They started out pissing off Steam users with Metro Exodus going exclusives and pulling it from Steam. Not a great first impression and a lasting one at that. Not everyone will care and will buy from epic, but alienating a whole bunch of Steam’s core users off the bat is probably going to ensure they’ll never win them over.
I claim games from epic and have bought from even origin and uplay, but I’ll probably never spend any money at epic.
I could be wrong, but I believe Epic or Sweeney threw something like that around about Steam's pricing model. Or maybe it was just an Internet thing. Regardless, the idea floated was that the only reason Steam took such a cut was it's monopolistic powers. What I believe jaden is trying to say is that that line of reasoning is being shown to be bullshit and that Steam takes that much so it can be profitable.
To be fair, if the EGS had as large a user base as Steam, it might be profitable at 12%… but we’ll never know because they spent shit loads of money getting exclusives plus who knows how much more to give away free games every week, while doing absolutely nothing to actually attract paying customers.
I’m surprised since I’d assume most people don’t care where games are from and just buy it from whatever launcher. At least that’s what people claimed throughout the years.
I don't think anyone has claimed that ever. Having all my games spread across 8 different libraries is a pain in the ass. Having Steam plus Blizzard's Battlenet launcher was already pushing it in my opinion and I dropped them too after Overwatch 2. (Which, hilariously, is also now available on steam anyway).
to disagree slightly: there were many different stores and lunchers before Epic even existed. Apart from Steam I have bought games and other digital goods on Gog, Humble and the now- extinct Desura. While totally avoiding the stores from companies as Ubi or Ea because they just suck.
Having an addititional account wasn't the big issue. There were already attemts to integrade several libs into one launcher, and if not you can at least run the start commands for that games out of steam.
What was sucking from the beginning was that arrogance of this sweeny guy, his promises of hot air, and his telling us of being the great saviour for all developers - while we as paying custemers were fed up with this bad launcher that is still missing every user interaction.
In the end not even the developers have profited from the store. Sales are not as promised, and in order to release a game on this platform sweeny blackmails you to give away older titles for free.
It’s the equivalent of “I don’t want to buy my produce from Mike’s Fresh Local Produce, electronics from Three Brothers Electronics Since 1978, and my car from Local Town Used Motors. I want to buy EVERYTHING from WAL-MART, where I have my WAL-MART loyalty membership.”
But, I also note the exception to that comparison - that Steam genuinely does work harder on their consumer features, and even trades away profit to let people buy games from other websites (eg, Greenmangaming)
In my eyes, part of the reason for this is that they forgot a key element of penetrating a market... you need a potential customer base that is actually displeased with the current available solutions and is actually looking for an alternative. And, by and large, the current storefronts had done a good enough work of pleasing their customer base that, when the Epic Store rolled out, few people were actively looking for a switch, to the point that no bonuses or goodies or exclusives that Epic offered could outweight the friction of moving from a platform that was perfectly serviceable, please and thank you.
The whole thing was just mistimed. They should have waited to see if Steam committed some sort of fuck up. They should have waited for some type of negative sentiment. I don't know. I know that developers did feel displeased with some of the conditions on Steam, but Epic could only do so much to win them over with 88%'s and paid guarantees and what have you, when they couldn't offer them the most important thing: a paying customer base.
I was never happy with Steam. It always seemed bloated with unwanted features that had nothing to do with playing a game, constantly wanted to run in the background and update, launched at a snail’s pace.
I’ve found myself liking EGS a lot more because it’s clean and simple.
Both are owned by big gross corporations, so really I’d prefer no launcher at all.
If speed is a problem, The EGS is painfully slow. I don't use is because it needs like 15 seconds to load the library (and it's just the part that is on screen if you scroll, it needs more time to load the games), in the rest of the launchers is practically instant
I have the opposite experience. Initial load speeds between the two are about the same, however in my experience steam can re-open instantly when minimized to the system tray, while EGS takes multiple seconds.
There are problems with Steam that a competitor could win customers from by solving those problems, but they didn't bother. They only went after the people producing games, not buying games.
As much as I like GoG, it doesn't really solve any problems that Steam has that I can think of. In fact, in several ways it seems like they've gone backwards in the last several years, imo (as a launcher/storefront alternative)
My understanding is that GoG does some work to make sure that old games they sell will work on new PCs. I have at least one game that is bugged on Steam, but works fine from GoG.
When I bought Vampire the Masquerade from GoG it came pre-bundled with the primary community bugfix patch, I thought that was pretty neat. It didn't come baked in, so they still give you the base version of the game, but I pretty much just checked a box on install and it added it on.
That said, Steam could arguably be a better solution for that sentiment, now that it has such good Linux compatibility. I doubt I’ll be able to run Windows 11111 on my computer in 2080, but I can always choose a Linux install.
Yep. I have not and will not give epic store money because they didn’t try to make a better product.
In fact they attacked me as a customer, in essence, by offering a worse product but then paying for exclusivity on various games. And in exchange they try to bribe me with free games.
Well, I’ll take the bribes, as I try to remember to collect my free games each week, but I’m not giving them money.
It does take time, but when you launch a product that's missing basic features (like a shopping cart, something almost every online store in existence has) you tell on yourself to your customers, and let them know they're not a priority.
I don't disagree that Steam's feature rich platform makes it hard to compete with on that level... but for fuck's sake, at least try a little bit. Especially if your first move is to say they're unfairly gaming the market by... providing something people want.
Sure, but the epic store doesn’t/didn’t have even basic features. Nobody was expected a steam remote play equivalent when the launcher first released, but they were at least expecting a cart, and reviews, and all kinds of other stuff that isn’t just a feature of steam, but features of storefronts in general.
exactly that was my thought on Borderlands 3.
And after gatting it for free my realisation was that it even is the worst part in the whole series. Not bad, but the story isn't that overwhelming as the stories in BL1 or BL2 had been.
Have to wonder if they would actually be totally fine if they just didn’t have to pay out such huge legal expenses in lawsuits, and for enormous settlements, and had just played it straight with customers, and just accepted Apple and Google’s fees.
Epic do not has economic issues, they earn a shitton of money between Unreal Engine licenses and Fortnite. It's only the Epic Game store and the issue is not the legal expenses is that nobody spends money in their store
IIRC the data they show every year says on average each users spends like $15 per year
Sure, but I was commenting more on how it seems that it’s an issue for them that their store isn’t being a source of income, but that they probably wouldn’t care about that nearly as much if they weren’t losing far more money by way of their own legal stupidity.
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