The Epic Games store for PC and Mac [2018-12]

Epic being owned by tencent is more than enough reason for me to stay far away. That company is fucking garbage.
Technically not "owned by" Tencent, but they have around 40% share or something. Obviously a huge influence in the company.
 
So while Steam and GoG go about things in slightly different ways, they both invest a lot of money into their storefronts and operations in order to make life easier and better for their consumers while offering their developers various tools in order to promote their games.

Comparing the clients with their launch dates aligned, I honestly struggle to see much of a difference between GOG Galaxy and EGS in terms of features and roadmaps. At what point did you decide that GOG's feature set had progressed enough to stop protesting it with the vehemence you now use for Epic's?

I've said it before and I'll say it again. If Epic had gone about trying to compete by offering a superior storefront experience and focusing on the customer first, not a single person on the planet would have had a problem with it.

And nearly that same number of people on the planet would have used it, due to Steam's entrenched lock-in and network effects.

It's a combination of both them not doing anything to provide a good storefront and them trying to limit choice by throwing money at developers in order to sign exclusivity deals.

Are all exclusivity deals deserving of death threats, or just Epic's? Where is your crusade against those developers who take moneyhats from Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Apple, et al?

Epic recently had a promotion for 10 USD off any game purchase 14.99 USD and more. Only they didn't give a shit about developers and rolled out that promotion in all territories. So there were cases where developers games were being sold for 0 USD because they had discounted those games in less financially stable countries in order to help consumers there buy their games instead of pirating them. But Epic included those games in the sale regardless due to them being sold for 14.99 USD in NA.

What a clusterfuck that was.

That certainly was a clusterfuck, and a valid complaint. I hope Epic learned major lessons from the mistakes of that first sale on a then-5-month-old store, lessons they are incentivized to learn as the $10 discounts came out of Epic and not the developers' bottom lines (which, while obviously not damage-free, belies your claims that Epic didn't give a shit about them). Such fuckups are, of course, not an EGS exclusive, as the Steam Summer Sale one month afterward had devs caught unawares to see their games removed from user wishlists en masse due to Valve's promotional giveaways; do you still hold a secondhand grudge on their behalves over that as well?

But then, I guess there's a lot of people that support monopolistic behavior. So go on supporting the Epic Game Store.

Explain, clearly, how you believe Epic is a monopoly here or otherwise.

Epic being owned by tencent is more than enough reason for me to stay far away.

This is a lie. Epic is not owned by Tencent, and repeating this lie is intended only to repurpose anti-Chinese sentiment against them in the absence of anything real.

Obviously a huge influence in the company.

Since it's so obvious, what has Tencent's influence been on the EGS?
 
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This is a lie. Epic is not owned by Tencent, and repeating this lie is intended only to repurpose anti-Chinese sentiment against them in the absence of anything real.
40% of Epic is literally owned by Tencent.
 
Your posts make no sense. Instead of only disagreeing with others and coming up with what if replies, maybe try using some actual logical arguments to try and convince people why EPG isn't a bad thing.

For example silent Buddha made a good point about people not liking Epic buying up exclusives yet you come up with a reply about death threats. What does that got so do with anything?
 
Instead of only disagreeing with others and coming up with what if replies, maybe try using some actual logical arguments to try and convince people why EPG isn't a bad thing.

I wrote one post in this thread making those arguments six months ago, and left it at that. In the time since, increasingly unhinged attacks on the EGS have spiraled into a full-blown fucking hate movement, so clearly letting fake news and FUD fester in this thread without pushback was a mistake.

For example silent Buddha made a good point about people not liking Epic buying up exclusives yet you come up with a reply about death threats. What does that got so do with anything?

I don't see a good point. I see the same selectively sustained complaints about exclusives reserved for Epic, when bought exclusives have been a part of the videogame industry for as long as it's been one. To reiterate my reply: why are EGS exclusives so much more deserving of vitriol than all the others? Timed exclusives on a free launcher are such a low barrier compared to having to buy a completely different console or platform that I really can't see any rationale for this shrieking mob other than such deep complacence with the Steam monopoly that any competitor who cannot be ignored must be destroyed.

Silent_Buddha's point is so banal that it was preemptively addressed by the Ooblets developers last month, triggering an avalanche of abuse from entitled manchildren:

It's a combination of both them not doing anything to provide a good storefront and them trying to limit choice by throwing money at developers in order to sign exclusivity deals.

https://ooblets.com/2019/07/we-did-the-thing/ said:
I’ve read through all the arguments against Epic and they all basically come down to a couple core issues:

“EGS doesn’t have as many features as other stores”

As a user of both Steam and EGS myself, I haven’t had any issues with using EGS to buy and play games personally. But regarding the features that are still missing, that’s just sorta the way software is developed. Things take a lot longer to develop properly than people tend to realize and nobody comes to market with perfect software.

I remember waaay back when I plopped the disc for Half Life 2 into my PC for the first time and was forced to install this new thing called Steam. It was a barely-functional mess back then, as anyone who used it from that time period can tell you. It’s had like 15 years to improve. If it wasn’t worthwhile to improve, it wouldn’t have been and you wouldn’t still be using it.

I’m sure there’s a team of folks working on launcher features for EGS, but their work depends on the platform being worthwhile from a market-share perspective to keep going.

“It’s anti-consumer to have exclusives”

This is the most common complaint about Epic, but I don’t think people have really thought it through.

I can understand the frustration of having to buy different consoles to play the games you want, but there’s no extra cost to use EGS. The store and launcher just require a free signup. It’s not like having to pay for HBO and Netflix and Hulu to watch all the shows you want, it’s more like just having to press a button on your remote to change between free TV channels.

It’s also really disappointing to see folks threatening to pirate a game just because they can’t get it on the game launcher they’re used to. Feeling like you’re owed the product of other people’s work on your terms or else you’ll steal it is the epitome of that word “entitlement” that people use to discuss immature, toxic gamers.
 
I am hugely befuddled by the store wars. I view the stores, and more important the software front-end for launching games, as a means to an end. Like a lot of people my first experience of Steam was trying to install/play Half-Life 2 where the experience was just bad because it was the first version of the software and it felt like I had to install this community app to play a game. When I try to recall playing Half-Life 2, more than anything about the game I recall being annoyed at Steam. Chat options - fuck off, auto-load on boot - fuck off, etc etc. Steam isn't too now bad but the Mac client is doing with weird UI shit which isn't Mac-like and is very slow. And as my Mac keeps warning me, this Steam shit isn't 64-bit, what fucking decade is this? Steam doesn't crash, but the updates to the software are a bit much. Comparatively the EGS software feels a lot more streamlined. I don't miss the 'community hub' of Steam but I do like the Steam Workshop for mods.

Neither is more compelling than the other so I just tend to buy where something is cheaper or exclusive, if there is price parity I will use EGS so the devs/publishers get a larger cut.
 
If I want to know if a game runs well or has issues, Steam’s reviews and discussion forums are a pretty good first source. Epic makes me look elsewhere for that pretty important info. If we assume all Epic consumers enter their storefront educated about their purchase ahead of time, then, sure, what’s not to like about giving devs a bigger piece of the pie at the same price point?

Epic Store store started out geared toward developers and influencers, with the assumption that price (and exclusivity) was enough to draw consumers. Nothing particularly wrong with that from a business standpoint, but it’s hard to argue that it isn’t slightly tilted against consumers right now, at least in terms of information (quantity, not necessarily quality).

The barrier of entry to the store is relatively low (yet another login, yet another potential leak vector for your personal info), but how is it different than a legit Steam key reseller like the Humble, GMG, Fanatical, etc. (that I believe give devs a better cut than Steam while offering consumers all the benefits of Steam)? I guess Unreal Engine devs are the biggest winners.

I haven’t had many problems with Steam’s launcher or prices, so I may be missing something. That’s not stopping me from grabbing the free games (even though most of them have or will be included in a game bundle or PS+/GWG),.

isdn6, you still haven’t mentioned how Steam games were denied to you. Mind sharing? How do other stores avoid it?
 
If I want to know if a game runs well or has issues, Steam’s reviews and discussion forums are a pretty good first source. Epic makes me look elsewhere for that pretty important info.

In my experience, the discussion forums vary game to game. Visit the forums for Paradox games like Stellaris, CKII and EUIV and it's all very polite and well mannered, visit community hub for Assassin's Creed or Far Cry and it's pretty toxic out of the gate. And you can never ever mention you're using a Mac, even if you have an eGPU with Geforce 2080 and are boot camped into Windows, you'll just people telling you to buy a PC. :???:

I haven’t had many problems with Steam’s launcher or prices, so I may be missing something. That’s not stopping me from grabbing the free games (even though most of them have or will be included in a game bundle or PS+/GWG),

Steam's launcher is a bit rougher (laggy, less responsive) on linux and macOS. It didn't used to be this bad, it's got worse over time. EGS is noticeably snappier but maybe it'll get worse over time. I do appreciate an uncluttered snappy UI :yes:
 
Unfortunately the Toxic PC Master Race Gamers are the vocal ones, so anything like game reviews or discussion forums had to go on competing game stores that isn't their beloved.
 
isdn6, you still haven’t mentioned how Steam games were denied to you. Mind sharing? How do other stores avoid it?

I mentioned in my first post that I generally only bought games from stores that are DRM-free by policy, and while on that basis I hadn't installed Steam and wouldn't install EGS, I supported Epic's entry insofar as it brought some needed competition to a monoculture. From my perspective and priorities there's little difference between Steam and EGS, so gamers who were religiously for one and against the other at first seemed silly, and then, as the outrage and disinformation campaigns continued to ramp up, baffling and obnoxious.
 
I can haz a question
Can games bought via the egs be run without egs (like gog galaxy) ?
No. They added the ability to play single player games in offline mode back in Feb. Initially you couldn't even do that :)
 
That's not true. You need EGS to install, but any games that don't use DRM, like Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, can be played without it running or even installed. You lose benefits like automatic updates and cloud saves, of course.
Oh that's nice. I didn't know there were DRMless games on there.

What % of games are actually like that?
 
Unfortunately the Toxic PC Master Race Gamers are the vocal ones, so anything like game reviews or discussion forums had to go on competing game stores that isn't their beloved.

And this is an issue if you need support. Like a lot of communities that are simply too big to moderate, the asshats drown out folks legitimately willing to help and having been one of the latter in a large community, when it turns toxic you just lose to will to spend time in it so you stop reading leaving just the asshats. It's markedly different across the communities, sometimes by genre. RPG/RTS communities are generally pretty cool. But, for example, every reply to any new subject in the general forum for Fallout 4 at launch was almost entirely responses from Bethesda-haters telling everybody play New Vegas. WTF.

Steam community hubs? No thanks, if want to pain I'll go out and kick over a hornet's nest, the net effect is much the same and at least the Hornet's aren't mocking my choice of hardware or game. :nope:
 
So how long do we think until RDR2 PC is announced as an EGS exclusive? Or do we think this is the opportunity for TakeTwo to go the Origin route and create their own launcher?
 
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Doesn’t Rockstar have their own launcher? I thought physical copies of GTA V for PC came with Rockstar keys.
 
Doesn’t Rockstar have their own launcher? I thought physical copies of GTA V for PC came with Rockstar keys.

CDKEYs sell GTA V on PC and the platform is shown as Rockstar Social Club, which is interesting - I'd never realised this before. I assumed it was like Bethesda games (Fallout 3, NV, 4, Skyrim etc) which also have their own launcher but 'ownership' is bound to Steam keys - if bought through Steam.
 
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