+- Tendo City (https://www.tendocity.net)
+-- Forum: Tendo City: Metropolitan District (https://www.tendocity.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=4)
+--- Forum: Tendo City (https://www.tendocity.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=42)
+--- Thread: Epic Games Store (/showthread.php?tid=7226)
Epic Games Store - A Black Falcon - 27th October 2019
The biggest controversy this year in PC gaming is undoubtedly the Epic Games Store, but we haven't mentioned it much here. So, I decided to make a thread.
Epic MegaGames started out in the early '90s as one of the two major PC shareware game publishers, along with Apogee. (I, of course, always preferred Apogee.) They changed their name to Epic Games in the early '00s, after hitting the big time with Unreal Tournament. Gears of War in the '00s just increased their prominence. After that they were in a bit of a downturn, and founder Tim Sweeney left.
But then, things changed for them -- Epic Games made big, BIG money when Fortnite Battle Royale became one of the most popular games in the world. In response, they eventually decided to turn their previously small launcher, which had Fortnite, their now sadly abandoned (but great!) new Unreal Tournament game, and a few more things on it, into a major PC gaming platform rivaling Valve's Steam.
Now, that on its own is potentially good. Steam is a decent to good storefront and platform, but more competition's usually a good thing; things who have no competition usually stagnate, which ultimately isn't great.
No, the problem is how Epic has chosen to go about it. They decided that just making a storefront won't be enough to get many people to actually use the thing. After all, there are a bunch of sites and launchers out there competing with Steam -- GOG, EA and Ubisoft's launchers, sites like Gamersgate, and plenty more -- but none are serious competition, Valve still has the vast majority of the market.
So, to get attention, Epic decided on a two-front approach.
First, they release free games. Every week or so through much of the year, they have given out a new, often pretty recent, game for free. They are usually indie games, but not always; some are older major-studio games. Some weeks even have two games or bundles of games. You have to add the game during the free period to get them, of course, but beyond that I don't believe there are any catches -- they're yours, on the Epic Games Store, for as long as you have the account. I ignored these at first, but started adding most of them eventually and so now I have a small game library on the Epic Games Store, completely free. (No, I haven't mentioned any of them in my collection thread.)
And second, they decided to buy exclusivity. Do you have an indie, or maybe even major-studio, game that Epic likes? And are you willing to take a bunch of money to release the PC version of the game exclusively on the Epic Games Store for a year, before it will finally be allowed to launch on Steam and other PC gaming platforms? If so, congratulations, you're in! If not, the EGS probably doesn't want your game; they have turned away some developers who said that they were interested in being on the storefront, but not in exclusivity. This, naturally, has caused a great deal of controversy among gamers to say the least, as games people are interested in go EGS-exclusive and they get angry about it. A lot of PC gamers are very adamant about only playing games on team, and while some of that is foolish Steam partisanship, some of it makes sense -- if you want to play games with people on your Steam friends list, getting a game on Epic's store isn't great, you probably won't be able to play with them, for example. Each store has its own separate friends list after all. (Steam is the only PC storefront I have any friends list in at all, really...)
As an aside, like a lot of Steam's competitors, the Epic store focuses on selective game availability, as opposed to Steam's open floodgates of anything. This means that finding games on the Epic store is easy, which may be good for the developers that get on -- finding anything on the massive flood of terrible stuff that is Steam is quite difficult, and I think I've heard that a lot of games don't exactly sell well on Steam. But on the other hand, being selective means that fewer games get on your store, which excludes many games which ARE worth a look, so ultimately I think I prefer Steam, even if I admit that it does mean that finding things you are interested in may be impossible at times, good games WILL be buried under all the detritus.
Anyway, meanwhile, Epic's roadmap of features has fallen far behind. It may be extremely popular and a major branch of this very profitable company, but the Epic Games Store is still very barebones. For one example of this I ran in to recently, last week when looking around on my hard drives, I realized that some games I'd downloaded though the EGS weren't on the hard drive partition I wanted them on; it'd installed them on my external hard drive, but I'd meant to put them on an internal one. So you can just move it, right? After all, Steam added that feature years ago. I used to complain about how Steam didn't let you set game install paths and I had to fix that problem with Junctions, but Steam eventually fixed that problem and now let you have as many Steam library drives as you want, and you can move games' installs between drives as well. Well, the EGS does let you set an install path when you are first installing a game... and that's it. Once installed you cannot move it without some seriously tricky Windows maneuvers, and the Epic launcher won't even show you where they're installed to! Seriously, nothing in the Epic launcher hints at where games are installed to in any way. You can't view the folder on your hard drive, view the path, move the install, or anything. Once you set that path when you installed it that's it, beyond that it's all hidden from the user. That's a just insane and unacceptable limitation, to say the least!
This is one of just many examples of how feature-light the Epic launcher is. It, quite intentionally, also has no analog for Steam's forums for every game, for example. Don't expect a community or community help section on Epic's launcher, because it isn't there. Etc, etc. And they are not at all quick in adding any of the many features a major Steam competitor needs.
So, when you combine all of this -- the feature-light storefront; paying for exclusivity, often for games that had been announced on Steam; the connection to Fortnite, a super popular game but more so with casual gamers than core; and such, what you get is a huge, and ongoing, controversy.
Myself... well, I don't hate the Epic Games Store as much as some do for sure, but I have my issues with them for sure, both in their business practices and in their seriously lacking store features. So far I haven't spent anything on the Epic Games Store but have some games on it thanks to the free ones, and I'll take them, but it's definitely nowhere near Steam in features or content. If this is their plan to match Steam, so far it's not working I don't think, at least not for me. I'm sure it is probably growing their store faster than it would otherwise, but is this actually the plan that will create a real competitor to Steam? I guess in the coming years we'll see, but it's hard to imagine that angering a significant number of core gamers as much as Epic has working out for them... it's really questionable business, I'd think. And paying for PC store exclusivity is kind of annoying, too. I get why they're doing it and it might at least in part work, but still, it can cause problems and is artificially limiting on what should be the most open platform.
So yeah, it's an interesting issue, and Epic is one that is definitely an ongoing controversy.
RE: Epic Games Store - Dark Jaguar - 29th October 2019
I dislike Epic Games Store not for any reasons specific to it, but rather because it is run the same as other alternatives like Origin, and they basically bought their way into it and forced themselves to be relevant without actual merit. They also lack a number of features, indicative of the "bum rush" nature of Epic Megagame's business model as of late.
That said, I did buy Outer Worlds, so there's that. I want real competition, and for the most part I've been willing to wait out exclusives until they end up on the GOG store, which is by and large my favorite platform for this.
I don't know what a solution would look like short of a FTC mandated singular repository of digital sales which stores all have to sync to, but that runs into it's own issues that I personally am not prepared for. However, it can certainly be better, a lot better, and there's got to be SOME outside pressure, some shifting of the systems these companies operate under before they'll be compelled to change anything. They certainly won't be doing it for us.
RE: Epic Games Store - Sacred Jellybean - 1st November 2019
There's a storefront called Gamersgate? wtf. That's like calling a restaurant Hepatitis, to steal a Larry David joke.
Sorry, I intend to read the rest of this and possibly respond in kind, but I need to run, but that joke was too good to make imo, I might not have gotten back to this to make it and also I feel like if I post here promising to read it that I actually will, don't want egg on my face ya know?
But yeah. Game storefronts and shit. 'ts fucked up.
RE: Epic Games Store - Dark Jaguar - 1st November 2019
Gamersgate? Did that name come before or after the stained movement?
There's also F2A, which resells codes. In a perfect world, this would just be a place to actualy sell your digital games to other people to redeem, but in reality it's full of "giveaway" codes from people pretending to be reviewers that are repackaged and sold thus nearly bankrupting indie companies.
RE: Epic Games Store - A Black Falcon - 1st November 2019
Before. I imagine Gamersgate was not too thrilled about that movement....
RE: Epic Games Store - A Black Falcon - 1st November 2019
(29th October 2019, 12:59 PM)Dark Jaguar Wrote: I dislike Epic Games Store not for any reasons specific to it, but rather because it is run the same as other alternatives like Origin, and they basically bought their way into it and forced themselves to be relevant without actual merit. They also lack a number of features, indicative of the "bum rush" nature of Epic Megagame's business model as of late.You bring up a good point here, though -- what do we want? What is ideal here? I'd love if buying a game from one online storefront didn't lock you to that storefront for, say, any DLC or addons or such the game may release, for example -- I have bought games before from GOG and then kind of regretted it when the Steam versions of the games got patches sooner, had DLC sales that GOG rarely got, and such. It can be frustrating. But that's pretty much impossible without a single repository like you mention, but yeah, who would you trust to run that repository? There's nothing in such a database that could be used for questionable means, oh no...
That said, I did buy Outer Worlds, so there's that. I want real competition, and for the most part I've been willing to wait out exclusives until they end up on the GOG store, which is by and large my favorite platform for this.
I don't know what a solution would look like short of a FTC mandated singular repository of digital sales which stores all have to sync to, but that runs into it's own issues that I personally am not prepared for. However, it can certainly be better, a lot better, and there's got to be SOME outside pressure, some shifting of the systems these companies operate under before they'll be compelled to change anything. They certainly won't be doing it for us.
But anyway, as for the EGS, paid exclusivity is very far from new -- that's what console makers have been doing for a long time after all, paying third parties for exclusivity on consoles. It's just not something that has been seen much before within the PC business, and maybe that's part of why it's so controversial... though when a console maker pays for some big exclusive that casues a lot of controversy too, this controversy won't go away in a way you rarely see with such things.
If the Epic Games Store actually worked as well as Steam I think this would be a different conversation. It doesn't though, not even close, and that's a big part of the issue -- that Epic is paying for exclusives that work a whole lot less well than Steam versions of those games would due to all of their stores' missing features when compared to Steam. And the whole thing about friends lists and Steam achievements and such is a big point for many people, too; the PC certainly has plenty of messaging and friendslist options, but Steams' is a very convenient one. So yeah, I've never agreed with the "Steam or nothing!" people and still don't, but even so Epic is being irritatingly aggressive here, I'd rather use a launcher which actually works well and is feature-rich like Steam or GOG over the Epic launcher... and sure, if you follow that line of thinking it would be hard for some new player to get into the PC digital storefront business, but that's okay; after all, you're giving these companies money and hoping that they continue to exist to allow you to have access to that game in the future, after all. And there's no guarantee of that. I don't think any of the digital stores I've bought games from have shut down other than Microsoft's Windows Live store, but it could happen... like, clearly somebody still buys from Gamersgate as the site is still up and while I haven't bought from them in years, I can still re-download the games I did buy there years ago (yes, they don't just sell Steam keys though I think they have those too), but who knows how long that will last... or anyone else, you never know. Nobody likes spending money on something that later vanishes with no recompense. Right now, both Valve and Epic are probably very good bets in the money front, so that probably is not an issue between the two of them, but for some of the smaller stores it sadly could happen.
On that note, if Google Stadia has as many problems after launch as it seems to be having before it, I wonder if all the 'Google will just kill the thing off like they do with failing projects' speculation will actually happen...
RE: Epic Games Store - Sacred Jellybean - 2nd November 2019
Okay, I read all of it. So the issue is that Epic stays artificially competitive by throwing money at exclusives, which they retain for a year, during which time it's only available on their storefront, which they don't have to bother to make as functional as competitors' storefronts? And that you'd have to wait a year to buy it on another storefront to get their own features, such as communities and choosing where on your PC you can save it to?
RE: Epic Games Store - Dark Jaguar - 2nd November 2019
More or less that's the issue, yes.
Is it the same as being stoned to death because the town thinks you're a witch? Of course not, but as it turns out it's possible to be angry at more than one thing at a time.
RE: Epic Games Store - Sacred Jellybean - 2nd November 2019
No disrespect, I get angry about far more trivial things over the course of one day, approximately 40 or 50 of them by some estimates.
RE: Epic Games Store - A Black Falcon - 2nd November 2019
Almost anything in gaming can be reduced to "first world problems" but that does not mean that it doesn't matter.
I did forget about one important thing though -- as another build-support move, Epic has significantly decreased their cut from store sales. So, on Steam, and on any console, the company running the store -- Nintendo, Sony, Valve, and such -- take about 30% of every sale. Epic, fueled by Fortnite cash, has dropped their cut down to 12% instead of 30%, which is a huge decrease. This means that developers make more from sales on Epic's store than they do on toher platforms, since the prices are the same but they make more money. However, this means that Epic makes less; I think smaller companies like CD Projekt (The Witcher, and GOG) probably would not survive at EGS cut levels. Even Valve would be hurt a lot. This probably does not help the EGS get those features it needs, either, when it's making way less revenues than other stores do... but it makes developers, particularly smaller ones, happy so it is a somewhat complex issue. I think that this is Epic showing off really, saying 'we have so much money right now we don't even need to take a regular cut, here devs come to our store and make more!'... which, like, sure that's true, but not everyone running a digital store could afford such a low cut and if it's a factor in why the EGS is so behind in features that makes it not great either. Developers making more money IS good though, so there are upsides and downsides to this for sure.
RE: Epic Games Store - Dark Jaguar - 3rd November 2019
I'll grant that's a good thing, but I am under no illusions it will last.
RE: Epic Games Store - A Black Falcon - 8th November 2019
True. If the Epic Games Store really caught on, I'm sure they would eventually move that percentage up.
How about another negative about it: when you install an EGS title, it makes a shortcut on your desktop... and that's it. It does not add anything to the Start Menu, and there is no option to do so. You also can't disable the automatic desktop link. I do not leave much of anything on my desktop -- I want it empty except for a couple of icons -- but do still use the Start Menu to keep track of what I have and run things (particularly those not in launchers and such but sometimes anything), so this is really annoying to say the least...
If you want a new desktop shortcut for a game you can make them in the Epic launcher, but still they are desktop shortcuts only, if you want them in the Star Menu you'll have to manually move them there yourself. How user friendly.
RE: Epic Games Store - Great Rumbler - 11th January 2020
Free Chinese spyware with every purchase!
RE: Epic Games Store - A Black Falcon - 12th January 2020
You think that Tencent might have spyware in Epic's stuff? I guess it's possible for sure...