Alright I know people rag on Epic all the time… but it’s truly incredible how hard they keep dropping the ball. It’s been SEVEN YEARS since it was created and it still feels so basic and terrible to use.
The store is drab and uses huge chunks of space just to advertise fortnite and f2p rewards. Discovery is terrible and the store is full of crypto scams and AI spam shovelware, which is ironic because Epic started off being very selective about what’s allowed to be published there. The store also feels like adware because it keeps spamming random notifications and ads unless you turn it off.
The best part is that Epic constantly blames users for not wanting to leave Steam instead of admitting their store sucks. They keep spending tens of millions buying exclusives and giving away games for free rather than spending any time improving the store. Seriously, what are they doing over there?
I think Epic was very arrogant in their approach assuming consumers have no self control over buying things, so assumed they’d get them no matter what if they made things exclusive to their store. That pissed off vocal people would still not be able to resist not buying games.
Which actually is not a bad bet to make, but turned out to surprisingly not work as well as they hoped it would. And led to lingering animosity towards them that is still around years later.
And they still seem lost when it comes to trying to figure out how to win consumers over. It’s like they got advice from Randy Pitchford from 2K telling them the way to win consumers over is to berate them and attack the competition.
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I don’t engage with the community at all. I don’t buy games on Epic because their launcher is ass. And last I checked they don’t even have reviews for games. They don’t require disclaimers for anti-consumer measures either like Valve does for 3rd party accounts, Denuvo, etc. and they even had the balls to criticize Valve’s requirements for AI disclosure.
The fact that their CEO is openly anti-Linux is another good reason.
They just come off to me like a very anti-consumer company, like most all other corporations.
If you have ever used the steam workshop, read discussions, guides or news. You have benefitted from the steam community.
And reviews are also part of the steam community.I have not done any of those things.
The meme of “Valve maintains dominance by doing nothing but waits for competition to trip over itself” is funny but they do put part of the billions they make towards beneficial products for their customers.
- Remote Play (stream your own game from another PC)
- Remote Play Together (can stream a game to friends without a copy of the game and play together)
- Linux, Proton
- Well designed hardware innovations
Not out of the goodness of their heart but to drive sales and foster a customer base willing to return.
GOG and itch do try in their own way so I have bought from them, IMO they are the only competitors making serious efforts to build a mutually benefical gaming ecosystem.
Epic, Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA and the rest are like a trapdoor with a wooden board over it. Tim Sweeney is standing there hoping you won’t think he’s trying to find the right time to swipe the board away and get you to fall in.
Honestly, remote play together has probably sold me more games than all of the summer/winter sales combined. I don’t play multiplayer games much, so I don’t really invest in them. If my friends are enjoying one we will remote play it together and I can make a decision to purchase after that. Otherwise, I would just never purchase them. Because of that, I’m also now incentivized to purchase any remote play together games that come across my feed and I think would be even a little fun so that I can return the favor. If they enjoy it then I will often just buy them a copy and they will get to share the experience with their go-to multiplayer friends who also go on to purchase the game. That may not be everyone’s experience with remote play together, and it’s possible that they are missing out on more sales than they are generating, but I doubt it from my personal experience.
Being the go to gaming platform really just means you’re a money printer at a certain point. I have quite an extensive friends list on Steam, often adding people from conventions on steam and nowhere else. I have never once met somebody at a con and exchanged epic information with them. But because of my extensive friends list I’m introduced to a bunch of games that I would never have heard of or seen otherwise. It’s basically free advertising for all of those titles. I might not personally be interested in any of those games, but if I notice I have friends with a similar gaming history, I will look into whatever other titles they are playing as possible gifts for topics to bring up next time we’re chatting about games.
Also all the consumer friendly shop page stuff like labeling anti features
Not out of the goodness of their heart but to drive sales and foster a customer base willing to return.
I think this is partially true, but also I legit think Gabe Newell is ideologically a market anarchist that legitimately loves video games as a medium. He probably could have (more safely) made even more money doing something else considering his early Microsoft connections and ability but he didn’t.
Unfortunately as a result, the moment hes dead Valve might be in trouble long term. Depends on who takes over afterward and how they want to direct Valve. Pierre-Loup Griffais or Lawrence Yang seem possible given how successful Steam Deck has been. Its hard to get a read on them. They seem smart and well meaning though.
I have never had remote play together work smoothly enough to actually play. Even when on the same network the input lag is problematic.
Tim Swiney said on the game product page there should be no disclosure of Ai usage in the games, in response to Steam “forcing” the disclosure of what is being used Ai for. Just shows how I will avoid Epic Games Store even more than before. There are plenty other reasons. Epic will not buy me as a “user” by giving me free games (however I do not blame anyone else doing so, free is a great deal to be honest).
I collected free games for sure. I don’t even know if I played many of them. Tbh most of them were older and would go on sale on steam and I’d just buy them there.
Also steams Linux support is so good, I just can’t do epic
Does EGS have reviews yet? It didn’t last time I visited for a free game.
I’m (probably) not going to buy a game from a platform that doesn’t have reviews.
The only written reviews it shows are industry ones from OpenCritic.
It shows a user rating out of 5 stars but no idea how that is derived.
It’s just perfectly anti-customer.
It has, but not for everyone. They’re randomly offered to players, but I’m unsure of any hidden criteria to trigger the pop-up.
Sweeney is overly opinionated and will dictate to you how you will use your products. Valve largely short of the app’s drm just gives me the games and the app just sits in the background, this is why GOG is the true contender to Steam as they have a similar approach.
We don’t want to be told how to play our games, give us services to help do so by all means, but otherwise it’s a take money and leave situation.
Steam is easy to use. Egs always feels slow and bloated even though it doesn’t have things to load.
Just as a reminder you still can not see the games in your library for Epic without getting the desktop app or looking at your past purchases.
Absolutely dense how bad and how little you can do with their game store.
I don’t use EGS because it they actually locked in significant market share they would enshittify so fast your head would spin.
From what I remember back when EGS started appearing in the headlines, its main intention was to replace Steam. Besides barely delivering anything relevant other than freebies, and I could argue what people would want/expect after being fed so many “treats”, but something born only to destroy is fated to destroy itself. Perhaps due to being stores from other times, but even places like GOG and Itchio understood engagement is important (even if execution is not always pristine).
The launcher is still just awful. Its only purpose is to give me free games. It has never felt polished or finished at all.
Why would I want to use a worse product?
Almost a decade ago I was playing a game called paragon in development by epic games. The game was amazing, and then epic forced the devs away from what the game was, a MOBA, and forced the devs to make it more like a brawler with smaller and smaller maps. Epic ignored the community playing the game and acted shocked when the community left. While all this was going down, they were alpha testing fortnight, which was a plants, zombies clone with base building. When PubG took off, they killed Paragon, rolled the assets into fornite, and abandoned what fortnite was to turn it into a PubG copycat. (Highly recommend predecessor, a fan made remake from the released paragon assets with og heros, it’s on steam.)
Epic doesn’t have an original thought rattling around in the heads of their MBAs and C-suite. They copy what others are doing, and pray that some of the shit they fling against the wall will stick. They don’t want to take chances or innovate. Plenty of other options out there besides their game engine too. I’m looking forward to the fall of epic and EGS.
They got SO lucky with that Fortnite pivot, the original game was in development hell
At the end of your first paragraph I thought that if Epic are taking other ideas and implementing in their own games would work well in the long game. Just do what competition does, but better.
By the time my eyes flew to the first word of a second paragraph my mind acknowledged that Epic would never actually do something good for industry cause all they know is how to leech.
It only took maybe 0.04 seconds or so.
I’ve gotten more free games from EGS than buying anything and I don’t think I’ve ever bought anything on EGS. that’s all it’s good for to me.
News flash: epic was never anyones friend or any type of “good guy”.
I mean isn’t replacing community with consumerism one of the main goals of modern capitalism?
