I’m genuinely shocked how much Epic poured into the store and it still lacks so much basic features. Sorting games is still extremely barebones, store is filled with NFT/crypto garbage, the store still looks like a college student’s first front-end project, and last time I used the launcher to pick up free games (last year), it was still slow as hell. What were they doing in the past 5 years aside from dropping millions on exclusivity deals?
Epic is going to have to prioritize the store and try some new initiatives while also doubling down on earning pivotal exclusives if it is going to have a chance. I also hope other viable competitors arrive.
I see some larger publishers bemoan the fact that Epic hasn’t caught on, but it should be pretty obvious why. Markets that favor the buyer more than they favor sellers will typically attract the largest user base, and the sellers don’t have a choice to not sell where the buyers are.
Epic giving away free games is a nice buyer friendly action, but literally everything else they’ve done, from paid exclusives to poor client experience isn’t favorable to buyers. They’ve created a market that no buyers want to use unless the product is free or literally not available anywhere else.
Giving publishers/devs better cuts is great, but it does nothing for you if all the buyers are on Steam instead.
Advertising better cuts to publishers doesn’t mean much when the price is the same across platforms. If epic was consistently 10% cheaper than steam it would get better traction.
They still have to sell for what the publisher/devs want to sell the game for, a bigger share goes to them if it’s the same price as it is on Steam.
Which I as a buyer don’t care about. That’s the whole point of the parent.
Just saying that it’s not Epic’s fault
They can’t sell the games cheaper than steam as the steam’s conditions doesn’t let devs sell games on steam if the game is available for cheaper somewhere else.
I don’t even get their free stuff. And if it’s only epic, I won’t even bother checking it out or well…ya know.
I hope it’s okay to ask, because I am being genuine, but why is using the Epic Games Launcher such a deal breaker for you? I have Steam, Epic, Ubisoft, Xbox, Battle.net and I’m sure more that I’m forgetting and I honestly don’t mind at all. It’s never been an issue for me but I think that I’m in the minority on that so I was curious to hear your thoughts.
Personally, while I do use Heroic to access games from the epic games launcher, I will probably never buy anything from them because of Epic buying exclusivity and removing Steam as an option from games that were crowd-funded.
Thank you! Ever since the start of the Epic Store, I’ve always thought this whole “exclusive” scandal was blown out of proportion. There is a MASSIVE difference between a game being exclusive to a $400+ console vs to a free launcher that you can install in 5 minutes and add your already multi-launcher platform.
I always say the reason they give so many free games is because the real price is in having to use that goddamn launcher
It does what it needs to do, you open it, your installed games list is on the left, click and play.
No, you don’t need a launcher to run an exe. lol
You realize there’s more DRM free games on Epic than on Steam even though there’s less games overall? If your standard for a good launcher is being able to start the game from a .exe then I’ve got bad news about Steam…
What bad news about Steam?
You can’t just launch Steam games without Steam running, Steam itself is DRM.
It really doesn’t, I tried finishing Industria while I had no internet and that electron piece of shit refused to open even though I set it up to work offline in the settings, thankfully the game had no DRM so I was able to finish it just by opening the exe.
Never had an issue with offline play, so there, my anecdote is just as valid as yours
I want to point out that Valve won’t allow games to be sold on Steam and be cheaper anywhere else. With the lower cut Epic takes games could be cheaper there, but Valve uses their dominant market position to force developers to set the same price on other marketplaces if they want to also be on Steam, which is essentially required.
I get some of the hate, but the “fuck Epic” crowd always annoy me. It’s such an ignorant position. That said, I don’t use the Epic store because it sucks to use. Fuck monopolies though. Steam has too much control. We need competition or we’re going to suffer in the future.
I am always suprised that people expected anything differently.
Epic was from the start doing things the wrong way, and I will not support any store that has exclusives.
Making a good gaming platform that could rival Steam would take A LOT of time and money and dare I say - no company is willing to lose that for a chance of one day perhaps being only slightly worse competitor that still can’t convince people to migrate.
There are only a few companies that could even hope to take on Valve, at this stage. The likes of EA and others. But by definition, their company culture means they’ll never be able to take on Valve.
Someone else made a comment about what will happen when Gabe steps down and I suddenly realize what a short-term golden age we’re likely living in, even with all the bullshit.
I’m far from being a business savvy person, but honestly, from business perspective what exactly is Epic offering that sets them apart from other competitors? Even if Epic fixed their launcher issues, how would they be different to Steam that is already well established for 20 years? That’s why I like GOG as Steam’s competitor. GOG focuses on selling DRM-free and retro games. If a game also happens to be available in GOG, I would prefer to buy it from there than Steam. Moreover, GOG keep old games well maintained and updated to run in modern computers; something that Steam is very poor at doing. What does Epic even do differently, apart from doing exclusives which any companies could do?
It’s slightly cheaper for developers to put their games on there. But that sucks as a business model, because game prices aren’t any lower so for the end user it doesn’t matter. And on features, Epic just loses every matchup against Steam.
Specifically, if they’re also wanting to be on Steam (the largest marketplace by far, so you need to be there) your game can’t be cheaper anywhere else. It’s a little fucked up that Steam can wield their power like that, but they essentially have a monopoly so they can.
@TankovayaDiviziya aren’tyou guys tired of talking about steam vs epic etc ?
Same discussions for years.Move on.
To be honest, I totally forgot about Epic until articles are popping recently that it’s not going well even after all these years.
Also, what’s wrong about discussing this? Epic is a good example of a business venture not doing well for failing to do one of the most basic business philosophy: set yourself apart from the competitors.
@TankovayaDiviziya it’s an endless discussion where people are only divided by their opinions about each company.
You literally opened the thread. People are gonna talk about anything you can’t stop them. You going in here like this is just foolishness.
@Xenny darn
If Borderlands 3 had released on Steam, I’d have probably bought it when it came out because I still had a lot of goodwill for the series at that time. Instead, I had to wait until the Steam release when the game already had loads of negative press. Exclusive deals are idiotic
Epic store not being profitable and despite the backing of Fortnite and Unreal Engine surplas being at the state that it is shows that it is probably much more expensive than expected to make a feature rich launcher. What epic has is more a glorified storefront like humble bundle or Fanatical but worse because it isn’t even selling keys for the platform of your choice, and they have to handle server costs of storing all the games too.
They didn’t invest in features.
They “invested” in paying out the ass for exclusivity and loss leaders thinking that buying users would result in users ignoring how terrible their store was and buying more games there.
I own a handful of games on Epic that I actually play. But whenever I see one of those games under $5 on steam sale I buy it. I think I’m down to two games left. Playing Fallout London on GOG gives me the same heebie jeebies
You at least actually own your games on gog
A lot of Steam games actually ship DRM free.
I like how many games they give away for free, but tbh I’ve never played any of them there. Some of those games I decided to buy later on Steam anyway just to do achievements (epic launcher doesn’t have achievements, cards, any meaningful statistics, etc).
https://www.shacknews.com/article/130172/epic-games-store-unlocks-achievements-for-all-games
They’ve had achievements for over two years… I swear all the anti epic crowd knows nothing about what their launcher is like at this point and just keep repeating what they read back when it launched… Just like the Steam boycotters back in the early 2000s
Are you serious? Obviously people don’t care about achievements on a platform that has almost no community-related functionality.
The person I was replying to said there’s no achievements on EGS, I showed them the proof that achievements are supported and they’re now mandatory.
I don’t care at all about community shit on Steam and consider all of it to be bloat, I still love the challenge from achievements.
I see. Still, I can see that for many people achievements with no value are no better than their absence. Platform provides value, and for now only steam provides a lot of it with almost each purchase.
I’m willing to bet all I own that most Steam users don’t care about their profile or people seeing the achievements they got but they still care about achievements as a form of optional challenges they wouldn’t have thought about otherwise.
If you mean just the percentage of users I might agree. But those people don’t really correlate with the users who provide most of the profit of the platform.
Pretty sure you underestimate what the average gamers spend, you’re in a bubble if you use the social features and it makes it seem like most people do, Steam has 132m monthly active users.
Sorry if this comes across pedantic, but in case anybody isn’t aware there are some games that offer Achievements (Alan Wake 2 is one I know).
I do agree though, Epic just doesn’t have the features Steam does. I don’t think their barrage of free games idea is a bad one, but it feels like an afterthought when it’s just not as fun to play them there. (Better Linux support would be nice too, at least there’s Heroic.)
They have achievements on all games, it’s been the case for two years
Edit: to be more specific, on all games on-boarded after March 9th 2023 (need to have the same achievements as on other platforms) and available at the dev’s discretion since May 2022
I just checked this again, first for game I had there for free but bought later on Steam - City of Brass - and couldn’t find achievements anywhere. I then looked into Fortnite and League of Legends - also no achievements. I then found there is “my achievements” link somewhere in my profile, from where I could click “browse games with achievements” and turns out, from few dozens games I own there not a single one has achievements.
I admit that I should have been more specific, the change wasn’t retroactive, so I should have said that achievements have been available since early 2022 and since early 2023 games can’t release without the same achievements as other platforms
https://www.exophase.com/platform/epic/page/27/?q=&sort=awards
Over 1300 games with achievements
If achievements haven’t been added to some games released prior to that it’s on the devs though.
This CEO may think it’s developer-friendly, but I highly doubt if Epic will keep such developer-friendly stance if Epic becomes a giant in this industry.
Epic burnt so much money on Epic store these years. If it succeeds, it’s very likely Epic will try to earn it back. From player? Will players willing to pay more in Epic store than the others? If the answer is no… Sometimes it really makes me wonder if these CEOs are really that stupid…
Yeah, obviously they’d want to earn it back and yeah, obviously from customers. You make that sound malicious. Steam is doing the same thing. With the amount of money Steam makes, they could drop their share in half and still make a killing. Epic wouldn’t have to do anything that Steam isn’t to recoup costs if they were competitive with Steam.
That said, Epic does take less revenue from developers, which is nice. This doesn’t translate to less for the end user though because Valve uses their market dominance to force the same price across marketplaces or you aren’t allowed on Steam. It’s fucked up.
Fuck Epic. I will never forgive them for buying Rocket League and ripping it away from my Linux library on steam. I will never do business with them, never play any of their games, never give them a dime, never even sign up to claim their free slop of the week. Fuck Epic with a cactus.
To be fair, Rocket League runs fine in Proton.
Also, to be fair…agreed. Fuck Epic.
