Epic Games Store - the console war comes to PC

[Paul_cz]

In many (most?) cases Steam is the only platform that welcomes these games (didn't GOG turn down Grimoire?).

Well, I mean if all else fails they can always sell DRM-free copy on their own website. And if they are lazy to do their own finance processing and stuff, they can use humble widget.

 

[DalekFlay]

Ok, you’re just trolling at this point.

Nope, you guys just don't see it because this whole thread is a big Steam fan-wank. If you don't want to use any of these fucking DRM clients then being forced to use Steam by literally hundreds of games over 15 years makes you a little immune to "oh noes I'm gonna be forced to use Epic client!!!" I've been forced to use bullshit clients since forever, I gave in a long time ago. It's priced-in to my continued PC gaming. Which one I load and put in offline leave me alone mode matters pretty much fuck-all. There's literally zero difference experience wise between the two for me. Same shit different day.

 

[Jonathan "Zee Nekomimi]

PRAISE LORD GABEN
Also

 

[normie]

one forces contractual exclusives but the other doesn't but it's the same hurrr

durr if you don't like forced exluveis u r steam FANBOY

I use epic now just to spite gaben

 

[Black Angel]

Seriously, bitching about "Steam exclusives" because developers are lazy to publish elsewhere is next level retardation.

This. Like, seriously, I even met some people who proclaim physical copies of games they bought but still needing Steam to install and launch as 'exclusivity', too.

 

[Reinhardt]

Selling game only on Steam because you are too lazy to do additional work yourself and selling your game only on Epic because you are not allowed to sell it anywhere else is totally the same. If you disagree - you are steam fanboy.

 

[FeelTheRads]

not that they don't bother to publish it anywhere else.

They don't bother because in most cases it's not worth the time. Steamtards make sure of that.

And if they don't bother or are "lazy", what's the difference between them and those who take money from Epic? If you blame the developers when they release only on Steam, why don't you blame the developers too when they release only on Epic?

because you are not allowed

Dumbshit, they're "not allowed" because they signed into it. There's no "forced exclusivity". There's bought exclusivity. Or rather sold exclusivity.

one forces contractual exclusives but the other doesn't but it's the same hurrr

durr if you don't like forced exluveis u r steam FANBOY

No cretin, you're a steam fanboy because you can't see how for the players it's the exact same thing: being forced to use one client or another.

This. Like, seriously, I even met some people who proclaim physical copies of games they bought but still needing Steam to install and launch as 'exclusivity', too.

What do you call it then?

 

[normie]

my fellow epic boi

being forced to use digital platforms is shit, so I love epic now because they have bought exclusives

fuck steam though, I hate using only one platform, I want five (none of them steam)

 

[GrainWetski]

I like how the current tactic of the Epic shill is now to say Steam is EXACTLY THE SAME. Is it what Sweeney's been puking out on Reddit the last week?

On another note, Epic's store is so good for everyone that they had to reduce the percentages on HumbleBundle for their games.

Wallet credit and charity percentages go up if you add non-Epic store games.

Very cool.

 

[commie]

Fuck all digital distribution....

Remember the good old days when installers were animated and came with FMV and backstory?

We'll never get the mid-late 90's back again...

 

[Kitchen Utensil]

Epic being utter cancer doesn't make Steam good. It's way less shit than Epic, but still shit compared to how it worked before Steam, when you had a physical copy you could do with as you pleased, including making copies, giving it to a friend or sell it. And DalekFlay is right in that the majority of people is addicted and dumb, and probably doesn't care enough to give up on those tasty exlcusives. They accepted Steam, uncountable of shitty DRM products like SecuROM, Denuvo etc., they swallow the increasingly intrusive microtransactions, lootboxes etc.
Steam has way more features, but so did most other software just a decade ago. For example, most websites had way more functionality back then. And the dumbing down of most games continues. Most users are too stupid to navigate lots of features, they don't want them. They want to click a button and play the game (or rather make the game play itself).

I'm not saying Epic will replace Steam, but with gamers (or people in general) being as retarded as they are it's certainly not as inconceivable as reading this thread would make you believe.

 

[Jigawatt]

Why do people keep repeating the falsehood that this was THE ONLY WAY EPIC COULD HAVE COMPETED?

That’s stupid. Give the customer what they want in a way the current dominating force does not.

Uber did this to Taxis.

Youtube/Netflix did this to cable companies.

It’s not a complicated concept.

Leaving Epic/Steam aside for a moment your cited examples completely undermine the idea that it's just easy-peasy to dislodge entrenched competition by simply giving the consumer what they want:

Uber has never been profitable, and just to expand to this point have continuously and flagrantly broken the law all over the world, even going as far as to dedicate an engineering team to evade law enforcement.

YouTube (also not profitable) has content mostly complimentary to cable companies - in the instances where big rights holders do publish full episodes they negotiate to the point where they keep all profit (and then some) - YT tolerates this in the hope users will click away to related videos where they can actually make some money.

Netflix isn't even nibbling the sandwich (let alone eating the lunch) of cable companies as long as there is no live sports on offer.

Basically what I'm saying is that catering to customers is just a baseline - no it's not complicated, and yes Epic largely fails at it - but you've still got to play some hardball after that or you'll end up being wiped out.

 

[Dexter]

Also, steamtards look down upon any developer who releases anywhere else and/or his own website but not on Steam. Because... umm... durr I WUNT ALL MUH GAEMS IN TEH SAME DRM CLIENT!!!!1
The good old "I can take all my games with me in my mom's basement" argument. Steamtards have NO problem with clients. The love it and they want it. They just want to use the one they know and that's all. If Steam removed the client and sold the games on their own steamtards would have a fit.
So it's also bullshit to say how "PC gamers" totally don't like clients.

Yeah, maybe technically Steam doesn't pay developers for exclusives. But it's only because they don't have to, the retarded userbase makes sure that Steam has the most exclusives of any platform.

Oh yes, I totally remember the mass of people complaining that MineCraft, Dwarf Fortress, StarCraft II, League of Legends or any number of games like all of the MMOs that came with their own Launchers or the ones GOG dug out of history "were not on Steam". That's totally a thing that happened. I still remember the bloody riots that went off when people found out developers were selling games on their own websites, which Steam doesn't explicitly endorse and totally forbids.

This is obviously what it's about. Ignore that Facebook and Epic Games are the only two companies in gaming paying off developers to Exclusively publish solely on their "platform", it's only a "technicality" after all and doesn't set any bad precedent at all. It's all just the same. Console Exclusivity was always a GOOD thing after all, buying 3+ hardware machines every 5 or-so years weaker than a PC to play "Excl000sive" games makes sense and isn't a retarded practice at all. Also what I said was totally ""PC gamers" totally don't like clients" and not "PC gamers have also always hated and looked down upon the practice of "Excl000sives"". Which is totally the same thing and you didn't just choose to reinterpret for your hate-rant about your pet issue, everybody knows clients didn't exist before Steam after all and that's the only issue here, BECAUSE STEAM BAD!

Fuck all digital distribution....

Remember the good old days when installers were animated and came with FMV and backstory?

I certainly know that without Digital Distribution I wouldn't own thousands of games, but maybe a few dozen or low hundreds at most. I still have a stack of game cartons like Planescape Torment, Sam & Max, Baldur's Gate, WarCraft II/III, Simon the Sorcerer, Kingdom O'Magic, Phantasmagoria and similar in the attic somewhere - it wouldn't have been feasible to buy all these games that way, and it certainly made installing and playing games a lot more convenient when you didn't have to dig out the disk medium or search for it for half an hour before you can install and play something by switching between 5-7 CDs first for the installation and then often between switching areas or chapters while playing in the game. Without Digital Distribution consoles would have certainly won out in the games race, there was a period there in the Mid-to-Late 00s where aside from Valve and Blizzard almost every major developer saw them as "the future of gaming" and had jumped ship to consoles (Epic included and being one of the major ones btw.) and they thought of the PC as a "dead" platform for games where even porting their games to wouldn't pay off before others proved them otherwise.

Without Digital Distribution a lot of the games being discussed especially in the RPG side of the forums likely wouldn't exist, a lot of them didn't even have a measurable Retail release and many of them wouldn't have been the kind of games to have taken "top spot" in Retail locations and wouldn't have sold at all that way or made shit numbers not worth of taking away shelf space in a shop and even the bit of a "KickStarter Renaissance" we had wouldn't have been a thing. Or do you think Age of Decadence, Banner Saga, Expeditions Conquistador, Underrail and Grimoire would have taken top spot at Walmart? Choice would have been great though.

 

[Reinhardt]

Remember the good old days when installers were animated and came with FMV and backstory?

Installers? All i remember is carrying pack of floppy disks.

 

[Black Angel]

The only legit bad thing with digital distribution as far as I know, in case of Steam it's

1. The fact that they didn't sell you the actual games, instead they sell you the rights to play the games. So, if one day Steam actually pulled the plug, the only games you'll able to play that you bought from Steam are the ones with no DRM in it, so you could simply save the folder of the game, back it up, and if you ever want to play just launch it from the .exe (at the very least, this isn't much of a problem (for me, at least) because DRM-free alternative exists in form of GOG, and because most of the game I truly love and the devs whose endeavor I will wholeheartedly support would almost always publish on GOG, unless GOG derped with their questionable curation system).
2. Anyone with only meager internet connection will get fucked by even having Steam launching in their PC. This isn't my experience, but some people shared to me how they launched Steam, had to stare at the window saying that Steam is verifying updates, and then it just freezes and can't even be killed by End Task.

Other than those two above, Steam is literally a godsend for people who lived in third world country like me. As Dexter pointed out, I wouldn't own half the games I own nowadays without digital distribution. Here, in my country, back in the day the cheapest physical copies of a game I could find are mostly pirated by local resellers. Meanwhile, legit shops selling original, first-hand copies of a game will burn through my wallet, and even then they don't sell ALL the games that might be in my interest.

Oh yeah, speaking of not all games could be available physically, indie stuff like Underrail and Age of Decadence wouldn't even see the light of day if they had to go physical distribution (in my country). The devs might be able to afford manufacture in their region, but down here, tens of thousands of kilometers away from there I wouldn't even be aware that these cool stuff even exists.

 

[Mustawd]

Uber has never been profitable, and just to expand to this point have continuously and flagrantly broken the law all over the world, even going as far as to dedicate an engineering team to evade law enforcement.

For one, they’re a fast growing tech company that is making huge investments worldwide. It makes sense that they’re not profitable.

Second, whatever wrong decisions they’ve made has nothing to do with my example. Consider all the ways the Uber app addresses consumer needs vs taxis:

1. They incentivize shorter routes
2. They create accountability for a bad ride experience
3. They make payment of the ride easy
4. They considerably cut down on wait time
5. They cut cost of a ride because drivers are using they’re own cars instead of some weird system where they MUST use a taxi vehicle.
6. They don’t let the driver know where the ride will be ending. Drivers hate this, but it’s an important part of why the experience has improved for consumers.

These examples are all ways in which the consumer experience has been improved over taxis. And it’s also an example of how the Epic Store could have approached things versus relying on exclusives.

Funny enough, many taxi companies are now using their political muscle to try and ban or limit how much Uber can expand in s given city or country. So in this case they are limiting consumer choice just like Epic is now doing with their store.

 

[Cromwell]

There's tons of shit you can only play by going through Steam. TONS. You guys don't see it as "exclusive" because Valve didn't pay anyone to do it, but the user experience is identical.

no its not because I can buy it from another site for 25% less and then install it through steam instead of buying it for 100% in the epic store and have the benefit of even paying extra for them to allow me to actually pay how I want. Are you seriously this retarded?

The discussion is not about exclusives are bad, the discussion is about "exclusives are bad if the customer gets fucked in the process". I am the consumer, I am the only one that matters, the customer is always king. Everyone that wats my money and doesnt beg for it will not get it out of principle.

 

[Metro]

Uber may not be technically profitable yet, but it's ubiquitous. This is what Epic is trying to accomplish but, unlike Uber, they are doing it at the expense of consumers and competition.

 

[Modron]

Remember the good old days when installers were animated and came with FMV and backstory?

I think my favorite was actually just Silent Storm's install wizard, it was just a technical drawing of an m1911 getting ever more lines drawn in as the install progressed.

 

[Rahdulan]

The discussion is not about exclusives are bad, the discussion is about "exclusives are bad if the customer gets fucked in the process". I am the consumer, I am the only one that matters, the customer is always king. Everyone that wats my money and doesnt beg for it will not get it out of principle.

I wouldn't put it like that, but you are ultimately correct. Problem is this industry seems entitled to success and when they don't get it there's always someone to blame other than themselves. Who was the big publisher that learned this lesson recently? Was it EA when they said if people don't like it they shouldn't buy Battlefield 5? Although saying EA has "learned" anything would be a stretch. I've seen people discuss exclusives as good, but that's in high level "stores are competing with each other" sense. In reality these stores live and die by their customers and we've seen jack shit from this so-called competition that would benefit us, the customers. Some simply have yet to learn this lesson.

 

[J_C]

Remember the good old days when installers were animated and came with FMV and backstory?

No, but it sounds pretty retarded.

 

[DalekFlay]

This. Like, seriously, I even met some people who proclaim physical copies of games they bought but still needing Steam to install and launch as 'exclusivity', too.

They are available to play exclusively through Steam. Borderlands 3 is available to play exclusively through Epic. Different reasons, same outcome. This isn't rocket science you cucks.

 

[cosmicray]

6. They don’t let the driver know where the ride will be ending. Drivers hate this, but it’s an important part of why the experience has improved for consumers.

Sorry for offtopic, but could you elaborate? How does it work with driver not knowing and why is it important?

 

[JarlFrank]

This. Like, seriously, I even met some people who proclaim physical copies of games they bought but still needing Steam to install and launch as 'exclusivity', too.

They are available to play exclusively through Steam. Borderlands 3 is available to play exclusively through Epic. Different reasons, same outcome. This isn't rocket science you cucks.

Yeah I do agree that physical copies requiring an online service to install and activate is pretty damn shit.

You shouldn't be required to activate a key with an account to which that key will then be locked when you purchase a boxed copy. Boxed copies should always be DRM free.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

keeping the metaphor: epic is not uber, epic is buying out every uber driver it can find and forcing you to reach to those drivers it stashed hidden somewhere in the asshole of the world. of course the extra mileage is on you.