The price of taking on Steam - Epic Games loosing money with EGS according to Apple

[suicidalfranco]

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

Pirates on consoles have to work for it and usually risk destroying the hardware in the process.

The most work I had to do to mod my PSP, Vita or PS3 was clicking my mouse.

[JZStudios]

On 4/13/2021 at 9:56 AM, RejZoR said:

@JZStudios

Reason we love Steam so much isn't because it's the best. We're just fed up with running 50 game clients

Well then you should be fine with whatever comes along, as long as it's only one. I've been using GOG Galaxy 2.0 and it's fantastic.

 

On 4/13/2021 at 9:59 AM, tikker said:

I'm not saying Steam is an angel and it's a free market after all, so developers/publishers who don't agree with that 30% cut, for example, can go and have gone elsewhere as we see. The problem with a million clients and storefronts for me is that everything gets spread so thinly. No longer are achievements centralised, hours played differs, friendlists need to multiplied and, worst of all, if they decide to publish on another platform "launching" it from that platform launchers their launcher to launch your game anyway.

 

Plenty of hate when Steam first came out as well.

EGS is a far cry from those better places though.

Galaxy 2.0 does all of that, as long as whatever platform the game is on tracks and logs all those things. You can even manage your Sony and Xbox games.

 

In what way? It's a store, it let's you buy things. Browsing on it is far better than browsing on Steam. Sure, they're taking for fucking ever to update it, but it's not like that's anything new.

On 4/13/2021 at 10:27 AM, Blademaster91 said:

Well I've never had an issue with Steam, and not being able to move a game drive easily definitely seems like a pain to use compared to Steam, but not surprising for a launcher that still doesn't even have a shopping cart.

Sure the free games are tempting but having Steam, Origin, Uplay, and GOG are enough launchers for me so i'm not even interested in EGS, and last time I considered using EGS I heard pausing downloads doesn't always work and thats a feature I like if I don't want to leave my PC on to download a game.

I don't like moving game folders from any platform other than GOG because everything else requires some bullshit to get it recognized and working. Steam has been doing this super cool thing where it'll download a 10mb update, and then get "stuck" for 20-30 minutes on "disk usage." It's not uncommon and people have tried a whole bunch of things. It would take a while to explain everything wrong with Steam.

At least with Epic you have the store, and your game library, and that's it. People bitch about a shopping cart, but realistically that's a very minimal issue. Otherwise the store and downloading works fine, and it has properly DRM free titles.

On 4/13/2021 at 11:18 AM, Stahlmann said:

I personally don't think steam is garbage at all. Otherwise why would so many people use it?

 

That's the same with so many people saying Windows 10 is crap, but in the end most people use it because it's the best OS around.

Where else are you supposed to get your games?

 

No, Win10 objectively added in shit most people don't need, force you to use and tie it to a MS account for "security" has more but mostly less features than Win7 while having a fucking terrible UI scheme that's ugly to look at and horribly inefficient in terms of usability and space. If they didn't completely end support and block the new hardware from working on Win7 people would still be using it.

On 4/13/2021 at 6:22 PM, Zodiark1593 said:

One game I’d really like to have (legit, my favorite RPG) is Final Fantasy XII, though as it’s on only Steam, I’m pretty much stuck emulating the IZJS version (quirks and all), or on my Playstation 2 at a “crisp” 640 x 480i. I’d probably pay up the standard $60 if I could get a stand-alone download. 

 

5 hours ago, LAwLz said:

I really don't get all the hate people seem to have for Epic games.

I don't think it's any better or worse than Steam. Actually, I take that back. I think EGS is slightly better than Steam because it gives more money to the developers rather than the middle-man.

 

I am getting strong religion-like vibes from people when it comes to Steam and EGS. People seem to WANT to hate one and love the other. 

I like the store on EGS better. It's a better layout and Steam's user tags are a fucking joke and a mistake. There's way too many of them and people can add anything to any game. I looked for Forza Horizon 4 on Steam and it was hidden because I blocked VR games since I don't have a headset.

Forza Horizon 4 has absolutely zero VR support.

[RejZoR]

One of biggest benefits for me with Steam was easy reinstallation after system format. I have it installed on drive D and when I format and reinstall Windows on C, everything remains on drive D. I just install Steam in same folder as it was before and everything just works without any redownloading or fiddling. GOG requires you to scan the games folder and then it takes some half an hour to do verification and redownloading of parts of games, Origin is the worst offender really. For long it just trashed whatever was installed before. Only relatively recently it keeps the files and just verifies them. Before I had to manually redownload all games and it was super annoying.

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Origin is the worst offender really. For long it just trashed whatever was installed before. Only relatively recently it keeps the files and just verifies them. Before I had to manually redownload all games and it was super annoying.

That's the same with Epic Game Store. If you reformat, it forces you to redownload everything, it's utterly hundreds of miles behind Steam.

 

The Windows 10 store is worse, not only do you have to redownload things, large games you often end up redownloading every single time you want to play it.

[Tenelia]

Let's not forget that instead of making a sound business plan or making ethical decisions, Epic decided to spend even MORE money to mount a campaign against Apple. That churned out internal documents that revealed all of this information and their real intentions anyway.

[avg123]

I used to be on Apple's side but now I am on Epic Games side. I think Tim Sweeney is doing the right thing trying to open up the apple ecosystem. 

Apple should allow installation of third party apps.

[LAwLz]

7 hours ago, Tenelia said:

Let's not forget that instead of making a sound business plan or making ethical decisions, Epic decided to spend even MORE money to mount a campaign against Apple. That churned out internal documents that revealed all of this information and their real intentions anyway.

What are their "real intentions" exactly? 

Making the market better for consumers and developers by forcing consumer choise, breaking up monopolies and making middlemen get a smaller cut? 

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

What are their "real intentions" exactly? 

Making the market better for consumers and developers by forcing consumer choise, breaking up monopolies and making middlemen get a smaller cut? 

Their intentions are to take 100% of the profit and cut Apple entirely out of their customer acquisition commission. This is literately nothing new. Remember such charming attitudes such as:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/markrogowsky/2015/12/10/walmart-drops-an-atomic-bomb-on-its-applepay-competitor/?sh=5e90eef126a4

Quote

Walmart, the largest retailer in the world, has just fired the biggest salvo in the mobile payment wars since last year's launch of Apple Pay. The Bentonville, Ark. giant announced it is starting to rollout Walmart Pay, a smartphone-based payment solution that will work with all credit cards, debit cards and Walmart gift cards at its own U.S. stores. Walmart Pay will run on both Android and iOS and should be available nationwide by the middle of next year.

 

But the big news, which Walmart neglected to mention in its press release, is that in dropping this midnight bomb just two weeks before Christmas, the retailer isn't targeting Apple Pay. Instead, it's essentially blowing up MCX, the Walmart-led consortium that was formed in 2012 and has been desperately trying to roll out an Apple Pay competitor called CurrentC. 

Where is CurrentC now?

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/currentc-retailers-defiant-answer-to-apple-pay-will-deactivate-its-user-accounts/

Quote

Shortly after Apple Pay launched in 2014, people began noticing that drug store chain Rite-Aid was pulling support for Apple Pay and Android Pay (then Google Wallet) at its cash registers. Although it was done without any fanfare, the reason for the pivot was that Rite-Aid was a member of the Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), a consortium of retailers that included Walmart, BestBuy, and CVS, among others. MCX wanted the retailers and their customers to use its own payments app called CurrentC.

 

Now two years later, CurrentC is shutting down. The company wrote on its website that all user accounts would be deactivated June 28.

All CurrenctC did was delay adoption of NFC payments by two years.

 

Oh and Walmart still doesn't accept NFC payments.

[ravenshrike]

On 4/15/2021 at 10:28 AM, JZStudios said:

 

In what way? It's a store, it let's you buy things

In point of fact, EGS didn't. Does it even have a shopping cart yet? Something that IIRC Steam had in the first year, if not from launch. Buying multiple games quickly locked out your account on EGS.

[Kroon]

3 hours ago, ravenshrike said:

Something that IIRC Steam had in the first year, if not from launch.

 

Steam got it's store 2005 two years after it started.  Steam had a lot of problems with crashing and demeaning internet access even for single player games at a time less then 20% of US had access to broadband internet.  It was simply a glorified RDM in the beginning, really disliked one at that.   In 2008 Steam only had 183 new releases, that is 5 years after it opened. 

 

Today Steam are mostly a good user experience but do not forget they had a really hard time in the beginning.  Some of the problem are quite similar to what EGS have now, not enough game developers on the platform.

[JZStudios]

8 hours ago, ravenshrike said:

In point of fact, EGS didn't. Does it even have a shopping cart yet? Something that IIRC Steam had in the first year, if not from launch. Buying multiple games quickly locked out your account on EGS.

The last time I used the Steam shopping cart I tried to refund a single item and they refunded the entire purchase so I had to buy everything back again, but at a higher price since the sale ended. That was even after supposedly talking to a real person that I specifically only wanted to refund a single item.

Since then I've just bought everything individually. The EGS just removes that middle step. Locking the account is most likely a security thing so someone can't steal your card and buy lots of games, like happens with Steam. Personally I find it a moot point, maybe I'm Abby Normal but I usually don't buy more than one or two games at a time, which EGS does perfectly fine.

[GeorgeMKane]

Kind of barely joining in here, but I was talking to a family friend yesterday and we were both laughing about the Epic Games situation. Think about it. You're paying so much money for limited exclusivity (usually a year) right? To attract gamers to spend money on your store, etc. etc..... but I still got like 50 games on my steam backlog, with more steam games upcoming. "I think I'm good for a year."

[Fnige]

On 4/13/2021 at 6:46 AM, Kisai said:

Likewise  the only store worse than EGS is Microsoft's.

From my own experience with both, I personally feel like mica still wins out. As it did actually work unlike epic

[D13H4RD]

I kinda feel like Epic has sort of given up on trying to compete with Steam.

 

The store and the platform hasn't really changed and they seem to be doing less and less exclusivity.

 

And here I was hoping that we would at least see some competition...

[calcal]

I mean, EGS is okay. I bought borderlands 3 on sale, next day it was cheaper, few days later, they refunded me the difference within those 2 prices. I didn't even ask..

[jagdtigger]

On 4/15/2021 at 8:57 PM, Kisai said:

it's utterly hundreds of miles behind Steam

Thats for sure, for exapmle i have a setup where my steam library resides mostly on a iSCSI share ( i only keep games on local ssd that need it) and 2 machine can connect to it. Obviously one of them is the gaming pc, the other is a VM running on my NAS. The VM keeps the games updated all the time so when i want to play i just shut down the vm and attach the iSCSI share to the gaming PC and play right away....
No reinstalls, no verification. Steam just picks games right up as if nothing happened.

[JZStudios]

On 4/15/2021 at 8:54 AM, RejZoR said:

One of biggest benefits for me with Steam was easy reinstallation after system format. I have it installed on drive D and when I format and reinstall Windows on C, everything remains on drive D. I just install Steam in same folder as it was before and everything just works without any redownloading or fiddling. GOG requires you to scan the games folder and then it takes some half an hour to do verification and redownloading of parts of games, Origin is the worst offender really. For long it just trashed whatever was installed before. Only relatively recently it keeps the files and just verifies them. Before I had to manually redownload all games and it was super annoying.

Considering GOG games are entirely DRM free I don't know why it would need to rescan and download stuff unless there was updates you didn't install.

And I've never been able to have Steam "just work" after a drive change. I guess technically you aren't changing drives, but Steam always requires a verification check. With GOG you can move it anywhere and just play it.