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.
TL;DR
What’s wrong?
- Their launcher has a terrible UI AND UX.
- They make exclusive deals with studios to prevent other platforms from getting games. (Someone mentioned that Steam did the same thing in their infancy. Also, I have another question; why is it ok for Sony and Microsoft to make exclusive games for their consoles but not ok for these PC platforms to do so?)
- They have been invested in by a Chinese company, Tencent. (Someone mentioned that it isn’t that big of a deal, but idk.)
- They are actively anti-linux for some reason.
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
- Ties with Tencent (super anti-consumer chinese state-owned megacorp)
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.
Valve is what happens when someone who’s not just outright fucking evil invents a money printing machine
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.
somehow they managed to invent like 90% of all “evil” MTX and DRM in the process
Having worked with DRM systems since long before Valve existed, I’m reasonably certain this is just plain false.
Yeah, and I don’t remember Half-life being the game that introduced the world to horse armor.
The user is being hyperbolic, but is referring to their substantial role in popularising loot boxes, as well as the marketplace that has spawned a real gambling industry around it. Kids gamble on 3rd party sites for marketplace prizes and Valve does very little to interfere.
Not to mention that Steamworks DRM is practically non-existent anyways (and that it also wasn’t necessary to use, it’s rare, but some games just don’t protect their game with any DRM).
Blending the storefront with a DRM solution? No, that was them.
That’s their entire call to fame. They first turned their auto-patcher into a DRM service, then they enforced authorization of physical copies through it and eventually it became the storefront bundled with the other two pieces. If somebody did it before them I hadn’t heard of it, but I’ll happily take proof that I was wrong.
None of the pieces were new, SecuROM and others had been around for years, a few publishers had download and patch managers and I don’t remember who did physical auth first, but somebody must have. But bundling the three? That was Steam.
I said not outright evil, not good.
Hah. Fair enough.
I mean, I’d say that’s probably true of most companies making videogames. People are really hyperbolic about this stuff.
I mean, do you have any good examples though? Because most of those things are blatantly false and/or happened 9+ years ago. If that’s that’s the worst you’ve got then Valve is must be amazing.
Loot boxes were, if not invented by them, definitely popularised.
and/or happened 9+ years ago
That was like 15 years ago hahaha
It’s not a trend they abandoned - Counter Strike is still a huge source of deceptive digital item trade. It also spread to Team Fortress 2 in the meantime.
Didn’t TF2 have it first?
I made soooo much money off’a TF2. Bought an index!
They straight up don’t want people reselling games they own. They could do it easily, they just don’t want to.
Yeah, Steam does cool things, but the moment you start thinking that very huge corporation somehow cares about you, you’re doomed. Companies don’t care about people, they care about numbers. Especially huge companies like Valve.
I don’t know if many companies allow you to resell your digital goods in the first place (other than, funny enough, Valve themselves who let your resell digital Steam assets).
Valve’s DRM prevents the resale of physical PC games, as Steam codes are single-use. They singlehandedly killed the used PC games market.
See what I mean? That’s nuts. That’s a nuts sentence right there. Imagine having a brand so sticky that people go "but did they do something really bad recently?
For the record, Valve’s games run loot boxes today. Like, right now you can buy loot boxes from Valve. CS gambling is also still happening, although I’m not into it enough to know how much better it is these days.
They invented the battlepass, too, that’s a Dota 2 thing. Hey, remember how people refer to buying cosmetics for games as “buying hats”? That one’s from TF2. Oh, and technically the trading cards you get for purchases are NFTs, since the term doesn’t require the tokens to be stored in a blockchain.
And then there’s the dev side. Everybody was super pissed with them on that end while they were figuring out greenlight processes, which… I’m not sure if they did or people just kinda got used to what’s there. And if you’re around devs you’ll know that Valve’s whole deal is to tell people what to do and give them zero support to do it. And there are other horror stories about shadowbans and Apple-style manual rejections and delistings and stuff, but at that point you’re getting more into inside baseball and I wouldn’t expect it to be shaping public perception at all.
Well I’m not going to be eternally mad at Coca Cola because they put cocaine in their soda a century ago, there’s got to be a cut-off point somewhere. If I’m going to hate them it’s because of the things they are doing right now. Valve over the last eight years has been pretty well-behaved considering their market position gives them the capacity to be way worse. There’s nothing stopping them from
-
buying up exclusivity contracts
-
making a DRM that actually functions
-
developing only proprietary software
-
making their games pay-to-win
Oookay, so we’re all cool with MTX cosmetics, loot boxes, battlepasses and lacking full ownership or transferability of games, then?
I’m just trying to figure out if the things Valve is doing right now are fine for everybody or just for Valve.
Which again, is my problem. I’ll keep saying it, because having to argue for reality makes it sound like I’m a hater. I like Steam, I think Valve games are generally great (and it’s a shame they’ve stopped making them), and I think Valve’s management is a good example of many of the pros of a private company (look at Twitter for all the cons).
But holy crap, no, man, they are THE premier name in GaaS. Everybody is taking their cues from Valve, Epic or both in that space. Their entire platform is predicated on doing as little as possible and crowdsourcing as much as possible to keep the money machine churning. Corporations are not your friends.
-
Their DRM is easily bypassable with SteamEmu, as opposed to other inventions like Denuvo
Ah, so if it’s crackable it’s fine?
Somebody tell Denuvo, they’re off the hook.
Seriously, why try so hard to go to bat for a brand name? I get that everybody wants to root for something these days, but I’m too old to pick sides between Sega and Nintendo and I’m mature enough to reconcile that Steam can have the best feature set in a launcher and also be a major player in the process of erasing game ownership and the promotion of GaaS.
Since I can almost guarantee you major publishers would not publish on steam without some sort of DRM, yeah Im fine with them having an easily crackable form of DRM. Especially since they’re not exactly jumping to prevent people from doing it.
Oh, they are not. Their DRM wiki page for devs goes “this DRM is easily crackable, we really recommend you use secondary DRM on top of it, see how to do that below”. I linked to that elsewhere.
Which is… you know, fine, but definitely one of the reasons I always check if a game is on GOG first before buying it on Steam.
They invented Denuvo?
Drm = digital rights protection
Denovo is a form of drm made by iredto
Technically, Denuvo isn’t DRM, it’s anti-tamper. It protects the actual DRM from being modified or removed. It’s closer to an anticheat, as it ensures the game wasn’t modified.
Fun fact: my autocorrect changes anticheat to Antichrist.
… right. And it’s also considered one of the premier “evil” DRMs.
So I ask again… they invented Denuvo?
Oh, is that the bar? I hadn’t received the memo. That’s cool, then, because Activision, Epic, Microsoft and Ubisoft didn’t invent Denuvo either, so we’re all good.
All their platfomrs support it and sell games with it, though.
For the record, Steam actively suggests using multiple online features and multiple layers of DRM to minimize piracy:
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/drm
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.
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
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.
You can no longer buy the game on Steam though.
The difference between Steam and Epic is that Steam gets modders who mod their Source games. These mods don’t exist outside of Valve games. Valve is paying someone who loves their games and makes content for those games. They are smart in recognizing talent and bringing it to their development teams.
Epic finds existing games with existing communities and build a wall around it so Epic becomes a gatekeeper to the fun. They stop games from working on other storefronts or pay for “exclusivity” which means stopping people from playing the game.
Epic cons:
Also:
- 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.
- Epic’s habit of interfering with game availability, through exclusivity deals.
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 (likely including user data) and they directly benefit from Epic’s growth.
Steam pros:
Also:
- Actively funding and supporting development of linux gaming technologies for more than a few years now, to the point where linux is now very much a viable gaming platform.
Steam cons:
DrmGiven that DRM on Steam is entirely up to each game publisher, I don’t think it’s appropriate to list 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, and 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 gamesAnother plus for GOG is that they let you download games with a web browser. No special app required. (I think Itch.io does this as well.)
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
Valve was scanning your DNS cache
The story I read was that they didn’t collect or report anything, but just flagged a user if the cache contained a known game hack site, and that they stopped doing that years ago.
Not comparable to what Epic was caught doing, IMHO. Still, if there’s an article with more detail, I wouldn’t mind reading it. (Maybe it was part of their anti-cheat system of the time?)
Funny how if it was any other company you would call bs and tell them to fuck off with their “trust me bro” attitude.
To me it’s much worse what Valve did, they have no business looking at my browsing history, that’s much more private than the games I own on Steam or the three friends I’ve got on both platforms anyway.
A con for GOG is their site is slow as fuck. And god 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
Gog also seemingly no 2fa other than an faq page with instructions that cannot be followed.
I always get 2FA’d on GoG for an emailed code
Do you remember how to configure it? Last I checked I went through every account and settings page on the store site and seemingly separate customer service log in and no clear way to set it up.
Not a clue sorry. I’m personally not one to go out of my way to set up 2FA even though I know it’s good practice to do so (unless it’s work related, then I do)
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.
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?
Sadly, it’s likely a lot of tracking. The kind that look where your mouse is and where you scroll and stop etc.
What tracking does Epic need? “According to our analytics, 100% of users scroll to the free games banner on Tuesday at 5pm CEST, then leave and don’t come back for a week. What a mystery!”
Oh thanks for the reminder, I hadn’t opened epic so I can scroll down to the free games banner in a while.
You’d be appalled how much people in corporations earn for making these obvious observations…
In Steam’s case, the slowness looks more like a side effect of it being a Chromium Embedded Framework application (similar to Electron) with a lot of extras bolted on. It’s just not built for efficient use of resources.
The website, outside of the client is still slower than it used to be a good few years ago
By making the entire thing a JavaScript monstrosity with egregious amounts of scripts.
Steam have DRM free games too, you don’t have to launch them through steam even.
steam drm is so easy to bypass that it almost doesn’t count
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.
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.
Steam ui might be messy but you can get custom skins for it.
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.
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.
Epic has a significantly higher percentage of games confirmed to be DRM-free.
So if we just assume this random wiki with no sourcing is correct…
Steam has more games than everyone else, DRM on Steam is the developer/publisher’s choice, Steam still has more DRM-free games than Epic does, and how many of the ones Epic has are exclusives that don’t count?
Many of the articles do have references on the DRM status. Here’s an example indicating verification by a staff member. I personally tested a bunch of the games for DRM and noted it back when I contributed. Until recently, most of the games released on Epic were DRM-free. Even the Sony games were notably DRM-free on Epic before they were released on GOG. Nowadays, it’s more common for the new ones to use EOS and have it function as DRM.
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games
The Origin store proportionally has more DRM free games than Steam…
deleted by creator
Do you know what proportions are?
So if we just assume this random wiki with no sourcing is correct…
Steam has more games than everyone else, DRM on Steam is the developer/publisher’s choice, Steam still has more DRM-free games than Origin does, and how many of the ones Origin has are exclusives that don’t count?
Another Epic con: they bribe devs to not launch their games on Steam and GoG, because their store isn’t good.
Steam DRM is optional, it depends on developers to implement it.
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.
Eh… A whole bunch of games on Epic are DRM free, more than there are on Steam in fact…
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
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.
Considering they have bugger all cost with distribution points being hosted for free by service providers it’s an overpriced over glorified website with online payment processing. 30% cut is massively tax for very little
You don’t own the games on any digital platform, neither steam, epic or gog. You’re only being sold a license to use it, and the license can be revoked whenever the company feels like it.
Thisbis actually true for most of the physical media back in the day, the only difference is that they didn’t really have a method to revoke the license… But that nice old cardboard box you have in your attic, with the nice shiny plastic disc… You still don’t legally own the software on it.
So what. It’s still valid Cons for the platform.
Stop making excuses for scamming one sided purchase agreements.
You are absolutely correct, but it’s a con for Epic too. Your comment makes it out to look like you don’t own your games on Steam, but by omission you make it seem like you do own your games on Epic.
I just want to make it very clear that you don’t own the games on either platform. But also want to mention that even if you buy a good old CD/DVD with the game on, then you still don’t own the game…
It’s absolutely awful that it’s practically impossible to own a game, and it’s even more awful that the platform can take away a game you paid for, let alone that they don’t even have to refund you for it…
Epic’s CEO has a hateboner for everything Linux.
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: Tim Weeney, the CEO of Epic, is an asshole. A giant, narcissistic, hateful shitbag. Just look at his Twitter, the dudes a giant POS.
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.
I didn’t know about this.
It happened to Metro Exodus (great game btw) but iirc all pre orders were honoured and the game was just delisted.
Has it happened after that?
It also happened with at least two more. Yakuza and some indie farming game.
Removed by mod
-
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.
Wow. That’s understandably frustrating.
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.
They are still doing it. I’m still waiting for dead island 2 to come to steam because it’s a 1 year timed exclusive on epic
They still sign exclusives, they don’t do it with crowdfunded projects that promised a Steam release anymore.
I didn’t know this. Which games did it?
No linux support. Actually, in the case of games like rocket league, they REMOVED linux support.
They bought the game and changed out the graphics API to kill the Linux native builds, then after the community got it working via Wine, they added anticheat. Epic went further than incompetence on that one.
I’ve been able to play it in heroic launcher. Didn’t realize it was it was this bad
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.
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.
Don’t forget them being hypocritical again for suing google/apple for being monopolistic because they don’t want to have to go through them for payment.
You guys don’t understand what a monopoly is…
I do know what it is, and I don’t actually think Steam is one. They have a considerable market share, but they are by no means the only way to get games on PC, nor do they exercise their dominance in a way that stifles competition.
I’m pretty sure Tim Sweeny knows this as well, but he still calls it a “monopoly” whenever he has the chance.
They were sued in the EU for violating anti trust laws, lost and decided not to cooperate.
They’re currently getting sued for forcing devs to not sell their games at a lower price on other platforms.
Their marketshare is more than enough to consider them a monopoly, you don’t need 100% of the market to be one, you just need to be so implanted that you become the default solution. Google doesn’t have 100% of the market, it still is considered a monopoly for search engines
Definitely a terrible idea.
Using money to jump ahead in the line is a terrible mindset. Provide good features, you’ll get your recognition.
Which they don’t do. Their platform has very few features, and doesn’t even have a cart. (Well last time I booted EGS like a year 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.
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…
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.
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.
They got paid for the exclusivity, after that if they don’t sell as much then so be it, but just releasing on Steam is like choosing to play the lottery as a retirement plan and signing an exclusivity deal is like having a job, one might pay tens of millions or nothing, the other you’re sure will let you buy food for the next couple of years.
There’s tons of games on Steam that the devs have put everything they had in it only to never see any success and then you’ve got games like Vampire Survivors where nothing happened for months until suddenly a YouTuber started playing it and it became a major success. And I mean, good for Luca (and eventually for his team), but for every successful small dev there’s tens of unsuccessful ones…
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).
Especially when Epic is funding development with those deals.
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.
This. Steam also offers reviews, achievements, workshop, communities, groups, streaming, etc, etc
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.
At this point, I don’t know if Epic can get better than Steam in the ways that matter simply because they are clearly trying very hard to gain a dominant market position in ways that make it seem like they would abuse such a position, while Valve has had that dominant position for decades without abusing it. Valve is one of the few companies I trust these days. That trust is Valve’s to lose, not any other competitor’s to gain, though I am open to other adjacent providers (like I’ve got an xbox game pass sub, a ps5, and switch).
Valve is one of the few companies I trust these days. That trust is Valve’s to lose, not any other competitor’s to gain
So much this!
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.
Steam has always been rather bad on performances, but epic somehow managed to do worse.
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.
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.
which I hate considering UT2003/2004 had native Linux support.
Also, they killed off the UT franchise so that it wouldn’t compete with Fortnite, even though the games were at best adjacent.
Epic represents the worst parts of capitalism intersecting with games. Well, a set of them, EA represents another set, and Activision-Blizzard yet another set (though there is some overlap). And Microsoft might be the worst of them all but they are still posturing and doing a much better job than Epic at taking market share (which means they know to hold back on the anti-consumer stuff after learning lessons about overplaying their hand too soon several times over).
They learnt their lesson many times over in the past and know how to play the game better
deleted by creator
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.
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.
This is exactly it. They’re not building their brand by providing a superior service/experience or driving market prices down. They’re using venture capital to fund giving away games to get you to use their wildly subpar services. They’re trying to buy market position without the services to justify it.
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.
for sure! steam liberated my machine from a windows dual boot partition. and made me go 100% linux all the time. gratitude is not really strong enough. it is more like when you have been captured, and then set free.
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.
This.
I fundamentally have no issue with the Epic Games launcher. Steam needs competition to keep it in check. Without alternatives, Steam can and will strangle Dev profits, which is a problem. But Epic is a mediocre service, another app to be running, and actively going out of their way to prevent games from being on the platform of the consumers choice, which I am not a fan of.
Related note: does Epic have any DRM free games? Even Steam has a fair portion of games that are DRM free and work perfectly well from a flash drive on a computer that doesn’t have Steam installed. As far as I am aware, Epic does not.
There’s just a series of minor ways in which epic is worse, and I don’t like having front-end clients for my games as is, so a second, competing alternative going out of its way to push me into using it rubs me the wrong way.
Where can you find what steam games are drm free?
Steam DRM is optional and implemented by the developer.
Hmm…
I have never used a launcher before (for obvious reasons as mentioned in my post), so I found the idea of a separate launcher dumb in the first place. I have used it in recent times thanks to Epic’s free games. Finished two of the Tomb Raider trilogy.
Like, I’m fine with a store, but I gotta open the launcher to launch the game? On Windows, with the Tile based Start Menu, I kind of thought it was a terrible idea NGL. I gotta open, wait for it to load, open the library, then click to run, THEN it’ll open…
Plus, if I want to track progress, it’s a hassle because I can’t track without the damn launcher…
You don’t need all store fronts running at once on your pc though. Just boot up what you need for the game you want and it’s just six and two threes, whether it’s steam or epic, or any other launcher.
The issue is that I miss features when using Epic. Additionally, games from Epic are not visible in my steam library which leads to me forgetting that they even exist. And also nobody uses it, so there’s no community feeling like I have with all my Steam friends.
I don’t mind it for free games though. If they give me a game for free, they deserve me using their launcher for that game haha.
You don’t understand, it’s ok if the extra app you need to run is Steam, it’s not ok if it’s Epic!
deleted by creator
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.
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.
I mostly game on my Steam Deck and assumed Heroic was only a Linux thing, but recently learned it’s available on Windows too. How’s it do? I’ve been collecting the free games from Epic and Prime Gaming, but barely touch them. Being able to open a single launcher for everything non Steam in Windows sounds amazing!
haven’t tried the other platforms in heroic other than epic, it works 100% except for adding friends. You can add them via the overlay but it’s incredibly janky. Then again, it’s about as janky as it is on the actual launcher. But other than adding friends works great.
I just learned about heroic since getting my steam deck. I’ll be switching over on my pc too since the Epic launcher has such a horrible ui.
I installed it today on my computer and then set up Sunshine so I could stream from it to my Steam Deck easily.
I personally find the app experience better than that of steam when it comes to browsing for new things. Do elaborate
for me the entire launcher is slow and a massive resource hog. The entire GUI has the same issue I had with windows 8 with everything feeling way too big and a whole lot of form over function.
I dont see how steams any better
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.
For Linux support
They support third party clients better than Valve does. You will have no issues on Linux or Steamdeck
