Gaben isn't going to last forever. But honestly the only other good games storefront is GoG. I'll continue using Steam for as long as it's still good.

Gaben has been hands off at valve for a decade. He's off breaking world records with research submersibles. Playing with his rubber duckies in the bathtub.

Both Valve and Epic are private companies. I still trust Valve over Epic, but I think technically Tim Sweeney has pretty much full control over Epic as well (for better or for worse).

In Gaben we trust.

When he's gone I assume it will go to shit.

Don't fix what ain't broke.

Rest assured, you didn't miss anything with the latest Saints Row. It was decent fun for about 20-30 hours, but it felt like much less of a game than any of its predecessors. I got the impression that the idea was to restart the franchise back to square one with minimal features so they could sell them back to us in future installments.

Linux gaming has come so far. I don't even run Windows anymore. Especially with how much open source AI stuff I use.

This and the paid exclusives mean I haven’t, and won’t use EGS out of pure spite.

That's what I always said, why use Epic store? As a user you get worse treatment. Sure price is the same or they give you some discount but number of services offered is far from being on par with Steam. No family sharing, no refund policy, no cloud saves, no networking system, no streaming, no card collecting, no steam play. I might not use or desire all of those but some people do.

The fact Epic had to resort to extremes like timed exclusives just meant I dropped those developers off of my list of wanted games as it only went to show they are willing to sacrifice your inconvenience and happiness for some extra money. For them it was probably making sure project succeeds but in the end I don't care about them if they don't care about me.

it's the paypal problem

sellers everywhere fucking hate paypal

but they all still use it because buyers fucking love paypal

💯

Although, I can imagine supporting Epic is annoying. Unlike even GOG, they don't have their own support mechanism like a forum. I can see why someone would release on Steam (and hence stuff like GMG and Humble) and even GOG but not Epic. Example Baldur's Gate 3, which released on everything except Epic. Although in their case Larian commented that the decision to not release on Epic was specifically to not show support for their exclusives-everything stance. Hence on everything except Epic.

Oh that's another really good point: Epic trained the consumers to open Epic weekly to get free games, then close it again. It's a weird thing to be known for.

Sure, had them cornering the sellers market worked out - unrealistic as it was in hindsight - then having the buyers already all have the store installed for the free games would have been a genius way of getting more and more people onto the store. But it did not, and now it has just cemented the Epic store as a place you do not spend money on!

Man the thing I hate the most about fortnite is that it killed UT4...

What did they do to Unreal?

It's not a hard thing to get. Over the years Valve has had relatively low amount of blunders and for the most part they were of the misjudging customer base kind but ultimately they have been very consumer oriented and have provided great value for the money. From universal refund policy to family sharing and similar. Their service consists of many benefits for the consumer but all of that is charged from the developer. Very hard not to like such approach.

Epic on the other hand did the opposite. They catered to developers and inconvenienced consumers. You get to pay the same price as everywhere but you are forced to get exclusives from them and you don't get any of the benefits Steam has. Am in fact surprised it gained as much popularity as it did. Goes to show people will sell their own pride for occasional free game you don't even get to chose.

Oh, don't mistake me preferring Steam (and GOG, for example, who have an actual value proposition to me as a consumer - unlike Epic!) to "Valve worship". They're simply the least bad option, but of course they're all huge corporations. Realistically though Valve has actually surprisingly little bad given the amount of money and market control they have, so eh... for now, I'm happy buying about half my games there (usually ends up that way, though I prefer GOG for games also releasing on that).

I remember when Valve and Steam was the great enemy in the early 2000s.

Everyone hated how buggy it was and needing it to play Counterstrike.

steam is good and egs sucks. it's not worship, just consumers voicing their preference for a better product.