Renault on 17/5/2019 at 19:05
After buying Ashen and saving my credit card info in my profile, I read the end of this thread. Needless to say I immediately went back and deleted all my CC info. Hopefully that's good enough. It seems like keeping your customers info private shouldn't be that hard, I'm a bit surprised this has become such an issue. At least most credit card purchases are typically protected by your bank.
Tomi on 21/10/2022 at 12:53
Epic Games Store has been a thing for nearly four years now, and I still don't get the irrational
hate that Epic gets for it.
Sure, the store and the launcher are still very basic and they don't have all the little features and community stuff that Steam has. Not that I'd even want to see all those stupid little features that have turned Steam into a bloated ugly mess these days. You know, trading cards, flashy avatars, badges, and custom emoticons, etc. Then there were those rather serious security issues on EGS near its launch that may have put some people off, but so did Steam a few years back, so I dunno.
Could the reason be the Epic exclusive games then? Naaah. The (
https://www.gamewatcher.com/news/Epic-games-store-exclusives) list of the Epic exclusives isn't even that long, I thought that there would be plenty more games on it. And it's not like they're the only gaming platform ever to have exclusives.
So what is it then? Do people
really worship Steam so much that they see Epic as some kind of a threat? That's the only real reason that I can think of for the zealous comments that I've seen from so many people. I thought that the whole "Gabe Newell is our god" thing was only a joke, but apparently it's not. Steam has been the only big boy at the PC playground for far too long already, so I think that it's a great thing that they're getting some serious competition at last.
The days of "I want to have all my games in the same place dammit" are long gone already - that used to be my excuse for not buying games on EGS for some time. But I must confess that I can't remember buying a single game in EGS anyway (then again I haven't bought anything directly from Steam for a long time either), but somehow I already have 285 games in my games library over there. I bet some people have secretly changed their minds because of the freebies! Sometimes I feel a bit guilty about not buying any of their games while happily accepting their freebies, and while I don't have anything against the idea of spending my money there, I just haven't gotten around to doing it. My new excuse is the Epic games launcher - how can it be so damn slow when it has next to no features?
So, does
anyone actually buy games on EGS?
demagogue on 21/10/2022 at 13:03
The first time I tried to register, my email address was already taken by an account based in Thailand. That was a big knock against my confidence in them from the start.
I think I don't buy games on it now because, if I have a choice between multiple platforms, it's better to have a game on Steam because of things like my screenshots go to the right place, it can have mods in the Workshop, there will be a community page and forum for it, my Steam friends are "around" ... things like that. Those things aren't deal breakers if there's no way to get the game on Steam or the price difference is outrageous, but it's better to have them than not if I can.
I have bought things from the Epic store, but it's all things for Unreal Engine, not games.
Nameless Voice on 21/10/2022 at 14:08
The Valve fanboyism is definitely a part of it, but I think there's also a bit of really weird racism going on.
Epic Games is part-owned by the Chinese corporation Tencent, and there's been a lot of anti-China hatred in the west lately (especially in the USA, and even more especially during the Trump years), so I've seen a lot of people specifically hating on Epic for this reason. Even though Epic an American company owned and majority-controlled by an American.
The same people don't seem to bother attacking other things that Tencent have a stake in though, e.g. they will happily complain about Tencent owning Epic stocks, on Discord or Reddit, which Tencent both also own stakes in. Or use Facebook.
As for actually buying games on Epic... I have bought one or two, but to be honest I have such a huge backlog that I rarely buy new games at all these days.
In theory I'd like to support Epic's 12% cut, but practically, if the game has online multiplayer I'd rather buy in on Steam and have access to the friends list and other features there, and outside of that I'm more likely to buy on GOG than Epic because I like the concept of DRM free.
WingedKagouti on 21/10/2022 at 14:37
Quote Posted by Tomi
So, does
anyone actually buy games on EGS?
I've bought a couple of titles on EGS, mostly because they were about half the Steam sale price.
And if we go by exclusives, the list for Steam is stupidly massive compared to any other platform
including consoles. Most people just don't seem to want to acknowledge that, possibly because they've already got a large Steam library, which means it's not an issue to them that some games is only available on their preferred store.
Then again, it does also feel a lot like the old console wars, just more stupid because it's about stores and not hardware. With the console wars there was at least some "My console can do this thing the other console can't due to hardware", but for stores it's about who skims money from the sale.
Sulphur on 21/10/2022 at 15:07
I suspect the market for EGS is a bit larger than we think it is, given that the folks who do use it don't have a platform to talk about it on a la Steam's discussion forums teenage wasteland. Getting your opinions from Steam's reviews and discussions is also sort of unhelpful, because of course a vocal segment of people on Steam exhibit tribalism towards the platform.
Sales, as well as the store cut, should be pretty important to publishers/devs and thus will have an impact on how successful the store is -- I haven't heard of any publishers complaining about sales numbers on the store, but that might be partly alleviated by Epic forking over dosh for exclusivity rights. I suppose we'll see when there's some functionality similar to Steam charts.
Having said that, Steam is still easier to use and has most of my games on it, so I'd prefer having a single storefront despite the fractured kaleidoscope hellscape of per-publisher launchers we're in right now. Just because that's the way it is doesn't make me happy about it. And yes, I know there's Playnite, thank you. EGS also takes a fucking age to load, and the library view takes far too long to get itself pieced together, and these are just the fundamentals. Fix them, and then we can talk about the nice to haves like community integration and whatever.
But the biggest thing about EGS for me, at least, is that I'm a cheapskate, and Epic's regional pricing tends to be cheaper than Steam's for me, and throw on a discount and you bet I'm getting a game there first despite Steam being more convenient. So yeah, I've got a decent library on there, and it's not all just freebies.
Starker on 21/10/2022 at 15:22
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
The Valve fanboyism is definitely a part of it, but I think there's also a bit of really weird racism going on.
While there is a fair bit of racism being stoked, especially in the US, it's also the actions of the Chinese state that put some people off. Their handling of Hong Kong, their treatment of Uighurs, their "unlimited friendship" with Russia etc... At the very least it makes me vary of trusting a Chinese corporation, not that I have a lot of trust in corporations in the first place, Chinese or not.
Pyrian on 21/10/2022 at 21:48
I thought the EGS hate had died down. At least, I haven't seen any in a long time. Even here, people now are just referring to hate from elsewhere, rather than actually posting it.
As for buying games there, nope. Don't really see why I should. Got a good size free library from them, though, which I use periodically. Can't complain.
...The death of a product isn't hate. It's indifference.
Nameless Voice on 21/10/2022 at 22:04
Quote Posted by Starker
While there is a fair bit of racism being stoked, especially in the US, it's also the actions of the Chinese state that put some people off.
Well, yes. But the USA has done a lot of similar things and worse, yet no one ever talks about not trusting US corporations because of their ties to the US government. Don't really want to get into the politics of it, so let's just leave it at "pretty much all huge corporations are evil, all large states are evil, so it's racism / xenophobia to only be critical of some but not others."
As for the hate having died down, I still see a bit of it occasionally, but it's mostly just a vocal few who always insist on bringing it up.
Starker on 22/10/2022 at 04:53
The way I see it, US is the lesser evil, so supporting a corporation which is subservient to a totalitarian state and helps wield its (soft) power is different from supporting a corporation of a more or less democratic state. In the US, for example, there may be people, even at the highest level of government, who want to severely regulate video games, but the US is still a state where people have some say in the matter and you can at least challenge things like that in courts. If the US government suddenly came and said video games are spiritual opium, I'd doubt Valve would eagerly and proactively start self-regulating their users' playtime.
Disclaimer: yes, I know the US has done terrible things and by no means do I want to disregard them. I'm just suggesting that states like China and Russia are capable of far worse. Also, yes I'm aware that the term spiritual opium doesn't have nearly the same connotations or history in the West as it has in China.