- cross-posted to:
- gaming@kbin.social
- cross-posted to:
- gaming@kbin.social
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Maybe less investment in trying to monopolise the market and more investment in developing their shopping platform so it’s not a smouldering turd.
This is the most asinine approach IMO.
“Let’s release a worse product. Hey, no one likes it. Okay, let’s spend money on games so THEY can essentially force people to use our software. Hey, still, no one really likes it. Okay, let’s try to give away stuff for free. Hey, people use our thing for the free stuff but still no one likes it for any other reason.”
They just keep spending money to up their numbers and their product is still missing features and inferior to competition. They spend big money on exclusivity, but that is only temporary - if that’s how you’re getting your customers, you’re going to have to keep doing it forever to retain them. If people only use you for free stuff, you’re just going to have to keep giving stuff away at a loss to retain them.
This model is not sustainable. You’re not doing anything that aligns value with your customers besides just throwing free stuff at them. That’s not a business.
What’s especially sad to me is they could literally have just spent that same money to improve their launcher and have an actual product. Instead they’ve invested in temporary stats. They’re essentially bankrolling other devs on games with temporary popularity instead of in their lifelong product.
Using other games exclusivity as sway into your ecosystem only works when you have a good product the person would be interested in but they haven’t seen it yet. EGS is currently something people are essentially coerced into using but no one really gets any real value out of it other than “well I couldn’t buy this game anywhere else”
Plus it’s not like there wasn’t room for a good shopping client, if you go smart about it.
Steam had at the time - and still has - tons of bad UI design, stemming for its very old layouts wrangling with newer client additions and changes. Plus Steam for the longest time until the new client solved it had serious issues with late boots and hanging closures. GOG had just tried to bring out their own client a few years before, but in the move to GOG Galaxy had gotten a lot of ire and fucked a lot of things up. All the per-developer clients were berated constantly.
There was room there. But Epic, hell, this is so not it. Your client is so much worse than even the bad competitors…Steam may suck at extra goodies like streaming but they sure as hell don’t suck at selling games. Constant sales, cloud saves, pre-downloads, a solid friend system for co-op games. They nail all the important shit and that’s really all that matters to most people.
I think it just depends on how long they can do this. I think they are banking on getting the fortnite kiddies hooked on the store. They typically have far less disposable income (yet they still charge kids for 20$ skins), they will most likely not have a super large steam library (probably due to the aformentioned skins) so they are banking on the store being that kids default to Epic rather than steam. Its not terribly odd since Steam basically did the same thing, when it used to have those mega sales with the flash sales and the such. That is when the love for Steam basically exploded and its been cruising on that hypetrain for a while.
We made the shittiest thing and nobody likes it. We’re all out of ideas.
Yeah, if I’m reading that right they’re complaining that they’re stuck at phase one of enshitification - lose money on aquiring users. The reason behind that is they’re not able to monopolize the market for their games. “These damn mobile stores won’t let us turn the corner and put the clamps on our users. Fix it please.”
If you count all of Steam’s features (Steam Input, Big Picture Mode, Proton etc), then Epic has decades of catching up to do. The problem is that usually executives will choose the “easy way out” of problems, so let’s just give free games instead of making a good platform.
Well not to discourage them but I like Epic games because every Thursday they give me a free game sometimes two. Hell all the 100 games I own on their platform I gotten for free. So maybe that’s why it’s not profitable?
Beyond that I see no monopoly every game on their I can find on Steam and so far have had no issues with it.
They literally pay for exclusivity. It’s weird that people seem to selectively ignore that every time someone brings up their desire to get free games from them.
This is the main reason why I never made an account, despite the free games.
Epic still has to pay the developers even if they give away the game for free. I’m happy to help bleed Epic dry by taking their free games. But I will never ever spend a single cent on their platform.
You’re lying to yourself. They pay a fixed amount for the giveaway and it doesn’t matter if the games are claimed. If anything, you owning a game on Epic means you’re more likely to mention it to your friends and possibly get them to use the platform and spend on it.
This. Active usernumbers are more worth to them than the small fee they pay the Devs. Everyone who “just redeems the free games” is helping them actively.
They pay a fixed amount based on expected/average number of units given away. If that number is higher, devs can get more money.
Can you provide any evidence for this? The documents from the Apple trial showed fixed and round figures for every single giveaway.
Same If I buy a game it will be either directly from the maker or Steam. Epic strictly for the free games.
I mean, I get why people hate this, but some games would literally not exist if not for that exclusivity funding. For example, the newly released Alan Wake 2 is completely funded by Epic. I’d say at that point, the exclusivity is fair game.
Epic funding games development was only a recent thing. For the most part, they were buying exclusivity for games that were already set to be released or were already in active development. The other reason why this was hated was because they bought exclusivity for games that were crowd-funded back when the store was newly opened.
After Control’s success, I’d imagine AW2 still would’ve been made even without Epic’s exclusivity/publishing deal. If anything, Control’s timed EGS exclusivity hurt their numbers until they eventually hit Steam.
So your theory is that Control wasn’t a major success on Epic, so Remedy decided to do the same thing with their next game? Sounds legit.
Epic funding games just makes them a publisher, nothing groundbreaking.
I have not bought a single game from their store. I have over 300.
I also haven’t played any of the games I got for free. Maybe one day I will, but today is not that day.
I started playing a few and they play well and so far are fun. Have had no issues with the platform.
every game on their [sic] I can find on Steam
Oh yeah? Find these:
3 out of 10
A Knight’s Quest
Alan Wake Remastered
Alan Wake 2
Assassin’s Creed Mirage
Battle Breakers
Binary Smoke
Castle Storm 2
Core
Corruption 2029
Crime Boss: Rockay City
Dangerous Driving
Dauntless
Dead Island 2
Diabotical
Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed
Goat Simulator 3
Grit
Infinitesimals
John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando
Kid A Mnesia Exhibition
Kingdom Hearts series
The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria
Ooblets
PC Building Simulator 2
ReadySet Heroes
Rocket League
RollerCoaster Tycoon Adventures
Salt and Sacrifice
Saturnalia
The Settlers: New Allies
Shoulders of Giants
Sins of a Solar Empire II
Space Punks
Star Trek: Resurgence
Tchia
The Crew Motorfest
The Expanse: A Telltale Series
Tortuga - A Pirate’s Tale
Touch Type Tale
Witchfire
The Wolf Among Us 2
I don’t know about any of the others, but at least Rocket League and Fall Guys are great examples here.
Both games already existed and were extremely successful on Steam.
Both games got bought by Epic and we were told they were going to get continued support.
Both games were then REMOVED from Steam.
Both games then started suddenly having objectively worse monetization. Both communities grew a pretty negative opinion of the changes.
Both games are objectively less popular now, though at least some of this is just age/fads.
But both games are just objectively in a worse spot than they were before. All Epic did was make them objectively worse.
This list is just another argument against epic… artificial exclusives. For a FUCKING LAUNCHER. Even fucking Playstation, EA and Ubisoft opened up.
Fuck Epic.
Fucking Playstation is not better than Epic with handling exclusives lmfao come on now
They are literally releasing their games on another platform that actually requires them to put money into the project again to develop a port. So yeah, even PS atm is better than Epic.
So Playstation releasing some of their games literally years later as often sub-par ports is better than being able to play a game day 1 native on PC? I’d love to hear to the logic for that lol
It’s better than keeping them artificially locked behind a launcher for no reason whatsoever, yes.
They bought fall guys and removed the possibility of buying it on steam. And timed exclusives like borderlands 3.
Battle Breakers
This is a bad example to put down, can’t find that on the epic store either.
Okay, fair, there are some exclusives. But reading through these, wow, nothing of value is lost.
Most importantly because for the newest ones like AW2, they’re just on a 1 year Early Access release in a lot of ways. Every time someone I know bought a game there, I was grateful they did the paid (as in, they pay, not get paid) bug testing work for the poor devs. And then once it releases on other stores, you can buy a somewhat patched-up version, and usually for 25%-50% off.
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Sure isn’t profitable from me, I haven’t bought shit from them.
That’s one interesting thing about this: They trained the players so hard to associate their store with the free weekly giveaways and only the free weekly giveaways, that’s all everyone uses the client for now, and never mentally considers it to be usable for anything else.
The effect is pervasive, too. Games factually have not released if they’re epic-exclusive. They’re not discoverable on PC, as nobody would ever imagine checking the Epic catalogue for a game they’re looking for. That’s not what you open Epic for, it’s those 1-2 free weekly games and nothing else.
In their bid to vie for developers not consumers they went so far too far that they have managed to alienate the concept of “selling games to players” in the consumers’ minds, therefor making their store automatically unable to compete at its main intent.
Mind you, there are far more problems with it. Among which is that despite having so little in there, discoverability and navigation are downright terrible! It’s an interesting lesson for frontend/UI design I imagine.
This. I visit the site every week to claim the free games. If a game is epic exclusive, I consider it not released yet.
Protip: isthereanydeal.com has an RSS feed which will also alert you to other givaways.
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This is a good point. Everyone harps on Epic’s exclusivity, but there are a huge amount of games that only exist on Steam. Most of these never go on other platforms, and many that do, do so only years later.
When put like this, it sounds a lot like Steam and Epic are similar. Of course the difference is that, as far as we know, Valve doesn’t pay for this exclusivity - except indirectly by visibility.
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Won’t even take their free ‘gifts’, worse than Origin when it comes to spyware and data collecting. I can’t understand anyone who willingly puts EGS on their device but complains about advertisers on other platforms collecting info about them.
Yeah let’s not forget this is the client that went through your Steam-installed files on your drive to see what it could offer you.
Free games be damned, I’m not using it while they pay for timed exclusives and limit consumer choice.
Right? Can you imagine what they could have been if they just sold the same games as Steam but tried really hard to just be a really good platform? lol
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They’re welcome to release their own games on their platform like EA or Activision.
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Are they releasing any games not named “Fortnite”?
Because ads are something I dont want to see in general. EGS is something I knowingly use and want on my pc to play games. The choice is what makes it different.
Probably people who understand how to make their computer do what they want it to? You control who your software talks to.
Well, at least at the application level.
I’m going to guess the majority are people that don’t care that much, rather than people with such good security knowledge that they can stop a games distribution platform from spying on them.
Also, Epic is inherently online. Like, it needs an internet connection to distribute the games. Is it even possible to use it for that whilst also stopping it from phoning home?
Well yes, they don’t care that much, so I’m not see the hypocrisy you implied.
The Internet is a series of tubes. The tubes that deliver you file content are rarely the same tubes that carry usage and telemetry data. You can also open or close these tubes at will. Like a Valve!
I don’t think you understand how the Internet actually works, which is perfectly fine. Just weird to act so confidently giving silly advice
In order to decide if they want to send you the games, they need identifying information in the form of your account, otherwise they won’t give you the games, which may well be in a different “tube” (it’s okay, I know they’re called ports, you can use real terminology).
Any programmer worth their salt will know that the way to prevent this kind of tampering is to make the phone home data go through the same port as the account data. That way you can’t block it and keep using the service. This especially makes sense since the phone home data will necessarily be tied to your account.
It’s nothing to do with ports. Teach yourself how to use a hosts file and you’ll be a happier user
Okay, so you’re saying they can’t also bundle the authentication and data collection to the same host?
Bu-but muh free games, tho?
- Dimwits, probably
Worse is, that Epics Spyware finds its way onto Steam releases as well with their online services… And don’t get me started on other cancer like mod.io
Hold on, a platform-agnostic solution to mod integration (mod.io being one example) is now a bad thing compared to the platform-exclusive one (Steam) we usually get? Isn’t it inherently better if I can get games wherever I want and still get mods instead of them being of course all locked to Steam after Steam Mod Downloader got disabled?
Curse you for offending Lord Gaben!
You are putting words in my mouth. I never said I’m opposed to mod support across platforms. In fact, I wish that more games would do this. I looked into mod.io for a bit and have to apologise, though. It seems I fell for the privacy concern myth, if you can call it that.
I still oppose some implementations of it. The game “Ready or Not” especially is atrocious with its mod.io implementation. You can only install + enable, or uninstall mods there. No disable option what so ever. Really fun with mods that are multiple GB in size, like maps.
The free games are 80% shovelware not worth playing, 15% indie experiments that have the potential to become a full game with another development iteration, and 5% AAA games that can be bought on sale for a fiver anyway.
I doubt much of their Fortnite money is actually being spent on licenses for these games. They likely negotiate some kind of “do it for the exposure” deal with the smaller developers in order to keep the flow of free games going.
Chances are the games given out for free will end up in a Humble Bundle at some point anyway. Which is when you acquire a steam key anyway.
So that’s why they’re giving away all that free stuff. 🤔
I got Death Stranding…
…It was free. The Epic client runs under Bottles in its own isolated sandbox, so it can’t spy on me.
If it’s free it’s for me, if you have to pay no way.
They had some amazing coupons a few years ago, I remember buying Jedi: Fallen Order for like $4 USD
You never bought a game made with the Unreal Engine?
How exactly does paying for unreal games make the epic games store profitable? Epic would still be getting that money even if the store didn’t exist.
Yeah that’s the point… They said they never bought anything from epic games. I was wondering if they really never bought an unreal game. Why are people butthurt about that question?!
When you buy from Taco Bell, you’re also buying a product made by a farming company, but you’re not buying from that farm.
Same with EGS/UE. People are happy to buy an Epic Games product, but they won’t buy it from EG, because their store is shit.
There aren’t that many comparable situations where a company both makes a product and has a storefront, without that product being exclusive to that storefront. Perhaps buying Honda, but only used, never from a dealership?
But when someone says they don’t buy Honda shit but than buy a used Honda, wouldn’t you say that’s weird?
The Epic Game Store was in part trying to get money in when the Unreal Engine was falling behind with Unity’s popularity. The hatred many people show for Epic Games is irrational, in my opinion. Especially when you consider that all the “arguments” against Epic Games are the same people had against Steam when it was new. It doesn’t really make sense and just seems like hate for the sake of hating.
It just seems so much like hypocrisy. Everytime Steam brought a new feature, like achievements, cards, communities, etc. people were falling all over themselves hating Steam for it.
And know they hate Epic for not offering these features?
The same with exclusive titles. People regularly hated on Steam for having a monopoly on the market and that they therefore could take increasingly bigger cuts from developers. Epic takes less money in exchange for timed exclusivity and many developers like that they get more money for their games. Why do gamers dislike that?
If you dislike Honda as a company (for subscription key fobs, or crappy warranty practices, say), you can still like the cars without giving the company a single dollar, by buying used cars. I suppose this doesn’t quite work, because EG is still getting money for UE.
Perhaps an inversion: Amazon Basics are usually trash, and many consider giving Amazon money distasteful, yet the storefront is definitely quite effective and the shipping fast. Denigrating one while using the other is common.
As for the different treatment, the people behind UE seem to make decent decisions (especially in the light of Unity’s recent decisions), while the people behind EGS have done nothing but aweful anti-consumer crap. They’re both owned by the same company, but behave differently, so different treatment seems reasonable.
That being said, there’s lots of people in gaming communities who whinge just to whinge. No changing that. I don’t get much of the hate for Steam, but I do agree that having a monopoly is bad, no matter how benevolent Valve is right now. EGS should have been the silver bullet to that situation, but the silver was arsenic, the bullet was hollow point, and they tried to shoot us instead of Steam.
When Epic stops trying to kill user fteedoms and divide the market, and instead make a competitive service, they’ll get far less hate. They’ll still get hate, that’s gamers, but winning by damaging the market is always bad.
They were saying the Epic Games Store hasn’t made any profit from them, not that they never bought any product that makes Epic money.
“Sure isn’t profitable from me” - clearly referring to the store, which this entire post is about
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Oh what a suprise. Maybe… Just maybe…spend some bucks on developing the store to be viable(!) competition to steam. And not just a ghastly shit-shop, where people only exist because of the freebies and partially because of the exclusives (i pirate the exclusives. Fuck exclusives).
Even GOG galaxy is a better client/store and they don’t have the same budget.
Epic sucks sweaty, hairy monkeyballs. And i would welcome competition for the apex.
Did they get a shopping cart yet? I remember not being able to buy multiple games at once, but I just gave up on that store so no idea how it is now
They do now, yeah
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I do through playnite. Using their own launcher for anything else than playing a game is horrible
I get the free games via the site but I dont use windows so I’ve never even tried to play them. I’d rather support valve who have really went all in on Linux gaming.
I know it is possible to get some of epic ones working via lutris but I’m not that bothered to be honest.
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Also works with Amazon and the free games you get with Prime
What? I’ve never heard of this? I have prime, where do I get my free shit?
Here: https://gaming.amazon.com/intro The games kinda suck though
You can also log into your Epic/Gog/Origin/Ubisoft accounts via Lutris and install the games via that.
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For anyone interested in running epic games on linux, try heroic launcher.
Using dishonest tactics to claw away market share won’t work with gamers. Steam got to where it is by good will, good prices and good features.
Steam got to where it is by good will, good prices and good features.
Well, eventually.
When Steam was first released, the running joke was “steaming pile of shit”. It was slow, unreliable and only a couple of shades of green away from the worst color in the world. People complained about the birth of “always online” games and about paying full price but not even getting a box with it.
It’s not exactly unassailable now either. It’s my platform of choice as a user but for indie developers, the 30% cut is brutal and last I used it, the Steamworks SDK was pretty rough. The app itself also has a lot of legacy bloat like a built in MP3 player.
It’s ahead of the rest but I think “good will, good prices and good features” might be an overly romantic take on “it’s where all my games already are”.
the 30% cut is brutal
This part always confuses me. When Steam started allowing non-Valve games on their storefront, 30% was considered a bargain compared to selling your games at retail. In fact, PC versions of games were often $10 cheaper than their console counterparts specifically because distribution and platform fees were lower. It wasn’t until MW2 came out that PC prices started reflecting console prices.
It’s confusing to you that manufacturing, shipping, and selling physical copies of a game was more expensive than digital distribution? The world is very different today. Digital distribution is the norm and everybody knows you don’t need 30% to make it sustainable.
It’s confusing to you that manufacturing, shipping, and selling physical copies of a game was more expensive than digital distribution?
That is not what is confusing to me.
Digital distribution is the norm and everybody knows you don’t need 30% to make it sustainable.
I’m not sure I buy this. Epic’s 12% is the bare minimum just to cover basic infrastructure costs for distributing modern AAA games. It doesn’t even include transaction fees, which vary based on which payment method the user selects (whereas Steam and other storefronts eat these as part of their 30% cut).
Simply sustaining your existing platform is also not enough. Where Epic runs a barebones storefront and client with little in the way of useful features beyond “download game and keep it updated”, storefronts like GOG and Steam take their actual profit and re-invest it in improving their platform for everyone. Think of all the time and money that goes into making things like Steam Input, Proton, or even GOG themselves fixing up older games for modern PCs.
The fact that it has been 5 years and Epic still hasn’t been able to make their 12% cut break even speaks volumes.
Epic’s 12% doesn’t do much because they’re constantly burning money trying to find more revenue. It’s obvious they’re not doing anything efficiently. They also have far fewer sales than Steam which further hurts their bottom line.
The standard internet payment processors take 3% as their cut.
With modern cloud systems we can quickly distribute files globally for tiny amounts of money.
The truth is that Valve makes a ton of money off of this fee. It’s great that they contribute to open source projects but plenty of companies make similar contributions with a fraction of the resources.
I still remember being annoyed I suddenly needed to get a separate app just to continue playing counter strike.
Ah yeah, I was a bit of a hold out going to 1.6, but eventually all the servers started disappearing. That was like ~8 years ago… right?
Na homie that was almost 10 years ago.
the 30% cut is brutal
Reportedly Epic’s 12% barely covers costs and would not if they included transaction fees. 20% seems to be the bare minimum if you want a store to actually have good service, and then I’m giving Valve additional credit for sinking boatloads of money into general infrastructure, in the long term Proton alone is worth those 10%. Much unlike the rest of the stores (exception GOG) which take the same 30% and are run by humongous multinationals.
…and then there’s itch.io. If you’re a small and scrappy indie very much an option: They’re also small and scrappy. And they’ll probably shout at you if you try to upload a 20G game I very much doubt their servers would survive an AAA launch. OTOH, reportedly their average revenue split is 8% (customers can choose).
The difference is that Steam sells a ton of copies every single day. The vast majority of Valve’s fortune has come from that fee. People jump to defend Steam but it’s already been established by lawsuits against other major corporations that a 30% cut is mostly driven by greed.
The 30% cut was industry standard for digital distribution for years. Google, Apple, and numerous other players all took 30% as standard.
That being said, Steam hasn’t taken a flat 30% for years now - their standard agreement starts at 30%, decreases to 25% after the first $10m in sales, then decreases further to 20% after $50m.
Furthermore, Valve has done more in terms of providing services, APIs/libraries, and end-user features (all with no additional fee to the developers or consumers) than any other game storefront has. I’d say they more than justify their cut.
Industry standard by massive corporations synonymous with corporate greed. Boy am I glad the fee decreases after $10m in sales. That will go a long way with helping out indie devs.
It’s okay to like Steam because they’ve provided us with a good way of purchasing and playing games. I like Steam but we don’t have defend things that are obviously greedy.
Valve is constantly looking for ways to help the customer, just in their own weird ass way. Having linux as a competitive option to windows and being able to refund/return digital games, as well as a built in mod searcher and loader being some of the things they brought to the platform because Valve employees themselves are gamers and want their platform to be useful towards gamers needs
I think they do hell the consumer. And agree it’s weird. But would argue against that being their goal with the caveat that what I’m about to say makes no real difference to anything.
I think they’re looking to increase profits first and foremost. However, because they’re not answerable to shareholders, they understand that the best way to do this is by building loyalty and ensuring “stickiness” loyalty. ¹
It’s still about money. They just understand that the safest way to make it is by having a long term view and not burning people.
I think its both tbh. Money is certainly a factor, we live in a Capatalist society, the more money you have, the more you can do and influence, so even companies with the best of intentions will focus on profits. But with the shit Valve does, like the Steam Deck being a Linux machine (and thus open source), and working through the legal hassle of designing and making developers agree to digital item returns/refunds, I’m thoroughly convinced Valve generally does just want to make the gaming scene better as well because the employees themselves are also gamers
I think they just understand whatost executibes are too greedy / shit sighted / stupid to understand. Doing what’s right for consumers drives revenue. It can be good for the consumer and motivated by profit. They’re not mutually exclusive.
Refunding/returning digital games is an outcome of a lawsuit if I remember correctly
“it’s where all my games already are.”
My pet theory is this was realized by epic and so the only reason they give games away is to “help” users build a library they won’t want to “leave behind” for another store platform. Once they reach the market share they were aiming for I fully expect the practice to stop.
Moreover, just like that guy, Epic thinks that’s the only thing that matters, or at least the biggest issue. The idea that gamers might not use them because their service is actually just worse seems to have never crossed their minds in any serious fashion.
That is their exact strategy…
Yes, there’s bloat from old features, but there’s also quality tools built into Steam, such as Steam Input and Proton.
Well, eventually.
When Steam was first released, the running joke was
Has anything ever worked perfectly when first released?
If that was true, EA would have been dead in the water 12 years ago.
Didn’t EA shut down Origin or at least make it optional?
Remember Valve is the company and Steam is the storefront/launcher.
Epic is the company, EGS is the storefront/launcher.
EA is the company, Origin is (was?) the storefront/launcher.
Didn’t EA shut down Origin or at least make it optional?
Technically no. EA now just calls it “The EA App”
If Mass Effect Legendary Edition actually included ME3’s multiplayer I might’ve considered installing Origin again.
Nope. Star Wars Squadrons (which I got from Epic, BTW) required me to download and install Origin first. I’d be salty as fuck about that if all parties involved hadn’t already guaranteed that it was a game that I was never going to pay for anyway.
Yeah, making it a requirement for playing your physical copy of Half-Life definitely looks like good will to me.
And in turn diminished the industry’s piracy problm for many years, making PC Games market a stable ecosystem instead of letting all of PC gaming die.
No? Cracks were created for that too
Yes? How can you possibly deny that? Steam was able to claw a market in russia, a country famous for piracy. Gaben was right, convenience with good prices trumps everything.
Sure, cracks still exist, but I’ve stopped downloading them in favour of buying off Steam because the user experience was a lot better. I’m sure I can’t be the only one to do this.
Before Steam existed i would even crack games I had legitimate copies of solely because pre-Steam DRM was such an enormous pain in the ass to deal with.
Even today Denuvo is a veritable paradise compared to what DRM used to be like.
Maybe just uh…
Put your games on steam?
Steam won’t let Tencent put their spyware on the platform.
On what basis do you say that? There’s tons of legit malware on there, just search for shit that implements denuvo.
I think you misunderstand the statement.
I’m not saying every game and software on Steam is quality or proven to not have malware or spyware packaged in the games.
I’m saying Epic Games Store and Launcher itself is spyware, that actively snoops through user’s personal files well beyond the scope of its install directory and phones home encrypted packets of the results. And Epic Games will not give proper response to why it’s doing this or what it’s returning.
Valve at least has been forthcoming about what Steam looks for and why it monitors specific ports, as part of VAC.
Why would Epic put a store launcher on Steam? This is a silly argument.
Valve happily censor their client and games for the Chinese audience.
Nope, they have the moral high ground, like pioneering and perfecting how to market gambling and loot boxes to kids through video games.
Or do we only hate that when EA does it?
I was up for a Steam competitor. I signed up for the Epic store a few years back. Tried to get the first free game. It wasn’t available in my region despite being plastered all over the store in my region. The exact same thing happened the next month. Both of those games were available on Steam in my region at some pretty low prices by then.
Then, Epic started paying for exclusivity, making games not available in my region at all. I had at least deleted their stupid app by then anyway. Fuck Epic entirely.
I was up for a Steam competitor.
GOG Galaxy has been good even before Epic Store existed.
My only complaint about GOG is that developers treat it as an afterthought. Plenty of games that stop receiving updates, or are pulled out of the store entirely, while the Steam version remains maintained. Also, the required lack of DRM makes multiplayer online games relatively scarce.
GOG is great. I have an account and have bought a few games there when I think of it. I just wish they had Souls games.
Used to have similar problem with Steam back in the day.
Edit: I like how some people disagree that i experienced something by downvote. It’s not like i can change it or something 😅 👌
I don’t doubt it, but I’ve been a pretty regular user since 2009, and I’ve never had a game advertised to me on the front page that wasn’t available in my region. In fact, there are games I want that I know aren’t available on Steam here, and the only way to get to the Steam page for them is by using a proxy or VPN. I definitely can’t buy them with my account. It seems pretty amateurish of Epic to advertise unavailable games and to even let me click “buy” before telling me I can’t buy it. Maybe they’ve fixed that by now, but whatever. The paid exclusivity bullcrap showed me where their priorities lie.
There are mistakes being done unintentionally when you develop complex software.
Take my example, Humble showed me Bandai Namco game that I could not even get in a bundle. So out of 10 games, I received 9, while other regions receive 10.
That is even worse than Epic’s (probably honest) mistake.
Humble isn’t trying to compete with Steam or Epic, and they don’t engage in the anti-consumer practice of paying off developers for exclusive access to games.
I’m aware of the complexities of software development. If Epic seriously wanted to compete with Steam, they really should have tried harder to provide a better service instead of trying to buy loyalty through free games and exclusivity contracts.
It’s not amaterish anymore than GOG or Steam giving out free games back in the day. Even before it used to be magazines with free games on CDs. I still have these games in my libraries. It’s widely used strategy by bigger business to start new departments or even child companies. It’s why they say money makes money.
It’s amateurish that their store advertised games to me that were unavailable to me. I’m no code whiz, but it can’t be that hard to chuck in an if (region == false) then !advertise; Valve and GOG don’t seem to have any problems with that.
I have no issue with them giving away free games. Too bad that and the paid exclusives don’t earn them a loyal customer base. Maybe if they’d put more effort into their store. Like maybe not advertising region locked games to regions where they’re not available.
That part i agree. It’s not that unrealistic with their budget .
Shocking literally no one, the game store that took a shot at the king with store that (initially) didn’t have baseline stuff like reviews and a cart, and tried to get by on giving away product and paying a bunch of money to make stuff exclusive isn’t doing so hot financially.
On one hand, thanks to the nonstop giveaways, I have way more games on Epic than I do on Steam, so I have a reason to continue using Epic.
On the other hand, Epic’s launcher runs like shit, constantly refreshes my library page, slow as hell, glitchy as hell, and makes me feel dirty when I use it.
Steam is just so cozy and is on the whole a much more enjoyable PC gaming experience. I imagine 95% of Epic users are people like me: sign in on Thursdays for the free game and then bounce.
Have you tried Heroic Games Launcher?
I know about its existence, but I’m not sure how safe is it as a way to prevent Epic (and potentially Tencent) from tracking my personal information.
they have no excuse for it to be slow as shit
I talked to their support about the library force refresh and it’s apparently intended. That library refresh is literally the only reason the EGS isn’t open all the time like Steam is. Random data usage is bad, and can fuck off. I do not need random lag spikes.
thanks to the nonstop giveaways, I have way more games on Epic than I do on Steam
I still have more games on Steam, however, Itch.io has had a couple of insane bundles in the last couple of years, which mean I have way more games and content on Itch than on Steam, which I did not see coming. I still use Steam the most, though, because I’m used to their interface and it works really well on Linux.
Valve has not optimized big library, so me with 4k games and good computer but Steam performs like PoS.
My launcher shows that I have 379 games from Epic. Not DLC, not demos. Full games.
I have never given Epic a single cent and I never will. (That is to say, until they offer me something that makes me want to use their platform). They have no killer features - AT ALL.
To make it worse, I have all these games, but I still rarely play them. Not that it’s a bad selection, but between steamdeck, gamepass and just a crazy backlog on Steam makes me rarely think of Epic store.
Well that’s at the crux of it, indeed. Steam has these killer features that enable and empower me as a gamer.
Then there’s Epic that still doesn’t have controller support.
Wait, what? No controller support?
That’s disingenuous. The games have controller support, as you’d expect them to. EGS itself doesn’t have an outside-the-games input layer like Steam Input.
But you can always load up an EGS game in Steam as a non-Steam game and have full access to Steam Input on it that way, so why would Epic spend time and effort re-inventing the wheel when they have other priorities?
But you can always load up an EGS game in Steam as a non-Steam game and have full access to Steam Input on it that way, so why would Epic spend time and effort re-inventing the wheel when they have other priorities?
Why would Epic implement a feature when I could just run Epic games through Steam? Why don’t I just use Steam then?
Maybe the game was free on EGS but not on Steam?
So still not an argument for giving Epic any of my money.
More accurately: the games have support for Xbox styled controllers, because Windows ships with support for that. However, they usually don’t have support for PlayStation controllers unless the game actively adds support for them, or Steam Input deals with converting the controller inputs to Xbox format on the fly. Most of the time, Epic exclusives do neither of the above.
Ok cool that makes way more sense.
But… If I am gonna buy the game elsewhere and then port it into steam, for no discount… Why not just buy it on steam, and not bother with the extra steps?
And by that I mean, it sounds like a waste of time to buy from epic, since I get more features for the same price elsewhere. So whats such an important priority?
LoL. Yeah I’ve got a ton and I’ve never actually launched a single one
I spent about $600 with epic. All of that was on fortnite skins. None of it on games.
Just wow
Hey man, it provided value to my life… its a fun game, i play it quite a bit. Plus half of that was for my kid, he would ask for vbucks every birthday and Christmas for years.
The “killer feature” is that they pay more to the developers, so if you are getting the exact same game on (e.g.) Steam versus Epic Games, then whomever actually made the game gets more money from the Epic sale. Isn’t that a good thing?
(Note that I may be conflating the publisher with the developer, but either way, it’s still the case that less money is taken by intermediaries, which is a good thing.)
Except they only do that because its the only way to get publishers to use them over steam, and once they have a reliable customer base they will reneg on that generosity to gain profit.
We know this business strategy. It will not stay that way.
Quite likely, but until then…
this is how we get companies like walmart and amazon.
they roll in, throwing bags of money into a bottomless pit as long as it takes to amass a large customer base and ruin existing competitors. Then they start enshittifying, and everyone wonders where all the competition went.
No, Steam are the monopoly now! The only other option is Good Old Games and for weird indie titles Itch.io.
Until then, what? You as the consumer have no incentive to use their worse service, and publishers clearly arent that enticed by it for how few exclusives the store gets?
Or until then, you want to reward a bait and switch that you know is a bait and switch to try and trick you into using a worse product?
Which option are you excited about here?
Their service is in no way worse: I buy games, and I get them.
I’m excited about the fact that someone provides an alternative to the monopoly that is Steam.
… The ability to purchase is not the only aspect of a stores service
It’s all I need: I buy a game, I download and play it. I don’t need anything else.
That’s a reason for developers to use them, not for consumers to use them.
EPICs anti-customer practices (such as trying to make everything exclusive) are reasons for consumers not to use them.
There are tens of thousands of Steam-exclusive games: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_games_exclusive_to_Steam
What is the alternative to Steam?
And are those because Steam is trying to pressure them into being exclusive on Steam? Or did they just not bother releasing anywhere else?
If a developer just wants to release on Epic and nowhere else they can do that. My issue comes from Epic approaching games that have already announced a Steam release asking for exclusivity, and having no interest in hosting the game if they don’t accept the exclusivity offer.
There are almost 40,000 entries, I obviously cannot answer for all of them.
Still waiting for you to answer my question.
Well you sound like someone trying to have a good faith discussion and attempting to continue would be a good use of my time.
What is the alternative to Steam?
However because of their 40% ownership, you’re ALSO giving more money to Tencent.
Wait tencent has ownership of epic games?
Yes
Yikes. Good point.
No, because epic has been engaging in anti consumer practices from the start. This is literally the only category epic has a leg up on steam, and if they didn’t need to bully their way into the marketplace, I have no reason to believe they’d treat creators any better than they currently do customers
edit: The revelation that they are running the store at a loss just furthers me not believing they are helping developers from the goodness of their heart, it shows they’re likely running the Walmart strategy of using their vast wealth to choke out their competition until there is none, and then once they have a monopoly, jack everything up, which’d probably include their cut of the pie
Note that I may be conflating the publisher with the developer
You think?
Yes, I do, or else I wouldn’t have mentioned it. I’d prefer the publisher gets money over a middleman store. Isn’t that preferable?
Its a phrase that signals something else, and not a literal content reply.
How about you write what you mean and have quality conversation in the future?
How about you write what you mean
I did. Its a standard phrase used by people in conversation. See defintion #2 below.
Below definition is from here …
you think
- A question one uses at the end of a sentence to express uncertainty. We’re not going to get into trouble—you think?
- A sarcastic rhetorical question used as a retort when someone states the obvious. A: “Wow, I bet that fire is really hot.” B: “You think?”
and have quality conversation in the future?
Quality is in the eye of the beholder, apparently. /shrug
I did.
If you did, then I answered the genuine question you asked.
See it’s not all negative news on the internet.
EGS losing money has been great for gamers, as they continue to give away free games in an attempt to claw any marketshare. Gamers continue to win as long as this situation lasts. But reading these comments, nobody seems to recognize this.
Gamers lose when the store shuts down and you lose access to all of the games you got for free, or worse actually paid for.
Many of the games are DRM-free, as evidenced on PCGamingWiki.
I actually didn’t know this. Fuckin eh!
Yeah but Unreal Tournament goes back on the shelf
ESG losing money is great for me just on principle, Tim Sweeney can go fuck himself.
Tencent is a despicable company
Consumers also won when a Walmart would open up in their neighborhood and run the local stores out of business by selling everything at a loss.
Of course, once the competition was eliminated, Walmart stopped selling things at a loss.
Epic Games launcher/store is nothing more than Tencent spyware using “free games” as bait and masquerading as a Steam competitor.
Well. It’s required for downloading Unreal Engine for development. Not really sure about spyware.
Yeah I am not buying that spyware argument either.
Here’s some info about the spyware that they had in Epic Games that was allegedly “fixed”
You can sell access to your PC for the free games from Epic if you choose to. I choose not to install their garbage app, because I have plenty of other games and I don’t need their free bait.
Once trust is lost, it’s hard to get back.
WeChat would like a word
WeChat is not Epic Launcher last time I checked.
I have no idea why this is newsworthy. Epic’s own 2019 documents and testimony in the Apple trial showed that the company did not expect the store to be profitable until 2024 or even 2027. The strategy of heavy investment and operating at a loss to turn a profit later worked for Spotify, Netflix, Microsoft, and many others. Even this week, there are headlines like “Elon Musk Says SpaceX’s Starlink Achieves Breakeven Cash Flow”.
Spotify has never turned a profit, at least not yearly.
That could be true, making it an even stronger argument.
But all the other companies had in mind something else besides “gotta beat the other guys” and actually brought something to the table.
You can’t deny that Epic taking 12% revolutionized the industry, with Microsoft following suit and even Valve making some small changes. As Gabe himself said on the competition, “it keeps [them] honest”. That’s a win for game creators.
For the gamers, we got many free games and I think the Epic freebies inspired Microsoft to offer similar deals with Game Pass, Amazon with Prime, and even GOG recently gave away a pretty notable game, Blacksad, which was uncharacteristic in relation to their past giveaways.
Pretty sure all those were offering games with their subscriptions long before Epic store was a thing.
But, on the other hand, every other thing they did outweighs the rest - exclusivity, shitty launcher, and spyware.
I am also not sure if any game given away by Amazon Prime really interested me at all.
I have a crazy idea for Epic. Instead of paying a fortune for exclusives, leverage the lower 12% cut and have game publishers sell for less (so that the publisher makes the same amount on Steam and Epic)
And GOG. They used to have several games up there, and then delisted them.
Publishers sets their own prices though.
So why can’t they sell their game for $56 on Epic and $70 on Steam? They’d make about the same money per sale on each?
Are you seriously asking why a company in a capitalist economy would keep more money for themselves?
Most likely reason, contracts.
Example Nike sales shoes directly at the same price as footlocker. Why dont they under cut footlocker? They have a contracts that says they won’t under cut footlocker
There could br an issue like that but well you can make new contracts
But price disparities already exist in other places sometimes. Like YT premium using the App store (due to the 30% cut) and everywhere else.
it depends on what the contracts say
Valve prohibit that, according to the lawsuit filed by Wolfire Games.
There’s no way that can be legal. I generally support Valve but that is monopolistic as hell.
That only applies to the steam keys valve supplies to developers that have a 0% cut. Also doing regional pricing would be a massive headache if that were true due to different stores having different recommended price conversions.
The claim specifically mentions Epic and quotes a Valve employee who made statements to the effect of it being prohibited, irrespective of whether a Steam key is involved. Read from page 47 and pay attention to the last paragraphs of page 55.
What do you mean by this?
doing regional pricing would be a massive headache if that were true
Aren’t games regionally priced like forever ? I’ve buying key’s in GB because they are cheaper. Also Doesn’t steam lock you out of your games if you bought US version and travel to the other side of the world? I just vaguely remember people complaining about it.
No and no.
The time lock lasts 3 months, not forever.
I’m pretty much sure that they had 60$ = 60€ kind of regional prices.
If the developer chooses to do so themselves then it’s likely ok, but forcing the developer to do so likely violates some sort of law.
I imagine that when Epic instituted it’s lower percentage they hoped that developers would sell exclusively on their platform for higher profits. Instead the developers decided to sell on both platforms and just make a larger percentage on the Epic sales. From the developer perspective it would have been wise in the long run to lower prices so that Epic could grow, but that hurts their short term profits and also stymied Epic’s potential.
If Epic’s store grew to truly rival Steam more developers might have jumped ship, but to do so prematurely would be losing a large portion of the potential customers.
Ultimately Epic had to develop a full Steam clone quickly while all Steam had to do was not suck for the end user.
Why would the developer sell at a loss to help Epic out? What’s in it for the developer?
Well it shouldn’t be at a loss. As the person I responded to pointed out, Epic had a lower fee than Steam so the developer can sell on Epic for less than they would on Steam and make the same amount of money.
Doing so wouldn’t be at a loss, but it wouldn’t make as much profit as possible.
If the developers did choose to sell on Epic for less than it would bolster the Epic store and potentially lead to more people moving to Epic.
If Steam’s fee is 30% and Epic’s is 15% the developer could sell on Steam for $70 and make $49 and they could sell on Epic for $60 to make $51. That’s a 4% increase in profits.
If the Epic store takes off and a large enough user base switches they could maybe increase the Epic price to $62.5 which would result in an additional 4% increase in profits.
Epic’s deal is that they’re offering a lower rate, but the developers aren’t sharing the benefits of that to help Epic grow. If they did the long term profits would likely exceed the short term.
Again, why would the developer care about making Epic grow? It’s the store’s responsibility to offer good service, you don’t see Nintendo trying to help out Target or anything like that now do ya?
hing like that now do ya?
I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic or if you really don’t understand. If you don’t understand I’d be happy to elaborate.
Epic paid $146 to make borderlands exclusive to epic. The game kind of flopped.
Completely untrue. It was a major success and brought record numbers of new customers to the store, which is the main metric pursued by Epic.
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