- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
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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.”
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.
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.
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 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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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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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.
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
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. 🤔
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?
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?
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.
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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
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.
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 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.
For what it’s worth, the Heroic Games launcher works out of the box for me on Mint, it also handles GOG
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.
You can yeah, I’ve just had major trouble getting Lutris to work on my system
For anyone interested in running epic games on linux, try heroic launcher.
See it’s not all negative news on the internet.
If you haven’t tried a linux distro since the release of the SteamDeck, I highly recommend you give gaming on linux a shot.
Gotta love the diehard linux users promoting their preferred OS on a topic even slightly related.
Man, I enjoy Linux too, but I cannot see how its related to the post.
Oh that is why this proton thing makes tons of games runnable on Linux now?
Yes, both from Valve working hard on compatibility and game devs testing against it
Having been on Linux for over a year now, I don’t. It’s still plagued by instability, weird bugs, and big limitations whenever non-Steam games are involved.
You mean games that arent available in steam at all, vor those which you haven’t bought there? I found the easiest workaround for me was to simply add the games to my steam library and to launch it from there. Then I don’t have to worry about what proton version I should use or whatnot.
Which destro would you recommend? I’m kind of sick of Windows.
Fedora with “Dash to Panel” and the “Applications Menu” make the GUI identical to Windows. That would be a good start :)
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/6/applications-menu/
Or just use KDE instead of Gnome. It’s such a terrible DE anyway.
If you want a Couch Gaming Station I recommend you to look at ChimeraOS. Linux first that boots directly to Stream Big Picture (since it’s based on SteamOS) and it supports emulators and Epic Game Store.
On my old i5-8700T with qUHD630 it pretty much was a install, reboot, login to Steam and start playing. My Wireless Xbox Controller USB dongle was plug’n’play.
Nobara has, for me, been the most plug and play no headache distro I’ve touched, ever.
What brand of graphics card do you have? If it’s Nvidia Pop!_OS will likely work best. If you have an AMD card I’ve heard good things about EndeavorOS.
Also, feel free to shop around for a desktop environment (DE) you like, which controls the look and how things are organized. While distros have a default, it’s pretty easy to swap them. I personally use KDE Plasma (the same DE the Steam Deck uses) with Pop!_OS
How’s the performance on Nvidia cards? Most benchmarks that I saw are people using AMD cards.
NVIDIA is a one-line command to install and setup the drivers.
For me? Most of my games run better on Linux. Such as CSGO, which is why I initially switched.
I generally prefer AMD, how are they for Linux?
Great! You don’t even need to install any drivers. It just works.
Also some distros like Pop!_OS just have it included and automatically update them
Thanks for the tip but no
Not worth the hassle but you do you. Keep fighting the good fight.
Keep fighting the good fight.
And it really is the good fight in this case. I’ve been running Linux on my gaming PC for around four years with very little trouble. Games from Epic and GOG run very well(for me at least) through Heroic Games Launcher. I’ve been using Windows for work on/off the last couple of years, but especially since they “upgraded” to Windows 11, it’s such a relief to come home to Linux.
No thanks
Sorry, I’ll wait some more. I tried two times getting back to Linux as I see the potential. It didn’t work. I’m gonna stick to windows until some problems will be fixed, or Microsoft further enshittifies itself.
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.
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)
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?
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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 😅 👌
Would that be because it is still a pale imitator not remotely competitive with steam?
I might actually buy a game of the app didn’t constantly sign me out.
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.
ESG losing money is great for me just on principle, Tim Sweeney can go fuck himself.
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.
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.
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Seems to me that the most lucrative thing in gaming is still just making really good games.
Sure, there’s Steam, but that’s a fluke. The exception that proves the rule. Just get back to actual game making.
And it’ll never be.
