27th October 2019, 10:30 PM
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.
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.