it was sort of doom 1.5 really
I think they’d rather you spent money 
I’m too lazy to look up the numbers again but, as I recall, their year end report showed Epic with a 12% gain in sales of 3rd party games (so no Fortnite packs, etc) last year and Steam with a 25% gain. That feels low to me given how aggressively Epic has promoted with free games and coupons and how much room Epic should have to grow versus Steam (which I assume everyone and their dog is using in the PC space). I also get the impression that Epic is also feeling this, given the lesser relative value of their free games in the past months and their $10 coupons during the sales going away (weren’t part of the last Winter or Summer sale). The cost perhaps isn’t justifying the returns.
None of which is intended to be “Epic bad!” or whatever, just a comment on the state of free games in the PC space where Epic is the largest regular provider.
That’s the problem, though. While it’s possible I may have paid for something on epic, it would have been in the first few weeks after building a computer and being all excited. Very quickly I started wishing my entire library was just on Steam.
Probably not what epic wants to hear, but I have now recently actually rebought a free epic game on Steam. (Subnautica for like $8, same time I got Below Zero for essentially the same price.)
My biggest annoyance with epic lately, specifically with frostpunk, is that the epic launcher isn’t reliable after waking the computer from sleep. That translates into having to wait an extra 10 seconds every time I close the game so I can exit the epic client before going to sleep.
I’m a smoker, and I like to put the computer to sleep when I smoke, so this is a frequent occurrence. 10 seconds isn’t bad, but it’s infinitely worse than the 0 extra seconds I have to wait when playing a game on Steam. It’s also probably another 5 seconds on startup having to relaunch the epic client.
I was religiously picking up the free Epic games just to assist in draining their coffers, but I have stopped doing even that… so that’s success of a sort, too! (I never installed any of my games; if it was something I wanted to play, I had already bought it on Steam!)
Yeah, they made a whole new game for N64?
I just never understand the whole “Steam Gud! Epic Bad!” battle out there. If I ever post to Reddit that Epic is ok I get downvoted into oblivion. I think that may be part of the numbers @Jophiel posted above. There is just this weird hatred for Epic.
I don’t see it though. There are a lot of launchers out there. I have Steam, Epic, Battle.net, Origin, Ubisoft and GOG. I get preferring to have one but that ship sailed long before Epic showed up.
And, competition is good. Better for gamers and better for developers. When Steam ruled the roost developers were getting gouged by Steam. IIRC they still gouge them but not quite as badly as before Epic came around.
YMMV but, personally, I do not use most of the bells and whistles Steam has. I have Steam points…what good are they? I have many dozens of collectible cards…still don’t know why I should care. I have a gallery of screenshots I doubt anyone has seen. Maybe it matters to some but mostly it is useless.
The ONE thing Steam rules supreme on is Steam Workshop allowing you to easily mod a game. I use Nexus Mods too and that is pretty easy but Steam has that nailed. For moddable games I will always use Steam (if I can).
Oh, it isn’t JUST Epic that I don’t like; all of the other alternatives you list, with the exception of GoG, I ALSO don’t like.
One big problem I had with Epic is that it was (I haven’t opened it in more than a year) objectively worse than Steam (the Workshop being a good example of “Steam is just better”). But my biggest gripe with Epic was that rather than compete with Valve by making a better product, Epic chose to use the (in my opinion) scummy practice of dumping shitloads of money taken from kids (Fortnite) into providing free games and pulling game developers into timed exclusive releases. It’s my own personal bugaboo; I don’t hold it against others for taking the free games, at all!
ETA:
Agreed. Not sure what the purpose is, but I think that is because the younger folks seem to enjoy the weird emojis and whatnot that you can buy with points (my son is constantly picking up stuff like that). Generation gap, I guess. My son has also sold lots of cards to buy other games, so I guess that’s a thing…
Yeah, the main complaint I saw on Reddit was about those exclusives. People hated it that the game they had planned on buying was switched to only be available on this launcher that was even worse than Epic is now. They hated the idea of someone coming in and buying people out rather than focusing on making a good product first. They saw it as unfair competition, unlike the other launchers.
While those other launchers existed, the games they ran were usually also available on Steam. Even if their launcher was required, you could still buy the game on Steam, and then Steam would launch the launcher which would launch the game. And the games would still have all of the Steam integrations.
Only later on did Epic start announcing these as timed exclusives. Maybe they all always were timed, but people didn’t know that.
Oh, and Epic was said to be using Chinese investment money, of the kind that was common in those privacy-invading shovelware ripoff games. They were concerned that Epic would allow the same sort of crap.
And, well, gamers tend to hold grudges.
Steam’s share is still the industry standard of 30% to start. It scales down after your first million or so but the sort of companies that are hitting, say, 20% are mainly the sort of companies that weren’t struggling under the 30% either. Aside from rare lightning-in-a-bottle exceptions like Vampire Survivors where some indie game suddenly sells a bajillion copies.
My main feather-ruffle with Epic is their disingenuous tact of pretending to be “pro consumer!” and “competitive!” while doing things like paid exclusives that exist only to force people to use their store if they want to play the game. It is not (as people often mistakenly argue) the same as Playstation/Nintendo/Xbox since those are all discrete platforms. With Steam, Epic, et al the platform is PC. It’s less like Nintendo being the only platform with Pokemon and more like Gamestop making themselves the only place to BUY Pokemon games then say this is promoting “consumer-friendly competition” with Walmart and Target. In reality, in this context consumer-friendly competition involves a product being at numerous stores so you can choose the store you want to buy from based on price, service or whatever other metric.
Really, I guess I mainly object to being bullshitted to and told that they’re really doing what’s best for me as a gamer by holding a game for a year when they’re entirely doing what’s best for their own profit margin and trying to drive sales/accounts. I’m not an idiot and resent them treating me like one. I still post the free games (well, I’m usually beaten to them these days) and would post if they had some amazing deal/coupon but I rarely purchase from them and make it a point not to buy their exclusives. Your mileage may vary and all that – I don’t care if other people want to buy from them; got enough of my own shit to worry about 
[Edit: Also, Epic’s vocal decision to allow Crypto and NFT oriented games on the platform which, again, drives home the point about it being all about the dollars while pretending to be all about the customers. ]
ISTM that Epic was trying to build their business. Why would anyone buy a game on Epic when they have been using Steam forever and their whole library was there? The only way to pull players to the platform was to force exclusivity for some games.
Further, lots of games were exclusive to a platform well before Epic. Origin, Battle.net and so on.
And, in the end, it is a freaking launcher. Why care? You want to play Game-X. Does it really matter to you if you launch it from Steam or Epic or whatever? It’s the same game. You will enjoy it (or not) the same unless “achievements” matter to you (with the previous caveat of Steam Workshop…if the game is moddable then for sure Steam is light years better than anything else).
Well, they could have gone with price (as they claimed would happen due to their lower cut but hasn’t actually affected pricing at all) or service or features to attract customers. And, to some extent, they have such as the free games. But they also went with an inherently anti-consumer behavior of buying exclusive access which isn’t anything I care to reward.
The other clients you mention are owned by the companies that actually developed those games. Battle .net isn’t really a store for anything but their own products. Origin is primarily for games developed by EA – well, WAS since they’ve since changed to put their games on the MS/Xbox store and Steam and are phasing out the Origin store. The only games on the Ubi store are games developed/published through Ubisoft (Ubi also sells though other stores anyway). I can’t think of another 3rd party store that actively buys exclusive access to games developed elsewhere in the PC space. I haven’t seen anyone seriously complain that you need Epic to play Fortnite.
I just realized that I didn’t have this problem with subnautica, so it may be specific to frostpunk. Or maybe it’s a new issue with the epic launcher.
It’s really annoying, though. If I exit Frostpunk and leave the epic launcher running when I put the computer to sleep, when I wake it up after a cigarette, shortcuts to launch the game directly don’t work. It’s as if the shortcuts just ignore your clicks. The fix is to exit epic – wait until it’s fully exited! – relaunch epic, then the frostpunk icon works fine.
That “Wait for it to fully exit” aside just reminded me from a while ago, someone around here said they never use steam because of the screenshot uploader. Pretty much everyone, including me, thought that was a really weird objection.
Except now, I’m noticing that every single time I close Steam quickly after exiting a game, like say maybe I want to reboot or log off or whatever, task manager tells me I have to wait because the following process isn’t finished: steam screenshot uploader. It’s really freaking annoying waiting for that stupid thing to close before being able to close Steam. Sort of on the same level as if every stop light got extended 10 seconds: as infuriating as it is trivial. Not even first world problems; 0th world problems.
Well, the developer could lower the price because they are getting a better deal on Epic. Or, they could charge the same price and pocket the extra money. It’s not up to Epic or Steam (they take their cut and the developer sets the price).
Not a shocker which route they chose.
Is this due to saving to the cloud?
If so, you can disable cloud saves.
Not sure I am understanding the problem. Just some thoughts.
That’s a great thought, and probably the answer. I saved my Subnautica games locally to the hard drive. If Frostpunk defaults to saving to the cloud, changing that could fix me right up. I’ll give it a shot, thanks much!
My cities skylines steam saves are saved to the cloud, and I think I did have similar issues with trying to immediately put the computer to sleep the second I exited the game client. After waking up the computer, trying to launch cities skylines would throw a cloud sync error, which would require closing and restarting steam.
Yeah, that’s totally gotta be it. At very least, it doesn’t seem like something I should blame epic for specifically. My bad, epic.
Sure. I guess there, I don’t really give a shit if Epic charges developers 15% or 30% or 99% vs what Valve charges in response because neither helps me as a consumer. $59.99 AAA games are still $59.99 ticket priced no matter where you buy them. But Epic DID claim that cheaper games would be a consequence of their percentage and the one tangible pro-consumer/pro-competition thing that was supposed to come out of Epic never materialized. Even their exclusives are priced like standard titles of their tier.
As an aside, it probably doesn’t help that the head guy, Tim Sweeney, acts like he’s trying to be the Elon Musk of the gaming space (in attitude on social media, etc, not innovation) whereas Gabe Newell of Valve comes across as more “affable goofy nerd”. I’m not saying that should be a reason for anyone to pick their store of choice (but then these are disposable luxury products so use whatever dumb criteria you want) but it probably doesn’t help soften anyone’s attitude who currently sees Epic in a bad light.
Well, if Epic lowers the cut they take from the developer and the developer lowers their price then the developer is doing no better than they were on Steam and Steam is where most people buy their games.
So, the lure was to put more money in the dev’s pockets and not to give the consumer a better deal.
Again, Epic explicitly claimed customers would see better prices. They even got Metro: Exodus (their first exclusive) to lower its list price after it left the Steam store (as a pre-order) to be all “Look, see? Lower prices” but that was the last time that happened.
If someone wants to buy from Epic as a “support the developers” thing, that’s legitimate but it’s not pro-consumer. Anyway, I’ll leave it at that since (a) we’ve gotten off-track from “free games” which my initial Epic comments actually were connected to and (b) I’m not trying to convince anyone else to have feelings about Epic, I was just answering the “I don’t understand why…” remark with my own thoughts/reasons and think I’ve done that adequately (even if your opinion differs). I don’t rate anyone down on Reddit, though
Just marketing BS. On paper the economic notion is sound. The sellers get a better deal at merchant-A than they do at merchant-B so, in theory, they can pass some savings on to the customer and then the customers will all shop at merchant-A where they get a better deal.
But, as it happens, the better deal for the seller is not a whole lot for the buyer. If the whole savings was shifted to the buyer then the seller is no better off and, as it happens, the buyer isn’t getting all that better of a deal. A $60 game is now a $57 game. Not really worth switching merchants.
But, that extra $3 * 1 million buyers is a lot of money for the developer. So, the dev pockets the difference and Epic spins a fable that this is prosumer because, in theory, it is. The devs COULD pass the savings along. But they don’t.
If we want to push it the advantage to the buyer is the devs stay in business and make more games you like. That’s a reach I admit.
(I did not do the math…the above example was pulled out of my…something)
And that’s the problem. No one wants to feel like they’re being forced into using your product. People want to feel like they gain some sort of benefit from you, not like you came in and made things worse.
You seem to be overlooking just how bad the Epic Launcher was at launch. It was a buggy mess. Here are just the some of the complaints I remember people talking about:
- It had no offline mode
- It did not have functioning chat.
- You couldn’t buy games directly from the app.
- There was no overlay
- There was no big screen mode for playing on big screen TVs.
- Achievements didn’t work
- It slowed down the game
- Modding didn’t work
- Achievements didn’t work
When your product is that bad, and customers have to put up with it to play their game, of course that’s going to make people upset. Sure, you get some to pay (though most gamers know how to pirate games). But you generate a ton of ill will.
And even as they did start fixing the launcher, you have to realize that a lot of the features you say they don’t use are considered bare minimum for many gamers. So they still were only reluctantly buying games there.
They could have used the money they had to make a product that was actually attractive to gamers. But Epic instead used that money to give loss-leader pricing to publishing companies, in exchange for exclusivity deals. This in no way benefits the actual gamers, so why the hell would they support it?
And, as I pointed out, games with those launchers could still be found on Steam, and the games still integrated with Steam at least to some degree. The stores like Origin and Uplay would entice you by offering you better deals and stuff, not by saying “you can only use us.”
Heck, Epic actually removed Fortnite from Steam when they created their own store. Originally they used the same concept the other companies used, where Steam would launch the Epic launcher which would launch Fortnite.
Because launchers do a whole lot more than launch games. They are essentially the platform the game runs on. Just because you don’t use their features doesn’t mean that most gamers don’t. And most people don’t like to feel like they were forced to give up something they use just to be able to play a game they were looking forward to.
A company that only helps the already rich publishers get more money but makes things worse for customers is going to be despised. And, while Epic has gotten better since launch, gamers don’t forget.