SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I just don’t like the launcher. It’s absurdly slow and bloated even though it doesn’t contain many features. On fast hardware, it takes 30s to open and lags harder than Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. It also eats up my CPU for no reason and has an invasive privacy policy. I try to use the open source Heroic launcher instead, it’s much better.

Although recently Steam has moved from slow to within a stone’s throw of the launching speed of the Epic Games Store. I’m now looking for an alternative to launch my Steam games.

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BoastfulDaedra@lemmynsfw.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The issue with Epic isn’t as bad as people imply, but it’s very real. They produced an incredibly shoddy launcher and store, frequently engage in anticompetitive practices like exclusives, and are happy to frequently update their launcher with new unhelpful bullshit without addressing its core problems.

Me, I’m not upset that Epic exists, even as a Steam user I would not like to deal with them as a true monopoly. But, they give me zero reason to use the store.

The problem is that it’s a half-baked product.

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- lightnsfw@reddthat.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  These are my sentiments as well. In summary their existence has made things worse. Had they not been greedy assholes I would be neutral to them.
  
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overzeetop@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Epic doesn’t play nice with Linux, and lemmy is a Linux-centric place. I find Linux to be a pain in the ass because everything else I use, and am of my games, are Windiws native. I click the install button and never have to worry about which version of proton will work. It’s the second worst thing about my Steamdeck (the first is, of course, that atrocious keyboard).

You will be able to tell how rabid the Linux continent is here by the number of down votes I get for saying that windows is simply a better gaming platform and Epics nose-thumbing at Linux causes me exactly zero worries because I play on the OS these games were made for.

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- Dexx1s@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  This has nothing to do with Linux. Gamers in general, the cast majority being in Windows, hate EGS. It makes contracts for exclusivity, the launcher is apparently atrocious and there’s an almost inherent bias against any launcher/storefront that isn’t Steam. You’ll find those three reasons in just about any conversation about EGS.
  
  And, to actually address your Linux theory, all I have to do is to open Heroic, sign in if I haven’t already, download the game and run it through Proton, in exactly the same way I do on Steam. Epic’s hate for Linux isn’t really that much of a problem.
  
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  - Kecessa@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    “Gamers in general”
    
    No. Gamers in general aren’t on gaming platforms to see the minority complaining about the things that bigger them, the vast majority of gamers are playing games wherever they are.
    
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- julianh@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  My main issue is that Tim Sweeny has repeatedly shown that he really doesn’t know that he’s taking about when it comes to Linux and how it works. Like if you’re gonna diss something at least have valid reasons. Windows is a better gaming platform right now, but that’s only because companies like epic refuse to pay any service to it. Hopefully that changes soon.
  
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Uninformed_Tyler@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Issues I can think of in the order they occur to me. These are off the top of my head refections not researched.

Group think: If I shop where most other people shop I have outsourced research and decision making. Is there a good reason? maybe, maybe not but I’m going to follow the masses because I can’t research everything.

Stability: neither store offers physical assets so if the store shuts down my purchases could also vanish. Steam is a bigger player and appears to be more stable and GOG is DRM free.

3 The shopping experience: I personally find the layout of steam better for discovery and finding reviews. With the current epic coupon available I have looked on epic for games and if you’re just browsing it is not a intuitive experience. GOG similarly has a variety of sorting tools available.

private vs public ownership: Epic is a public for profit company. Over and over I have seen public companies screw there customers in the interest of profit. Valve (I believe, this is really off the top of my head) is privately held and as such can choose to prioritize whatever their leadership wants. They can’t just be bought out and taken in a totally different direction.

This all could be insane ramblings but these are the things that motivate me to spend my money on Gog or steam in general.
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- ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Fair enough I guess… I only use Epic for the free games, so I can’t say I’ve spent much time genuinely looking at the user experience 😅.
  
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TootSweet@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

what’s the issue with Epic

Enshittification.

why should I go for Steam

Not sure you should.

or GoG?

I hear GoG tends to be less DRM-y.

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- nave@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  Enshittificatiom
  
  You cant enshittify something that wasn’t good in the first place.
  
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  - key@lemmy.keychat.org ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    We’re in the phase of the meme where use is broadened more and more until it ceases to have any connection to its origins.
    
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  - CileTheSane@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    They’re trying to enshittify PC gaming.
    
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- ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Fair enough.
  
  I’ll have to take a look at GoG anyway… I don’t remember but I heard it’s like an aggregator of some sort too, right? Like, you can access games from your steam account too or something?
  
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  - B0NK3RS@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    GOG Galaxy let’s you combine most of your game library in to one but it has it’s issues. GOG, Epic and Microsoft Store all work great but the other clients aren’t officially supported.
    
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  - brawleryukon@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    I don’t remember but I heard it’s like an aggregator of some sort too, right?
    
    GOG the store is just that - a store. They only sell games that have no DRM at all, which means a couple of things. One, they almost never get AAA games at release (the exception being games developed/published by CD Projekt, as CDP owns GOG), and two, there’s a high likelihood that GOG will offer game versions that are out of sync with or missing features from the same game sold on other platforms (for example, if a game uses Steamworks for its multiplayer, many devs will just strip out multiplayer altogether for the GOG version rather than patching something new and store-agnostic in).
    
    What you’re thinking of with the aggregator is GOG Galaxy, which is their (completely un-required) launcher software. Unlike Steam and EGS, GOG’s DRM-free nature means you can just buy games on their site, download the installers directly, and go on about your business. Downloading games, starting games, etc., is all just done manually. If you want a dedicated launcher software similar to the Steam and EGS clients, that’s what GOG Galaxy is for. And as a value-add, they implemented aggregator features where you can have it pull in your library from Steam, EGS, EA/Origin, Ubisoft, etc., and just view and launch everything from the one spot. I’ve generally found Playnite to be a little better at being a one-stop launcher, though everyone’s mileage will vary of course.
    
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  - mateomaui@reddthat.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Playnite is a better free option for a library manager and the steam integration doesn’t break constantly.
    
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  - ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Edit 2: (replied because I got some error when editing comment a second time…) Okay nevermind. Thought it was too good to be true… why open with an in-app browser?
    
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- MudMan@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  To be clear, it's not less DRM-y, it's straight up DRM-free.
  
  They had a poll at one point asking the community whether they were fine with DRM-enabled games and/or modern releases. As I understand it, the community said yea to modern games, nay to DRM, so now they do games of all ages but only if they're willing to give up on DRM.
  
  I'm amazed they haven't turned back on that, because a couple years ago they were bleeding money and you can tell they really need to cut costs or increase revenue somewhere. But hey, at least you can back up your library.
  
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- EternalWarBear@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  GoG isn’t terrible, but is a little bit of a pain with Linux. They don’t have native support with the desktop client. Although, there are things like “Heroic Launcher” and “Lutris” that work well as a substitute. Granted most of my experience with those are on my Steam Deck. And it just caused too much pain to get CP2077 working for me. That I got it again on Steam when it went on sale.
  
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ObsidianZed@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Epic Games is useful for the free games they giveaway every week, some weeks better than others. And I know the topic of ownership of these “free games” is another conversation, but I’ll take advantage of it while it’s there and also while giving them little to no money.

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stevecrox@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Basically Epic like every other publisher has created their own launcher/store.

They aren't trying to compete on features and instead using profits from their franchise to buy market share (e.g. buying store exclusives).

The tone and strategy often comes off as aggressive and hostile.

For example Valve was concerned Microsoft were going to leverage their store to kill Steam. Valve has invested alot in adding windows operability to Linux and ensuring Linux is a good gaming platform. To them this is the hedge against agressive Microsoft business practices.

The Epic CEO thinks Windows is the only operating system and actively prevents Linux support and revoked Linux support from properties they bought.

As a linux user, Valve will keep getting my money and I literally can't give it to Epic because they don't want it.

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- ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yeah, what is up with that? What’s wrong with Epic and Linux?
  
  I remember reading that they bought Rocket League and then removed Linux support. Really dumb strategy.
  
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  - Kata1yst@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The owner is a piece of shit who's convinced he's smarter than everyone else and has been hostile to Linux for decades.
    
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radix@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Pure speculation: of the people who don’t like Epic, maybe 25% are legitimate, principled objections to their business practices. The rest are split evenly between people who just want to manage their entire library on a single platform, and folks just going along for the hate-ride because it seems like the “safe” position to take.

From a technical stance, Steam and GOG are superior platforms (for different reasons). For equal-price purchases, I can’t think of a single reason to choose Epic over other options. But claiming a game for free? That doesn’t make anyone a bad person.

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- ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Hmm…
  
  I’ll be honest, I definitely prefer having everything on one platform for convenience. This is in second place; right after letting me play a game directly from the icon without having to open the damn launcher in the first place.
  
  Also, I am not well educated about the technicalities of Steam or GoG, so all I can say is I’m enjoying the cool factor of GoG combining my accounts in one place. Kinda bummed that Epic’s integration doesn’t have game time and achievement sync… But that’s probably an Epic thing.
  
  Also also, fuck yeah! If it’s free, I’m in 😂.
  
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  - Radicaldog@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Playnite can do game time from Epic and Steam, plus its own accounting.
    
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BigVault@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I just don't use Epic myself but do use Gog and Steam (with the ultra shitty EA launcher and Ubisoft Connect bundled with some of my games) and Playnite has changed everything unifying it all into that single launcher.

Full screen mode in Playnite works fine on my HTPC and as a launcher it does consolidate all of them into one place easily. Worth trying if you use multiple stores.

As for why I'm not using Epic, the whole paying for exclusivity with third parties really didn't appeal to me at all.

If the free offerings from Epic do appeal to you, or if they do better deals on localised currencies (especially if you do struggle to pay for things), don't worry about using their services. I wouldn't want you to deny yourself some entertainment just because other people have issues with them as a business.

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- ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  My first purchase when I’m earning enough to spend on entertainment will be a good device. The second will be games that I can either physically keep or digitally store on physical drives.
  
  Let’s hope that happens next year 💯
  
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  - brsrklf@jlai.lu ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Gog is the main place for that, since their principal stance is DRM-free downloadable installers. They have a launcher too, but it’s optional and only meant as convenience. Itch.io does DRM-free too, but they’re often more about very indie and often experimental games. They have a few all-time indie classics though.
    
    Steam technically doesn’t require the games to implement DRM, so a part of their library is DRM-free once you’ve passed the installation process (they don’t need steam to be running). This is on a case-by-case basis though. Lots of Steam games use steamworks (Steam’s very own DRM) and a lot more use third party DRMs (and even require external launchers like Ubisoft’s or EA’s).
    
    For years I have been a bit pissed at Steam for opening themselves to all and every shitty fake game/quick buck asset flip there is out there, refusing to do any kind of curation. Instead they opted for letting the almighty Algorithm do that for them. I doesn’t work, their store is a discoverability catastrophe full of shit.
    
    That said, I still buy from them in some cases, and these cases are mostly down to one point : the workshop, the integrated mod and user content interface. It’s for a handful of games that profit a lot from it, but it’s undenyingly convenient.
    
    What I often do if it’s a possibility is buying directly from the developer, which often include a Steam key. That’s what I did for Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress (through Itch.io). It gives you everything Steam has to offer for the game and usually a DRM-free version too. Only “down point” is that your Steam review doesn’t count for the game’s Steam score when you have activités it from an external key. I don’t care much for that.
    
    In the end at that point you’ve noticed I talked about a lot of different platforms and launchers, and it’s not even all of them. Like the previous poster, I can’t recommend Playnite enough. It’s a meta launcher that makes all of your libraries united in the same place, with a lot of options. You still require all the platforms installed, but you’re not using them directly most of the time.
    
    I’ve got Steam, Gog, Humble, Ubisoft, EA, Amazon, Xbox, Itch.io and yeah, even Epic through it (though I only use EGS to get the free games, I don’t plan on buying anything from there).
    
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hightrix@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Nothing is wrong with it. It is just another games store.

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Copernican@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
There’s not really a good answer other than convenience. Folks view Steam as the benevolent convenient monopoly. They want it to be their store for everything, their launcher for everything, their friends and social networks for all gaming on PC and what not. Epic is behind on feature parity and function, but even if it did have parity, I think gamers still want the convenience of one store/library/friends list.

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MudMan@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Real answer is branding. Steam has cultivated an absolutely stellar image of being the "good guys" of gaming, and it's super hard to counter that. Epic came on the back of publisher-specific launchers getting a bad reputation for both legitimate and illegitimate reasons, so you end up with a weird, paradoxical defense of Steam's quasi-monopoly.

I guess tehcnically GOG is exempt, in that they also have a good reputation and they're objectively more radically pro-consumer than Valve by a huge margin, so the lines get blurred there.

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- Hajotay@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  Steam has cultivated an absolutely stellar image of being the "good guys" of gaming
  
  How are they cultivating this exactly? I mean other than just doing consumer-friendly moves like free updates, supporting open source, etc. This makes it seem like Valve is out there pushing out pro-Steam propaganda or something, but does Valve even market Steam at all? They don't do interviews or put out commercials or buy billboards. They put up a few silly YouTube videos to advertise a sale or new product and then it's radio silence for the rest of the year.
  
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  - AlteredStateBlob@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Exactly. Steam didn't invest in marketing nonsense and gimmicks to get people on their platform. For consumers it is simply the superior product, DRM not withstanding.
    
    They got their issues, no doubt. But I have never seen a quasi monopoly be more consumer oriented than steam.
    
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  - MudMan@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Well, that's cultivating an image.
    
    I have this conversation weirdly often around here. Steam launched under a TON of pushback. They effectively did what people criticise Epic for doing and locked down Half-Life 2 under Steam, and in turn under always-online DRM. People were very angry, nobody wanted that crap and it was pretty controversial. As I recall, Valve didn't react much. They just kept going, adding more first and third party content until they were the de facto storefront. They targeted their publishing and purchasing strategies to keep content first and consistently avoided controversy via the silent treatment, outside of having Gabe talk in public here and there and keeping his persona out there, along with a couple of select employees, although once they phased out game development for pure publishing even that went away.
    
    They are very careful to not demistify themselves and to keep that semi-accidental conflation of being the de facto monopoly with being pro-consumer. It's kind of insane how resilient to speaking publicly or being perceived as speaking publicly they are, especially with how much they had to let go of that in regards to the scandals related to CS gambling grey markets, game greenlighting processes and a few other key snafus. But it works. The brand is sticky and they know if they don't say anything the community will do the job for them, so they just... shut up, avoid constructed corpo PR when they can and favor having their content makers handle communication whenever they can, including product launches.
    
    By the numbers Valve is a fairly standard tech upstart: comes from Microsoft vets, uses traditional disruption tactics, throws everything against the wall to see what sticks, fixes broken things later. Their branding is up there with Coca-Cola, though. Hell, Disney wishes they looked as squeaky clean as the "we had kids gambling on gun skins" guys. It's kinda nuts.
    
    I mean, good for them. I don't know why they aren't more of a mainstay in PR and marketing degrees. It's kind of amazing.
    
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- Aurix@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Your post and further explanations are excellent. Don’t let the down vote fool from people with parasocial bonding to their game launcher fool you. Valve introduced account bound DRM, unregulated lootbox gambling, skin gambling and for the better part of a decade their UI was crap, there were no user reviews etc.
  
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  - Rose@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Epic’s current approach to reviews is arguably better anyway. There’s no toxicity, incentive to troll to farm points, and it’s randomized, so it doesn’t enable review bombing.
    
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dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Honestly, if their launcher wasn’t so buggy and didn’t refresh itself every 10 seconds, I would use Epic a lot more. They have given out a bunch of great games over the last few years I’m trying to play.

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PsychedSy@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I refuse to patronize Epic until they continue working on UT4. I’ve been playing their games for 25 years and they make fortnite then decide to just drop all of their long term fans.

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- ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  UT = Unreal Tournament, yes?
  
  My dad got me that game on his old laptop when I was a kid. It barely ran, but boy was it exciting ❤️.
  
  The Plasma gun was my favourite 🫡. Especially in that space level… The one where you could jump outside the windows.
  
  I have a bone to pick with Epic regarding Unreal Engine as well. Terrible optimisation. Any game I play, if made using UE, is terrible.
  
  I’ve played the first two of the Tomb Raider trilogy on medium on my 4GB GTX 1650, i7 9th Gen, 16GB RAM laptop. This device has pushed me through my engineering and still continues to run most of my work. It also runs Forza Horizon 4 and Red Dead Redemption 2 good enough.
  
  Yet I install Deliver Us Mars, a game with a much smaller scale, and my beautiful beast starts to stutter. 🫠🫠🫠
  
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  - PsychedSy@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yeah. They had an alpha out for a while and just deserted it after fortnite took off. I really enjoyed playing it, too.
    
    The optimization is kind of up to the devs. It’s fairly accessible to all sorts of people with varying levels of skill, but you still have to identify bottlenecks and move to c++ sometimes. Making it easy to implement in the editor means some people will make shit they can’t optimize or support.
    
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woelkchen@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
They’re partially owned by Tencent, a big Chinese company. And as Chinese companies are, the government has direct influence over them. And while Tencent is not a majority owner, Tim Sweeney happily took Chinese money and now pays his co-owner a portion of the profits which then go to pay for Chinese gulags.

There are many things, especially hardware, where it’s impossible to avoid Chinese companies but simply buying games somewhere else is super easy. It’s obviously not a perfect system because even on GOG there are games using UE, but just buying games somewhere else is such a low barrier, it’s not an inconvenience at all.

That said, claiming the free games doesn’t help them. It helps the developers making those games because Epic has to pay them and won’t get anything in return if that doesn’t result in users leaving money in EGS for other things.

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rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
ITT: Steam shills pretending that their platform is better

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Cringe2793@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
As someone who seldom plays with friends (I have very few who want to play online), I just pick the store where the games are the cheapest or there’s a sale or something. It doesn’t really affect me that much.

But if all your friends are on steam, then check before getting a game on Epic, sometimes they don’t let you play together. Most of the time they do, though.

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DingoBilly@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Nothing really. Just pick whichever platform is cheapest/where your friends.

It’s just another competitor in the games marketplace. Some people like it, some people don’t. It’s the same as with any other brand/item.

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macisr@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Just my personal opinion

The good clearly are the free games and that some games go cheaper there, they have better sales sometimes. The bad is that the store is badly optimized. The UI is annoying, no cloud saves for a lot of games. As of recently there were no achievements or even a cart, but they have that now which is good. The friends tab is bare bones still. They have aggressive DRM. For some reason it’s a pain in the ass to log in, but that might be just on my end.

Now with GOG, you don’t have DRM, you can integrate all launchers so you can launch all the games from one, which for me, is pretty useful. GOG has great deals. The bad is that the ui as well is kind of bare bones, but i don’t know, they are not trying to take over the market and their store works very well.

As of steam i don’t need to say anything, everything is in there. If you play on linux you basically will get every game from steam. They have the most robust launcher with the most options, etc.

That said, personally I use the three of them. Gog primarily since i can launch everything from there and if i find a game in there, i’d rather get it from them. But i’ve found sales on epic too good to let go so i play those games there. For me it depends on what they’re offering, but for some reason i really dislike Epic’s layout and ui, i feel like it is very annoying and that it is missing a lot.

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- ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Fair points.
  
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TheGalacticVoid@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
As for minor issues, EGS does not have feature parity with Steam or GOG. They don’t have user reviews, for example. This makes it a worse user experience.

More importantly, Epic has a habit of anti-competitive or anti-consumer behavior. When EGS first launched, they were keen on doing console-style timed exclusives, even for games that were already purchasable on platforms like Steam.

Lastly, Epic has a history of neglecting or shutting down games. A few of their older games were taken offline permanently when Fortnite started gaining traction. They then purchased a few studios, namely Psyonix (makers of Rocket League), Mediatonic (Fall Guys), and Harmonix (Rock Band/Guitar Hero series). These studios seem to be a shell of what they used to be. Psyonix’s first major project under Epic was Rocket Racing in Fortnite, and this project seemed to be prioritized over Rocket League and even caused the removal of core features of Rocket League. Harmonix worked on Fortnite Festival, but that came at the cost of Fuser, which shut down and was delisted about a year after launch. As for Mediatonic, I don’t think they worked on anything else yet, but a large portion of the studio was recently laid off. Needless to say, fans of the affected studios aren’t happy with Epic as they’re being treated as 2nd-class citizens compared to Fortnite players.

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- ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Regarding the user reviews, I would much rather prefer stores integrating with existing sites like IGDB rather than have independent review systems.
  
  But that’s fine I guess.
  
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mateomaui@reddthat.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Epic’s customer service sucks. Consider my experience from a prior xmas sale:

had multiple games in the cart with discounts applied, checked out with paypal

for whatever reason, the paypal communication broke, and didn’t go through

my cart then got stuck in a limbo where I couldn’t check out with any method to receive the discounts, everything was full price again

opened a customer support ticket to get the problem resolved (meaning clearing whatever the block was so I could checkout the same games with the same discounts again)

then went through 3 days of back and forth, explaining the situation over and over because

each of your replies are handled by whoever the next agent is

who evidently don’t read any history of the ticket, so they provide feedback or advice that already didn’t work

and it can take a full 24 hours or more to get a reply that ignores all previous replies

by the time the error was resolved by a competent person, the sale was over by only a few hours

despite the fact that I only missed the sale window because their reps were incompetent, they refused to make any exceptions to apply the sale prices I had been trying to checkout for 3 days

So, fuck them. I only claim free games from them now.
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- BigVault@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  each of your replies are handled by whoever the next agent is
  
  The names of their support agents is truly odd. I’ve seen people post complaints about their support that is little more than this:
  
  Hi, this is Charlie Uniform November Tango here to help.
  After receiving all the information that you sent us that we requested, we sadly can’t help because reasons.
  Thanks for being an epic gamer.
  
  Hilariously bad.
  
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  - mateomaui@reddthat.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That sounds about right. I’ve gotten a few replies back then that I would assume were AI generated if I received them this year.
    
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B0NK3RS@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
There are issues with every platform so all anyone can do is make their own decisions.

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- Zorque@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  ... and OP is asking for perspective so they can make their own decision.
  
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  - B0NK3RS@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yeah I was a bit vague with that comment. I guess whenever this topic comes up it, at least to me, feels like most of the comments are I’ll informed.
    
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- ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I guess so… Unless a company is objectively terrible, I guess it does end up being “subjective”.
  
  For example, I like the idea of Linux, but am happy that things work on Windows. And MacOS is too restrictive for my tastes.
  
  Now, surely there are objective reasons for why Linux is better than the others. But the entry point issue for me is that each distro is different, and while I love customisability, I cannot expend energy on setting up my distro at the moment… (Soon.)
  
  Plus, games work on Windows. I do plan to dual boot when I get a better PC, but not yet.
  
  And fuck Apple (subjective, but I don’t wike em). So, yeah 🫡.
  
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