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gnuplusmatt ,

I log into EGS via heroic a few times a year to claim a free game. Yet to ever play any said free games 🤷

Lautaro ,
@Lautaro@lemmy.world avatar

Remember to claim The Callisto Protocol!

Frozyre ,

Let's see...

The launcher itself ran poorly compared to Steam's. I've had instances of it freezing performance down just downloading 1 game through Epic's launcher.

You've locked down games behind multi-year exclusives, pissing off many people along the way that we're now just seeing their Steam releases.

You've spent years giving free games away, promising not to do anymore, going back to doing it again.

The launcher and storefront are incredibly barebones compared to Steam's. In fact, any launcher not Steam, has incredibly minimal to go with other than just running games through them.

altima_neo ,
@altima_neo@lemmy.zip avatar

EA at least made an attempt, but still not as fully featured.

Asafum ,

The one thing I like about them is they recognized why people really wanted to stick with steam: they have a large established library and don’t want to bounce back and forth.

They took that and said “ok we’ll give you free games every week until you have a large library here and won’t want to leave!”

Jokes on them, I now have a large library of completely free games on epic and still use steam for the games I want to buy because I refuse to support their exclusivity bullshit.

FlihpFlorp ,

Can you also launch the games through steam to get features like the overlay and stuff

Crikeste ,

You don’t need a subscription like Prime to get the free games? I was under the impression you do.

philycheeze ,

Hell no

Crikeste ,

Well that’s fuckin’ sick lmao

altima_neo ,
@altima_neo@lemmy.zip avatar

They were giving them away to anyone who made a free epic account.

Tarquinn2049 ,

There are even more free games from prime for the epic store, but the epic store has it’s own free games too that don’t require any subscription to anything.

JoeKrogan ,
@JoeKrogan@lemmy.world avatar

I get the games on epic but I haven’t even bothered playing them because I game exclusively on linux and just have not bothered with lutris / heroic etc. Proton with steam is just effortless and after years of tinkering with wine back in the day I want the simplicity

Zorque ,

I mean, Steam is also very functional and has a ton of support features. Especially for modding. It’s not just stockholm syndrome.

whenyellowstonehasitsday ,

with the amount of money they apparently had available to spend on this little jolly, it's absolutely incredible how much they fumbled things by trying to force their way in instead of asking nicely

if they just hadn't done exclusives, and had instead relied on their decreased split to offer lower prices, while chucking in the odd free game, they'd probably be a lot closer to the 50% of revenue they were hoping for when they started

valve is actively abusing their monopoly by preventing epic from offering the same product(s) at lower prices in their storefront, and their customer base are happy about it because of thoroughly epic pissed everybody off with their opening move

what chumps

Chronographs ,

I was actually excited about a new storefront that, if anything, might’ve made steam improve and then there was that game awards where it felt like every single game they showed was an epic exclusive and I lost all interest.

sylver_dragon ,

One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates. – Gabe Newell, 2011

Time and again, digital distribution platforms have proved this. Apple Music became a dominant music distribution platform at the height of Napster, LimeWire and other peer to peer sharing apps. They did it, because it was easier to just buy the tracks/albums you wanted than to dig through trackers and websites which may or may not actually have what you want. Netflix became the de-facto source for streaming movies at a time when BitTorrent was common and well known. Again, they made it easy and convenient, while not charging an arm and a leg. Steam also faced competition from BitTorrent piracy. But again, Steam made buying, downloading and running games easier than the pirates. And people are willing to pay for that convenience and not dealing with the crap which floats around the high seas.

And, so long as Steam continues to treat it’s customers right, those customers will keep coming back. And that’s the problem with Pitchford’s whole premise. Developers will go where the customers are. Sure, you’ll get the odd case of a publisher/developer doing an exclusivity deal. But even then, it’s probably limited, because the customers are on Steam. If another storefront wants to draw customers, they need to start with treating customers well. They will still face headwinds, as Steam has a large “first mover” advantage. But, success is going to start with making customers want to come back.

Davel23 ,

Didn't take long for Randy's tone to change after the Epic bribe money dried up.

Jaeger86 ,

I feel like he’s know for this shit like aliens colonial Marines

NeryK ,
@NeryK@sh.itjust.works avatar

The Epic Games Launcher is so far behind on features compared to Steam it’s not even funny. Epic chose not to try and compete with Steam on that front and to try and force users onto the platform with exclusivity deals and sweeten the deal with free games.

The one user-centric killer feature Epic has in their stack IMHO is the built-in multiplayer crossplay. Except it’s not even exclusive to their store ironically (you do need an Epic account for it though).

Giooschi ,

Epic chose not to try and compete with Steam on that front

Forget competing, they lack even the basics.

MHLoppy ,
@MHLoppy@fedia.io avatar

What do you consider basic that it's still missing? To be honest I've felt content with it as a game launcher for a while now, but I admittedly don't use it that often either.

frazorth ,

Linux support.

Caligvla ,
@Caligvla@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

No shit. Everyone was saying this from day one, but Sweeney was too stupid to realize it.

CaptainBasculin ,

After the Borderlands 3 incident, not surprising.

Telorand ,

I have some personal qualms about supporting “the biggest fish” in the pond, since that tends to lead to the Apples, the Googles, and the Microsofts.

However, Steam hasn’t particularly abused its market power, and has even used it to create a very successful Linux handheld that has both helped propel Linux desktop adoption and added upstream improvements to Linux in general.

I’ll revise my opinion when Valve changes to a more overtly predatory model of capitalism, but for now, I’ll enjoy only needing to keep a partial eye open.

magic_lobster_party ,

I'll revise my opinion when Valve changes to a more overtly predatory model of capitalism

I believe as long they’re not publicly traded )and Gabe is in charge), that’s not a concern.

Being public (or owned by a publicly traded company) tend to bring out these nasty traits. It’s more about finding ways to bring value to shareholders than the customers.

Shiggles ,

Private companies can be dicks. Public companies can and will be sued by their shareholders if they aren’t big enough dicks.

cobysev ,

I’m terrified of Gabe retiring or passing away. He’s been amazing for the company and I don’t trust anyone else to not want to use Valve for their own greedy purposes. The next president of Valve will likely ruin all the good things about it, thanks to late-stage capitalism.

I firmly believe in voting with your wallet; I normally don’t invest much long-term interest into businesses because you never know how they’ll change over time, but I’ve been so happy with Valve that I’ve gladly given them thousands of dollars over the decades for Steam games. My library is sitting at just over 3,500 games right now. I don’t know what I’m gonna do when Valve crumbles one day. I really hope they give me an option to download and play offline all the games I’ve bought, because that’s a massive library to lose.

I’ve never given a penny to Epic Games, and unless they get on-par with Steam’s functionality, I won’t ever buy or play any of their games. The one thing that might make Epic Games competitive (and could convince me to use their platform) is letting Steam users copy their libraries over, so we’re not just starting over from scratch with a new service.

That’s what got me on Steam in the first place. Back around 2010 or so, I discovered that if you had a physical PC game that was also in Steam’s store, you could type in the serial number on the game box and it would register and add it to your Steam library. That’s how I got my collection of early Call of Duty titles on Steam, as well as Half-Life and some others. I moved my physical game library over to Steam and I’ve been a Steam loyalist ever since.

snooggums ,
@snooggums@midwest.social avatar

Back around 2010 or so, I discovered that if you had a physical PC game that was also in Steam’s store, you could type in the serial number on the game box and it would register and add it to your Steam library.

There were a few older games I owned that had trouble with running well on newer hardware because of the messy manual updates. Did the seriel bumber i to steam and it installed and updated to a smooth running version on steam at no cost.

Yes, this tied the hard copy to the steam account so there was a loss of reselling unless they changed that at some point. But I never bothered with selling used games and these were old enough that nobody wanted them anyway so I got some free use out of something I was almost ready to throw out.

Phen ,

Anyone in charge of a non-publicly traded company will want to do what’s best for the company in the long term instead of milking as much from it as fast as they can, so I don’t think that replacing Gabe by someone else will be the end of Valve like so many people claim.

phdepressed ,

The problem is that you can never be certain about someone’s ability to stand their morals atop money until it is truly offered to them. Supposedly Gaben has turned down Billion dollar offers for steam. It is certainly not every person who will do so and it is hard to know how a person will react until that is truly offered to them. I don’t know that I’d turn it down (though I also don’t know how much Gaben makes).

Damage ,

Not necessarily. Sometimes even owners just want to milk as much as possible as fast as they’re able.

Source: life.

seaQueue ,
@seaQueue@lemmy.world avatar

I really hope GabeN has a continuity plan that involves a nonprofit governance board when he’s no longer in the picture. I don’t even want to imagine valve as a publicly traded company (or owned by a private equity company for that matter.)

big_slap ,

I’ll revise my opinion when Valve changes to a more overtly predatory model of capitalism, but for now, I’ll enjoy only needing to keep a partial eye open.

this is the correct approach towards how a society should support big buisnesses. the companies that don’t fuck us over will continue to get my public support and money

fluxion ,

They’re also directly funding linux devs to work on related projects, which the most mutually-beneficial way to build products around linux

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