I don’t engage with the community at all. I don’t buy games on Epic because their launcher is ass. And last I checked they don’t even have reviews for games. They don’t require disclaimers for anti-consumer measures either like Valve does for 3rd party accounts, Denuvo, etc. and they even had the balls to criticize Valve’s requirements for AI disclosure.
The fact that their CEO is openly anti-Linux is another good reason.
They just come off to me like a very anti-consumer company, like most all other corporations.
The reviews are a part of the community, even if they’re not found in the “Community” part of Steam.
But yeah, EGS has many failings, pretty much all of which were pointed out right at the start. They weren’t improved upon because Epic don’t want to deliver the best possible experience or promote the capability of the PC as a gaming platform. They just want you to buy digital shit, get bored of it, and then buy more digital shit at the lowest possible cost to them. Effort costs money so they won’t make any.
When they first launched, their whole main message was “it’s a cheaper cut for the devs!” Perhaps I’m being selfish, but that’s not a message that resonates to me as a buyer.
Hint: most of us don’t get hot and bothered about exactly how much margin Walmart lets Tyson take on their chicken nuggets, so trying to apply that message to games is weird.
Effort costs money so they won’t make any.
Well, at least in Tim Sweeney’s twisted mind that’s how it works. In reality, spending $100,000 to have a developer actually support the year would do way more to get long term customers on the store while coating a pittance jn comparison to how much EGS spent on exclusivity deals.
Steam is the only platform I can think of where I actually still trust the review
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If you look at steam reviews (text or even just ratings), you do kind of engage with the community!
Steam is very “community-focused” in that regard as opposed to the top-down corporate “buy what I’m selling, trust us it’s good”. Posting two review scores (recent and all-time) is not something most stores, games or not, will do
EGS isn’t really even a store, it’s sole purpose is to avoid giving anyone else a cut of fortnite.
If you have ever used the steam workshop, read discussions, guides or news. You have benefitted from the steam community.
And reviews are also part of the steam community.I have not done any of those things.
The meme of “Valve maintains dominance by doing nothing but waits for competition to trip over itself” is funny but they do put part of the billions they make towards beneficial products for their customers.
- Remote Play (stream your own game from another PC)
- Remote Play Together (can stream a game to friends without a copy of the game and play together)
- Linux, Proton
- Well designed hardware innovations
Not out of the goodness of their heart but to drive sales and foster a customer base willing to return.
GOG and itch do try in their own way so I have bought from them, IMO they are the only competitors making serious efforts to build a mutually benefical gaming ecosystem.
Epic, Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA and the rest are like a trapdoor with a wooden board over it. Tim Sweeney is standing there hoping you won’t think he’s trying to find the right time to swipe the board away and get you to fall in.
- Steam multiplayer networking
- Steam Input
Family sharing got a huge upgrade recently too where now only the game you’re actually playing is locked instead of your whole library.
It’s a sidegrade. The ability to share with overseas family was nixed, which sucks for immigrants
Also all the consumer friendly shop page stuff like labeling anti features
Valve reinvests and does more work then basically every other major studio. It’s just a lot of back end stuff they don’t market.
Since valve doesn’t care about selling anything. Their service sells it self so they don’t need to shove it in your face.
They are a hardware and software RnD company more then a game studio too. Which is just boring to most gamers till there is a finished product or someone points out that x y or z was because of a decade of effort by valve in the back ground.
Honestly, remote play together has probably sold me more games than all of the summer/winter sales combined. I don’t play multiplayer games much, so I don’t really invest in them. If my friends are enjoying one we will remote play it together and I can make a decision to purchase after that. Otherwise, I would just never purchase them. Because of that, I’m also now incentivized to purchase any remote play together games that come across my feed and I think would be even a little fun so that I can return the favor. If they enjoy it then I will often just buy them a copy and they will get to share the experience with their go-to multiplayer friends who also go on to purchase the game. That may not be everyone’s experience with remote play together, and it’s possible that they are missing out on more sales than they are generating, but I doubt it from my personal experience.
Being the go to gaming platform really just means you’re a money printer at a certain point. I have quite an extensive friends list on Steam, often adding people from conventions on steam and nowhere else. I have never once met somebody at a con and exchanged epic information with them. But because of my extensive friends list I’m introduced to a bunch of games that I would never have heard of or seen otherwise. It’s basically free advertising for all of those titles. I might not personally be interested in any of those games, but if I notice I have friends with a similar gaming history, I will look into whatever other titles they are playing as possible gifts for topics to bring up next time we’re chatting about games.
Not out of the goodness of their heart but to drive sales and foster a customer base willing to return.
I think this is partially true, but also I legit think Gabe Newell is ideologically a market anarchist that legitimately loves video games as a medium. He probably could have (more safely) made even more money doing something else considering his early Microsoft connections and ability but he didn’t.
Unfortunately as a result, the moment hes dead Valve might be in trouble long term. Depends on who takes over afterward and how they want to direct Valve. Pierre-Loup Griffais or Lawrence Yang seem possible given how successful Steam Deck has been. Its hard to get a read on them. They seem smart and well meaning though.
Based on what I’ve heard of the internal structure of Valve, there’s a good chance he’s helped foster enough an environment of “doing what you love” that it’d survive him retiring/dying. Maybe not forever, but at least for a long while after he’s gone.
And hopefully by that time they’ve built up the open source community enough that even if Valve turned bad they wouldn’t be able to do much damage
I have never had remote play together work smoothly enough to actually play. Even when on the same network the input lag is problematic.
It works great for me on wifie 6e, I did have issues using remote play from my PC to my deck until I disabled AX for the 2.4/5ghz networks on my router tho
Just as a reminder you still can not see the games in your library for Epic without getting the desktop app or looking at your past purchases.
Absolutely dense how bad and how little you can do with their game store.
Steam is easy to use. Egs always feels slow and bloated even though it doesn’t have things to load.
Tim Swiney said on the game product page there should be no disclosure of Ai usage in the games, in response to Steam “forcing” the disclosure of what is being used Ai for. Just shows how I will avoid Epic Games Store even more than before. There are plenty other reasons. Epic will not buy me as a “user” by giving me free games (however I do not blame anyone else doing so, free is a great deal to be honest).
I check their free games once a week, and take any that pique my curiosity - after all, Epic still has to pay the actual publishers of the games, right? Then, if I enjoy the game enough, I buy it on Steam. Yes, for the cheevies.
I collected free games for sure. I don’t even know if I played many of them. Tbh most of them were older and would go on sale on steam and I’d just buy them there.
Also steams Linux support is so good, I just can’t do epic
They don’t even do the shop or library right or well. Come on, their whole app is a joke. I’m glad their (epic’s) anti-competitiveness hasn’t worked so well.
I mean, I got a bunch of free games off epic, and have never touched any of them.
Sweeney is overly opinionated and will dictate to you how you will use your products. Valve largely short of the app’s drm just gives me the games and the app just sits in the background, this is why GOG is the true contender to Steam as they have a similar approach.
We don’t want to be told how to play our games, give us services to help do so by all means, but otherwise it’s a take money and leave situation.
GOG is actually losing ground, in my opinion. I still use it, as that’s where I bought the Witcher games (and some old classic collections), but the launcher is SO persistently annoying. If Steam is running and minimized to the tray, I never see it unless I want to. GOG Galaxy pops to the front and demands input WAY too often.
Have you tried https://heroicgameslauncher.com/ ?
Fuck even steams drm is optional, even when it’s on by default is frequently opt out.
There’s like less then a few hundred games on steam that require its drm AND don’t let you just delete or turn it off.
You don’t get much better then that. Companies that really want can have it and customers win in literally every other case.
I don’t use EGS because it they actually locked in significant market share they would enshittify so fast your head would spin.
They’re innovating, then. They chose to enshittify before getting significant market share.
It’s a moving target. Everything I care about video game stores now I did not care when it was new. Steam itself in 2003, need it to update to latest counter strike. By 2014 years later, I’m done managing updates for individual games by looking on websites online for downlads. I want a store client like Steam to handle that. Didn’t care for the first half of Steams life. I was still buying physical PC games when I could up to 2014. That’s why I said 2014
Didn’t care about linux Steam because it sucked until Proton. Since Proton I care. Didn’t care about big picture mode because steam machines bombed the first time and I didn’t use remote play. Now I use remote play and regularly use big picture mode because I buy big phones with OLEDs and remote play is great now because of that. Phones are why I care about 21:9 support as much as I do now.
Didn’t care about Steam Input because I was kb/m all day type of person. I play with gamepads more now. Steam Input is major. Indie games were less common in 2008 and a lot less complex than they are today. Easy to get the good ones because everyone talked about them. Now most good indie games have no reviews on open/metacritic. Steam reviews and curators point me to the majority of my purchased indie games. Also even the studio/publisher pages that Steam has now showing what they have released. That’s the other way I find games. Steam has brand pages for a while now. I actually use those like here for koei tecmo
https://store.steampowered.com/developer/KOEITECMO
Or smaller game XD. Played Icey and ended up trying a couple games under them through the publisher Steam page
https://store.steampowered.com/developer/XD
Library organization. Did not care about the collections feature until this year. Same with the user submitted store page tags. The collections feature can create from those tags and I make custom collections too to organize my big library. I just recently learned you can drag and drop rather than right click add to collection.
Sounds simple but it sucks on pretty much every PC store platform software besides steam. Managing multiple drives. Moving game folders between drives and the store client handling it well
numerous other things that come in handy from time to time. Like user created guides. SteamOS is more featureful than the OS’s on a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series before even exiting out to the desktop mode. Remember Mixer on Xbox. Steam has broadcasts and has had it for a long time now and it’s never been popular but they never killed it and now I occasionally use it to check out how a new game looks. MS would have killed broadcasts like they killed Mixer when it didn’t become a mega hit. Steam keeps it’s niche features ongoing and generally improves over time even if at a snails pace. MS and other companies, they just kill the feature
Latest thing that is just as much Valve as it is community. PC gaming on Android. Valve initiated funding for Fex emu and it’s paying dividends now that you can run a lot of Steam games on Android now. Same with recent versions of Proton/Wine that now have ARM builds for them. Major boon to Android PC game emulation. Eventually going to be a major plus for Steam in user friendliness compared to the storefronts not putting resources towards easy x86 to ARM translation support
EGS is a laggy mess and I can’t even play Fortnite, one of the top 5 most popular games, on Linux, because Epic Games decided they don’t like Linux. Other games have Easy Anticheat that works on Linux, but Epic intentionally chose to exclude those users, this is an encapsulation of why they suck ass compared to Steam.
Epic also has a shitty UI. Steam’s isn’t great, but at least it’s mostly intuitive.
I mean isn’t replacing community with consumerism one of the main goals of modern capitalism?
Almost a decade ago I was playing a game called paragon in development by epic games. The game was amazing, and then epic forced the devs away from what the game was, a MOBA, and forced the devs to make it more like a brawler with smaller and smaller maps. Epic ignored the community playing the game and acted shocked when the community left. While all this was going down, they were alpha testing fortnight, which was a plants, zombies clone with base building. When PubG took off, they killed Paragon, rolled the assets into fornite, and abandoned what fortnite was to turn it into a PubG copycat. (Highly recommend predecessor, a fan made remake from the released paragon assets with og heros, it’s on steam.)
Epic doesn’t have an original thought rattling around in the heads of their MBAs and C-suite. They copy what others are doing, and pray that some of the shit they fling against the wall will stick. They don’t want to take chances or innovate. Plenty of other options out there besides their game engine too. I’m looking forward to the fall of epic and EGS.
At the end of your first paragraph I thought that if Epic are taking other ideas and implementing in their own games would work well in the long game. Just do what competition does, but better.
By the time my eyes flew to the first word of a second paragraph my mind acknowledged that Epic would never actually do something good for industry cause all they know is how to leech.
It only took maybe 0.04 seconds or so.
They got SO lucky with that Fortnite pivot, the original game was in development hell
The launcher is still just awful. Its only purpose is to give me free games. It has never felt polished or finished at all.
Why would I want to use a worse product?
I use their website to get the free games then use Heroic Launcher to download and run them.
I just collect them directly through heroic these days
Oh, yeah. Forgot you could do that through the embedded web browser. Really, I only get them when I see the deals pop up on Lemmy. I’ll ‘purchase’ it on my phone. I haven’t even opened Heroic in a while.
Now that is a serious big-brain maneuver!
