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Opinion so far on the Epic Games Store?
Okay, so it's been around now for a year and a half. What's the good, bad, and ugly? I know they've got free games every week, I know they've got a bunch of timed exclusives, and I hear they've still got kinks to iron out. I'm primarily asking from the perspective of an occasional gamer who prefers to be as hassle-free, launcher-free, and DRM-free as possible.
I think it feels undercooked and unnecessary. The big thing it has over Steam are the Epic-subsidized sales. However these are clearly unsustainable long term, which makes me unwilling to count them as a point in Epic's favor.
However the biggest reason I remain loyal to Steam is their massive investment in Linux. By pouring engineering resources into Wine and Proton, they have made Linux a viable gaming platform. Proton is so good in fact that I often prefer to run Windows versions of games in it even when native versions are available. I get more value out of a game I own on Steam because running it in Linux becomes borderline trivial. The only non-Steam game I've even bothered with on my Linux drive is Overwatch, because running Origin and uPlay games is so much more of a hassle.
I'm not actively boycotting EGS like some people, but so far they haven't had any exclusives I really want that I didn't feel like I could just wait 6-12 months for. I still haven't even bought Control yet, as I am patiently waiting for 2nd generation ray tracing capable GPUs to come out.
This is going to sound dismissive of both EGS and the people who hate on it, but to me the Epic Game Store is just another storefront. That's it. I feel like its importance has been skewed way too heavily by many who have made it out to be this sort of evil raid boss of gaming that we all have to collectively destroy, and I have a hard time not seeing that as a completely unnecessary overreaction.
I watched the gaming community lose their minds over Uplay and Origin back in the day, and then I watched it happen again with the Epic Game Store. Uplay and Origin have both gotten less terrible, more mature, and more feature rich over time, and I fully expect the same thing to happen with EGS.
I'm also saying this as someone who doesn't have any love for EGS myself. I'm someone who loves game deals, but even I haven't taken advantage of most of their game giveaways or their really solid coupons, as my main OS is Linux, so the EGS is pretty much a non-starter for me at the moment. Nevertheless, I have a hard time watching a bunch of people who, like me, also don't use it feel compelled to constantly drag it and any developers associated with it. The hate levied against it and games associated with it seems incommensurate with its role. It's just another storefront.
I do think there are valid criticisms to be made of it, but I honestly find it hard to put any stock in them when I see so many of these talking points used less as genuine complaints on their own and more as a shield for vitriolic outrage and abusive behavior. It seems to have died down a bit from where it once was, but it wasn't that long ago that people were sending threats en masse to devs who took Epic's funding.
Pretty much my thoughts. My issue with their practices was over exclusive retail rights, not because it's EGS doing but because I'm worred about the next one to do it. I do not want to participate in another cable TV style industry.
So I just don't buy games that are sold (or, in some of these cases, platformed) exclusively until after that period is over because I don't want reward that sort of approach. Besides, they're usually on sale when they get released from such a hold. If EGS happens to sell it for the least, then they get my custom.
I get where your coming from but I think we have been at an uneasy peace for a while, the new storefronts coming out have more or less focused on first party titles, epic is the first storefront in a while to really focus on the same niche as steam. The exclusives also made a lot of highly anticipated games harder to obtain. I think criticism of exclusives is warranted, they are very much anticonsumer. However, I think the outrage is larger because people in general are scared (perhaps that's too strong a word) of the fragmentation that we have started seeing in streaming services and don't want the same to happen to games. Obviously no ones paying to use a storefront (I guess stadia counts, but who uses that) so I think it's somewhat overblown.
That said Epic's marketing team probably sees the outrage as a win. No one is talking and taking ideological stands against the bethesda launcher.
While the GamerScreechingTM is definitely overblown, I wouldn't call EGS "just another storefront". Whenever I buy something from GOG, Humble Bundle, or Itch, I don't have to use any special launcherNote 1. Sure, two of them offer launchers, but they do it as an optional bonus; you can just as easily skip it and download the installer directly.
Personally speaking, I don't think that Uplay and Origin are points in EGS's favor. Games being exclusively on those platforms simply means that I'm not regularly exposed to them, and that means that I'm not buying them. Though to be frank, the largest reason why I don't bother with Origin in particular is that they only sell games made by Evil, Inc.
And for one more personal opinion, the reason why I don't want to buy things on EGS is simply because they are a digital distribution platform. The problem with that is that you need to have some sort of guarantee that you will always have access to your purchases. This is one thing that Nintendo actually does right; even though they may discontinue their digital platform, you will still have access to any title you have downloaded. Valve has made promises that they will make sure you have access to your games if they ever go out of business, but more importantly they are so successful that it's not really that likely they will ever go out of business. EGS is pretty close to having the latter, but they are still a little bit too new for me to invest in.
I've always wondered: is this valid or apocryphal? I've heard it repeated many times but I did some source digging years ago and basically found that it came from an off-hand comment from either Gabe Newell or a Valve support staff member (I can't remember which it was). I'd love to believe it, but I don't see any feasible way Valve could actually do such a thing. I think if they fold, our Steam libraries are very likely going with them.
As for the differences in all the various offerings, I pretty much agree with you. I was a longtime GOG devotee until shifting over to Linux had me reluctantly making my way back to Steam (Proton is genuinely amazing). While I'd much rather have a fully DRM-free library, I'm willing to give up that for Steam's selection and mostly frictionless Linux support. I ultimately feel like each store has its own positives and negatives, and deciding where to buy things is all about weighing those on an individual basis.
I fully support people not using EGS for whatever reasons they deem valid, I just find the GamerScreechingTM you identified to be both overblown and also in many cases disingenuous. As you note, many of the complaints they have against Epic also apply to Uplay, Origin, and even the internet's beloved Steam. It too was the public enemy of gaming back when it first launched, but now it and those other platforms seem to get unilateral passes for things Epic gets crucified for.
Based on everything I've said here, clearly I, like the people I'm complaining about, have too much invested in a platform I don't actually use, and in thinking about it out loud now, I think it comes down to the real source of what's grinding my gears. To me, it's not even specifically about Epic as it is about the discourse surrounding them -- the screeching. So much of it falls into the "finding justifications for our abuse" type of communication that I feel has been a raging infection in the gaming community for as long as I can remember. It's people wanting to hate, who seek out and surface any reasonable sounding excuse to give themselves plausible deniability. That way, when their abuse or hatred is openly identified, they can hide behind the cover of it being either principled or provoked -- in this case a sort of "it's about ethics in games
journalismdistribution" defense.100% apocryphal. I wish that particular myth would stop rearing its ugly head, because it gives people a false confidence in the system.
Every time it comes up I ask for proof, and it's never materialized. The only supporting evidence I've ever seen is a screenshot of a Steam support rep who gave an ambiguous "We'll make it right" style answer.
Assuming the screenshot is genuine, it's still just as likely to be speculation on the part of the support rep than an actual position within the company. Most reps have little training before they're thrust into the wild, and they're under high pressure to get through tickets as quickly as possible.
From a legal perspective, there's nothing written into their subscriber agreement or any other terms. Realistically, they'd need to have negotiated this with all partners as well. With the thousands of companies and individuals they've partnered with, I'm sure somebody would have commented if there was an "in case we go out of business" clause by now. Everything else, including percentages and sale dates are leaked within minutes of being announced.
Finally, if Valve really offered this guarantee, it makes no sense that they'd keep this tight-lipped about it. A fallback for consumers would help increase confidence in their platform and drive sales. Seems odd then that they've never mentioned it.
The only logical answer is that it doesn't exist. There are no protections if Valve should ever go out of business. This rumour seems to persist on wishful thinking alone.
@cfabbro wrote this to me a year and a half ago and it covers it all very well.
Thanks! It's nice to see it laid out so explicitly in the support messages there, but I'm with @cfabbro in that I'm not holding my breath. Outside of other concerns, of which there are many, I think the biggest one is the idea of scale. Steam struggles to have its servers up and running during just the increased web traffic from their regular sales -- how would they handle a sunset where nearly every single person on the platform is scrambling to grab terabytes of data from their servers all at once? And moreso, what incentive would they have to do so given that they're going out of business anyway? It would be significant added cost in return for customer loyalty for a soon-to-be-dead company. I have a hard time thinking someone would be willing or even able to pay up for that.
Well, if there's any company in the entire industry I would trust to show customer goodwill for no benefit in their last days, Valve is at the top of my list by a wide margin.
One nice thing I don't think most people realize is that there is no launcher DRM. I don't think that's a feature from Epics perspective, but it's a thing.
Now, that doesn't mean there aren't games with DRM, but the DRM is not from the Epic Launcher, it's Denuvo or something the devs homebrewed.
There is no Steamworks equivalent, and any game you install you can just open without the launcher.
Personally I disabled it on startup and only open the launcher to install new games. I have enough electron apps. But considering you almost never need to have it open, it's not that big of deal.
Tbh if you don't like launchers or DRM, EGS is technically better than Steam, only second to GoG which refuses to even sell games with DRM.
That's not really entirely true. Some games, especially the higher profile free ones, require the Epic launcher to run in order to work. Just Cause 4, for instance, will always open the Epic Launcher, which it uses for online connectivity. And it will only run if it can connect online.
I only learned this because I wanted to play it with the Steam controller, and this whole process prevents it from working properly. Though on a personal note, It's what made me buy an 8bitdo SF30 Pro, which is probably the single best generic bluetooth game controller ever made.
Do you know about https://alia5.github.io/GloSC/? It's what I use to get the Steam controller to work on non steam games.
I don't care for controller compatibility layers because they tend to work poorly. And in any case, I seem to remember that while I was searching for solutions that this particular solution did not work.
I can second the SF30 Pro. It really is wonderful!
This is likely a dumb question, but can't you put the Epic Games Store as a game entry in Steam, then launch it from there? I imagine you'd have to have some complicated bindings though.
You can, but the games you launch from then on do not have the steam overlay, nor do they work with the steam controller.
Granted, not all games rely on the Epic Launcher, so often you can just point Steam to the executable and it will work as you'd expect.
That's counterintuitive. I've always wondered how that overlay works and tracks processes, because I've used it to launch MultiMC, then from there launch some Minecraft pack to play using the Steam Controller. Any idea why this doesn't work with the Epic Launcher?
This isn't really a differentiating factor with Steam. Steamworks is mostly used purely for integration with the Steam client (friends list, achievements, etc) and not as a form of DRM.
Plenty of games on Steam ship with no functional DRM and do not require Steam to run once installed. Many even still offer Steamworks features while also functioning without Steam. Meanwhile there are still games on EGS that require the client to run in the background to facilitate social/multiplayer features similar to Steamworks.
When my Internet went down I was not able to play Control without launching EGS, while Steam specifically has offline mode even for games with DRM (though some DRMs might require an online connection, but that's a different story)
The fact that you don't get to download and save an installer for your own convenience is essentially DRM. I have the same gripe with Steam.
If I copy the installed game files on another computer it will run? Like GOG.
Regardless of DRM you shouldn't just copy games (or any programs) like that unless it's specifically a "portable" version. Installed game is not the whole game, installers usually create config/save file directories in other locations, the game might work without them (or create them on first launch), or it might not.
I am in the group that will never use the Epic Game Store. I don't want to support a company who decided the best way to gain market-share was to try and buy their way to success. If they had come in with just a normal barebones launcher, and got games on it via integration with Unreal Engine I would be fine with it and use it.
But they didn't, they came in and bought out games that had steam launches planned for months. They throw money around like crazy but can't even add basic features to the store like reviews or shopping cart or forums. And it seems like they brought along this superior attitude that they are better than everyone else despite lacking in so many features.
I will continue to support Steam for many years to come, in every way they have a superior store. Have many amazing tools and features to help developers. Support tools to play games on linux, play games remotely, do livestreaming, and experimental features to constantly improve user experience.
It may or may not collect user data for the Chinese government.
To be fair that's a pretty tenuous claim. It stems from the fact that Epic looked at your steam install for game/friend data, and that Tencent has large minority stake in the company. Note that Sweeny alone has the majority stake.
I doubt there's actually a connection.
Given how ugly the Chinese government behaves on the international scene over the last few years alone, whether it actually feeds the data may hold less sway than the fact that Tencent owns 40% of Epic Store.
There's something particularly creepy about the fact that a platform that so aggressively pushes itself onto the market also happens to be in a close relationship with a known CCP collaborator.
I think it's overly paranoid to be worried about the 40% stake. Not only is it stake in a private company, but Sweeney himself still has majority stake. If Tencent wants to do something, and Sweeney says no... there's nothing Tencent can do. There's no way to do a hostile takeover, they don't have the majority vote on the board, and they can't even liquify their stake easily. Their gains are really just monetary.
I would love to share your innocent sentiment.
I really dislike these "sweet summer child" posts, on reddit, tildes, and real life. They have no real substance, it just tries to condescend the other person into silence.
No looking down on anyone here. I'm just way too tired to bring my Google-Fu A-game to the field. It's morning and I'm yet to sleep. This is me trying to sound sincerely relating.
Wait until you look into EAC, which requires a kernel level access to the system, and loads up a binary blob from somewhere which is then executed on your system. I know it's really tin-foil-hatty, but putting things together I must say I am at least a little concerned at how carelessly people let software run on their computer if it comes with a game. EAC is a massive NOPE from me!
I miss achievements far more than I thought I would. I also find the launcher crashes often. As of now I'm not going to be spending any money on it but I will pick up the freebies. I will never buy an epic exclusive on epic.
I think the free game thing is a bit of a trap. Users who switch will invariably be cheaper than than those that stay. The real whales will prefer the convenience of one platform. Sure it will boost their numbers and look good to game devs, but If you tell a studio "hey we have x% of steams users" but then they make y% the money on epic then if y is a lot smaller than x it will really scare them away in the long term. It didn't work for origin and I don't think it'll work for egs.
On an amusing note I came quite close to paying for civ vi dlc after enjoying the free base game. Then I noticed that the dlc on epic was more than 2x the price of the base game+dlc on steam. It was (and as of now still is) on sale on steam but I still find it halarious that Epic's give away made me spend more money on steam.
Uh, hwhat? Was that double steam's sale price or regular price?
The sales price. Dlc+base game is the same price on both platforms normally. I just found it funny.
It suffers the most in its storefront. There's no cart and buying multiple things one item at a time really sucks. It sucks enough that it might even damage actual sales because it's so out-of-date with how people buy things on the internet. Every time I run a transaction for one item between buying multiple things is another chance I won't buy the next thing. If I can load up a cart and buy everything at once, I'm done. It's baffling that a cart hasn't been implemented yet. There has to be some underlying reason why there is no cart that I can't fathom. But during their first big sale, I probably skipped on half of the things I planned to buy because it was so tedious to do things one at a time. They desperately need someone to tell them "every obstacle to a purchase is a potential purchase lost".
There's a wishlist but it's hard to find. It's functional, and that's about it.
The free games have been a great way of getting people "in the door". They're a good mix of classics and new enough desirable games. I can't really call any of them junk because they're pretty much all good enough for at least an hour of fun.
It's missing almost all of the social features like achievements and profiles. I'm not that bothered by this though. Fewer interruptions and beans to count.
It's got some work to do on the buying games parts. They should work on that. And then they can work on the social nonsense. But it's been great for free games, and they've gotten some excellent exclusives, even if most of them are time limited.
With regards to not having a cart, I wonder if their situation is similar to itch.io, which also doesn't have one. I don't have all the correct terminology for this so my apologies if I convey something inaccurately, but my understanding is that on itch.io you're not buying games from from the platform itself so much as you are from individual developers that happen to have space set up there -- sort of like a flea market model rather than a department store. I wonder if Epic is doing something similar, thus ruling out the possibility of using a cart?
Maybe? But Bandcamp works like how you've described Itch.io, and Bandcamp will let me fill up a cart. It just queues up all of the purchases for me and I'm just clicking through the transactions. Still messy but so much easier than finding and purchasing a bunch of songs or albums one at a time. And it groups together purchases that can be grouped, like multiple albums on the same label.
This is a really good point. I didn't even think about Bandcamp and its cart, but you're absolutely right.
It's allowed to exist, has gifted an incredible backlog of free stuff to it's Thursday club, and whatever demonic screeching is valid or not about exclusively deals, there are games that wouldn't be able to exist if Epic wasn't funding them.
Epic could be putting a fraction of it's money into taking better care of their in house Fortnite devs, but that's neither here nor there.
I don't mind it. Was I on the hate bandwagon early on? Sure. But I got off that real quick when a friend wanted to play Satisfactory, which at the time was a EGS exclusive, after it was revealed on Steam. I said, fuck it, let's get EGS and play.
Since then, I've continued to use EGS. Not just for the free games. I've purchased at least one other game that was an exclusive, that was also advertised on Steam initially, though unreleased yet.
Like most gamers, I already have Origin and UPlay, because I have games from Steam that require them. I also buy from GOG and have their launcher. I use other stores that don't have launchers like GMG and HumbleBundle. And I even have launchers that don't make sense, like the Paradox launcher. I don't care. I'm not playing on a potato, so who cares about having a few launchers open?
Out of all the launchers, I like Steam the most, followed by GOG Galaxy. Does EGS have room for improvement? Absolutely! But people forget, or perhaps don't know, that Steam was hot trash for a long time, too. It took years for Steam to get to where it is today. Even Galaxy is missing things. But these launchers, including EGS, will get there.
The most annoying thing about having several launchers is friends list. But that's relatively minor since the people I play with are also in our Discord or Teamspeak servers. I can always find out who's playing what.
Overall, I think it's overblown. Even the whole exclusive thing. Bitching about console exclusive makes sense, since a person would have to shell out a few hundred dollars for the hardware to play an exclusive. That problem doesn't exist with PC. I don't have to buy separate hardware to run a separate launcher. There's no cost to do so. If anything, I can save money. I'm willing to go to wherever has the best price, because I'm a smart consumer. Loyalism to Steam/Valve is the opposite of that.
Good: Free games.
Bad: Limited other info/features about the games: it lacks reviews, the news feed for a game to see updates, the built in forums, the mod workshop... all the stuff that Steam has developed around the game itself.
Ugly: Exclusives. I get that they want to build up their store, and there's certainly games that have been saved by Epic money, but it means using a product that worse in every way to access them.
The only reason I have it is for the free game giveaways. Otherwise, it's pretty bad.
I still can't believe the no cart thing. They must still think of it in-house as a Fortnite launcher.
The exclusives policy turned me off immediately, and it's been surprisingly easy to avoid giving them any custom. Their priorities are too skewed. Still not having a shopping cart is pathetic.
I would have to say I rank them:
I typically forget about about everything below Xbox, since I don't subscribe to Uplay+ or Origin Access (at least until Madden comes out). I sometimes get the free game on Epic Games Store but I often forget. My mind space can only handle so many launchers and when 80% of my digital library lies on Steam, I don't often look at the store fronts on the other launchers, except for one-and-done games. Between Steam and Gamepass, and the occasional Origin Access, I have absolutely zero need for another storefront. So I guess to say whether they are good or bad, they are just unremarkable?
It's nice for games and game developers (because of Unreal 4) but it's "trying to bind customers as much as possible" thing is pretty obvious.
For an example, they recently released Quixel photoscanned textures for free, for use in game assets. They're high-quality as fuck, as it's a team of techs travelling the world to create ultra high resolution textures of just about anything. You're licensed to use them for free, but only if you use Unreal 4. Same for the engine in general, it's free to use, but they've got all sorts of licenses in place to make sure that you stay on their platform.
I've purchased some games there (those that were exclusive). The client is shitty and undercooked, but mostly I don't care, I just launch the game from desktop shortcut and don't see a lot of the launcher when things go right.
But when the game is not an exclusive, I default to searching for the game in this order: GOG -> Steam -> EGS -> Itch -> MS Store