- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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Oh no, rival game stores realize that they need to be better than steam to compete against steam? Won’t anyone think of the shareholders?!?
It’s almost like their shitty games aren’t enough to draw in sales. Almost like bringing down prices to where people are willing to pay them might actually convince people to spend money.
Weird.
It was never about any of that. It’s that Valve is a trustworthy company so far and epic is not. The only way at this point I would buy from epic store is if they offered DRM free copies.
I’m sure it’s about that for some people, but yeah if they ever actually get significant market share they will enshittify so fast it’ll make your head spin. The only thing that has changed is they’ve decided they need to make a bare minimum experience instead of just throwing money around.
those are just words, they won’t be doing shit
stop believing words people, we have years of actions, there is no reason the think they have changed
That’s why I said DRM free, because I don’t trust them, so I would only buy something if I could take it and use it away from their store forever.
Replace ‘buy’ with ‘download for free’ and ‘launcher’ with ‘unnecessary software after the download completes’, and they might get my attention.
I wasn’t swayed by their ‘free’ games that require their software. I wasn’t swayed when they bought up exclusivity contracts (yarr!). I’m sure as fuck not going to be swayed by the software having the absolute bare-minimum feature set.
I have fully taken advantage of their free games. I just never buy anything on their store. I have hundreds of their free games and a lot of them are awesome games. Anything I want to buy I go through steam or gog.
Fuck Tim. He’s the reverse-GabeN. NebaG ? 🤣
They definitely lost sales because of how horrible the user experience was/is, too.
Remember how the store launched without a fucking shopping cart so you had to buy each game as a separate transaction? Pepperidge Farms remembers that Epic isn’t even capable of the most basic of features required for an online store.
Of course, they’ll never get a cent out of me after they pulled that scumbag move of putting games on sale without ever asking the devs - they put games that hadn’t even released at like 50% off!
Even if they offer DRM free copies, I’d use GoG first. The Epic Game Store just doesn’t have the feature parity with GoG or Steam stores.
I’ve been rapidly barrelling toward a DRM-free-only self-hosted future, and part of that is DRM-free books. In an attempt to get out of Amazon’s clutches, I looked for where I can buy DRM-free books, like Project Hail Mary. The answer I came up with was: nowhere. Everyone is following the same playbook. Why would I buy from your store if you’re doing exactly what Amazon is doing? I’m already shopping on Amazon, and I want something better.
(The answer is that I can break the DRM on other stores, but I can’t on Amazon. When it’s this difficult to get DRM-free books, I wouldn’t blame people for resorting to piracy.)
Why on earth would I buy from Epic if I have any other option? What are you doing better?
Yeah, GOG is at least offering DRM-free games. That gives them one big plus over Steam and is why I maintain a library on both.
On the other hand, I can’t name a single thing Epic does better than Steam and GOG.
Many games are DRM free on Steam too. Cyberpunk 2077 for example. The Steam DRM is at the publisher/developer’s discretion, not Steam’s.
Steam DRM itself is also trivially bypassed which is surely intended.
FWIW a lot of games on Steam are also entirely DRM-free it’s just not overly obvious without checking on PCGamingWiki.
Free games
At the cost of having to play them through the Epic Launcher? Nah, too rich for me, boss.
I’ve only been getting comics from bundle sites since they give you epubs and PDFs. Kind of a necessity for a non-Amazon eReader.
I appreciate my Kobo eReader though, and it’s possible their online store will be DRM-free? Or, it could be per-book; when I put my own up, they had a checkbox to turn on DRM which I left off.
Kobo is where I ended up buying from, because I can break the DRM there, but it wasn’t trivial to figure out. For comics, I use Global Comix; they seem to be universally DRM-free, at least what I’ve seen so far. Failing that, Google at least tells you on a per item basis what the DRM situation is for books and comics.
Buy from Kobo, download from Anna?
Two plugins for Calibre and a free Adobe account.
And Linux support right?
Right?
Might as well do the meme right:
If anything this will likely break support with Lutris, Heroic, and others so they can force you to run their client.
Isn’t legendary using the APIs directly? It could affected by minor changes I suppose but hopefully that can be updated. Not sure if Lutris uses legendary but heroic does.
The APIs are all undocumented and reverse engineered for Legendary. Chances are a major re-write like this could change the APIs.
Maybe support for Linux is part of the new redesign. I mean they want to or already have hired someone to champion Linux Anti-cheat support, directly by Epic. Maybe there is hope.
Easy anyi-cheat is a different team to the Epic Store, so the effect of that hiring is indeterminate.
I’m a little surprised they didn’t wait until after all of the Valve monopoly suits to play out first, as if this is successful it will just undercut the argument against Valve.
If it’s successful it might under cut the claims against Valve but they can just claim the press from the lawsuit helped break the monopoly – and besides the lawsuit was just for PR and to try to get Valve to break financially. It was always a longshot that it’d do anything else. If it’s unsuccessful, however, it can be blamed entirely on Valve and can be used to get the lawsuit to actually do something as “look we implemented everything Steam did and didn’t get any more market share.”
But Epic kinda doesn’t have a choice. They’re bleeding money, Fortnite is waning, they have no popular properties on the horizon, they’re hard into AI for customer service and moderation which is only getting more expensive, and they keep doing the sweetheart deals to devs for their game giveaways which haven’t really brought any paying users to the platform.
It’s either attempt feature parity or start cutting the consumer facing part of the business, and for one of the industry’s oldest and most prominent players that’s really not a choice they want to make.
No tux no bux
And we all know what the asshole at the top thinks of linux. So, pass.
I love this XD
They already lost me when they told me I couldn’t play a downloaded game without an internet connection. DRM free is the only way.
You can, with some. The launcher has an offline mode and a lot of the binaries within the install location can be run without the -epicportal requirement, but I’m unsure if you can also play them without keeping the launcher installed. Depends on the game, I guess.
that’s a whole lot of text to say no
i’ll just stick with steam and gog
LOL After all this time, now they decide to finally compete?! Tom Sweeney is a creep and a weirdo, I’m never going to buy anything from the platform. As a Linux gamer, I don’t have a strong interest in Epic at all. I deleted my Epic Games account about nearly two years ago because their service was garbage and I prefer to use Heroic Games Launcher to connect to GOG.
Maybe they’ve been working on it a long ass time and it’s only now close to ready.
LOL I doubt that! Making a good and lovely storefront was never the priority until Sweeney realized that he couldn’t beat Steam by exclusives, Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and offering a fuckton of free games. This absolute clown is finally facing reality, too late of course, but that’s how these painfully stupid people operate. Valve literally wrote the blueprint for success and Sweeney ignored it all until he realized that he couldn’t.
All are expected to debut in the next 12 months.
Wouldn’t want to rush these things. Absolute clowns lol.
For as much as people like Steam, their storefront and app is a pile of simultaneously over and under engineered shit.
So I don’t think this will really accomplish much for Epic.
Classic case of too little, too late.
Get fucked Epic. Get epically fucked.
Lol guess its nearly time to watch another epic dumpster fire.
- I lose access to the email I’ve had since 1997.
I try to reset my login credentials. The website is caught in a loop. I open a tech support issue explaining that I just need to change my email.
I get sent an automated reply being told email changes use the automated system…the one caught in the loop.
I post a reply to my ticket saying I can’t use the automated system. It’s stuck in a loop.
I get sent an automated reply being told to use the automated system.
I search google for an 800 number. I find there is no 800 number.
2026 I still haven’t changed my email address. I also haven’t bought a single game. I claim the free ones, snd I can still log in for now. But I just know eventually it’ll say something like “For security purposes we’ve emailed you a code” snd that email will go to my lost email address. And I will have lost the whole account. So I’m not spending money on games I could lose next week.
So Epic, you want sales? Step 1, let me change my login email.
Step 2…well, you’re still fucked. Steam is a juggernaut in their space.
But at least you gained 1 potential customer. Though lets be real.this 3 year wait has left a pretty bad taste im my mouth. I’m not sure if regaining my account would prompt me to buy from a company making me wait this long.
If it exists on GOG or Steam, I can’t imagine wanting it on Epic.
Steam: Good featureset, good Linux support, large library, probably going to be around in 10 years.
GOG: Offline installers, some explicitly DRM-free stuff.
Matrix: Specialized niche wargaming stuff, some physical media.
What does Epic bring to the table?
If it brought a big picture mode with controller navigation that wasn’t irretrievably broken, that would be an improvement.
Steam’s website design generally is so bad, and when you then add big-picture and controller it’s “I can’t believe it’s not a teenager’s first web project” bad.
Steam has a lot going for it, but don’t pretend it’s perfect.
Oh man, their website…
Its so slow and not interactive. Every click is a full page reload…
What is this, 2007?
What’s a Matrix?
Matrix Games. They’re a publisher that specialize in wargames that I frequent to get some of my more-serious milsims from (though availability has improved on Steam). They also run an online store. The above three stores are the only places that I’ve bought video games for a long time. Well…tries to remember actually, I did get a few things on itch.io, and IIRC I bought Starsector directly from the company that makes that.
Imagine what the epic store would look like if instead of spending all that time and money suing stream, they used it on their launcher
