Epic cons:

• Filled to the brim with DRM, at the point where you can't even launch many singleplayer games offline
• Actively against linux, for some fucking reason
• Bad launcher (but this one is no biggie, you can and should use Heroic launcher instead of the official one)
• Bad store in general compared to steam
• Ties with Tencent (super anti-consumer chinese state-owned megacorp)

Epic pros:

• Free games
• With coupons prices can get VERY low
• When it opened I heard the percent they take from game devs was lower than the other stores (not sure if it's still the case and tbh if it ever was)

Steam pros:

• Pushing linux gaming like their life depends on it
• Generally correct towards the consumer
• Huge store and many information, from the game store pages to the workshop
• During sales prices are good

Steam cons:

• Drm
• Bad official app Ux and messy ui

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.

Well, I have four big ones:

• System scanning: EGS is known to automatically scan your system and send your data back to them. While this seems to be the same type of analytics Steam does occasionally, in Steam's case, it's opt-in, and done with full, informed consent.

• Paid exclusives: Epic has been known to pay publishers to make their games artificially exclusive to their own store. They regularly claim this money is to support the development of the games in question, but this is easily disproven, as they've been seen buying games known to be complete more than once. Additionally, this has resulted in bait-and-switch-like situations, where users would prepurchase Steam copies of games, only to be informed that they wouldn't be getting them.

• Publisher-centric behavior: Another user here claimed that EGS is pro-developer and anti-consumer, but this is only half true. This only rings true in the case of self-published games. There have been cases of developers getting unwarranted backlash after aforementioned bait-and-switches, when they were just as surprised to learn about all the "development support" they received as anyone.

• Tim Sweeney: Tim Weeney, the CEO of Epic, is an asshole. A giant, narcissistic, hateful shitbag. Just look at his Twitter, the dudes a giant POS.

I posted about this in another thread, but Epic also bought exclusivity for games that were crowd-funded then had the option to have the game on Steam removed or you'd get the Steam key after the exclusivity period expired. This pissed off a lot of people.

Epic's CEO has a hateboner for everything Linux.

No linux support. Actually, in the case of games like rocket league, they REMOVED linux support.

I personally don't like Epic for paying developers for exclusivity deals, keeping games off other PC platforms for a year or more. Artificial scarcity is bad for consumers.

Tencent (aka basically the chinese government) having 40% ownership is a major red flag for me.
Don't really have that much more to say about them, since I don't play their games. Unreal Engine is really impressive so it's a shame

The multi-billionaire owner with the backing of the Chinese government is claiming that he's the underdog against a popular company/piece of software/GabeN. He's made some poor choices interacting with the community.

Yes, it's probably nice for a publisher to have a guaranteed income, which is why they sell exclusivity. It leaves a sour taste in my mouth, so I choose not to support it.

The rest about the launcher being bad sounds unhinged to me, but some people are really into that.

They bought Rocket League and actively made it worse.

Epic is the worst of the 3 platforms for a user. It is a drm like steam, but with less games on it, and even less optimized (so even more wasted resources and time loading useless advertising).

Steam has it that is makes game run on Linux smoothly, and the biggest library of games. Gog is drm free. Epic has absolutely nothing a user may want, except for free games so that you are now captive of their shitty platform.

Pretty much every single decision you can see from their history since the inception of EGS is either stupid or blatantly destructive to gaming industry. Just some examples: better revenue shares for developers? Sure but this translates into worse platform. Money bonuses for exclusivity is great for developers? Sure but the game is then stuck at the platform that gives no means for users to interact and let developers know how they could improve their product. Cross platform multiplayer platform that works? Sure but then we have to deal with stupid requirements like having an account on additional platforms we may not want to use, even to play single player modes sometimes.

You can also check Tim's Twitter and see how ignorant and hypocritical he is. I wouldn't mind it but his decisions seem to actually affect the whole platform and therefore the industry so... too bad.

No support for Linux - steam has it built in and the DRM free nature of gog games means that they're not too tough to get running via wine.

aside from what everyone else said, they killed the beloved Unreal Tournament series, which is a huge sour spot for older gamers who fondly remember those. Then there's the excessive microtransaction demand inside Fortnite, a game with a large playerbase under the age of 18. That alone led to two major lawsuits that they both lost

In short, Epic is anti-consumer. They claim better support for developers, but in reality consumers are the one paying for that. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but you the consumer have no choice in it. You are forced through exclusives and other limitations to use inferior service for the same price. Even free games they give are there to drag you into their ecosystem and abuse.

This is why Valve doesn't feel threatened, I assume, and is not likely to feel the pressure from Epic anytime soon. For that to happen, Epic would have to get on par with features and customer benefits equal or better than Steam and that's not happening anytime soon. Epic would rather throw hundreds of millions on exclusive deal with some developer and force you the consumer to buy the game on EGS than actually improve the service.

Epic doesn't see gamers as their customer - they see developers as their customer and shape the customer experience around that. For example, Epic said that if/when they add reviews, developers could choose to opt their games out of reviews. That's very pro-developer, but very anti-consumer, whatever you might think of the value of reviews. Informed customers can rattle off a long list of reasons they don't like Epic and why they're bad, but they are a small minority of PC gamers. The "silent majority" doesn't keep up with this kind of stuff or really care about it, so they are literally judging stores on their merits and Epic is a bare bones platform that doesn't offer customers a good reason to spend money in their store because they don't think they need to.

Instead of offering anything to be a better platform they are burning money on the platform in hopes they can pay their way to dominance by paid exclusivivity and giving away games. One of those isn't bad for users. Now consider what Epic offers beyond being able to buy and download a game. Nothing. Epic is only a storefront and they've had years to work on this at this point. Steam has gained dominance and maintains it in no small part due to all the additional features available to everyone. Do you use the steam workshop for any of your games? Have you used the steam community forums to troubleshoot a problem? Do you use big picture mode for a more console like experience? Do you customize your controller settings with the pretty expansive controller support built into steam? The overlay? How about the custom profiles and badges and trading cards? Epic is only a storefront. That's it. That's all that's on offer. So they supplement it with bribing devs to be exclusive to their store and giving away games to try and attract users.

I'm pretty pragmatic. While I appreciate what Valve has done for PC gaming, I like the idea of them having some legit competition in the space. So when the Epic store started, I bought a bunch of games there to give it a shot. Outer Worlds, Control... And of course I grabbed up a bunch of free games, too!

...and then, over time, I've repurchased all of the games I liked on steam anyway.

Make of that what you will.

Personally my main gripe is their aggressive strategies to force people into their garbage-tier launcher. Compared to Steam it's just miles behind, and it's yet another app to run on your PC. All my friends are also on Steam, and Steam had Linux support. However, if all you want to do is launch singleplayer games, you don't mind the Epic launcher, and you get a good deal, then do whatever you want to.

One reason is that Epic are very dismissive of Linux, while Steam go out of their way to be supportive and GOG are supportive when it's convenient

Another is trying to lock games into exclusives with them, which other distribution platforms don't do so much

That said, if you don't play games without cross platform multiplayer and don't care about Linux support or see yourself caring any time soon, there's not a huge reason to push you towards steam and away from epic. GOG is more of an anti-DRM thing, however barring sales the price and the cut for the devs is identical on all of them and it's the same game aside from DRM.

For me it's entirely self-centered and I'm dispensing with all the aspirational and political feelings that people have about the way businesses operate.

Quite simply I recommend Steam because it is a product with so many killer features, it's really hard to take anybody else seriously.

It's just shy of 2024, and Epic is still a non-realized alpha product. Their website, store, and launcher/library is a perfunctory effort at best. The most recent feature they added that I even consider to be an improvement would be the ability to look at my own games library - that should sound like a pretty funny joke but it's said deadpan. They don't even have proper controller support for PC, whereas Steam for example recognizes that PC gamers come with a variety of input hardware.

I mean it's so simply that steam is such a mature product that offers so much to the gamer, and epic just wants money and they're not really doing anything to compel me to want to use that platform.

GOG is great, it's a simple system that gives you the power to own your own games and I very much appreciate that. Personally I don't like to splinter my collection across different services so I'm mostly avoid them but I can't say anything really negative.

Anyways this is just my opinion, I feel like steam has tons of killer features, the otherS simply don't. There's lots of valid discussion in other areas about ethics and things like that but really I'm just looking at it from the perspective of what do I want from my money. Steam gives me the most, and the others don't even hold a candle.

Exclusives suck for everyone. Especially when Epic started out, they only had payment processors in certain countries. This meant that some people literally had no legal way to play the Epic exclusives. I'm not sure where they stand today, but that annoyed me enough, along with other shenanigans by Epic and Sweeny, that I avoid the whole ecosystem.

Paid exclusives locking content away from other online stores. Basically trying to force me to use it is a sure fire way of making me refuse.

For me it's simply EGS paying developers to lock games only their store.

If they were just competing, trying to deliver a better product I would massively support them, similar to how I support GOG, however when you start locking content to your storez you end up with "PlayStation vs Xbox" devision of content.

They do the same thing that the horde of shitty streaming services do: Hold content hostage through exclusivity deals so they can gain market share without actually providing a comparable technology or service as their competitor.

I don't like when huge, rich corporations pretend that they are an underdog.

On top of that, I don't like when a platform bribes developers to limit their game to one platform.

Aside from the other scumbaggery that Epic does, if you do wanna play their free games then atleast use heroic so you don't use the wasteheap that is the epic games launcher.

For starters: complete lack of features and user support. EGS gives you the game and basically no way to interact with the community around that game. They don't support Linux, which is huge for some people, but also makes some peripherals like Steamdeck that operate on Linux entirely incompatible.

Because their user support is so bad, nobody really chooses EGS to buy/play games from, so Epic tries to take that choice away buy giving payouts to publishers to only let the game be on their store for six months or longer, meaning anyone who wants to play such a game has to come to them. This is also why you see a lot of free games, EGS trying to lure people to their "service".

Which is where the real big problem comes in. Instead of user beneficial features, most of the storefront and game launcher is bloat ware that would rather show you more and more ads for other products on their store than let you get into the game you want to play. And if reports are true, advertising games already in your library. So they aren't even trying to tailor a custom user experience, they are just blasting you with a bunch of shit till something sticks (or you uninstall)

There have also been allegations of EGS scanning personal computer files outside of its install directory, which is scummy enough on its own but its also transmitting that data back to their central server, which gets handed off to Tencent, the Chinese owned company that is a big investor in Epic and has their own history of scandal and anti consumer behavior. So if this all is happening, its hard to say just what data on your computer is behind handed off to Tencent and the Chinise Government because you wanted to play a silly game on an inferior game service.

One of my biggest complaints with the EGS is their anti-competitive actions. Rather than try to out compete, rather than try to be the better choice, they pay developers to only release games on their platform, flat out barring them from releasing on any other store. They don't try to win your favor, they don't try to be a pleasant experience, they just shortcut their way to being the only option, without a care for improving any of the other faults or shortcomings.

My next complaint is that Tencent has a 40% ownership share in Epic Games, and I make active efforts to not give them a dime.

Epic wanted exclusives by pulling games from other platforms. I will never spend a single cent on Epic Games. I'm happy to spend it on Steam, especially games that I have pirated before (Commandos series for example) or indie games (Banished anyone?).

For bigger games such as Civilians, I'll purchase it on Steam and then pirate so I don't need to run Steam. I am a big fan of patches to remove the intro screen.

I like the way steam looks better and try to avoid spending money on software belonging to chinese companies like Tencent.

I wouldn't have much reason not to buy from Epic, but I also wouldn't have any reason to buy from it either. Other than free games I don't see why pick Epic over any other place. Steam has more features and GOG is DRM-free, even ItchIO has the benefit of being more supportive of smaller and upcoming game devs. Epic doesn't do anything but the basic.

Valve is viewed in an extremely favorable light in the PC world (and Valve deserves it). Therefore plenty of gamers take Epic throwing around their Fortnite money to get exclusively for their barebones launcher and game store very personally.

Their exclusives , the anti linux stance and the store is crap too

Epic gives better cuts to devs and games have to opt into DRM

Enjoy the free games if you cant afford them

Tim Sweeney hates linux so that's why I prefer Steam over it. Even though Epic gives people free games, the games were always free anyway (unless you want multiplayer), I know you said piracy isn't an answer though.

1. Epic Games paid big money to make some games platform exclusive.

2. Their launcher is, just like Origin and Ubisoft's one, features wise vastly inferior to Steam.

3. Smaller indie level multiplayer games do not have crossplatform play with Steam, or other issues like DNF duel breaking player room ping indicators.

None of these explain the amount of frequency of anemosity towards Epic for their store. It seems some are in a parasocial relationship with their Steam launcher. A bit like console fanboy wars. And for some reason they prefer a monopoly without alternatives than one with alternatives. Perhaps some see the installation of another program as an intrusion to to their private comfort. Not rationally like Microsoft's ill willed spying telemetry, but emotionally led. I encountered a few people who just don't want to install new programs and perhaps see Epic a threat to their habits.

But I dislike them for dropping Unreal Tournament.

Issues I can think of in the order they occur to me. These are off the top of my head refections not researched.

1. Group think: If I shop where most other people shop I have outsourced research and decision making. Is there a good reason? maybe, maybe not but I'm going to follow the masses because I can't research everything.

2. Stability: neither store offers physical assets so if the store shuts down my purchases could also vanish. Steam is a bigger player and appears to be more stable and GOG is DRM free.

3 The shopping experience: I personally find the layout of steam better for discovery and finding reviews. With the current epic coupon available I have looked on epic for games and if you're just browsing it is not a intuitive experience. GOG similarly has a variety of sorting tools available.

4. private vs public ownership: Epic is a public for profit company. Over and over I have seen public companies screw there customers in the interest of profit. Valve (I believe, this is really off the top of my head) is privately held and as such can choose to prioritize whatever their leadership wants. They can't just be bought out and taken in a totally different direction.

This all could be insane ramblings but these are the things that motivate me to spend my money on Gog or steam in general.

Epic client is a spyware.

I personally don't give a shit about whichever store I use for gaming because I have no loyalty to Steam like a lot of the people in this thread. It's just a store and launcher. I wish people would get a grip.

I buy games where it's cheapest, whether that's GoG, Steam or Epic or anywhere else. I use the wishlist functions to make sure I can price compare on sales etc.

Basically Epic like every other publisher has created their own launcher/store.

They aren't trying to compete on features and instead using profits from their franchise to buy market share (e.g. buying store exclusives).

The tone and strategy often comes off as aggressive and hostile.

For example Valve was concerned Microsoft were going to leverage their store to kill Steam. Valve has invested alot in adding windows operability to Linux and ensuring Linux is a good gaming platform. To them this is the hedge against agressive Microsoft business practices.

The Epic CEO thinks Windows is the only operating system and actively prevents Linux support and revoked Linux support from properties they bought.

As a linux user, Valve will keep getting my money and I literally can't give it to Epic because they don't want it.

I just don't like the launcher. It's absurdly slow and bloated even though it doesn't contain many features. On fast hardware, it takes 30s to open and lags harder than Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. It also eats up my CPU for no reason and has an invasive privacy policy. I try to use the open source Heroic launcher instead, it's much better.

Although recently Steam has moved from slow to within a stone's throw of the launching speed of the Epic Games Store. I'm now looking for an alternative to launch my Steam games.

The issue with Epic isn't as bad as people imply, but it's very real. They produced an incredibly shoddy launcher and store, frequently engage in anticompetitive practices like exclusives, and are happy to frequently update their launcher with new unhelpful bullshit without addressing its core problems.

Me, I'm not upset that Epic exists, even as a Steam user I would not like to deal with them as a true monopoly. But, they give me zero reason to use the store.

The problem is that it's a half-baked product.

I just don't use Epic myself but do use Gog and Steam (with the ultra shitty EA launcher and Ubisoft Connect bundled with some of my games) and Playnite has changed everything unifying it all into that single launcher.

Full screen mode in Playnite works fine on my HTPC and as a launcher it does consolidate all of them into one place easily. Worth trying if you use multiple stores.

As for why I'm not using Epic, the whole paying for exclusivity with third parties really didn't appeal to me at all.

If the free offerings from Epic do appeal to you, or if they do better deals on localised currencies (especially if you do struggle to pay for things), don't worry about using their services. I wouldn't want you to deny yourself some entertainment just because other people have issues with them as a business.

There needs to always be multiple game stores to keep prices in check. Steam can not be the only option or prices will skyrocket. See game console stores for reference. I use Playnite to seamlessly bridge my game libraries from Steam, GOG, Epic, Amazon Prime, itch.io etc. This is the way.

what’s the issue with Epic

Enshittification.

why should I go for Steam

Not sure you should.

or GoG?

I hear GoG tends to be less DRM-y.

Honestly, if their launcher wasn't so buggy and didn't refresh itself every 10 seconds, I would use Epic a lot more. They have given out a bunch of great games over the last few years I'm trying to play.

Just my personal opinion

The good clearly are the free games and that some games go cheaper there, they have better sales sometimes. The bad is that the store is badly optimized. The UI is annoying, no cloud saves for a lot of games. As of recently there were no achievements or even a cart, but they have that now which is good. The friends tab is bare bones still. They have aggressive DRM. For some reason it's a pain in the ass to log in, but that might be just on my end.

Now with GOG, you don't have DRM, you can integrate all launchers so you can launch all the games from one, which for me, is pretty useful. GOG has great deals. The bad is that the ui as well is kind of bare bones, but i don't know, they are not trying to take over the market and their store works very well.

As of steam i don't need to say anything, everything is in there. If you play on linux you basically will get every game from steam. They have the most robust launcher with the most options, etc.

That said, personally I use the three of them. Gog primarily since i can launch everything from there and if i find a game in there, i'd rather get it from them. But i've found sales on epic too good to let go so i play those games there. For me it depends on what they're offering, but for some reason i really dislike Epic's layout and ui, i feel like it is very annoying and that it is missing a lot.

Epic Games is useful for the free games they giveaway every week, some weeks better than others. And I know the topic of ownership of these "free games" is another conversation, but I'll take advantage of it while it's there and also while giving them little to no money.

Nothing is wrong with it. It is just another games store.

I refuse to patronize Epic until they continue working on UT4. I've been playing their games for 25 years and they make fortnite then decide to just drop all of their long term fans.

As for minor issues, EGS does not have feature parity with Steam or GOG. They don't have user reviews, for example. This makes it a worse user experience.

More importantly, Epic has a habit of anti-competitive or anti-consumer behavior. When EGS first launched, they were keen on doing console-style timed exclusives, even for games that were already purchasable on platforms like Steam.

Lastly, Epic has a history of neglecting or shutting down games. A few of their older games were taken offline permanently when Fortnite started gaining traction. They then purchased a few studios, namely Psyonix (makers of Rocket League), Mediatonic (Fall Guys), and Harmonix (Rock Band/Guitar Hero series). These studios seem to be a shell of what they used to be. Psyonix's first major project under Epic was Rocket Racing in Fortnite, and this project seemed to be prioritized over Rocket League and even caused the removal of core features of Rocket League. Harmonix worked on Fortnite Festival, but that came at the cost of Fuser, which shut down and was delisted about a year after launch. As for Mediatonic, I don't think they worked on anything else yet, but a large portion of the studio was recently laid off. Needless to say, fans of the affected studios aren't happy with Epic as they're being treated as 2nd-class citizens compared to Fortnite players.

Epic’s customer service sucks. Consider my last experience from a prior xmas sale:

• had multiple games in the cart with discounts applied, checked out with paypal, but for whatever reason the communication broke and didn’t go through
• my cart then got stuck in a limbo where I couldn’t check out with any method to receive the discounts, everything was full price again
• opened a customer support ticket to get the problem resolved, then went through 3 days of back and forth, explaining the situation over and over because
  • each of your replies are handled by whoever the next agent is
  • who apparently don’t read any history of the ticket, so they provide feedback or advice that already didn’t work
  • and it can take a full 24 hours or more to get a reply that ignores all previous replies
• by the time the error was resolved by a competent person, the sale was over by only a few hours
• despite the fact that I only missed the sale window because their reps were incompetent, they refused to make any exceptions to apply the sale prices I had been trying to checkout for 3 days

So, fuck them. I only claim free games from them now.

And I concur with problems other people have mentioned.

As someone who seldom plays with friends (I have very few who want to play online), I just pick the store where the games are the cheapest or there's a sale or something. It doesn't really affect me that much.

But if all your friends are on steam, then check before getting a game on Epic, sometimes they don't let you play together. Most of the time they do, though.

The first major issue for me was that the launcher was a crypto miner and they didn't tell anyone.

Since then, I have 0 trust in them and refuse to install the launcher. I don't care for the "free games"

They're partially owned by Tencent, a big Chinese company. And as Chinese companies are, the government has direct influence over them. And while Tencent is not a majority owner, Tim Sweeney happily took Chinese money and now pays his co-owner a portion of the profits which then go to pay for Chinese gulags.

There are many things, especially hardware, where it's impossible to avoid Chinese companies but simply buying games somewhere else is super easy. It's obviously not a perfect system because even on GOG there are games using UE, but just buying games somewhere else is such a low barrier, it's not an inconvenience at all.

That said, claiming the free games doesn't help them. It helps the developers making those games because Epic has to pay them and won't get anything in return if that doesn't result in users leaving money in EGS for other things.

Steam and GOG are simply better platforms overall. If you really care about being DRM free and owning your games you go GOG route, otherwise Steam is the king. Epic does not even have a review system.

Epic however is the best source of free games on PC. A lot of the latest games I have played have been from Epic giveaways. Right now they have Outer Worlds and yesterday it was Ghostwire: Tokyo, both of these games I played few months ago after purchasing them through Humble Bundle.

Will I ever buy a game on Epic? Probably not, I prefer Steam, but those that simply refuse to redeem freebies and install their launcher while shouting things like it being spyware are weird.

There's not really a good answer other than convenience. Folks view Steam as the benevolent convenient monopoly. They want it to be their store for everything, their launcher for everything, their friends and social networks for all gaming on PC and what not. Epic is behind on feature parity and function, but even if it did have parity, I think gamers still want the convenience of one store/library/friends list.

Pure speculation: of the people who don't like Epic, maybe 25% are legitimate, principled objections to their business practices. The rest are split evenly between people who just want to manage their entire library on a single platform, and folks just going along for the hate-ride because it seems like the "safe" position to take.

From a technical stance, Steam and GOG are superior platforms (for different reasons). For equal-price purchases, I can't think of a single reason to choose Epic over other options. But claiming a game for free? That doesn't make anyone a bad person.

You can use all of them, or none of them, at the same time.

There are issues with every platform so all anyone can do is make their own decisions.

ITT: Steam shills pretending that their platform is better.

I personally do not care at all, I only buy physical games or wherever it's cheapest.

They're both amazing and independent, and one day we'll realise this was the golden age.

Epic doesn't play nice with Linux, and lemmy is a Linux-centric place - that's nearly all of the hate. I find Linux to be a pain in the ass because everything else I use, and am of my games, are Windiws native. I click the install button and never have to worry about which version of proton will work. It's the second worst thing about my Steamdeck (the first is, of course, that atrocious keyboard).

You will be able to tell how rabid the Linux continent is here by the number of down votes I get for saying that windows is simply a better gaming platform and Epics nose-thumbing at Linux causes me exactly zero worries because I play on the OS these games were made for.

Real answer is branding. Steam has cultivated an absolutely stellar image of being the "good guys" of gaming, and it's super hard to counter that. Epic came on the back of publisher-specific launchers getting a bad reputation for both legitimate and illegitimate reasons, so you end up with a weird, paradoxical defense of Steam's quasi-monopoly.

I guess tehcnically GOG is exempt, in that they also have a good reputation and they're objectively more radically pro-consumer than Valve by a huge margin, so the lines get blurred there.