It’s absolutely terrible, if it wasn’t for the free games no one would use it at all.
I am waiting for the day that they hide our “free”-library behind a subscription.
They sure aren’t making money from me. Thanks for the free games I guess.
I have hundreds of free games on it.
I just object to digital only games in principle, unless at a huge discount.
Even my Steam account is like a thousand games from bundles.
The good news is that most free games were DRM free!
They had GTA V for free at some point
Free games were a great way to “get us there” but not a great way to monetize us. They haven’t come up with that. I’ve bought exactly 3 games on Epic, two that I price-camped because they were too expensive. The free games didn’t influence my decision.
The third was a free game where they had the best price around on a “more complete edition”. (Pathfinder Kingmaker). I feel like they could’ve done more of that if they wanted to monetize the free.
But what all these game stores need is to change the rules. GoG tried by making their Galaxy app pretty good at importing others’ apps. I feel like someone (Epic? lol) could go all-in supporting and helping maintain an open-source game management app like Playnite, so people who use that app would put Epic on the same tier as Steam, and then Epic would just have to win on an even playing field.
And if Epic provided a “find your price in all services” extension to an app like Playnite, and then just made sure to be $1 cheaper on everything, they’d dominate the market.
Or they could just continue doing what they’re doing and keep losing money.
The user interface looks and feels like it was designed by the 17-year-old “gifted” nephew of the CTO as a gig to make a little money before going to Uni.
Blowing up millions per years because you couldn’t be arsed to hire a senior UX/UI expert and a proper experience team to make that website is the very definition of stupid.
For those of you that don’t play rocket league, it is a prime example of just how badly epic is willing to fuck up a game for a dollar. Literally Mr. Crabs.
This December 5th, they are removing player to player trading from RL. Why would they alienate such a core faction of their player base?
Fortnite.
Apparently, that game is getting a racing mode and they want you to be able to drive your rocket league car in Fortnite. Apparently, the only possible way to make this happen is to eliminate player trading.
Now, every single high value item like alpha boost ($5-7k) or a white hate ($???k) is worthless. Now, if there is a particular item you really want, you can wait for rng to drop it, or nrg for it to show up in the shop where you can expect to pay a minimum of x10 credit it would have cost you on the trading market.
I expect a class action lawsuit. They locked player to player trading behind a purchase of credits. They made hundreds of thousands of players pay for a feature and are now removing that feature in a blindly idiotic money grab.
FUCK EPIC GAMES.
I play RL daily but had no idea about any of this (don’t trade nor particularly care about items).
I mean they made the app using a fucking game engine. Who knows what stupid idea they will come up with next.
Makes me think of the old saying (so applicable in IT, and I say this as also a mea culpa for what I do sometimes) that “When all you have is a big bloody hammer, everything looks like a nail”
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Id be more inclined to use the launcher if it was more like steams. The epic launcher feels more like a store than a library of my games.
Exactly.
The only time I ever look at the store tab in Steam is when there’s a sale on.
Otherwise, all I ever see and use is my library.
Steam has been improved over decades, epic has to play catch-up
No. They could have taken a look at what their competition does and start from there. When I’d want to sell a new phone I sell one that has festures of a common phone these days. What I don’t do is start with a brick of a phone and say “Please buy it, I have to play catch-up.”
Bad example as the phone can’t be physically updated as time goes.
Perfectly fine example. You are just dying on the hill of your pretty stupid argument.
Tell me how you change a flip phone into a smart phone with over the air updates, please.
Also it wasn’t me who made the original argument.
You are missing the point or that is a strawman. The argument ist that it is stupid not to learn from others.
To use your example: It is stupid to not release a smartphone in the first place.
I was just pointing out that it wasn’t a good comparison because you can’t change the physical limitations of an object over the air, while a software can be updated from being barebone to being full of features overnight. Just look at Steam on release vs today. Sure EGS could/should have included more features on release, but these things can be added and once it included the basic functionalities to allow people to purchase, install and launch games it was a gamble between leaving money on the table by pushing the release back and losing customers that would be angry enough not to come back because of what was to be added at a later date.
Steam pretty much invented online gaming retail.
Any competitor can and should learn from that instead of starting over from scratch.
As I mentioned elsewhere, better to release a product that has the necessary features to start having an income and then add extra features vs releasing a product full of extra features at a much later date and have to troubleshoot everything at once.
Heck, how many Steam users actually care about cards, achievements, reviews and so on? To me it’s Steam that’s full of useless stuff that’s only there to keep people addicted to the platform and to suck money from whales, there’s a reason why they now have the list of suggestions to get you to add games to your wishlist, they can create a profile and adjust the front page to your taste so you spend more money! Super ethical isn’t it?
MVP in this market doesn’t mean “make an interface that can sell games” because plenty of those existed alongside Steam and they all died: Discord’s store, Direct2Play, etc… Even now many publishers who left Steam are coming back because the shift to their own launchers went very poorly. Why? Because no one wants to have 6+ launchers.
You need to either be more than just a storefront and launcher, or offer something Steam doesn’t. GoG did the second by selling old games Steam just doesn’t have. To do the first, you’d have to build an integration with other services… like GoG Galaxy. Huh imagine that, Steam’s only competition that has lasted is actually trying to do more than just be a store.
Yes and no.
It’s not like Epic had to start where Steam started.
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It didn’t but creating a new Steam costs money and it’s better to release a working product that doesn’t have all the features you want it to have to start bringing in money while continuing to update it instead of waiting even longer only to have even more features to troubleshoot when the product releases while still bringing in the same amount of money.
And they focused on the wrong things right out of the gate
The wrong things? You would have wanted them to start with cards, forums, achievements but no way to install the games after buying them or something?
That is true for all the community driven stuff like forums and mods, but laying the groundwork and including basic features would’ve been easier when starting from scratch.
Even the first versions of steam that came with hl2 back in the day were more usable than epic’s trash launcher.
Still not usable
If you’re on a VPN, it reloads about every minute, meaning you can’t even scroll through your game library, or read the summary or watch a video for a game you’re considering buying. Their shoddy, clueless coding literally makes it impossible to shop in their store without disconnecting from my VPN, which is not happening.
Don’t they hook telemetry into their downloads? Maybe like… stop doing that? Why would anyone purchase an objectively worse product for the same price?
But it’s free and-or exclusive. I’m honestly terrified of how much money they have from Fortnite+UE they can buy their consumers into surrendering, and failing at it.
To me, Epic Games store is nothing. They have no official Linux support while Steam does. And also games purchased on Steam works on Steam Deck too!
Good! Let’s keep it that way
Objectively, for such a third party store, their prices are just too expensively normal. If they dropped them instead of giving and paying for free copies of games to people who’ve shat on their store, they’d probably be in a better position.
The only thing I use EGS for is Unreal, having the marketplace built in is pretty nice, but how Unity does it is still better.
Here’s what it’s like being their neighbor lol https://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2023/11/03/epic-games-cary-hq-will-it-ever-happen.html
Redditors are going to have foam in their mouth over this.
Personally I bought games on EGS and then always ran them without any issues with Heroic, the FOSS GOG/EGS launcher that also works on steam deck. I got better deals on epic than steam in recent years (especially back when they did coupons) and the devs got a better cut as well. It’s a shame to hear they’re not even breaking even, I think even GOG is at least self-sustaining.
That’s the thing, Devs usually don’t get a better cut, publishers do. So unless their publisher isn’t hoarding all the money (lmao) or they self-publish their games, Devs don’t even get to smell that extra cut.
You’re technically right but you know what I meant. I bought Hades on EGS with a coupon and Supergiant got more money than they’d get if I got it on Steam, and the game worked flawlessly there from early access to today as well. Everyone wins.
Why does a better cut matter when they cut sales by 99% by being a malware-tier dumpster fire of a platform no one is stupid enough to use? 88% of 1% as many copies is a huge loss of value.
Steam does more to earn their 30% than Epic does to earn even 1%. And games earn far, far more revenue on Steam than the Epic Store.
But if it’s available on multiple stores/platforms (like Hades) and you’re going to buy it anyway, might as well buy it from the place where they take the smallest cut.
Or you can buy it on the platform that actually functions.
And isn’t openly fucking malware.
You mean the thing about scanning Steam files and that they fixed years ago? Because with that attitude you shouldn’t be using Steam either considering they got caught scanning all the domains people accessed years ago.
Epic Games Store left my gate open and my dog ran away. 1/10 only because I’m impressed it got the gate open.
The actual developers using it obviously disagree so I’ll take their word over your incoherent childish rant.
The small handful of games that have chosen to release via epic did so for the up front cash advance to mitigate their risk releasing their game.
Virtually every single one released on Steam the second their exclusivity agreement expired, because that’s where all the revenue is from.
Yep, it’s not a bad thing to have an alternative to the popularity lottery. Heck, people make the same choice every day by going to work and not spending all their money on lottery tickets, guaranteed income vs taking a chance to win big and considering how many games there are on Steam and how few of them make their money back, it’s not a bad move to have a contract telling you exactly how much you’ll make by releasing exclusively on a specific platform for a limited time.
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