I can’t seem to find that one comment explaining the issue with them…
But for the sake of promoting conversation on Lemmy, what’s the issue with Epic, and why should I go for Steam or GoG?
Note: Piracy is not an answer. I understand why, and do agree to a certain extent… But sometimes, the happiness gained by playing something from a legitimate source is far greater 🥹… coming from someone who could never ever afford to purchase games, nor could my parents… Hence I’ve always played bootleg, or pirated games.
Epic’s customer service sucks. Consider my last experience from a prior xmas sale:
- had multiple games in the cart with discounts applied, checked out with paypal, but for whatever reason the communication broke and didn’t go through
- my cart then got stuck in a limbo where I couldn’t check out with any method to receive the discounts, everything was full price again
- opened a customer support ticket to get the problem resolved, then went through 3 days of back and forth, explaining the situation over and over because
- each of your replies are handled by whoever the next agent is
- who apparently don’t read any history of the ticket, so they provide feedback or advice that already didn’t work
- and it can take a full 24 hours or more to get a reply that ignores all previous replies
- by the time the error was resolved by a competent person, the sale was over by only a few hours
- despite the fact that I only missed the sale window because their reps were incompetent, they refused to make any exceptions to apply the sale prices I had been trying to checkout for 3 days
So, fuck them. I only claim free games from them now.
And I concur with problems other people have mentioned.
each of your replies are handled by whoever the next agent is
The names of their support agents is truly odd. I’ve seen people post complaints about their support that is little more than this:
Hi, this is Charlie Uniform November Tango here to help.
After receiving all the information that you sent us that we requested, we sadly can’t help because reasons.
Thanks for being an epic gamer.Hilariously bad.
Basically Epic like every other publisher has created their own launcher/store.
They aren’t trying to compete on features and instead using profits from their franchise to buy market share (e.g. buying store exclusives).
The tone and strategy often comes off as aggressive and hostile.
For example Valve was concerned Microsoft were going to leverage their store to kill Steam. Valve has invested alot in adding windows operability to Linux and ensuring Linux is a good gaming platform. To them this is the hedge against agressive Microsoft business practices.
The Epic CEO thinks Windows is the only operating system and actively prevents Linux support and revoked Linux support from properties they bought.
As a linux user, Valve will keep getting my money and I literally can’t give it to Epic because they don’t want it.
I’m pretty pragmatic. While I appreciate what Valve has done for PC gaming, I like the idea of them having some legit competition in the space. So when the Epic store started, I bought a bunch of games there to give it a shot. Outer Worlds, Control… And of course I grabbed up a bunch of free games, too!
…and then, over time, I’ve repurchased all of the games I liked on steam anyway.
Make of that what you will.
The only thing I make of that is that you are bad with money.
Ha ha - I mean, you’re not wrong!
Tim Sweeney hates linux so that’s why I prefer Steam over it. Even though Epic gives people free games, the games were always free anyway (unless you want multiplayer), I know you said piracy isn’t an answer though.
I refuse to patronize Epic until they continue working on UT4. I’ve been playing their games for 25 years and they make fortnite then decide to just drop all of their long term fans.
As for minor issues, EGS does not have feature parity with Steam or GOG. They don’t have user reviews, for example. This makes it a worse user experience.
More importantly, Epic has a habit of anti-competitive or anti-consumer behavior. When EGS first launched, they were keen on doing console-style timed exclusives, even for games that were already purchasable on platforms like Steam.
Lastly, Epic has a history of neglecting or shutting down games. A few of their older games were taken offline permanently when Fortnite started gaining traction. They then purchased a few studios, namely Psyonix (makers of Rocket League), Mediatonic (Fall Guys), and Harmonix (Rock Band/Guitar Hero series). These studios seem to be a shell of what they used to be. Psyonix’s first major project under Epic was Rocket Racing in Fortnite, and this project seemed to be prioritized over Rocket League and even caused the removal of core features of Rocket League. Harmonix worked on Fortnite Festival, but that came at the cost of Fuser, which shut down and was delisted about a year after launch. As for Mediatonic, I don’t think they worked on anything else yet, but a large portion of the studio was recently laid off. Needless to say, fans of the affected studios aren’t happy with Epic as they’re being treated as 2nd-class citizens compared to Fortnite players.
Exclusives suck for everyone. Especially when Epic started out, they only had payment processors in certain countries. This meant that some people literally had no legal way to play the Epic exclusives. I’m not sure where they stand today, but that annoyed me enough, along with other shenanigans by Epic and Sweeny, that I avoid the whole ecosystem.
Personally my main gripe is their aggressive strategies to force people into their garbage-tier launcher. Compared to Steam it’s just miles behind, and it’s yet another app to run on your PC. All my friends are also on Steam, and Steam had Linux support. However, if all you want to do is launch singleplayer games, you don’t mind the Epic launcher, and you get a good deal, then do whatever you want to.
This.
I fundamentally have no issue with the Epic Games launcher. Steam needs competition to keep it in check. Without alternatives, Steam can and will strangle Dev profits, which is a problem. But Epic is a mediocre service, another app to be running, and actively going out of their way to prevent games from being on the platform of the consumers choice, which I am not a fan of.
Related note: does Epic have any DRM free games? Even Steam has a fair portion of games that are DRM free and work perfectly well from a flash drive on a computer that doesn’t have Steam installed. As far as I am aware, Epic does not.
There’s just a series of minor ways in which epic is worse, and I don’t like having front-end clients for my games as is, so a second, competing alternative going out of its way to push me into using it rubs me the wrong way.
Where can you find what steam games are drm free?
Steam DRM is optional and implemented by the developer.
You don’t need all store fronts running at once on your pc though. Just boot up what you need for the game you want and it’s just six and two threes, whether it’s steam or epic, or any other launcher.
You don’t understand, it’s ok if the extra app you need to run is Steam, it’s not ok if it’s Epic!
The issue is that I miss features when using Epic. Additionally, games from Epic are not visible in my steam library which leads to me forgetting that they even exist. And also nobody uses it, so there’s no community feeling like I have with all my Steam friends.
I don’t mind it for free games though. If they give me a game for free, they deserve me using their launcher for that game haha.
Real answer is branding. Steam has cultivated an absolutely stellar image of being the “good guys” of gaming, and it’s super hard to counter that. Epic came on the back of publisher-specific launchers getting a bad reputation for both legitimate and illegitimate reasons, so you end up with a weird, paradoxical defense of Steam’s quasi-monopoly.
I guess tehcnically GOG is exempt, in that they also have a good reputation and they’re objectively more radically pro-consumer than Valve by a huge margin, so the lines get blurred there.
Steam has cultivated an absolutely stellar image of being the “good guys” of gaming
How are they cultivating this exactly? I mean other than just doing consumer-friendly moves like free updates, supporting open source, etc. This makes it seem like Valve is out there pushing out pro-Steam propaganda or something, but does Valve even market Steam at all? They don’t do interviews or put out commercials or buy billboards. They put up a few silly YouTube videos to advertise a sale or new product and then it’s radio silence for the rest of the year.
Well, that’s cultivating an image.
I have this conversation weirdly often around here. Steam launched under a TON of pushback. They effectively did what people criticise Epic for doing and locked down Half-Life 2 under Steam, and in turn under always-online DRM. People were very angry, nobody wanted that crap and it was pretty controversial. As I recall, Valve didn’t react much. They just kept going, adding more first and third party content until they were the de facto storefront. They targeted their publishing and purchasing strategies to keep content first and consistently avoided controversy via the silent treatment, outside of having Gabe talk in public here and there and keeping his persona out there, along with a couple of select employees, although once they phased out game development for pure publishing even that went away.
They are very careful to not demistify themselves and to keep that semi-accidental conflation of being the de facto monopoly with being pro-consumer. It’s kind of insane how resilient to speaking publicly or being perceived as speaking publicly they are, especially with how much they had to let go of that in regards to the scandals related to CS gambling grey markets, game greenlighting processes and a few other key snafus. But it works. The brand is sticky and they know if they don’t say anything the community will do the job for them, so they just… shut up, avoid constructed corpo PR when they can and favor having their content makers handle communication whenever they can, including product launches.
By the numbers Valve is a fairly standard tech upstart: comes from Microsoft vets, uses traditional disruption tactics, throws everything against the wall to see what sticks, fixes broken things later. Their branding is up there with Coca-Cola, though. Hell, Disney wishes they looked as squeaky clean as the “we had kids gambling on gun skins” guys. It’s kinda nuts.
I mean, good for them. I don’t know why they aren’t more of a mainstay in PR and marketing degrees. It’s kind of amazing.
As someone who bought Half Life 2 when it was released …
I only remember people being excited about Steam, Web stores weren’t a thing back then and they were the future! (It was the following years of audio and ebook stores locking stuff down and evapourating that taught us to hate it).
Game/Audio CD DRM hacking the kernel and breaking/massively slowing down your PC was pretty common back then and Steam’ s DRM didn’t do that.
The HL2 disc installer didn’t require you to install Steam, once installed it asked you to setup Steam and there was a sticker under the DVD with the Steam code for you to enter.
You were then rewarded with a copy of HL2 Deathmatch and Counterstrike Source.
Steam wasn’t always on DRM, back then ADSL/DSL was relatively new and alot of people were still stuck on Dial Up modems.
Steam let you sign in and authorize your games for 30 days at which point you would need to log into Steam again. This was incredibly helpful feature for young me.
I was there, I was an adult. I was mad and I was online enough to know I was not alone. In fairness, some of the being mad part was from people being locked out by login and server issues, which is a slightly different kind of mad.
But I personally did not play HL2 for a while because I was boycotting Steam. I remember so distinctly holding the box in my hand and going “hell no” at seeing the “Steam mandatory” sticker on it and putting it back.
You’re technically right that I wasn’t always online, though. It required you to go online to authorize it, as you say, but that was more than enough. I already had a standing veto on anybody attempting it.
I pirated HL2 when it came out entirely in protest of Steam. I don’t know how long it took me to relent, because I don’t have my Steam account on hand at the moment, but I think it was a couple of years at least. Honestly, to this day I still default to GOG, so I’m still a bit testy about it.
This image you are painting of Valve is just… funny to me. Anybody who plays Valve games could tell just how oblivious they are to PR or marketing. This is a company composed almost entirely of engineers that basically only communicates in patch notes. If they are trying to cultivate an image, they are doing a hilariously bad job at it.
That’s a hilarious thought. Valve is primarily an online storefront company that runs organized sales events multiple times a year. Their marketing arm is ruthlessly efficient. They invented maybe half of the GaaS strategies in the books and are arguably still one of the best at deploying them.
And they do have at lest one more vector of PR. Normally you’d think third party relations is a different category, because it’s a business-to-business thing, but when you get as big as Steam and have effectively removed or crowdsourced all greenlinghting and discovery you’re in a different space. Like Unity, Valve has a small ninja army of dev relations guys they send around the world to events and gatherings to deliver the good word of our lord Valve and ensure that indie devs know what they’re supposed to be doing to fit within their strategy. I assure you you haven’t heard more refined PR-speak in your life.
But again, they’re amazing at being quiet and keeping up that image of “just a buncha engineer underdogs in a room fixing the games industry, ya know?” I don’t hate them, or even dislike them. I don’t hate any game publisher. Games are games, it’s an entertainment industry, it doesn’t warrant love or hate of companies or corporations, beyond the larger questions of how copyright and IP work in an online world. But this idea that Valve is a magic wonderland with no agency on how their image is handled or moneymaking strategy or community management is… a lot.
Valve is primarily an online storefront company that runs organized sales events multiple times a year. Their marketing arm is ruthlessly efficient.
“Their marketing arm?” So… Kaci? The person they hired about a couple years ago to film silly minute-long YouTube videos about 5 times a year? Yeah she’s really ruthless…
Just look at the guys they send out to do Steam Deck interviews and tell me Valve has PR people working for them full-time. No offense to Pierre-Loup Griffais but there’s a reason companies hire good-looking celebrities to push their products.
Valve has a small ninja army of dev relations guys they send around the world to events and gatherings to deliver the good word of our lord Valve and ensure that indie devs know what they’re supposed to be doing to fit within their strategy.
jfc lmao does this “ninja army” sneak some shurikens pass the TSA so they can take out employees of rival PC gaming stores!? This doesn’t even sound remotely nefarious, just sounds like Valve sends out some guys to consult companies on how best to use their products and do a little salesmanship and networking. The horror.
But this idea that Valve is a magic wonderland with no agency on how their image is handled or moneymaking strategy or community management is… a lot.
So give me some proof of Valve’s “ruthless” marketing arm then? So far most you can say regarding Valve’s “image handling” is that Valve sends some devs out to talk up Steam to developers. Meanwhile, most companies spend BILLIONS UPON BILLIONS on marketing and PR. Can you not see the insane difference between these?
We already know a little how Valve works (here’s an old employee manual). Note the line “There are not different sets of rules or criteria for engineers, artists, animators, and accountants.” So yes, even Valve’s marketing team (which so far as we know consists of one person) has a flat structure. So it’s a little hard to see without any sort of management apparatus how “Valve” (as a whole) makes any concerted efforts towards these things.
Hey! Somebody brought up the “leaked” employee manual, I think I have bingo now.
The guys they have doing dev relations aren’t talking development, they’re talking business.
And just so I’m clear on how you think this works. You believe that Valve sets up what? Five sales a year? Plus the International. Plus coordinating and financing the CS Majors. Plus actually negotiating all the distribution deals for store placement with third parties. Plus shipping multiple hardware and software products, including setting up preview events and sending out review samples. Plus all the press relations for both games and press queries…
…with zero sales/PR/community management staff.
Am I getting that wrong?
Man, messed up as it is to refuse to put proper credits in games, you certainly see how that feeds into their, again, very carefully curated public image.
EDIT: To be clear, it’s hard to know what anybody does at Valve if you don’t work at Valve, or at least routinely with Valve. I’m not gonna stand here and say that all of the guys working on that don’t also… I don’t know go build 3D models or code store features when they’re not doing that. But they absolutely do that. And they absolutely have a PR strategy, which is mostly “shut the hell up, keep the black box a black box”. Again, so much to learn from them about how to handle PR, especially in tech and gaming.
I’m making a best effort guess based on the evidence to understand how the company works but yes, you can’t prove one way or another. All I can really say is
- Valve’s website doesn’t average any position related to PR, marketing or community relations
- I’ve never seen a marketing position advertised on glassdoor for Valve
- Valve’s public-facing communication is legendarily poor, almost entirely buried in patch notes
So I’m just putting 2 and 2 together here. If Valve actually has a community relations team, please God let me work there because that must be the easiest job on Earth.
Exactly. Steam didn’t invest in marketing nonsense and gimmicks to get people on their platform. For consumers it is simply the superior product, DRM not withstanding.
They got their issues, no doubt. But I have never seen a quasi monopoly be more consumer oriented than steam.
Epic cons:
- Filled to the brim with DRM, at the point where you can’t even launch many singleplayer games offline
- Actively against linux, for some fucking reason
- Bad launcher (but this one is no biggie, you can and should use Heroic launcher instead of the official one) -Bad store in general compared to steam
Epic pros:
- Free games
- With coupons prices can get VERY low
- When it opened I heard the percent they take from game devs was lower than the other stores (not sure if it’s still the case and tbh if it ever was)
Steam pros:
- Pushing linux gaming like their life depends on it
- Generally correct towards the consumer
- Huge store and many information, from the game store pages to the workshop
- During sales prices are good
Steam cons:
- Drm
- Bad official app Ux and messy ui
Gog
I don’t know anything besides the fact that it has drm-free games and that it’s owned by CDPR (the guys who developed the witcher series and cyberpunk)
I personally purchase my games on steam, since I think their contribution to linux gaming is crucial for linux to go mainstream
Choose what you will knowing this. If someone else wants to add something to this list you’re welcome to do so.
Eh… A whole bunch of games on Epic are DRM free, more than there are on Steam in fact…
Steam have DRM free games too, you don’t have to launch them through steam even.
steam drm is so easy to bypass that it almost doesn’t count
Valve is what happens when someone who’s not just outright fucking evil invents a money printing machine
Yeah, and somehow they managed to invent like 90% of all “evil” MTX and DRM in the process, take a bigger cut than competitors and actively reject having a returns policy until pushed by regulators and competitors, all the while being super not evil.
It’s a fine line to walk, that.
They invented Denuvo?
Drm = digital rights protection
Denovo is a form of drm made by iredto
… right. And it’s also considered one of the premier “evil” DRMs.
So I ask again… they invented Denuvo?
Oh, is that the bar? I hadn’t received the memo. That’s cool, then, because Activision, Epic, Microsoft and Ubisoft didn’t invent Denuvo either, so we’re all good.
All their platfomrs support it and sell games with it, though.
For the record, Steam actively suggests using multiple online features and multiple layers of DRM to minimize piracy:
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/drm
Technically, Denuvo isn’t DRM, it’s anti-tamper. It protects the actual DRM from being modified or removed. It’s closer to an anticheat, as it ensures the game wasn’t modified.
Fun fact: my autocorrect changes anticheat to Antichrist.
somehow they managed to invent like 90% of all “evil” MTX and DRM in the process
Having worked with DRM systems since long before Valve existed, I’m reasonably certain this is just plain false.
Blending the storefront with a DRM solution? No, that was them.
That’s their entire call to fame. They first turned their auto-patcher into a DRM service, then they enforced authorization of physical copies through it and eventually it became the storefront bundled with the other two pieces. If somebody did it before them I hadn’t heard of it, but I’ll happily take proof that I was wrong.
None of the pieces were new, SecuROM and others had been around for years, a few publishers had download and patch managers and I don’t remember who did physical auth first, but somebody must have. But bundling the three? That was Steam.
Yeah, and I don’t remember Half-life being the game that introduced the world to horse armor.
The user is being hyperbolic, but is referring to their substantial role in popularising loot boxes, as well as the marketplace that has spawned a real gambling industry around it. Kids gamble on 3rd party sites for marketplace prizes and Valve does very little to interfere.
Their DRM is easily bypassable with SteamEmu, as opposed to other inventions like Denuvo
Ah, so if it’s crackable it’s fine?
Somebody tell Denuvo, they’re off the hook.
Seriously, why try so hard to go to bat for a brand name? I get that everybody wants to root for something these days, but I’m too old to pick sides between Sega and Nintendo and I’m mature enough to reconcile that Steam can have the best feature set in a launcher and also be a major player in the process of erasing game ownership and the promotion of GaaS.
Since I can almost guarantee you major publishers would not publish on steam without some sort of DRM, yeah Im fine with them having an easily crackable form of DRM. Especially since they’re not exactly jumping to prevent people from doing it.
Oh, they are not. Their DRM wiki page for devs goes “this DRM is easily crackable, we really recommend you use secondary DRM on top of it, see how to do that below”. I linked to that elsewhere.
Which is… you know, fine, but definitely one of the reasons I always check if a game is on GOG first before buying it on Steam.
I mean, do you have any good examples though? Because most of those things are blatantly false and/or happened 9+ years ago. If that’s that’s the worst you’ve got then Valve is must be amazing.
Loot boxes were, if not invented by them, definitely popularised.
and/or happened 9+ years ago
That was like 15 years ago hahaha
See what I mean? That’s nuts. That’s a nuts sentence right there. Imagine having a brand so sticky that people go "but did they do something really bad recently?
For the record, Valve’s games run loot boxes today. Like, right now you can buy loot boxes from Valve. CS gambling is also still happening, although I’m not into it enough to know how much better it is these days.
They invented the battlepass, too, that’s a Dota 2 thing. Hey, remember how people refer to buying cosmetics for games as “buying hats”? That one’s from TF2. Oh, and technically the trading cards you get for purchases are NFTs, since the term doesn’t require the tokens to be stored in a blockchain.
And then there’s the dev side. Everybody was super pissed with them on that end while they were figuring out greenlight processes, which… I’m not sure if they did or people just kinda got used to what’s there. And if you’re around devs you’ll know that Valve’s whole deal is to tell people what to do and give them zero support to do it. And there are other horror stories about shadowbans and Apple-style manual rejections and delistings and stuff, but at that point you’re getting more into inside baseball and I wouldn’t expect it to be shaping public perception at all.
Well I’m not going to be eternally mad at Coca Cola because they put cocaine in their soda a century ago, there’s got to be a cut-off point somewhere. If I’m going to hate them it’s because of the things they are doing right now. Valve over the last eight years has been pretty well-behaved considering their market position gives them the capacity to be way worse. There’s nothing stopping them from
-
buying up exclusivity contracts
-
making a DRM that actually functions
-
developing only proprietary software
-
making their games pay-to-win
Oookay, so we’re all cool with MTX cosmetics, loot boxes, battlepasses and lacking full ownership or transferability of games, then?
I’m just trying to figure out if the things Valve is doing right now are fine for everybody or just for Valve.
Which again, is my problem. I’ll keep saying it, because having to argue for reality makes it sound like I’m a hater. I like Steam, I think Valve games are generally great (and it’s a shame they’ve stopped making them), and I think Valve’s management is a good example of many of the pros of a private company (look at Twitter for all the cons).
But holy crap, no, man, they are THE premier name in GaaS. Everybody is taking their cues from Valve, Epic or both in that space. Their entire platform is predicated on doing as little as possible and crowdsourcing as much as possible to keep the money machine churning. Corporations are not your friends.
-
They straight up don’t want people reselling games they own. They could do it easily, they just don’t want to.
Yeah, Steam does cool things, but the moment you start thinking that very huge corporation somehow cares about you, you’re doomed. Companies don’t care about people, they care about numbers. Especially huge companies like Valve.
I don’t know if many companies allow you to resell your digital goods in the first place (other than, funny enough, Valve themselves who let your resell digital Steam assets).
Valve’s DRM prevents the resale of physical PC games, as Steam codes are single-use. They singlehandedly killed the used PC games market.
I said not outright evil, not good.
Hah. Fair enough.
I mean, I’d say that’s probably true of most companies making videogames. People are really hyperbolic about this stuff.
Steam cons
- You don’t own the games, they are leased, like Sony
- store costs to developers/publishers are insanely high for a digital distribution platform
- early access games have very high volume of abandonware
You don’t own the games on any digital platform, neither steam, epic or gog. You’re only being sold a license to use it, and the license can be revoked whenever the company feels like it.
Thisbis actually true for most of the physical media back in the day, the only difference is that they didn’t really have a method to revoke the license… But that nice old cardboard box you have in your attic, with the nice shiny plastic disc… You still don’t legally own the software on it.
So what. It’s still valid Cons for the platform.
Stop making excuses for scamming one sided purchase agreements.
store costs to developers/publishers are insanely high for a digital distribution platform
Isn’t the 30% cut what basically everyone takes? AFAIK GOG, Ubisoft, EA and all three console manufacturers take the same share.
Besides Epic only itch.io with their choose your share system and Discord (do they even still sell games?) take/took less.
Considering they have bugger all cost with distribution points being hosted for free by service providers it’s an overpriced over glorified website with online payment processing. 30% cut is massively tax for very little
A con for GOG is their site is slow as fuck. And good forbid you want to go back to a previous page, you’ll likely lose where you were looking 9 times out of ten. Especially so on mobile.
Pros: Can be the only place you can get old games that would’ve been unavailable otherwise The older games are often really really cheap, especially during sales
Steam’s, Epic’s, Ubisoft’s, Battle.net’s and whatever-EA’s-thing-is-called-now’s sites are also slow as shit. What is it with these platforms which prevent them from loading a webpage in less than 10 seconds?
By making the entire thing a JavaScript monstrosity with egregious amounts of scripts.
Sadly, it’s likely a lot of tracking. The kind that look where your mouse is and where you scroll and stop etc.
What tracking does Epic need? “According to our analytics, 100% of users scroll to the free games banner on Tuesday at 5pm CEST, then leave and don’t come back for a week. What a mystery!”
Oh thanks for the reminder, I hadn’t opened epic so I can scroll down to the free games banner in a while.
In Steam’s case, the slowness looks more likely just a side effect of it being a Chromium Embedded Framework application with a lot of extras bolted on. It’s simply not built efficiently.
Gog also seemingly no 2fa other than an faq page with instructions that cannot be followed.
I always get 2FA’d on GoG for an emailed code
Do you remember how to configure it? Last I checked I went through every account and settings page on the store site and seemingly separate customer service log in and no clear way to set it up.
Epic cons:
Also:
- Epic has already been caught scanning and collecting data from files on people’s hard drives that are totally unrelated to Epic or its games.
- Epic’s habit of interfering with game availability by buying exclusivity deals.
Ties with Tencent (super anti-consumer chinese state-owned megacorp)
To be more clear about it, Tencent is Epic’s largest investor, so they obviously have a great deal of influence over and access to anything they want from Epic (likely including user data).
Steam pros:
Also:
- Actively funding and supporting development of linux gaming technologies for more than a few years now, to the point where linux is now very much a viable gaming platform.
Steam cons:
DrmGiven that DRM on Steam is entirely up to each game publisher, I don’t think it’s appropriate to list under “Steam cons”. I’m not even sure that any of my Steam games have DRM.
If you mean that most Steam games expect to find an instance of Steam running, you should know that is not DRM, and it’s trivially replaced with the open-source Goldberg Emulator or a similar tool.
Gog
I don’t know anything besides the fact that it has drm-free gamesAnother plus for GOG is that they let you download games with a web browser. No special app required.
Epic was scanning your Steam friends and play history
Valve was scanning your DNS cache
So… Maybe we shouldn’t forget to mention the second one if we’re going to bring up the first one
Valve was scanning your DNS cache
The story I read was that they didn’t collect or report anything, but just flagged a user if a game hack site was found in the cache, and that they stopped doing it years ago.
Not comparable to what Epic was caught doing, IMHO. Still, if there’s an article with more detail, I wouldn’t mind reading it. (Maybe it was part of their anti-cheat system of the time?)
Funny how if it was any other company you would call bs and tell them to fuck off with their “trust me bro” attitude.
To me it’s much worse what Valve did, they have no business looking at my browsing history, that’s much more private than the games I own on Steam or the three friends I’ve got on both platforms anyway.
I want to note that Steam isn’t inherently a DRM platform, as there are many games on Steam which are DRM free. Even ones that require the Steam backend can be bundled with Steamworks, serving all the same backend requirements without Steam needing to be installed on the machine.
yea, they steam has some drm-free games available… but steam is a drm platform… one that also helped normalize one-time-use codes and tying ‘purchases’ to a non-transferable online account. valve did more to shred the used pc game market than any other company.
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games
The Origin store proportionally has more DRM free games than Steam…
Another Epic con: they bribe devs to not launch their games on Steam and GoG, because their store isn’t good.
Your first line is straight up misinformation. Epic has remarkably few games with DRM, mostly from big publishers implementing their own. I’ve yet to find an indie that can’t be launched directly as an .exe. Same with Cyberpunk 2077, launches directly without issue.
The only singleplayer game I can’t play offline is Hitman, just like on Steam, because their publisher sucks.
Don’t forget that Epic buys up existing licenses to sell them as exclusives. They even pulled Rocket League from Steam after buying the studio.
Rocket League is fully playable on Steam.
The story of most of Valve’s games is finding a mod, hiring the modder, then making the game exclusive to Steam.
I don’t like when huge, rich corporations pretend that they are an underdog.
On top of that, I don’t like when a platform bribes developers to limit their game to one platform.
Yeah, man, screw Nintendo.
Brand perception is a universal mystery.
Fuck Nintendo to death, after listening to the abominations they committed in the Team Xecuter episode of Darknet Diaries I’m never giving them another cent.
Luckily, Yuzu runs games infinitely better than my switch anyway, so that’s awesome.
Oh, there’s a ton to say about why Disney get a reputation for being a litigious nightmare but Nintendo gets more of a connection to beloved franchises in a lot of the gaming community, but that’s precisely why they’re a good counterexample to Steam when you’re talking about branding associations.
Generally the only games that are de facto exclusive to Nintendo are the ones they make themselves or those that choose to stay on Nintendo (I haven’t heard of exclusivity deals, but I won’t discount the possibility).
A better comparison might be Sony with Playstation (and maybe Microsoft with Xbox, though I haven’t heard of as much from them on that) paying for exclusivity for a limited time.
Epic, on the other hand decided, at least at the start, to buy out almost finished games (some of which even had pre-orders on other storefronts) to have on their platform for at least a year. Then decided to try and play the victim, claiming that they had to do it to gain market share. Then claimed they were morally superior because they didn’t charge as much to publishers for putting games on their storefront. While also charging just as much for the games to the consumers.
Sony have very, very few straight exclusivity deals these days, they have a super robust first party network. Nintendo and them are very comparable, in fact. Especially in that Nintendo works with more third parties or partially owned “second parties” than you’d think, since people presume anything using their IP is their game, even when it’s not.
In any case, they’re both as not-comparable, in that Epic games run on the same hardware and platform as Steam games, Linux compatibility aside. You don’t have to pay any extra money to switch back and forth.
Epic legitimately hasn’t done anything Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft haven’t done on the regular. In fact, the current “boo, we hate non-Steam PC launchers” trend overlaps with the old “boo, we’re pissed that former console exclusive X is going multiplatform”, which was a surreal few years there.
Also, hell yeah, it’s morally superior to give more of the money to the dev while charging the same up front to consumers. 100%. Every time. Epic is not doing it because they’re nice, they’re doing it to attract talent to their platform, which is exactly why you want competition between multiple storefronts instead of a monopoly. But that doesn’t take it away from them, that’s the better answer.
No linux support. Actually, in the case of games like rocket league, they REMOVED linux support.
They bought the game and changed out the graphics API to kill the Linux native builds, then after the community got it working via Wine, they added anticheat. Epic went further than incompetence on that one.
Just my personal opinion
The good clearly are the free games and that some games go cheaper there, they have better sales sometimes. The bad is that the store is badly optimized. The UI is annoying, no cloud saves for a lot of games. As of recently there were no achievements or even a cart, but they have that now which is good. The friends tab is bare bones still. They have aggressive DRM. For some reason it’s a pain in the ass to log in, but that might be just on my end.
Now with GOG, you don’t have DRM, you can integrate all launchers so you can launch all the games from one, which for me, is pretty useful. GOG has great deals. The bad is that the ui as well is kind of bare bones, but i don’t know, they are not trying to take over the market and their store works very well.
As of steam i don’t need to say anything, everything is in there. If you play on linux you basically will get every game from steam. They have the most robust launcher with the most options, etc.
That said, personally I use the three of them. Gog primarily since i can launch everything from there and if i find a game in there, i’d rather get it from them. But i’ve found sales on epic too good to let go so i play those games there. For me it depends on what they’re offering, but for some reason i really dislike Epic’s layout and ui, i feel like it is very annoying and that it is missing a lot.
Well, I have four big ones:
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System scanning: EGS is known to automatically scan your system and send your data back to them. While this seems to be the same type of analytics Steam does occasionally, in Steam’s case, it’s opt-in, and done with full, informed consent.
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Paid exclusives: Epic has been known to pay publishers to make their games artificially exclusive to their own store. They regularly claim this money is to support the development of the games in question, but this is easily disproven, as they’ve been seen buying games known to be complete more than once. Additionally, this has resulted in bait-and-switch-like situations, where users would prepurchase Steam copies of games, only to be informed that they wouldn’t be getting them.
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Publisher-centric behavior: Another user here claimed that EGS is pro-developer and anti-consumer, but this is only half true. This only rings true in the case of self-published games. There have been cases of developers getting unwarranted backlash after aforementioned bait-and-switches, when they were just as surprised to learn about all the “development support” they received as anyone.
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Tim Sweeney: Tim Weeney, the CEO of Epic, is an asshole. A giant, narcissistic, hateful shitbag. Just look at his Twitter, the dudes a giant POS.
Removed by mod
Additionally, this has resulted in bait-and-switch-like situations, where users would prepurchase Steam copies of games, only to be informed that they wouldn’t be getting them.
I didn’t know about this.
It happened to Metro Exodus (great game btw) but iirc all pre orders were honoured and the game was just delisted.
Has it happened after that?
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I just don’t use Epic myself but do use Gog and Steam (with the ultra shitty EA launcher and Ubisoft Connect bundled with some of my games) and Playnite has changed everything unifying it all into that single launcher.
Full screen mode in Playnite works fine on my HTPC and as a launcher it does consolidate all of them into one place easily. Worth trying if you use multiple stores.
As for why I’m not using Epic, the whole paying for exclusivity with third parties really didn’t appeal to me at all.
If the free offerings from Epic do appeal to you, or if they do better deals on localised currencies (especially if you do struggle to pay for things), don’t worry about using their services. I wouldn’t want you to deny yourself some entertainment just because other people have issues with them as a business.
