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.
  • UprisingVoltage@feddit.it
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    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.

    • Alto@kbin.social
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      Valve is what happens when someone who’s not just outright fucking evil invents a money printing machine

      • MudMan@kbin.social
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        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.

        • ono@lemmy.ca
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          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.

            • Radical Dog@lemmy.world
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              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.

          • MudMan@kbin.social
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            Hah. Fair enough.

            I mean, I’d say that’s probably true of most companies making videogames. People are really hyperbolic about this stuff.

        • Hajotay@kbin.social
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          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.

              • Katana314@lemmy.world
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                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.

          • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.world
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            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.

            • Hajotay@kbin.social
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              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).

              • Something Burger 🍔@jlai.lu
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                Valve’s DRM prevents the resale of physical PC games, as Steam codes are single-use. They singlehandedly killed the used PC games market.

          • MudMan@kbin.social
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            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.

            • Hajotay@kbin.social
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              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

              • MudMan@kbin.social
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                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.

            • Something Burger 🍔@jlai.lu
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              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.

            • Zorque@kbin.social
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              … right. And it’s also considered one of the premier “evil” DRMs.

              So I ask again… they invented Denuvo?

              • MudMan@kbin.social
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                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

    • Hubi@lemmy.world
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      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.

      • hh93@lemm.ee
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        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

      • Rose@lemmy.world
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        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.

    • ono@lemmy.ca
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      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:
      Drm

      Given 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 games

      Another 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.)

      • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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        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

        • ono@lemmy.ca
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          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?)

          • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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            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.

    • JimmyMcGill@lemmy.world
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      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.

    • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works
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      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

      • cottonmon@lemmy.world
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        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.

      • Grass@sh.itjust.works
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        Gog also seemingly no 2fa other than an faq page with instructions that cannot be followed.

      • Something Burger 🍔@jlai.lu
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        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?

        • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works
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          Sadly, it’s likely a lot of tracking. The kind that look where your mouse is and where you scroll and stop etc.

          • Something Burger 🍔@jlai.lu
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            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!”

            • key@lemmy.keychat.org
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              Oh thanks for the reminder, I hadn’t opened epic so I can scroll down to the free games banner in a while.

          • ono@lemmy.ca
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            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.

    • ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.worldOP
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      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.

    • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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      Eh… A whole bunch of games on Epic are DRM free, proportionally more than there are on Steam in fact…

    • Radical Dog@lemmy.world
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      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.

    • wooki@lemmynsfw.com
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      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
      • mcforest@kbin.social
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        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.

        • wooki@lemmynsfw.com
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          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

      • FrederikNJS@lemm.ee
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        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.

        • wooki@lemmynsfw.com
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          So what. It’s still valid Cons for the platform.

          Stop making excuses for scamming one sided purchase agreements.

          • FrederikNJS@lemm.ee
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            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…

  • cottonmon@lemmy.world
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    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.

      • cottonmon@lemmy.world
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        Yeah, this caused A LOT of controversy back then. As far as I know, Epic has stopped doing this and has pivoted a bit more into funding game development (i.e. Alan Wake 2.) That being said, that gave Epic have a terrible reputation when they initially launched EGS.

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          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

          • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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            They still sign exclusives, they don’t do it with crowdfunded projects that promised a Steam release anymore.

          • cottonmon@lemmy.world
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            I meant with crowd funded games. I’m aware that they still buy exclusivity. Though from what I know they pay indies less compared to what they used to pay.

  • gerryflap@feddit.nl
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    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.

    • Glide@lemmy.ca
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      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.

    • ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.worldOP
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      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…

    • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works
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      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.

      • gerryflap@feddit.nl
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        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.

      • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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        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!

    • CosmoNova@lemmy.world
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      While this is a concern I generally share, I doubt the overwhelming majority of players even give it a single thought. Most don‘t care about things like human rights when the product is nice. Only once did I hear someone bring up Tencent owning 30% of Larian (Baldur‘s Gate 3) for example. The masses really don‘t even want to hear it.

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

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

    Make of that what you will.

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

  • actionjbone@sh.itjust.works
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    6 months ago

    I don’t like when huge, rich corporations pretend that they are an underdog.

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

      • Zorque@kbin.social
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        Generally the only games that are de facto exclusive to Nintendo are the ones they make themselves or those that choose to stay on Nintendo (I haven’t heard of exclusivity deals, but I won’t discount the possibility).

        A better comparison might be Sony with Playstation (and maybe Microsoft with Xbox, though I haven’t heard of as much from them on that) paying for exclusivity for a limited time.

        Epic, on the other hand decided, at least at the start, to buy out almost finished games (some of which even had pre-orders on other storefronts) to have on their platform for at least a year. Then decided to try and play the victim, claiming that they had to do it to gain market share. Then claimed they were morally superior because they didn’t charge as much to publishers for putting games on their storefront. While also charging just as much for the games to the consumers.

        • MudMan@kbin.social
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          6 months ago

          Sony have very, very few straight exclusivity deals these days, they have a super robust first party network. Nintendo and them are very comparable, in fact. Especially in that Nintendo works with more third parties or partially owned “second parties” than you’d think, since people presume anything using their IP is their game, even when it’s not.

          In any case, they’re both as not-comparable, in that Epic games run on the same hardware and platform as Steam games, Linux compatibility aside. You don’t have to pay any extra money to switch back and forth.

          Epic legitimately hasn’t done anything Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft haven’t done on the regular. In fact, the current “boo, we hate non-Steam PC launchers” trend overlaps with the old “boo, we’re pissed that former console exclusive X is going multiplatform”, which was a surreal few years there.

          Also, hell yeah, it’s morally superior to give more of the money to the dev while charging the same up front to consumers. 100%. Every time. Epic is not doing it because they’re nice, they’re doing it to attract talent to their platform, which is exactly why you want competition between multiple storefronts instead of a monopoly. But that doesn’t take it away from them, that’s the better answer.

        • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works
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          6 months ago

          Microsoft don’t pay for timed exclusivity. Instead they buy the companies and get exclusivity from them now being first party.

      • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        6 months ago

        Fuck Nintendo to death, after listening to the abominations they committed in the Team Xecuter episode of Darknet Diaries I’m never giving them another cent.

        Luckily, Yuzu runs games infinitely better than my switch anyway, so that’s awesome.

        • pivot_root@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Fuck Nintendo, but fuck Xecuter more.

          Anyone that follows the homebrew and CFW scene knows that Xecuter repeatedly and unapologetically ripped off the GPL-licensed components in Atmosphere and its various bootloader stages. On top of violating the licenses of and stealing from the homebrew community, they also added console-bricking DRM to their CFW. They’re not heroes supporting the ideological cause of piracy; just shitbags trying to profit off of it.

          • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            6 months ago

            ABSOLUTELY. But the guy whose life they fucked over had almost nothing to do with development. He was like a news site… guy.

            • pivot_root@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              Oh yeah, he was totally the fall guy and had his life ruined over it. He was made an example out of, while the rest and worst of them made bank and got away with it.

              • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                6 months ago

                Absolute bullshit. But you’re totally right, Xecutor was mostly corrupt and shitty. I forgot about the switch bricking thing, what fuckery to do to people.

        • MudMan@kbin.social
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          6 months ago

          Oh, there’s a ton to say about why Disney get a reputation for being a litigious nightmare but Nintendo gets more of a connection to beloved franchises in a lot of the gaming community, but that’s precisely why they’re a good counterexample to Steam when you’re talking about branding associations.

  • Mini_Moonpie@sh.itjust.works
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    6 months ago

    Epic doesn’t see gamers as their customer - they see developers as their customer and shape the customer experience around that. For example, Epic said that if/when they add reviews, developers could choose to opt their games out of reviews. That’s very pro-developer, but very anti-consumer, whatever you might think of the value of reviews. Informed customers can rattle off a long list of reasons they don’t like Epic and why they’re bad, but they are a small minority of PC gamers. The “silent majority” doesn’t keep up with this kind of stuff or really care about it, so they are literally judging stores on their merits and Epic is a bare bones platform that doesn’t offer customers a good reason to spend money in their store because they don’t think they need to.

  • Ganbat@lemmyonline.com
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    6 months ago

    Well, I have four big ones:

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

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

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

    • Tim Sweeney: Tim Weeney, the CEO of Epic, is an asshole. A giant, narcissistic, hateful shitbag. Just look at his Twitter, the dudes a giant POS.

    • lud@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      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?

  • Viper_NZ@lemmy.nz
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    6 months ago

    Paid exclusives locking content away from other online stores. Basically trying to force me to use it is a sure fire way of making me refuse.

  • tvbusy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    6 months ago

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

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

    • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
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      6 months ago

      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.

  • Uninformed_Tyler@lemmy.world
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    6 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.

    1. 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.

    2. 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.

    1. 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.

    • ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.worldOP
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      6 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 😅.

  • stevecrox@kbin.social
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    6 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.

    • ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.worldOP
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      6 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.

      • Kata1yst@kbin.social
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        6 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.