PC Gaming

Epic can take "some money" by selling third party indie and AAA games... or take "all the money" when people spend in Fortnite. It's a conflict of interest: Epic don't want a good store that do the job for other companies, Epic want advertisement for their single product. They give free games with the same logic you get free merchandise to gather people around place that cost money... they don't give the customer free stuff to make them happy, they don't give "free money" to publisher/developers because wants them happy (well, aside for the purpose to have happy business).

They want as much as people possible, regardless of their role as customer or publisher, to bring their business in their pocket.

The stupid piece of shit software doesn't tell me anything about the games. That's the problem with it.

I go to Steam and it tells me all sorts of info regarding the game. More videos. More screenshots. The data on the right side describing if it's coop/single/mmo/whatever. All the reviews.

HOW HARD IS IT TO COPY SOMEONE ELSE'S HOMEWORK?!?!?!?

It's a bad store more than a bad launcher (although it's also a bad launcher that lacks basic features)

Some of us have already been burned by EPIC and we aren't going back.

A decade ago, I was playing a game called Paragon that was being "beta" tested via EPIC. (I would say it was an alpha release because there were SOOOO many changes to gameplay and map, no sane person would consider it a BETA test.) Steve Superville was in charge. Early iterations were pretty sweet, match length could go 40-60 minutes because there were lots of mechanics that could dramatically shift the flow of a match. This is because the game was being designed as a MOBA, and it was a true MOBA. As someone who enjoys strategy and MOBAs, the early product was amazing.

Then the bean counters entered and forced production to reduce map size because they felt a 40-60 minute match was too long, despite no one from the community complaining about it. The bean counters forced more map shrinkage in an attempt to make the game play more like a brawler, when it was clearly not. They were just trying to ride the overwatch hype train because brawlers were successful at the time. Eventually Steve Superville was forced out of the project and they brought in Donald Mustard, because he was willing to turn the project into a pay to win riddled with microtransactions piece of trash.

These corporate bean counters alienated their entire customer base and acted surprised when the product failed. The best part is that while it was in BETA, they were fucking charging money for skins. When they closed the product you couldn't get a cash refund for the skins you bought. You got refunded in credits you could spend on their other products. I was alpha testing Fortnite at this time too. It was a plants/zombies type game with building. When they axed paragon, they rolled tons of those assets into fortnite, and redesigned the whole product to mimic PubG, because they wanted to ride the PubG hype train. No way was I willing to accept anything less than a cash refund for what I spent while I was beta testing their product.

Epic's corporate overlords don't have an original thought rattling around in their collective heads. Their entire business model is to flail around, copy anything that seems remotely successful with a reskin, and hope it sticks. Not even free products will convince me to download their laucher, or anything they put their mierdas touch on. /rant

Epic decided to enter the market by bringing the trash console exclusivity model to PC. Furthermore, they stated they will never support GNU/Linux. I will never touch this rubbish.

K

The whole idea sucks. You know what would be worse than Steam having a monopoly on PC game stores? Five different megacorps each as untrustworthy as Epic dividing the market between them, each with their own exclusive deals so that people who want access to most things need to sign up for all of them. Like with the streaming services it would only drive people back to piracy.

They took a look at Steam and decided the forums were the big thing missing? The community reviews of games are on some occasion useful, and the steam workshop is great, but the actual forum is just about the most useless feature of Steam I can think of. There are so many places on the Internet to talk about games, chat with people while playing games, post about games, etc.

There was a recent article about a dev saying that when their game was given for free on Epic, it increased their sales. But not on Epic Store... They increased on Steam...........

The problem with Epic is that they were with the wrong assumption that people will "just" migrate to a new launcher. You might be able to attract new players that don't have any baggage, but older ones with games on Steam, you'll need to climb the Everest to convince them.

That task would already be hard even if your platform had 100% parity in features with Steam. But it isn't, it lacks basic features that Steam has for years, so I'm not sure what they were thinking that giving free games would be enough (and I'm not saying this in hindsight, I've been saying this ever since they launched Epic Store)

GOG manages to get by because they offer something different. As long they offer DRM-free games, they will always have an audience. Steam can't compete with that, unless some day they decide to do the same. So GOG will always have a place in the market.

Epic on the other hand, is picking a fight with Steam, on Steam's territory, with Steam's rules. It could be a David vs Goliath story except David doesn't even have a sling or a stone.

Give us a native Linux client and a proton fork, maybe then we can talk

👍 good for you.