Sure, try the buggy Epic version then buy the usable Steam version.
Also, imagine making a launcher that is so trash people will buy games on other platforms just to not deal with it.
I’ve said this in the past but I think it’s worth restating. I’m amazed that EGS is willing to even front the cost of these free games. Like I would expect some form of arbitrary restriction like requiring periodic actual money purchase to be eligible. They have posted income reports that state the free program just isn’t working. Sure it’s increasing numbers, but that isn’t very helpful when your revenue is still decreasing ontop of the cost of the program. I mean it does help that its a flat cost and not a cost per install for them, but still.
for perspective: my last purchase was void train in super early stages of the game (2021 I think?) and prior to that was satisfactory somewhere around 2018 or 19. Meanwhile I have collected a lot of decent games from the program. And I’m one of the better cases. I have /tons/ of friends who have zero intention of ever actually buying anything on the shop, they only use it as a log in, claim the weekly freebie, log out or play the freebie game. Heck, there are programs that are dedicated exclusivley to log in as you, and claim the weekly freebies so you never even have to log onto the storefront. It isn’t a sustainable model.
I feel like they would be better off forcing an annual payment history check on the platform, something stupid small like “if total paid is > 5$” or something cheap, or even like how steam does it where once you purchase something once everything unlocks. From a financial/business mindset, I don’t get their intent on the current program. It only encourages people to grab games and never actually spend money on the sinkhole.
Sometimes the DLC for the free game on epic costs the same as the full package on steam. So epic is an extended demo really
I bought a game on steam once that I already had on epic for free. It was on sale for like $5 on steam(Hunter: Call of the Wild), and I was curious if all the shader pre-caching and optimizations steam does with the Steam Deck would have it run better with the steam version, compared to the epic games version.
Edit: my bad you guys. YES. It does run better. The pre caching steam games have is noticably gets rid of stutter. Mildly noticeable in a slower paced game like Hunter. Very noticeable in Borderlands 3 that’s higher paced.
Did it run better?
I edited my comment. Yes. It totally helps.
Totally left us hanging.
What a tease.
I saw xkcd 979, the name DenverCoder came to mind immediately
call me pavlov
An Epic win for Steam!
It’s a win for everyone except Epic. PURE BLISS.
This is just the PS3 vs Xbox 360 game wars but worse. Stop being loyal to corporations you imbeciles, of course a dev will say whatever makes him more money. Including appeasing the fellating steam fanboys. The game could have gone completely unnoticed if it wasn’t on epic, barely any sales, and even a minor bump in visibility would have created more steam sales regardless if users knew if it was available on epic for free. Unless I see numbers I don’t care what this dev says and you shouldn’t either.
But you’re all rabid to hate on epic when both stores are just bum ass corporations and will circle jerk each other off on why your team is better.
Been saying this for years.
Valve has brainwashed gamers and gained a monopoly using the same tactics people decry Epic for using.
But you’re all rabid to hate on epic
If I had to pick between buying a game on Steam or Epic, I would pick the one which did some good things for consumers over the one that stuck their middle finger up at us.
There’s no denying that Valve’s contributions to DXVK, WINE, KDE, and Linux are a self-serving way to ensure Steam remains relevant after Microsoft locks Windows into a walled garden. Even so, the end result was an overall benefit for consumers. We would have had something like Proton eventually, but it would not have come nearly as quickly without their financial backing.
What has Epic done? A bunch of free games that I still don’t have enough time to play and would not have picked up anyways, great. That doesn’t make up for the rest of their wannabe-monopoly, anticonsumer practices like making exclusivity deals to railroad people into using their store by making sure consumers are denied a choice.
Fuck Epic, and fuck Tim Sweeney’s self-aggrandizing attitude. If he actually gave a shit about anything other than his ego, he would have spent his time leading Epic Games to challenge “the Steam monopoly” by providing a better customer experience, not posting on Twitter acting like the messiah of PC gaming.
You make some good points about Valve’s bread crumbs, but my point still stands that this is an article with no other purpose than to reinforce the opinions of those who already had their minds made up about this. The dev possibly included, or inciting the opinions of those who have.
It’s a circlejerk post and article. Just because Valve sucks slightly less doesn’t mean we need to treat them like god’s gaming storefront. If people weren’t already on the “fuck Epic” bandwagon this is a non-story.
Agreed on both points.
If it was GOG and not EGS, the reaction would probably be very different. But, because people already hate Epic (for good reason), writing an article that appeals to schadenfreude makes for some easy ad revenue.
People also shouldn’t be idolizing corporations. They’re not our friends; we’re only a means to an end for them. The best case scenario for us is mutualism, and the worst case is parasitism. All it takes is a change in leadership or a change in circumstances to go from one to the other, and a constant need for growth encourages the parasitic enshittification we’re well acquainted with.
You couldn’t pay me to play a game on epic. It’s not even a boycott. They just suck and I’m not broke. I can buy my own games and I’d rather pay than put their software on my pc let alone play on their platform.
Literally it’s just a storefront. If Epic offered you $100 and you didn’t take it because “they suck” you’re just an idiot.
I think the store and the library search sucks on EGS. You can’t even tell what games you have purchased and for what platform (pc/ios/android). Best you have is the purchase history on their website and app.
I use Heroic Launcher (on Arch btw and Bazzite for kids) and that luckily works really well for displaying games that you have bought on PC. But there’s no such alternative for iOS or Android, and even Heroic doesn’t show you what games there are in your library for mobile.
“I used to think EGS was a Marketing Black Hole,” the New Blood CEO said, “but turns out having your game be free on Epic is great advertising for Steam sales!” Alongside the boost in Steam sales, Blood West also saw a jump in console sales as well while it was free on Epic.
That’s incredible.
Oshry is far from the only developer to point out issues with the Epic Games Store. Just recently, in an interview with FRVR, Painkiller and Witchfire creator Adrian Chmielarz explained that Epic doesn’t feel like “home” to players, and that causes many to simply clock out, saying “EGS is a shop, and Steam is a community.”
I have a lot of free games on Epic. But when I want to play with my gaming group, we’re using Steam. It’s just where everybody is.
Indeed, I suspect the sales funnel is like this: one person picks it up for free on EGS and then annoys their friends to get it as well for multiplayer, but those friends rather buy it on Steam than to bother with installing another (bad) store app. At least I had that happen to me a few times.
Under Linux, running a game on Epic is a pain next to Steam, so if the game is good enough…
I swear by Heroic for the other launchers now I’m on Linux
I use legendary (the command line backend for epic bundled with heroic) on windows as well. It’s just so much better and faster than the epic store.
Makes sense. By the time a game shows up on a giveaway it has been out long enough that there’s lot of discounts for it. So small budget price that might be less than the price of buying lunch is worth it for some to not deal with Epic.
And the giveaway is good promotion, since even people like me who don’t have epic launcher installed will still be aware of it and claim it through a browser. Ends up being free marketing among those who subscribe to gamedeals type communities or visit sites like isthereanydeals. Gives games an opportunity to get a second wind.
By the time a game shows up on a giveaway it has been out long enough that there’s lot of discounts for it
That’s often but not always the case. For example, the first ever giveaway in Dec 2018 was Subnautica, which was released in Jan that same year. Occasionally other stuff has only been out a couple years, which means it’s showed up with discounts before but probably not deep ones.
It’s true for me at least. If I like a freebie from Epic, I’m more likely to buy it on Steam also just so that I can use it easily with the Steam Deck without additional configuration.
It’s easy to use epic on steam deck? I need to look into this
Yeah, you need to install the Heroic launcher. Download the game, then in steam, add it as a non-steam game. This will let you access it from the nice UI.
Heroic can add the Game to steam too
It’s easy, but at least for me Epic forces me to login again on deck frequently, which is very annoying for quick sessions while commute.
Doesn’t happen on desktop, which is weird
I’ve installed games from both Epic and GOG on my steam deck via Lutris, and after it’s installed, it just takes a few clicks to have it visible in non-desktop mode. A little tedious sure, but not terrible.
Or install Decky and its plugin Unifydeck to have your Epic and GOG libraries appear seamlessly in your Steam library.
The current free game are the two Styx games. I grabbed them on Steam when I saw they went 90% off so I’d have an easier time running them on my legion go and my Android phone. I learned of the games because of them being the EGS free game and the game looked up my alley
https://store.steampowered.com/app/242640/Styx_Master_of_Shadows/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/355790/Styx_Shards_of_Darkness/
“Styx” just reminded me Song of Syx, which is an awesome (dwarf) fortress-like indie game. You can give it’s sales an uptick instead while Styx giveaways goes on:
I had no idea this existed(I never even look at EGS), thanks. Now I can live out my WoW Goblin Rogue fantasies.
While I do like the first 2 Styx games (the 3rd one is out soon-ish? if not now?), they are quite the “quicksave/quickload trial and error patience games” and quite deep in the eurojank spectrum. The climbing in the first one is pretty jank, and in both games the character breaks 4th wall deadpool-style pretty often, enemies are dumb as bricks but will absolutely murder you once alerted enough.
But on the upside, it’s one of those rare stealth games where murder is not penalized at all.
That said, the games are great!
(the 3rd one is out soon-ish? if not now?)
End of Feb (the 26th?), these sales seem to be to promote the launch of Part 3.
I played the 2nd one with a friend for a few hours last night. I appreciate the humor, the music selection is above average, the movement feels good and every time we died it was due to us being dumb. No bugs (playing on Linux, with GE-Proton10-27), runs great on maximum settings.
We were having an easy time by going on a murder spree, then we noticed that the game gives you rank medals for speed, avoiding kills and avoiding detection so we started playing to maximize the end-score. Those constraints make the puzzles a bit harder and I can see wanting to run a level multiple times in order to get it right.
Overall, it’s a fun experience, does the stealth thing competently and the graphics/music/animations/dialog is good.
What’s eurojank?
(video games, slang) Video games from Europe (especially Eastern Europe) with ambitious concepts but lacking in execution and sometimes exhibiting unintended glitches.
as per Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Eurojank)
I was under the assumption the Styx -devs were german, but apparently the studio is French. Either way. I also don’t recall any specific glitches, but the first game has a bit stiff climbing mechanics where you can (and will) do some unintended jumps to void etc.
Basically “AA game” instead if “AAA big budget game”
Steam is a self perpetuating monopoly because people love having all of their toys in a single place. Just one more confirmation that it’s pointless to try to compete until regulators take a look at this situation.
I hope their Android store offers a good experience and succeeds since Play Store just sucks. But Valve pretty much made Linux gaming, if you saw what it looked like before they got involved you would understand. And they are the only big video game company that still does some good stuff in addition to the bad stuff.
Epic burned 95% of their good will among gamers, if not all of it. They allowed play 2 earn and other crypto shit just to be contrarians, delisted and ended support for old Unreal games and are pretty much just The Fortnite Studio at this point, which itself is seen as an amalgamation of everything wrong with gaming by some, they struck exclusivity for highly anticipated games so that people have to buy it from them, stories of crunch and Tim defending and supporting every new technology gold rush including Grok producing fucking CSAM.
It’s not hard to see why people have so much animosity towards them.
I saw what it looked like. We had native ports and Wine (rebranded as Proton by Valve so that it looks like their own product).
EGS is just one store. Devs don’t even bother releasing games outside of Steam and you can’t make the same argument against GOG or Itch.io.
Every other platform is simply worse. The only one who even tries to be better is GOG, of which they do a good job for DRM free, which gets sales from me.
My question to you is: why would anybody buy something other than on those two platforms? There is not a single advantage to Epic’s or Amazon’s game store I can think of. They don’t have good Linux support, they don’t have a good review system, they don’t have forums, they don’t have mod delivery systems, they don’t have any better sales, they don’t have family sharing, they don’t have in-home streaming.
Edit: And don’t get me started on the Microsoft store…
About the linux support, not only its bad, they seem to actively hate it. Some games after getting bought by epic(like rocket league) lose their Linux support
Saw this today from the guy that did the WINE development to get the Adobe creative suite installers working
“Removed by moderator”
ahhh damn. It was a post from the person that submitted the wine merge request for Adobe installer support. In it was a screenshot of a steamdeckhq post about his WINE patch he did and Tim Sweeney having a mocking reply to the post about Linux and Adobe users. The dev was celebrating that Tim for whatever reason got a bit triggered about people celebrating his work to get the Adobe installer working in WINE
Valve is a private company. Are they going around buying out competition like an end game capitalist?
They are where they are at is because they do what they do well and people have voted with their wallets.
One of the few times capitalism has “worked” and all because it’s not a publicly traded company.
I really wonder where we would be if most big companies were not on the stock market as opposed to being on it.
They don’t have to. You don’t need to abuse your monopoly to be a monopoly (although Valve does in different way). Valve enforces same pricing on all stores a game is available on so EGS can’t compete on price despite having lower cut. In the end customers and developers lose.
There’s also the question of what happens when Gabe dies or retires. Unless he’s a secret communist and has plans in place to make it into an employee coop it’ll be sold by his estate to private equity.
He’s definitely not a communist, but there are other ways to choose a successor for a company.
Valve enforces same pricing on all stores a game is available on so EGS can’t compete on price
Obvious falsehood. Did you just choose to omit relevant nuance? The post is literally about games which are free on EGS and non-free on Steam.
It’s the first point of agreement Valve signs with a dev publishing on Steam.
Your screenshot doesn’t support your text, and from what I recall they say that:
- if you put your game on sale cheaper elsewhere (but are selling steam keys), you need to have a similar (not even identical) sale on Steam at some point.
- You can’t undercut Steam’s price and sell the freely generated CD keys that add the game to a steam account elsewhere for a lower price.
That’s it. It’s actually about the CD keys, not the game itself. There’s no rule about selling the game on another store, using that store.
Found the doc I was thinking of. They actually just say “a worse deal”, so it’s not even about a lower price.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys#3
Your screenshot there seems to be quoting this page, in fact.
My point is that they absolutely don’t enforce pricing, that was something one dev said in a lawsuit and you’ll notice they didn’t get agreement from people. You’re welcome to check the documentation out, or find any other source that isn’t bad reporting based on a lawsuit that wasn’t successful?
Pointless to try competing? I guess we’d know if there was ever a real competitor on the field.
There’s GOG, there’s Itch.io. What’s wrong with them?
GOG recently got on my radar since I heard they’d be focusing more on Linux support
Even if GOG gets Linux support it won’t make the devs come there.
I don’t mind not having large games, even if it ends up being an indie fest I’d be very content with that
Indies don’t release there either. I wrote about an observation in this comment thread - small devs are no longer releasing their games outside of Steam because they need all sales to go into one pot - if they split it between stores they rank lower in the only store that matters.
If epic put money into bringing linux gaming decades ahead of where it was instead of hating on it I would have jumped ship even if they didn’t make linux supported hardware that lives on my recliner.
Nobody cares about Linux, it has user share close to a margin of error in a poll of 1000 people. Valve employing 3 Linux devs doesn’t offset damage to consumers and devs.
and the bulk of the users can enjoy being forced to upgrade to
hardware with even more spying being the only difference just to run a shittier version of their old operating systemrental cloud compute and game streaming. I’ll reassess when gabe dies or if they start firing off u.s. politics level red flags but worst case I have drm free/stripped copies of every game I might play again or recommend on offline hdd and tape.„Gabe wouldn’t do that to me”.
literally just said I would reasses if he died OR things went that way
and literally every other company is aready doing their version of ‘that’ to their clients but yes lets attack the ones that haven’t yet then if they do I guess we can switch back to ignoring it like the rest of them
Aren’t you bothered by the fact that most Valve games these days rely on gambling for monetisation? Aren’t you bothered they don’t make an effort not to advertise gambling to children unless forced to like in Netherlands or Belgium?
that should absolutely be regulated globally and it better damn well include roblox and literally every gacha and shooter game too. Parents should really be doing the wallet voting and politician mailing there but I’ve seen dads quiet their kids by letting them roll gacha on the phone while waiting to pay for food and when I told my friends about the pedos on roblox situation they told me off saying I don’t know what its like to have kids… When the parents are happy to feed their children to the machine what the fuck can I do about it?
Yeah it totally has nothing to do with proton, steam input, steamvr, mods, remote play / together, family library sharing, flexible refund policies, or the multitude of other things that other stores don’t do.
flexible refund policies
That thing they had to be dragged kicking and screaming to enact under threat by the EU?
Can you please outline for me what the policy was before and after the EU intervention? It’s my understanding that it changed nothing about the actual refund process, which has always been flexible, but was purely about the wording during checkout. Correct me if I’m wrong. I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t refund a game that I played less than 2 hours, and I’ve been on steam for 17 years.
Edit: Looking at the EU regulation, it appears they don’t actually require Steam to offer refunds once you download/play the game. So their longstanding global policy is better than what is required by EU law. I believe they EU action just forced them to parrot the stricter EU refund guideline (14 days without downloading) during checkout, meanwhile they still provide their regular relaxed policy of allowing you to download and play for up to 2 hours and still refund it within 14 days.
Before? Their policy was: we don’t issue refunds.
Maybe if you had an egregious example of a game not functioning at all, they might issue a one off. But I was denied one trying to refund one of the cod black ops games that crashed within 10 mins of starting a match for weeks until they finally patched it.
And even that was an upgrade from: never.
I’m in France. Local implementation of the EU law may be different in other countries (that’s how EU laws work) but here every digital content store, including Steam, just has you ticking the box that says “You agree to no use your legal period of 14 days to cancel this purchase”, and then they can do whatever they want.
Steam’s refund policy is their own. And though it’s mostly a good thing for customers, in my opinion, it’s also an attempt to defuse some valid criticism. Easier to keep not controlling any of the broken or zero effort unity tutorial/asset flip shit that gets released on the store routinely if you can tell people “just refund”.
And yet, they still beat out their competitors on this front.
Nope
They take 30% cut of nearly all PC game sales. Sony uses that kind of money to sell PS5 at half the cost, employing 3 Linux devs is the least Valve can do.
They’ve been doing way more than employing 3 Linux devs.
I wouldn’t mind using other services if any of them were competent. Steam gives me one-click Linux support for Windows titles, massive control reconfiguration capabilities, and a full suite of the normal expected features: achievements, cloud saves, forums, etc. Name me any competitor who even comes close. They dominate because they put in the work. Everyone else wants their slice of the pie but won’t bother to develop features worth using.
GOG. If you’re a solo player, this is the place, for no other reason than their highly principled mission to do DRM free games. No, it’s not all the games, but even so. That and supporting CDProjekt appeals, to me anyway.
GOG has recently been sold to one of its original founders so it no longer has any ties with CDProjekt. Purchasing games on it now means you’re supporting GOG itself, which is nice.
Why do you think epic gives games away for free? They thought this was the main factor so they decided to build a library for you to not want to leave, but it turns out that it isn’t the only reason people like steam. I have a huge library on epic now (99% free giveaways), but I still would prefer to buy a game on steam especially if they utilize the steam workshop.
I wonder what the regulator will make steam do.
“no, you can’t have community page! Stop developing Proton and Lepton! You have to stop doing sales and deny more game from being sold in your platform and be generally shitty to your customer just so Epic Gamestore can catch up!”
EU seems to have the right idea with Digital Markets Act.
I epic hasn’t done anything but the bare minimum plus trying to buy their way into the market. Additionally, I don’t trust them a single bit. If they actually managed to get market share they should enshittify before you could blink.
I have even less nice things to say about all the other publisher run marketplaces.
GoG is cool because of their DRM policy and preservation. Steam provides labels for anticonsumer practices so consumers can be informed and does the cool stuff for Linux compatibility.
What exactly are you wanting regulators to do that you think will make people want to use EGS?
EGS is used as an example. They don’t charge devs until they earn $1M so you’d think games would release there at least but we now have many many Steam exclusives. It’s gotten to the point where indie games release demos on Itch.io but don’t release full games outside of Steam because they need algorithmic momentum there.
Check out EU DMA and how it impacts gatekeepers like Valve (even if Valve somehow dodged that label, probably because their finances are private).
Would you buy a game on EGS instead of Steam? And why?
Or, you could just answer by question directly
I’ve done so in this community it repeatedly over the course of ~2 years. If you don’t want to make an effort why would I.
If you already have an answer then copy paste it. If you already have an answer then why do this weasel dance? You clearly don’t have an answer.
Enforce interoperability, lower Valve cut as abusive and punish abusive clauses in developer agreement (you can’t price your game lower than Steam on other storefronts).
Ideally you’d treat Valve like a telecom monopoly, meaning you’d have to break it down into two companies - Valve infra (handling license ledger, storage, bandwidth) and Valve store/developer. Allow other stores to notify that user owns a game and allow access to Valve infra with third party stores. Valve infra can’t give preferential treatment to Valve store.
If Valve is as good as everyone says they have nothing to fear, they provide better service after all. Where I live this approach killed monopolies and prices dropped quickly.
Thank you. I’m not against any of that, except maybe some definition needs to be applied to what is infra and what is store. For instance, a big part of what people like about steam is that they have reliable reviews. That would need to remain true with this split. I think there is a fine line to walk between enforcing interoperability and compromising or letting other companies leech on steam for no reason. You also seem to be implying that regardless of what store you purchase something on, you can access it from any other store because steam manages the licenses? Seems strange to me.
In a scenario where I will own all of my games on Epic, and more than I own on Steam, I would still not use Epic, lol. Learn about the value some time.
The only better alternative (for me) would be a bunch of DRM free stores feeding their catalogues to an open source front-end that has everything that Steam already does.
Like Heroic, Lutris, Playnite, etc. But way more developed features and with official vendor support and a built-in unified store that supports all catalogues in the same view, like a federated marketplace.
That would be the only thing capable of moving me away from Steam completely.
