Not the hill I'd die on, but I'm not a billionaire.
    • mPony@kbin.earth
      6·
      57 minutes ago

      I guess “think of the children” only applies when it erodes consumer privacy

  • melsaskca@lemmy.caEnglish
    3·
    45 minutes ago

    Communities have values and standards. Those fat cats and their systems of extracting capital have been chipping away at that for decades. Shame used to be a thing. No values. No standards, No shame.

  • shiroininja@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    2 hours ago

    I knew I had a reason to hate Tim and Epic games. I’m glad I never took their bribes of free games and installed their store

    • FreddiesLantern@leminal.spaceEnglish
      3·
      1 hour ago

      At first I was kinda issues that they turned their backs on the unreal franchise in such a disrespectful way.

      But at this point that feels right. Current Epic doesn’t deserve to be associated with Unreal.

  • biofaust@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    2 hours ago

    I feel so good I left Epic Games Store and deleted my profile and asked to delete all my data last year!

    • kameecoding@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 hour ago

      I have boycotted them since their stupid launcher that was nothing but greed, and also when Idle it ate up like half my ram

  • pivot_root@lemmy.worldEnglish
    103·
    6 hours ago

    All you had to do was say nothing, Timmy.

    You’re an asshole, but only PC gamers had a reason to care—because you tried to buy your way into a dominant position by employing anti-consumer, monopolistic practices like paying for distribution exclusivity deals with third-party publishers.

    The best possible choice here, clearly, was to voluntarily align yourself (and by association, Epic Games) with Nazis and pedophiles. I sincerely hope the board forces you to resign, you absolute chode.

      • pivot_root@lemmy.worldEnglish
        15·
        2 hours ago

        No entitlement necessary.

        People typically welcome more competition in retail spaces. Having the freedom to pick between store A and store B allows consumers to choose whichever works best for them, whether for convenience or service reasons. Look at GOG. Nobody is complaining that they exist, or that they sell a subset of the games that people could instead purchase on Steam.

        What people don’t welcome is companies deciding they want a slice of the pie, entering a market, and then making the experience worse1. Coercing people onto a platform by removing their ability to choose is consumer-hostile. People complained when E.A. and Ubisoft made new games exclusive to their own storefronts, but they begrudgingly sucked it up because those were developed by the platform owners and they weren’t interfering with games they didn’t own.

        What Epic Games did was make timed exclusivity deals with third-party developers2 and publishers in an attempt to stick their foot in the door, while providing the bare minimum service to consumers3. They made EGS for the publishers and offered little more to their customers than contempt and the occasional free game as a bribe to boost the Epic Games Store user counts.

        The cherry on top was Tim Sweeney acting like the messiah of PC gaming coming to save it from the Steam monopoly, only to start behaving like a petulant child on social media in response to people justifiably being pissed off at Epic Games for the monopolistic shit they were doing.

        If his decisions weren’t openly hostile to the people he expected money from, there wouldn’t be much of a reason for people to dislike him. But, through his decisions and actions both as the leadership of Epic Games and as himself on Twitter, he gave people plenty of reasons.

        1: See digital streaming services, for example. Everyone was happy to just pay for Netflix. Some of them even paid for Crunchyroll, too, since it provided a separate catalog. Now, every media conglomerate has taken their shows off of Netflix and moved them to their own separate services at the same price point. It’s not a coincidence that digital piracy is making a comeback.

        2: Such as with Ooblets, when they paid the developer after the game was crowdfunded to release it on EGS instead of Steam.

        3: No user reviews, it took years to get a shopping cart, customer support being useless when people get locked out of their accounts, etc.

        • dukemirage@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 hours ago

          No one forced the studios to take up Epic’s offer of exclusivity. Nevertheless Sweeney is a cunt.

      • cybernihongo@reddthat.comEnglish
        2·
        1 hour ago

        I swear, the whole outrage over EGS can only be plainly and simply explained as the stupid “no steam no buy”. When a game remains exclusive to this DRM launcher made by an American corporation for 50 years, all is well in the world, but when the game becomes exclusives to that DRM launcher made by that other American corporation for a year, suddenly all hell breaks loose. They’re both the same toxin! Just blind devotion to a company that only did very pro-consumer things like make lootboxes really popular and making it hip and cool to give up ownership of your games.

        For the record, the Tim should really just shut up. Or really, any American wealthy CEO for that matter, their grand standing over freeze peach isn’t worth the oxygen required to produce it instead of just… not enabling CSAM like normal platforms do?