Who the fuck cares what a man baby who tried to make PC gaming worse for all of us thinks?
Fuck this punk, FUCK the epic “store”, can’t wait until that POS goes down in flames and all the “it’s just a free game bro” people get their info sold to advertisers.
Not a fan of exclusives and every company having a launcher, but I could work with it if they didn’t require the launcher to confirm the licensing. So they’ve broken it in a way that forces you to use their shitty launcher, which just highlights how bad it is.
People can forgive a degree of shittiness, until they’re forced to use your shitty product.
I know it’s popular to hate on Epic because of the whole exclusives thing and… well, that’s fair. But people don’t talk enough about how awful the whole package is.
They need to burn it to the ground and start over. From scratch. Building the EGS software in UE was their first mistake. And it’s a big, ugly “using a hammer on screws” tier mistake.
You want people to not hate you and use your stuff? First, make sure your stuff isn’t terrible. Make sure it’s good. Make sure it does valuable things your competitors don’t. Second, don’t be jerks and try to force people into your awful ecosystem using coercive strategies like exclusivity.
Fix it, Sweeny. Until you fix it, nobody wants to hear what you have to say about it. We don’t want talk, we want results.
Despite these inconveniences, Sweeney remains optimistic and predicts that, over time, his strategy will better connect players across different platforms, thus surpassing Steam in the long run.
And what’s that strategy? Bribe users to come to Epic and but exclusive rights to games to force users to come to Epic to play them? Really? How has that been working so far?
Especially since Epic doesn’t really have much to offer over Steam, other than its games and exclusives.
It wasn’t all that long that where Epic Games had the infamous issue with the store. Since their store didn’t have a shopping cart, if you wanted to buy multiple games at once, you had to buy them all in separate transactions, but the store flagged that as suspicious purchases/fraud, so more often than not, if you found a bunch of games you liked, and bought them all, your account would get locked.
Didn’t anti-virus, spyware and/or malware apps flag Epic as malicious when it first launched?
Idk, I have never installed EGS but have claimed hundreds of free games, and played several through Heroic.
I’ve given up on the free games. I’m sure some are great, but I have enough of a backlog on Steam, I don’t need more indie games. Plus I may as well pay for indie games - it’s the AA and AAA games I want to grab for free.
Now they still have some great AAA games every now and then that I would actually like to grab for free, but due to how much stuff they put out that isn’t interesting to me, I’ve given up looking at it. Doesn’t help that I have to re-login every time, regardless of whether I’m using EGS or Heroic (which is a way better launcher and the one I have installed right now).
At this point I think I need to invest some time in getting an RSS client set up and getting notifications for EGS free games and other things I enjoy that I keep forgetting about. I guess I had notifications when I had the EGS client installed on Windows and it ran on the background, now I only fire up Heroic when I realize it exists.
Edit: No idea why I didn’t do this sooner, I already have Akgregator installed and found this rss feed for free games from a reddit comment. It’s a Steam community and posts games from several sources, including Epic.
Eh, I have repurchased some games on Steam after getting them free from Epic. I rarely play them, but sometimes it’s fun to dig through and find something I claimed. It takes like 30 sec on the web, so I do it when I’m in a meeting or something.
I have to re-login every time
Really? I don’t. Maybe that’s why I’ve bothered claiming them nearly every week. I just open the web page, click the free game, then check out.
New games drop every Thursday at 9AM PST, so it’s easy to remember. I WFH Thursday and Friday, so it’s easy to remember to claim it in the morning. But honestly, any day of the week works since it’s one drop per week.
It’s more frequent during their Christmas sale, and I always forget when it starts, and I don’t care enough to figure it out. So around Christmas, I check the next drop date and when it says the next day, I go on every day.
Yeah, the session token expiry time seems to be something really short. In comparison, Steam has asked me to re-login like 3 times over the last 7 or 8 years I’ve used it (I used to be an active hater and only had it for HL2 and claiming the free games like Portal).
Allow third party launchers and drm free games
The only thing stopping you from making it not suck, Tim, is you. You did the bare fucking minimum, and it’s not even very good at that.
It’s because he squandered any goodwill or even playing field it might have by being spyware. Valve earned its trust after people fucking hated steam when it first came out
The epic launcher is exact as spyware filled as the steam launcher.
But does Epic have a fan base that will ignore any and all bad actions taken by the company and viciously support it? No, that’s Valve fanboys
Somehow it takes even longer to launch than the Steam launcher.
Because EGS is literally built in Unreal Engine. Instead of a normal desktop app, they built it in Unreal Engine. Yeah. Seriously.
That explains a lot. Except my computer is pretty top tier and even full games manage to launch faster than Epic Games Launcher
Bit barebones reporting. Here’s an article that at least quotes portions of the interview: https://wccftech.com/epic-games-launcher-is-indeed-clunky-admits-epics-tim-sweeney/
I can only partially empathize with the argument that Steam is better because of 15 years of refinement. Yes, they have a big featureset, amazing APIs, developer kit, the workshop, the list goes on. There are a lot of technical challenges here.
However, what cannot be excused with this argument is the Epic Launcher UX being this clunky, lmao. Yes, making a bunch of UI is nontrivial and takes work, but its also not rocket science. The layered and staggered loading of different UI elements and overal slowness of the whole thing cannot be explained by the lifespan of Epic Launcher. Steam was just as responsive on my old Windows XP back in the day as it is now. Throw something like Dear ImGui at a bunch of juniors and they could make something that is snappier than what the Epic Launcher is now.
Google made a bunch of useful metrics called Core Web Vitals that represent responsiveness pretty well. I’m sure they would score awfully on all of them.
There is no chance you can make a consumer-facing product using imgui. The closest to that I’ve seen is imhex, which admittedly is way better looking than I thought was possible with imgui. But it is a tool for mainly developers, not a consumer-facing product.
Haha yeah you definitely don’t want to do that. It was meant as a slightly ridiculous hypothetical. There are definitely better suited UI libraries it there.
Ah Tim, here we go with the “look how brutally honest we are” schtick. Yeah gamers dislike the launcher, but it’s not even about that; it’s about your business practices. Did you forget the part where you took the worst pages from the Xbox/Playstation book and tried to build an exclusivity platform on PC? Trying to buy devs with massive handouts and buy users with free games? We remember, Tim. We remember the Metro Exodus launch and the rest. Personally I can’t do much more than to deny you every single cent I can, but please be assured I’ll be doing that, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. I don’t even have an account with you to pick up free games because that’d be one more account that legitimizes your shitty platform. Go bankrupt at your earliest convenience please.
I don’t share your frustrations. Games like Control, Alan Wake 2, and Ooblets might never have been made without Epic’s funding. The Ooblets developer in particular stated that Epic’s funding was crucial for their survival. I think exclusivity is a very fair and normal thing to request when funding a game. Valve does it and people are fine with that.
Maybe it’s just me but I can’t recall any occasion where Valve said “hey devs, here’s a pile of money but you’re not allowed to sell your game outside Steam”, have any examples in mind?
Had a gamedev from a respected studio tell me that same rumour about Steam pushing exclusivities. All it takes is a little digging to find out that’s false. Some people were upset when Steam was installed with Valve’s own games as a launcher, and later more and more devs launched their games on Steam as a store because they wanted to. The alternative, Games For Windows Live, was lame and unstable. It was just the a smart choice for those that didn’t want to make their own launcher. Also, don’t feed that other troll who’s been posting nonsense everywhere. 🤣 And yeah, even if some good came from milking tons of cash from spoiled kids (I was glad for Oddworld Inhabitants to name one), as a consumer it’s best to just delete your EGS account. If you got a game there for free that you wish to keep just copy its files elsewhere ASAP before deleting your account. Epic Games is known to have randomly deleted games from accounts because of server issues and their customer support will reject complaints about this by default, so getting attached to it’s library is not a good idea.
Oh! One more thing. Epic Online Services. If it’s optional in a game just disable it. You’ll have less connection issues and in some games you just won’t be able to play online at all if you don’t disable that crap. Same goes for Epic’s Easy Anti-Cheat, some mods let you disable that in a few games and doing so fixes some stutters it causes (night and day difference in Elden Ring). You’re welcome. 🫶
Valve never had to because they established a monopoly so developers did that on their own without Valve paying them. Meanwhile Valve has ripped off the entire gaming industry for its entire existence, charging absurd fees to gamers and developers and you guys are all so bought into their monopoly that you blindly praise them for it.
Gabe Newell is a billionaire. No billionaire earned their money. Every billionaire exploited people for it.
Right, and GOG also “had to” purchase exclusive rights to the games on its platform and force DRM. Oh wait, that didn’t happen.
Oh yeah, let’s all repeat the playbook of GoG, first you just have to spend a decade establishing yourself as the only publisher able to get former Soviet gamers to pay for games rather than pirate them, then turn that trust that you built with two third party developers into a storefront selling their classic titles for them for 6 years, then use your established customer base and goodwill to try and transition into being a proper AAA storefront.
Totally viable business strategy /s
Epic has fortnite and the FUCKING UNREAL ENGINE THAT REPLACED THE QUAKE 2 ENGINE FOR BEING USED IN EVERYTHING.
I think they’re on an even ground.
If you’re building a game, and you build it on Unreal engine, so it’s handling literally all of the rendering, development tooling, animation engine, game logic engine, etc. etc. you’ll pay Epic a smaller percentage than you’ll pay Valve for hosting your exe file in cloud storage with some reviews and comments.
Think 5% vs 30%.
Why do you think the fees are absurd?
Because per employee, Valve is one of the most profitable tech companies ever. That means they charged far higher fees than their costs.
So is your solution to have Valve hire more people and be less profitable? That would justify their fees? Or are you mad that the best market place with the most features is beating the pants off the last second cash grab platform that is just an extension of Ten Cent and the giant money pits sucking up actual developers?
You talk like a shill. Valve doesn’t need to charge less for the services they provide. They know what they have, which they have earned through good will and listening to feedback. Epic has nothing but money to pay people to shit talk Steam.
So is your solution to have Valve hire more people and be less profitable? That would justify their fees?
No, they should have charged lower fees.
You talk like a shill.
You’re literally defending a billionaire who made his money overcharging gamers for decades.
I don’t get the logic.
If my company makes 10.000.000 with just 5 employees, then it is one of the most profitable companies ever.
But this does not factor in how much of that money ist spend on keeping the infrastructure up, paying for resources or manufacturing.
You’re thinking of revenue, not profit. Profit is revenue minus costs.
And the Ooblets dev was also the one who mocked people who lost interest in the game after it became epic-only - adding a second reason to skip it.
They fund games so who cares if they keep losing user information
You mean the thing we, the customers, have been saying from day 1 is true? How shocking.
You prioritized game exclusively and free games hoping that would draw in gamers. Instead, people just hoard the free games and spend no money because they don’t like your platform. There was no real reason for anyone to switch and your choices left a sour taste in our mouths.
Heroic is a FOSS launcher that’s straight up better. They use a sponsored link to get some kickbacks when you buy GoG games thru their launcher. Seems worth doing every once in a while in order to donate to the actual best launcher for non-Steam games
TBH using Bottles to run an exe feels more refined than the epic games UI.
Using wine CLI comamnds is more refined than the Epic launcher
IMO they should have put their money into making it good before pushing it on users so aggressively, instead of apparently never since it’s been years and they still haven’t made the user experience good.
I’ve been playing more of my old retail games that don’t require any launcher or drm beyond requiring the disc. It’s nice.
I’m not exactly sure if “xfire on steroids” bloat of steam actually adds anything anymore these days. Steam is nice because my library is already there. Even the friends list has mostly been supplanted by discord now.
I use the epic launcher for 1 thing, to launch Fortnite to play with my son. I don’t want more steam features, I’d rather acknowledge its existence less. Start selling games without DRM that only use the launcher to update and it’s better than steam. That’s the 1 feature it needs.
Start selling games without DRM that only use the launcher to update and it’s better than steam.
So… GOG?
And Steam. You just have to be picky. Even GOG sometimes lets a game with it’s own DRM slip. https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_DRM-Free_Games_on_Steam
This seems a bit like missing the forest for the trees. Steam does not really let you know if the game is DRM-free, does not guarantee it will stay that way, and does not provide a reliable way to back these games up in a way where they could be used without the launcher.
Supporting DRM-free games is key either way, but being fair there’s A LOT of work to be done to make it more accessible. GOG’s installers for instance are not better than compressing a game’s files yourself. Certainly hope they’re working on better installers. If it was in my hand I’d have them employ someone who makes game repacks. Anyway, I’ll take a peek and push for Steam to tag games as DRM-free when they are.
Another thread where gamers praise Valve for ripping them off for years, and think Tim Sweeney is the devil for trying to break into the market.
You can break into the market without exclusivity deals. It helps to have a reason outside of “we want da valve money pls”
Given that they offer half the fees of Valve, it’s more like 'we don’t want to keep having to pay Valve 30% of our entire Revenue on every game we want to sell when we can make a profit running a store that charged half as much.
Good thing that most publishers don’t pay 30% on Steam, they get a better deal the more they sell. And Valve does a lot to help games sell better, such as not having an awful client.
Terrible take
