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.
TL;DR
What’s wrong?
- Their launcher has a terrible UI AND UX.
- They make exclusive deals with studios to prevent other platforms from getting games. (Someone mentioned that Steam did the same thing in their infancy. Also, I have another question; why is it ok for Sony and Microsoft to make exclusive games for their consoles but not ok for these PC platforms to do so?)
- They have been invested in by a Chinese company, Tencent. (Someone mentioned that it isn’t that big of a deal, but idk.)
- They are actively anti-linux for some reason.
Epic cons:
Epic pros:
Steam pros:
Steam cons:
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.
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.
Having worked with DRM systems since long before Valve existed, I’m reasonably certain this is just plain false.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Their DRM is easily bypassable with SteamEmu, as opposed to other inventions like Denuvo
They invented Denuvo?
Drm = digital rights protection
Denovo is a form of drm made by iredto
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.
… right. And it’s also considered one of the premier “evil” DRMs.
So I ask again… they invented Denuvo?
Also:
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) and they directly benefit from Epic’s growth.
Also:
Given 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.
Another plus for GOG is that they let you download games with a web browser. No special app required. (I think Itch.io does this as well.)
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
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.
Another Epic con: they bribe devs to not launch their games on Steam and GoG, because their store isn’t good.
A con for GOG is their site is slow as fuck. And god 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.
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…
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.
Eh… A whole bunch of games on Epic are DRM free, proportionally more than there are on Steam in fact…
Steam cons
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
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.
You are absolutely correct, but it’s a con for Epic too. Your comment makes it out to look like you don’t own your games on Steam, but by omission you make it seem like you do own your games on Epic.
I just want to make it very clear that you don’t own the games on either platform. But also want to mention that even if you buy a good old CD/DVD with the game on, then you still don’t own the game…
It’s absolutely awful that it’s practically impossible to own a game, and it’s even more awful that the platform can take away a game you paid for, let alone that they don’t even have to refund you for it…