Features Hate for the Epic Store is out of proportion

It's capitalism. I didn't say I liked it but that's how the world we live in works.

I've been getting epic keys quite cheap on cd keys.

Good luck getting games launched on all platforms. It's all about money and greed.

Like I say, nowhere did I say I liked it but it's pointless even breaking a sweat over. I, like many I would assume, have more to worry about that what store I get my games from.

 

I got to disagree, because we brushed away the concerns over Steam and look how that turned out, I'm not up for repeating that mistake.

 

Epic's exclusivity strategy on an open platform is many things but to me it's mostly just...dumb. Did they really think there'd be no backlash...like, philosophically, man?

I've been saying it for years, but the best thing that could come to digital distribution, for media of call kinds, would be an openID/oAuth type system that would allow consumers to choose which platform locally manages their media no matter where they bought it; How content providers could be incentivized to provide such an implementation, beyond legislation, is a different discussion.

 

I would not mind the Epic store if they put 0.01% of the money they are giving devs for exclusives into making a better storefront.
Steam was not great when it started because it was the first store (that I know of), they had a lot to learn and didn't know if it would catch on.
I think most at the time wanted to own their games and liked physical boxes with art and instructions.

 

I'm boycotting Epic, it's store and any game exclusive to it, purely for the hostile way it's going about things and doing it with an unfinished product. TBH I don't care about all my games on Steam, I'm normally playing PUBG on Steam, Overwatch on Blizzard App and GTA V on Rockstar. I'm waiting until April for BL3 on Steam, maybe until the first time it goes on sale too. I don't preorder games but I will be getting CyberPunk 2077 on GOG.

It always makes me laugh how Epic are trying to sell it as "we give more to the developers", when most people buy black and grey market keys, which totally screws devs, so much so they'd rather you pirate their game rather than buy a key from a key store.

 

"Valve was PC gaming’s benevolent dictator... image as this perfect company where anyone could do what they wanted... In recent years, however, Steam has gone from PC gaming’s boutique store to PC gaming’s thrift shop, a gigantic virtual dumping ground where you need a headlamp and a shovel to find the games that are actually worth buying."


You can't have it both ways. They can't be letting everyone do what they want AND block most titles from publication to maintain a high perception of quality.

In the old days, I bought very little on Steam because I have a limited level of interest in the high-budget blockbuster titles that they were focusing on. It was only on my system because games I'd bought in boxes at retail required Steam(and boy, did I rant about it). All the weird low-budget games that everyone is complaining about "ruining Steam" now that they aren't excluded... are most of what I want to play. I feel that firing the gatekeepers was a win, as it made the dominant(and essentially only) PC games store accessible to people who don't have a budget equivalent to a small nation's GDP.
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I miss Desura, not coincidentally. The great atomic dumpster fire they ended in was a sad way to go.

Calculated risk. They know that, given the option of multiple stores, most people would prefer to buy from Valve's store. If they want to be more than another weird store no one uses because it isn't Steam, they need leverage.
A free game every fortnight wasn't doing it, as it turned out people would rather pay for games than touch a Steam competitor. So big-name exclusives were required. Any ill will they attained would be offset by gamers being gamers, as they installed Epic Store and bought the games while complaining about how much they hated it.
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It is actually a testament to Valve's marketing that people would rather skip Borderlands 3 and Metro: The Newest(and review-bomb the developers' other titles in the process) than use Epic Store. This is a much harsher backlash than I recall seeing when EA took their ball and went home, releasing their titles exclusively on Origin.

I definitely agree.
Interestingly, this has worked more-or-less for the movie industry, with most studios offering streaming videos through the Ultraviolet cross-platform syst... oh. Ultraviolet is shutting down because Disney launched a competitor and lured everyone away.

In seriousness though, almost all of those obnoxious "digital copy" codes that came with my DVDs and BluRays are available on Movies Anywhere, a service that didn't exist when I registered them. Some videos I got from services that no longer exist(due to freebie promotions) continue to be available. It has proven much more stable and robust than I expected.
So it is POSSIBLE. But the game industry really doesn't like being customer-friendly.

 

I didn't like the idea of exclusives (as I don't like exclusives in general) but wasn't that fussed, and have since nabbed a couple of free games from the store, I've got steam, uplay, origin, gog, and now epic installed (or can install if needed) and doesn't really bother me.

When I played more multiplayer stuff then the steam friends/chat was a huge plus, but I don't very much anymore, so doesn't really matter which icon I click to open things. People like moaning about stuff though and I fully support them in that

 

That's fair, but...
Linux: "Compatibility is a joke, we're deleting all the 32-bit libraries your software still needs. Wait, why are you mad? Only losers use 32-bit code."

 

Many people complained about steam, and are now very hypocritically saying they want games launched on it and death to the Epic store. It wouldn't all be so funny if not for that.

Also, what, pray tell, good did it do? Nothing. Same as the time people boycotted Valve for not giving L4D2 away for free.

I agree the Linux bit sucks, but given the only reason I'm still on Windows is because Linux gaming never really took off? I can live without it.

As for the other comments? Why, this is just a good old fashioned bit of throat cutting which apparently is OK in the name of capitalism. All's fair in love and war as they say.

If people could have actually controlled themselves and actually boycotted steam instead of pretending to whilst secretly playing HL2 then the monster would not have been created. But that's the thing, isn't it? We all create it and then go "RABBLE RABBLE" when we feel like it.

It's so that ep of South Park about Walmart. To kill it you have to take out the heart. They find it and it's a mirror.

 

They don't, they just find that vanishingly few people actually buy their games from other stores if it is also on Steam.

What exclusivity? I can go buy Half-Life 2 and download it through Steam, buy Journey and download it via the Epic store, then run the games directly on the same PC without touching Steam nor Epic again. Hell, I could nuke the .exes for both Steam and Epic and still play the games.

It's tautological to refuse to use the Epic store because of 'exclusivity', when the sole thing that makes it in any way 'exclusive' is the self-imposed refusal to use it.

 

I'm outraged that I feel no outrage.

 

I'm outraged that you're outraged to feel no outrage.

RABBLE!

 

Outrageous!

 

I was teasing. Mostly.

But I think Canonical's move is symptomatic of a larger problem. The Linux development community on the whole seems a lot less concerned about backwards-compatibility in general than some other operating systems. The attitude seems to be simply "if the code isn't being updated to fix the breakages, the program is dead and you shouldn't be using it". This is fair for some use cases, but hardly all.

 

You could literally run some form of Linux on a string of cheese*.

* Linux does not run on a string of cheese. Not without potato power. Not literally.

 

Sounds like you play a lot of single-player games...

 

When it comes to multiplayer, that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish, mostly down to whether a given game uses a homebrewed server/matchmaking system (can be as cross-platform or segregated as the developer likes/can be bothered with), a cross-platform API (ironically Unreal engine's fits here), or an API linked with a specific store (e.g. Steamworks). This leaves the weird sitation where you can have a game delivered via Steam that can talk to other copies delivered through any other platform (e.g. FF XIV), or games delivered through other services that still require Steam to be installed for multiplayer to work (e.g. using Steamworks).