this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
746 points (90.5% liked)
Games
16758 readers
1421 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I personally get most of my games from GOG and itch.io these days. And I've never bought anything from the Epic store whatsoever.
I will say though that I find it kind of weird how much hate Epic gets for their store. Like, I understand that someone prefers Steam, or doesn't want to buy stuff from Epic etc. - but what we see goes way beyond that. Epic has people actively campaigning against it, as if its mere existence is insulting. I don't really get why.
As for the 30% cut... Developers will try to price their games competitively, and within customer expectations. So with or without Steam's 30% cut, you can expect games to be similarly priced. The large 30% cut from Steam is basically coming out of the developer's revenue rather than from your pocket. (I'm under the impression that GOG also has a similar 30% fee. Epic has a lower fee. And on itch.io the seller gets to choose how money goes to itch.io anywhere from 0% to 100%. So itch.io is the best deal for developers in terms of fees.)
The reason people hate Epic is fairly obvious – they don't give a shit about the gaming industry nor about players. At some point their client contained literal spyware, they tried to brute force market share via sleazy exclusivity contracts, their software doesn't have one tenth of the features Steam has, their CEO is a piece of shit, etc.
What do you mean by that? For developers, they take a much smaller fee than Steam or GOG, and for players they're constantly giving away free games.
That sounds like a decent reason to campaign against them. I haven't heard anything about that before. What was the story behind that? (As in, when / why / how / what? Perhaps you have a link or something.)
I've heard people talk a lot about exclusivity contracts... but can you name even a single game that has such a contract? When people have discussed this the past, the relevant developers basically said "there is no contract". But maybe there is some different case I don't know about. In any case, that personally doesn't bother me anyway. If some developer wants to take money to be on one store rather than another, they can do that at their own peril. As for customers, we're only talking about a store. It's not like anyone is in danger of not being able to buy / play their favourite games. So it seems like a bit of a nothing-burger to me. Like, is there actually something bad happening here? Or are people just speculating that something bad might one-day happen if Epic got bigger?
Steam has more features, yeah. Steam is very good. But Steam has been around for some 20 years. It's hard to catch up with that so quickly. In any case, although missing features is a good reason to prefer Steam, it certainly isn't a reason to campaign against Epic.
... So from your list, I'll keep the spyware thing and the CEO complaint. I don't know enough about either of those to say much though. I don't recall who the CEO of Epic is right now, so I won't say whether or not I think that's a good reason. And the spyware... I take that kind of stuff seriously. Right now I'm posting this from Linux - because I'm fed-up with Windows spyware. But as I said, I've not heard any details about any Epic spyware thing.
Incidentally, I've found that Steam is very good for Linux gaming. ... But obviously that doesn't mean that I'm going to start making posts trash-talking Epic. I don't find it weird that people prefer Steam. I just find it weird that people put so much energy into attacking Epic.
It takes quite a lot of time to repeat all the wrong doings of Epic and it's CEO Tim.
Thus, I can only relay to the collected information of bad old Reddit, if you want to (I'm intentionally not linking, you can search it up easily). r/fuckepic has a lot of collected information on their side page.
In short, biggest issue for me exclusivity contracts with games advertised on Steam, then as a bait and switch removed from the store page and their physical copies getting a sticker on top of the Steam logo, so a last minute deal, for Metro Exodus. And then they continued their exclusivity hunt for games, they didn't even helped to develop. Nothing against self-made or published games to be limited time exclusive in my perspective, but not second hand bought (out).
The other about their CEO, r/timcritizisestim He's... a douche. Using kids with the free games to bait them to his store, using them against Apple's store rules like a little army... he is a bad person with too much money and luck to have build the Epic engine with Fortnite...