I am very pleased to hear this,it is a game I am very much looking forward to!
When the Origin client came out, some of the games they sold could not be activated, due to the old online activation servers having been removed. They didn’t offer refunds for that either, and those games were eventually quietly removed from the libraries of any suckers who bought them.
They still routinely falsely advertise sale & bundle prices. Watch for the price change after you enter your payment info.
Whew, I thought you heard something new and it scared me.
My only real Origin experience is Tapped Out and I stopped playing when CS basically said that yeah my game was completely bugged, but fuck you, we’re not fixing it.
[quote=“thelurkinghorror, post:23, topic:832054”]
Whew, I thought you heard something new and it scared me
I admit, it was an assumption based on the heavy advertising of the game on the Epic Store. Of course, all the games on the store get fairly heavy advertising, because they don’t have many.
That sounds to me reminiscent of Blizzard, who still sells Diablo 2 and Starcraft 1 for modern Mac systems. The games do in fact run on the current version of Mac OS… but the installer doesn’t. The official solution to this problem is to buy the game, install it on a Mac running an old OS, and then copy over the files to the computer you want to actually play it on.
For Exodus, they pulled it off the Steam store with two hours advance notice during the pre-order period but if you had bought it, you kept your Steam copy. With Division 2, retail stores were allowed to pre-sale the game up until the release date.
Phoenix Point was a real cluster with the dev taking the exclusive payout when he had Kickstarted the game with the promise that it would be on Steam. He said he’d refund people but a friend who had KS’d it said his “process” for requesting a refund was ridiculous. Given that the game was made with the funds of people who you’d promised a Steam key to, talking a payout and telling them to suck it is pretty shitty although I’ll admit that’s on the dev more so than anything else. Sure it didn’t endear anyone to Epic though.
The Epic Store provides a much worse experience for consumers just because of how it works. Rather than compete on who provides the best service, they have decided to compete by just buying up exclusivity deals. Sure, it does the bare minimum, providing you with the game, but it is missing standard features.
This isn’t the most recent list, but it’s representative of how little Epic provides. I’ve seen more recent ones that bring up privacy concerns.
The thing is, consumers wouldn’t use this service at all save for the fact that they are buying up exclusives, giving them no choice if they want the game. The result is an inferior experience, all because greedy devs want to make a little more money and don’t care about how the consumers will actually experience their product.
And don’t get me started with all the dark patterns in Fortnight, things that use psychological addiction properties to get you to buy stuff in there. I’ll just link this video which, after a bit of fun, discusses everything they do. And note that Fortnite these days is primarily targeted at children.
Epic is a very shady company. I for one will simply not do business with them, and hope that the rubes who will just buy from whatever store will not give them enough money to keep on doing this practice. Hell, I hope this practice is a huge loss leader thing that will fail horribly for them.
This is not what we wanted when we wanted a new viable store. We wanted competition, with companies competing to provide the best services and the best products for everyone.
Fuck, companies wanting to increase their profits? What is this hobby coming to??!?
Seriously, these are not charities. Their only purpose is to “make a little more money.” If they offer a product that is worth the price they charge, you buy it, and if not, you don’t. If their way of selling is too inconvenient or cumbersome for the price point, that’s baked into your choices.
The only moral judgment to make here is on capitalism as a whole. Nothing they’re doing is remotely remarkable within a capitalist system.
Hopefully informed consumer choices and understanding since you still have people who naively think that exclusivity deals are “competition” and good for consumers.
Quoted for truth.
That’s a warped vision of a capitalist system. The fundamental capitalist view is somewhat eco-Darwinian : “I make better/cheaper products than X, therefore people buy more of my products, I grow & make more money, I outlive them”. That’s a positive system, because the only way to break a death spiral is to come up with an even better product than the first guy ; or a way to make the same product cheaper. Everyone benefits, consumer and producer alike.
The perverted version of this good system is to “compete” using things like planned obsolescence, prices fixed behind doors by de facto monopoly holders (e.g. comcast & time warner) or undercutting the opposition to try and get them out of the competition entirely (what Epic is doing). That’s not a positive system, as it doesn’t result in better OR cheaper products over time. It just screws the consumer over ; and in many cases actively prevents new competitors from appearing to challenge this screwing over by returning to the positive version of capitalism.
Fuck that.
At the same time, though, Steam did get its position of dominance in the market by creating a better (and often cheaper) product, and even in the face of Epic et al, seems to be maintaining that dominant position. You’ve basically got competition between healthy capitalism and unhealthy capitalism, and the healthy capitalism is winning.
Right now, sure - because Epic is a newcomer. But while their PR tries to frame it that way, they’re not the plucky underdog defeating the ponderous monopolistic giant that is Steam. They’re scum, using scummy tactics (and I’m not talking about slings being OP against giants) and I for one will not be helping them in this endeavour ; just like I never helped the fuckers pushing anti-consumer DRM.
The simple fact that they built their fortune on scamming kids makes them the Man. They’re that guy who made Farmville and whose name I forget, only worse. People need to grok that.
And y’know, for all of its monoply, Valve hasn’t been terrible AFAIK. They haven’t shut down or shut out their competition. They haven’t built loot boxes systems into Steam. The only way they’ve been “harmful” is that multiple times per year they have a giant sale where people buy games they’ll never ever play because they’re 90% off (guilty as chaaaarged). I’m fine with that.
This reminds me of the feelings I had about Arco gas stations in the past. Arco used to charge extra if you paid with a credit or debit card when you bought gas. The point of that was because gas stations generally don’t make money selling gas; their big profits are from the stuff they sell in the store. By paying in cash you had to go in the store and you’d be more likely to impulse buy a bag of beef jerky or a bottle of soda.
I had multiple problems with that. For one, the price advertised on their sign was what it cost in cash, and you’d have to know ahead of time what the fee was or read it at the pump to know how much you were really paying. Also, when I buy gas I want to get it and go; I don’t want to stand inside waiting behind someone chatting with the clerk or wait for the clerk to get off the phone or come out of the back of the store or whatever. I always have bad experiences inside gas station stores.
So I chose to never get gas at their stations. Their gas was as good as anyone else’s, and if you paid in cash you got that product cheaper than elsewhere, so as a pure financial decision it made sense to buy there. But I wasn’t willing to put up with the irritation involved so I never got gas there. I didn’t think that customers who frequented the store were “rubes”, they were just willing to put up with more than I did.
This Epic Games store is the same thing. If you don’t want to buy from them, don’t. Don’t get mad when others do, it’s their choice to. There are so many good games available, and if there’s a game exclusive to Epic you want then you have to decide if you want to put up with whatever shenanigans involved to get it. But they’re not breaking the law or doing anything unethical, they’re just doing what they think will make them successful.
(By the way, eventually Arco stopped that craziness and stopped charging fees for using a card, they even had TV commercials to celebrate it as if people were supposed to be excited that you’re now just like everyone else. Now they’re just another gas station but I’ll buy gas from them.)
Dang, they still charge a card fee where I live. But with a 2% or 3% (forgot which) gas rebate I get from using my credit card, I come out a bit ahead.
Yeah, honestly, Steam’s recent move to not police the content of games on their platform (for the most part) has encouraged me back to them somewhat. I still prefer my games on GOG when possible, (DRM-free!) but I’m very happy with Steam’s move in that direction. That’s the main reason I always felt like Steam needed more competition - the fact that they have been, in large part, the gatekeepers to what games can be successful on PC, and they were in fact keeping some games out. Now that they’re mostly not doing that, I’m a lot happier with them.
I don’t get the notion that Steam are “gatekeepers”. From what I can see, they’ll sell anything - and I mean anything. There’s a lot of shit being sold on steam. And I’m privy to it because one of the games I’ve bought had the “adult content” tag for some reason, and ever since… oh boy. Let’s just say that if anime tentacle porn someday does it for me for some reason, I’ll be throbbing till I die. But for real, they’re shit games, and I’m not even talking about the content. But Steam sell thems, and that’s fine. Just goes to show that the floor is really low.
Well, yes, but we can talk about what our individual decisions are, which is what this thread is for.
I’ve bought things on the Epic store - my kids play Fortnite and have bought VBucks for skins, and I’ve already said I’ve bought Satisfactory on it (great game, btw). But I don’t like the exclusive practices, and I won’t be buying anymore exclusives from them.
I’ll still be along every two weeks to claim the free games though.
If only. Here are some select quotes from this thread.
The fact that the Epic store and game client are inferior (where “inferior” ranged from “less features” to “spyware”) to basically everyone else’s is just icing on the cake.
Continuing the spyware rumor/hysteria.
The issue isn’t the Epic store or the Epic client per se; the issue is what the Epic client allegedly gets up to. It does not play nice. Allegedly it sends a lot of data back to Epic.
And yet more.
Epic is a very shady company. I for one will simply not do business with them, and hope that the rubes who will just buy from whatever store will not give them enough money to keep on doing this practice.
So anyone who buys from them is a “rube”. It’s not about personal choice, if you buy from them you are a fool.
My comments have been reactions to these remarks, which I take exception to.
Indeed, that’s all I’ve done with their store, period. 
Loving my free copy of Subnautica.
If anything, Valve seems to be doing what they can to encourage competition. With their position in the market, they could get away with a heck of a lot that they’re not even trying, and they’d doing things like keeping their VR standards open, to facilitate other entries into the market. It’s sort of like Miracle on 34th Street, with Santa telling people the best place to buy their toys, even if it’s not Macy’s.