Introducing the Epic First Run program
Introducing the Epic First Run program
I don't like Epic's exclusivity deals.
I don't like Epic's invasive "telemetry" libraries.
I don't like Epic's client helping itself to whatever data it wants on my computer.
I don't like Epic's ethics.
I don't like Epic's leadership.
I don't like Epic's investors.
Come to think of it, I don't like anything about Epic. I won't be giving them my money or granting them access to my computer.
Valve, GOG, and Itch are far more deserving of my support.
For what it's worth there's an open source launcher that is 100x better than Epic's official one called Heroic. You can use that if you want to avoid their slow, ad-spamming store.
I played KSP on Epic because it was free, but I hate Epic so much that I just bought it on Steam instead since I really liked the game.
I'm half tempted to do the same with Cities Skylines.. besides the mod support is better on steam, so I might just do that
Remember when Epic opened and started a huge astroturfing campaign against Valve for taking 30% commission?
Years later the Epic store is still trash without basic features, and now they are pushing for exclusivity.
I'm a self proclaimed valve fanboy, I use Linux with proton and wine-ge, and I buy games on the epic store. I try not to have purchasing biases, if the price is good on epic and it's feature parity with other PC storefronts, I'll buy it on epic and install with heroic launcher. I've only ran across a few games that don't have feature parity with steam, the biggest being that remnant doesn't have cloud saves on epic. However, these cases are few and far between and most of the time I'm fine buying on epic.
Getting 100% of your revenue is pretty wild, epic taking 12% was already massively competitive though.
Pc gamers are just so hostile to anything but steam that it's unlikely it'll trigger third parties to go with epic over steam. 70% of something is better than 100% of nothing. Pc gamers aren't going to be accepting of anything but steam anytime soon.
The reason players prefer Steam is because the other products are not good. If a launcher wants to compete with Steam, they need to do things that Steam does better than Steam or do things that Steam cannot do yet. Right now, I log into Steam and I am immediately in my library without any ads or recommendations, ready to launch because Steam lets me pick where I load in. When I log into Epic, I am stuck in the store page with a full app rotating banner of a bunch of games I am not interested in. Plus the library is limited in scope and I have to slowly navigate through all the games to find the game I want to play. Same with Blizzard, Ubi, all of them.
I don't know if you intended it this way, but saying that Steam users are hostile of other launchers makes us sound like we are unreasonable in what we are asking for. If Epic was better than Steam, I would use it. It's not.
More importantly, as a consumer you really ought to not be bothered whether CEO #1 gets 100% of the money or has to split 30% with CEO #2. Either way, some rich old farts are getting richer and fartier.
Yeah, sure, indie games and all. That's nice. But it's all the company side, and as a consumer we ought to look at consumer values, in which Steam is just strictly superior. It has features that are actually useful, a far far far far larger library, and most of us have a significant portion of our library there already.
Plus, hey: It doesn't log you out every 2-3 days for not reason. 😑
And steam works like a charm in Linux with windows games.
Also works fine with joysticks like dualsense. (Although for some reason they started overriding the native driver with their own steam API after launching steam games even if the game is set to disable steam input).
That's not entirely true, I like GOG. But I will say that a big part of why I dislike the use of so many launchers is because 98% of my game library already exists on steam. Publishers would like to use the storefront analogy but I think that gamers look at it more like moving house, and no one likes to move house.
Also you have to consider that a lot of modern day PC gamers grew up with consoles where there are no launchers there is just the home page and the games.
That's not to touch on the much more prevalent and important topics like privacy concerns and the like.
Eh no, it's entirely true. We've a decade of data showing that almost all pc gamers will not use a storefront and launcher that is not steam. Even if you personally buy games on gog occasionally.
The revenue thing isn't a big deal, you can sell steam keys and get 100% of revenue indefinitely from those.