I love the idea of getting older AAA titles for free, but hate the idea of installing the Epic Games Launcher on my computer. Where do you guys stand on this?
It also makes me sad that Epig Games has fallen so far. I grew up on Unreal Tournament and now I don’t want them anywhere near my computer.
I have never installed Epic Games Launcher and still claim and play their games for free. It’s pretty easy:
- claim games on epicgames.com (I use my phone)
- install Heroic and login to your epic games account
- play your claimed games
I play on my Steam Deck and on my Linux desktop, and EGS isn’t supported on either. Seems to work fine.
Also works for prime games. And if you are on Linux especially GOG as well.
You can get free games with torrenting, so it never appealed to me.
I don’t want or need more accounts, nor do I want or need more launchers.
I have claimed most of the games and some have been real gems. I’ve bought a few games too because they were the cheapest option.
Personally I don’t have a problem with the Epic launcher as it’s just a launcher which is fine by me. I use GOG Galaxy anyway and I’m not a fan of Steam either so don’t care about that aspect.
I only actively seek games I want to play. I have negative desire to hoard games I know I will never open. I probably wouldn’t take the clutter even if they paid me to take it. Steam or Epic.
My Steam library is caked up with a bunch of decade old Humble Bundle packing peanuts and frankly I kind of wish it wasn’t.
On the rare chance a game I’ve been wanting to play is the free givaway, I might take it if it’s on Steam just because I’m already invested in that platform. If Epic was the one giving it away I probably wouldn’t bother. I don’t need my games library splintered across multiple launchers. I’m already annoyed at having the one. I’d prefer no launcher at all.
You can hide games on the steam library. I do that to not see clutter.
I’ll claim the games if they look interesting but usually someone else has to tell me what’s on there because I don’t look. I won’t buy a game from epic though, so this marketing tactic is lost on me.
Not lost, you boost their active user numbers
True, but active user count doesn’t increase revenue. And I imagine higher active users increases the cost Epic pays for those free games.
So I feel like claiming is a net drain.
What’s wrong with Epic Games launcher? I understand that they require some sort of delivery mechanism, even if you don’t use Epic you have to use Heroic or something. Is there something else I should hate?
Some people don’t like having to use more than one launcher. Some people don’t like Epic buying out games and making them exclusive to EGS (which keeps the price artificially high for longer). Some people just feel like the launcher, er, launched without feature parity with Steam, and has made very few improvements since launch. I’m sure there’s more reasons people dislike Epic. I don’t overly care but it’s certainly not a preferred platform for me.
They have been in hot water before when they were caught scraping data without consent and sending it back to Epic. Folders/files and apparently steam user info?
The client still supposedly phones home with some encrypted data and nobody is completely sure what it is, they say it’s anti-cheat stuff, but then there’s this:
“40% of Epic Games is owned by Tencent they’re a Chinese Tech Company which the Chinese Government has a certain say in what they do. LITERALLY without Tencent Epic would go under they’re the only reason why Epic Games has gotten so many exclusives and given away so many free games. There is LITERALLY a board member in Tencent that was appointed by the Chinese Government.”
So can we trust them? Probably not.
I claim the free stuff. I don’t really understand all the hate they get. It’s just another digital software storefront for gaming. It seems to do its job. Click a button, download the game, play the game. I have no reason to be mad at them.
A big reason people dislike Epic is due to their forced-exclusivity on a lot of games. A popular, highly-anticipated game will only release the PC version on Epic for the first several months, and then it’ll appear on Steam and other platforms, forcing fans to either wait or sign up for a new platform that they didn’t want anything to do with.
And it’s just one more piece of spyware on your computer to serve as a possible vector of attack from hackers.
This is c/patientgamers, so I assume that first reason wouldn’t bother most of us here. I’m curious about the spyware assertion though. Were they caught doing something shady?
iirc it was a bit of a controversy when Epic was newer that they would- without asking- just grab a bunch of information from a Steam install on the same PC. Stuff like your friends list and your play history. They did it by directly looking at local files, too, so it wasn’t even through Steam’s API.
