What's up with Epic Games?
I can't seem to find that one comment explaining the issue with them...
But for the sake of promoting conversation on Lemmy, what's the issue with Epic, and why should I go for Steam or GoG?
Note: Piracy is not an answer. I understand why, and do agree to a certain extent... But sometimes, the happiness gained by playing something from a legitimate source is far greater 🥹... coming from someone who could never ever afford to purchase games, nor could my parents... Hence I've always played bootleg, or pirated games.
TL;DR
What's wrong?
- Their launcher has a terrible UI AND UX.
- They make exclusive deals with studios to prevent other platforms from getting games. (Someone mentioned that Steam did the same thing in their infancy. Also, I have another question; why is it ok for Sony and Microsoft to make exclusive games for their consoles but not ok for these PC platforms to do so?)
- They have been invested in by a Chinese company, Tencent. (Someone mentioned that it isn't that big of a deal, but idk.)
- They are actively anti-linux for some reason.
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Epic cons:
Epic pros:
Steam pros:
Steam cons:
Gog
I don't know anything besides the fact that it has drm-free games and that it's owned by CDPR (the guys who developed the witcher series and cyberpunk)
I personally purchase my games on steam, since I think their contribution to linux gaming is crucial for linux to go mainstream
Choose what you will knowing this. If someone else wants to add something to this list you're welcome to do so.
Valve is what happens when someone who's not just outright fucking evil invents a money printing machine
Yeah, and somehow they managed to invent like 90% of all "evil" MTX and DRM in the process, take a bigger cut than competitors and actively reject having a returns policy until pushed by regulators and competitors, all the while being super not evil.
It's a fine line to walk, that.
Having worked with DRM systems since long before Valve existed, I'm reasonably certain this is just plain false.
Yeah, and I don't remember Half-life being the game that introduced the world to horse armor.
The user is being hyperbolic, but is referring to their substantial role in popularising loot boxes, as well as the marketplace that has spawned a real gambling industry around it. Kids gamble on 3rd party sites for marketplace prizes and Valve does very little to interfere.
Not to mention that Steamworks DRM is practically non-existent anyways (and that it also wasn't necessary to use, it's rare, but some games just don't protect their game with any DRM).
Blending the storefront with a DRM solution? No, that was them.
That's their entire call to fame. They first turned their auto-patcher into a DRM service, then they enforced authorization of physical copies through it and eventually it became the storefront bundled with the other two pieces. If somebody did it before them I hadn't heard of it, but I'll happily take proof that I was wrong.
None of the pieces were new, SecuROM and others had been around for years, a few publishers had download and patch managers and I don't remember who did physical auth first, but somebody must have. But bundling the three? That was Steam.
I said not outright evil, not good.
Hah. Fair enough.
I mean, I'd say that's probably true of most companies making videogames. People are really hyperbolic about this stuff.
I mean, do you have any good examples though? Because most of those things are blatantly false and/or happened 9+ years ago. If that's that's the worst you've got then Valve is must be amazing.
Loot boxes were, if not invented by them, definitely popularised.
That was like 15 years ago hahaha
It’s not a trend they abandoned - Counter Strike is still a huge source of deceptive digital item trade. It also spread to Team Fortress 2 in the meantime.
Didn’t TF2 have it first?
I made soooo much money off’a TF2. Bought an index!
They straight up don't want people reselling games they own. They could do it easily, they just don't want to.
Yeah, Steam does cool things, but the moment you start thinking that very huge corporation somehow cares about you, you're doomed. Companies don't care about people, they care about numbers. Especially huge companies like Valve.
I don't know if many companies allow you to resell your digital goods in the first place (other than, funny enough, Valve themselves who let your resell digital Steam assets).
Valve's DRM prevents the resale of physical PC games, as Steam codes are single-use. They singlehandedly killed the used PC games market.
See what I mean? That's nuts. That's a nuts sentence right there. Imagine having a brand so sticky that people go "but did they do something really bad recently?
For the record, Valve's games run loot boxes today. Like, right now you can buy loot boxes from Valve. CS gambling is also still happening, although I'm not into it enough to know how much better it is these days.
They invented the battlepass, too, that's a Dota 2 thing. Hey, remember how people refer to buying cosmetics for games as "buying hats"? That one's from TF2. Oh, and technically the trading cards you get for purchases are NFTs,, since the term doesn't require the tokens to be stored in a blockchain.
And then there's the dev side. Everybody was super pissed with them on that end while they were figuring out greenlight processes, which... I'm not sure if they did or people just kinda got used to what's there. And if you're around devs you'll know that Valve's whole deal is to tell people what to do and give them zero support to do it. And there are other horror stories about shadowbans and Apple-style manual rejections and delistings and stuff, but at that point you're getting more into inside baseball and I wouldn't expect it to be shaping public perception at all.
Well I'm not going to be eternally mad at Coca Cola because they put cocaine in their soda a century ago, there's got to be a cut-off point somewhere. If I'm going to hate them it's because of the things they are doing right now. Valve over the last eight years has been pretty well-behaved considering their market position gives them the capacity to be way worse. There's nothing stopping them from
buying up exclusivity contracts
making a DRM that actually functions
developing only proprietary software
making their games pay-to-win
I will be eternally mad at Coca Cola because they took the cocaine out of their soda a century ago.
Oookay, so we're all cool with MTX cosmetics, loot boxes, battlepasses and lacking full ownership or transferability of games, then?
I'm just trying to figure out if the things Valve is doing right now are fine for everybody or just for Valve.
Which again, is my problem. I'll keep saying it, because having to argue for reality makes it sound like I'm a hater. I like Steam, I think Valve games are generally great (and it's a shame they've stopped making them), and I think Valve's management is a good example of many of the pros of a private company (look at Twitter for all the cons).
But holy crap, no, man, they are THE premier name in GaaS. Everybody is taking their cues from Valve, Epic or both in that space. Their entire platform is predicated on doing as little as possible and crowdsourcing as much as possible to keep the money machine churning. Corporations are not your friends.
There has to be a cut off somewhere. Are you still pissed off at Ford for being pro-Nazi in the 30s?
I'm pissed with ford for single handedle fucking our infrastructure, can't live without a car now. But anyway things that company's do 10 years ago or 90 stick around
Does Henry Ford being a nazi impact your purchasing decisions now?
If he were still alive and running the company I do think that subject would probably come up, yeah.
But honestly, it's not a cutoff problem. Steam changed how games are marketed forever. I don't like the ways that went. I don't like that they killed physical media. I don't like that they killed ownership.
Those things are still happening. It's not over. They are still pushing that process. Today.
And then there's the MTX they're still pushing today. The loot boxes they're selling today. The race-to-the-bottom sales. The UGC nightmare landscape. It´s all in there right now.
And again, I am cool with that being the world we live in. I'm even much more friendly to many of those concepts than the average gamer, I just don't pretend Steam is not doing those things.
I don't hate Steam. But Steam's vision for what gaming looks like is not mine. I don't particularly like it and I absolutely need a viable alternative to exist alongisde them indefinitely.
But what does that have to do with comparing it to epic? Epic isnt giving you a physical market, they are taking the next step towards digital ownership loss. Epic took the idea of loot boxes and gave it hyper cancer in fortnite, and uses that hyper cancer cash to fund giving you free games. The list goes on and on. Epics vision is not to undo the damage steam caused, its to worsen the damage to try and push it further.
If this was about the shit trends steam created, sure ok. But all of these problems with steam are things they did in the past establishing themselves, and are things epic is now actively doing to establish itself while taking each one a step further.
If these are problems for steam to have done, then supporting epic over steam is making the exact same mistake again, yes?
Epic has done all of that and more lol
Their DRM is easily bypassable with SteamEmu, as opposed to other inventions like Denuvo
Ah, so if it's crackable it's fine?
Somebody tell Denuvo, they're off the hook.
Seriously, why try so hard to go to bat for a brand name? I get that everybody wants to root for something these days, but I'm too old to pick sides between Sega and Nintendo and I'm mature enough to reconcile that Steam can have the best feature set in a launcher and also be a major player in the process of erasing game ownership and the promotion of GaaS.
Since I can almost guarantee you major publishers would not publish on steam without some sort of DRM, yeah Im fine with them having an easily crackable form of DRM. Especially since they're not exactly jumping to prevent people from doing it.
Oh, they are not. Their DRM wiki page for devs goes "this DRM is easily crackable, we really recommend you use secondary DRM on top of it, see how to do that below". I linked to that elsewhere.
Which is... you know, fine, but definitely one of the reasons I always check if a game is on GOG first before buying it on Steam.
They invented Denuvo?
Drm = digital rights protection
Denovo is a form of drm made by iredto
Technically, Denuvo isn't DRM, it's anti-tamper. It protects the actual DRM from being modified or removed. It's closer to an anticheat, as it ensures the game wasn't modified.
Fun fact: my autocorrect changes anticheat to Antichrist.
... right. And it's also considered one of the premier "evil" DRMs.
So I ask again... they invented Denuvo?
Oh, is that the bar? I hadn't received the memo. That's cool, then, because Activision, Epic, Microsoft and Ubisoft didn't invent Denuvo either, so we're all good.
All their platfomrs support it and sell games with it, though.
For the record, Steam actively suggests using multiple online features and multiple layers of DRM to minimize piracy:
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/drm
Also:
To be more clear about it, Tencent is Epic's largest investor, so they obviously have a great deal of influence over and access to anything they want from Epic (likely including user data) and they directly benefit from Epic's growth.
Also:
Given that DRM on Steam is entirely up to each game publisher, I don't think it's appropriate to list under "Steam cons". I'm not even sure that any of my Steam games have DRM.
If you mean that most Steam games expect to find an instance of Steam running, you should know that is not DRM, and it's trivially replaced with the open-source Goldberg Emulator or a similar tool.
Another plus for GOG is that they let you download games with a web browser. No special app required. (I think Itch.io does this as well.)
Epic was scanning your Steam friends and play history
Valve was scanning your DNS cache
So... Maybe we shouldn't forget to mention the second one if we're going to bring up the first one
The story I read was that they didn't collect or report anything, but just flagged a user if the cache contained a known game hack site, and that they stopped doing that years ago.
Not comparable to what Epic was caught doing, IMHO. Still, if there's an article with more detail, I wouldn't mind reading it. (Maybe it was part of their anti-cheat system of the time?)
Funny how if it was any other company you would call bs and tell them to fuck off with their "trust me bro" attitude.
To me it's much worse what Valve did, they have no business looking at my browsing history, that's much more private than the games I own on Steam or the three friends I've got on both platforms anyway.
Don’t forget that Epic buys up existing licenses to sell them as exclusives. They even pulled Rocket League from Steam after buying the studio.
Let's also not forget that game developers have no choice but to release on steam if they want to have any chance on breaking even since they have that huge of a market share and that Epic challenging that already lead to better deals for developers since Valve hat virtually free reign before
Rocket League is fully playable on Steam.
The story of most of Valve's games is finding a mod, hiring the modder, then making the game exclusive to Steam.
You can no longer buy the game on Steam though.
The difference between Steam and Epic is that Steam gets modders who mod their Source games. These mods don't exist outside of Valve games. Valve is paying someone who loves their games and makes content for those games. They are smart in recognizing talent and bringing it to their development teams.
Epic finds existing games with existing communities and build a wall around it so Epic becomes a gatekeeper to the fun. They stop games from working on other storefronts or pay for "exclusivity" which means stopping people from playing the game.
Steam have DRM free games too, you don't have to launch them through steam even.
steam drm is so easy to bypass that it almost doesn't count
A con for GOG is their site is slow as fuck. And god forbid you want to go back to a previous page, you'll likely lose where you were looking 9 times out of ten. Especially so on mobile.
Pros: Can be the only place you can get old games that would've been unavailable otherwise
The older games are often really really cheap, especially during sales
Another con is that GOG versions are usually not updated as much as other versions are. It's a shame, because I'd prefer to use GOG when possible.
Gog also seemingly no 2fa other than an faq page with instructions that cannot be followed.
I always get 2FA'd on GoG for an emailed code
Do you remember how to configure it? Last I checked I went through every account and settings page on the store site and seemingly separate customer service log in and no clear way to set it up.
Not a clue sorry. I'm personally not one to go out of my way to set up 2FA even though I know it's good practice to do so (unless it's work related, then I do)
Steam's, Epic's, Ubisoft's, Battle.net's and whatever-EA's-thing-is-called-now's sites are also slow as shit. What is it with these platforms which prevent them from loading a webpage in less than 10 seconds?
By making the entire thing a JavaScript monstrosity with egregious amounts of scripts.
Sadly, it's likely a lot of tracking. The kind that look where your mouse is and where you scroll and stop etc.
What tracking does Epic need? "According to our analytics, 100% of users scroll to the free games banner on Tuesday at 5pm CEST, then leave and don't come back for a week. What a mystery!"
Oh thanks for the reminder, I hadn't opened epic so I can scroll down to the free games banner in a while.
You’d be appalled how much people in corporations earn for making these obvious observations…
In Steam's case, the slowness looks more like a side effect of it being a Chromium Embedded Framework application (similar to Electron) with a lot of extras bolted on. It's just not built for efficient use of resources.
The website, outside of the client is still slower than it used to be a good few years ago
Didn't know about heroic... Gonna check that out.
Also, wow. You're the dude that appears in comment sections with well-formatted paragraphs 💯.
Appreciate your service.
Steam UI is messy but they have a ton of functionality in their store/system. Epic took ages to even get a functioning cart, Steam has tons of features which are not even tied to the games in their store like remote play and Steam VR. Family sharing is also really cool for example. Also Steam basically killed piracy for a long time due to amazing Steam sales + convenience of use.
Steam ui might be messy but you can get custom skins for it.
I want to note that Steam isn't inherently a DRM platform, as there are many games on Steam which are DRM free. Even ones that require the Steam backend can be bundled with Steamworks, serving all the same backend requirements without Steam needing to be installed on the machine.
yea, they steam has some drm-free games available... but steam is a drm platform.. one that also helped normalize one-time-use codes and tying 'purchases' to a non-transferable online account. valve did more to shred the used pc game market than any other company.
Epic has a significantly higher percentage of games confirmed to be DRM-free.
So if we just assume this random wiki with no sourcing is correct...
Steam has more games than everyone else, DRM on Steam is the developer/publisher's choice, Steam still has more DRM-free games than Epic does, and how many of the ones Epic has are exclusives that don't count?
Many of the articles do have references on the DRM status. Here's an example indicating verification by a staff member. I personally tested a bunch of the games for DRM and noted it back when I contributed. Until recently, most of the games released on Epic were DRM-free. Even the Sony games were notably DRM-free on Epic before they were released on GOG. Nowadays, it's more common for the new ones to use EOS and have it function as DRM.
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games
The Origin store proportionally has more DRM free games than Steam...
Do you know what proportions are?
So if we just assume this random wiki with no sourcing is correct…
Steam has more games than everyone else, DRM on Steam is the developer/publisher’s choice, Steam still has more DRM-free games than Origin does, and how many of the ones Origin has are exclusives that don’t count?
Another Epic con: they bribe devs to not launch their games on Steam and GoG, because their store isn’t good.
Steam DRM is optional, it depends on developers to implement it.
Your first line is straight up misinformation. Epic has remarkably few games with DRM, mostly from big publishers implementing their own. I've yet to find an indie that can't be launched directly as an .exe. Same with Cyberpunk 2077, launches directly without issue.
The only singleplayer game I can't play offline is Hitman, just like on Steam, because their publisher sucks.
Eh... A whole bunch of games on Epic are DRM free, proportionally more than there are on Steam in fact...
Steam cons
Isn't the 30% cut what basically everyone takes? AFAIK GOG, Ubisoft, EA and all three console manufacturers take the same share.
Besides Epic only itch.io with their choose your share system and Discord (do they even still sell games?) take/took less.
Considering they have bugger all cost with distribution points being hosted for free by service providers it’s an overpriced over glorified website with online payment processing. 30% cut is massively tax for very little
You don't own the games on any digital platform, neither steam, epic or gog. You're only being sold a license to use it, and the license can be revoked whenever the company feels like it.
Thisbis actually true for most of the physical media back in the day, the only difference is that they didn't really have a method to revoke the license... But that nice old cardboard box you have in your attic, with the nice shiny plastic disc... You still don't legally own the software on it.
So what. It’s still valid Cons for the platform.
Stop making excuses for scamming one sided purchase agreements.
You are absolutely correct, but it's a con for Epic too. Your comment makes it out to look like you don't own your games on Steam, but by omission you make it seem like you do own your games on Epic.
I just want to make it very clear that you don't own the games on either platform. But also want to mention that even if you buy a good old CD/DVD with the game on, then you still don't own the game...
It's absolutely awful that it's practically impossible to own a game, and it's even more awful that the platform can take away a game you paid for, let alone that they don't even have to refund you for it...
Well, I have four big ones:
System scanning: EGS is known to automatically scan your system and send your data back to them. While this seems to be the same type of analytics Steam does occasionally, in Steam's case, it's opt-in, and done with full, informed consent.
Paid exclusives: Epic has been known to pay publishers to make their games artificially exclusive to their own store. They regularly claim this money is to support the development of the games in question, but this is easily disproven, as they've been seen buying games known to be complete more than once. Additionally, this has resulted in bait-and-switch-like situations, where users would prepurchase Steam copies of games, only to be informed that they wouldn't be getting them.
Publisher-centric behavior: Another user here claimed that EGS is pro-developer and anti-consumer, but this is only half true. This only rings true in the case of self-published games. There have been cases of developers getting unwarranted backlash after aforementioned bait-and-switches, when they were just as surprised to learn about all the "development support" they received as anyone.
Tim Sweeney: Tim Weeney, the CEO of Epic, is an asshole. A giant, narcissistic, hateful shitbag. Just look at his Twitter, the dudes a giant POS.
I didn't know about this.
It happened to Metro Exodus (great game btw) but iirc all pre orders were honoured and the game was just delisted.
Has it happened after that?
It also happened with at least two more. Yakuza and some indie farming game.
I posted about this in another thread, but Epic also bought exclusivity for games that were crowd-funded then had the option to have the game on Steam removed or you'd get the Steam key after the exclusivity period expired. This pissed off a lot of people.
Wow. That's understandably frustrating.
Yeah, this caused A LOT of controversy back then. As far as I know, Epic has stopped doing this and has pivoted a bit more into funding game development (i.e. Alan Wake 2.) That being said, that gave Epic a terrible reputation when they initially launched EGS.
They are still doing it. I'm still waiting for dead island 2 to come to steam because it's a 1 year timed exclusive on epic
They still sign exclusives, they don't do it with crowdfunded projects that promised a Steam release anymore.
I meant with crowd funded games. I'm aware that they still buy exclusivity. Though from what I know they pay indies less compared to what they used to pay.
I didn't know this. Which games did it?
I don't actually know all the games that did this, but the most famous examples are Phoenix Point and Shenmue 3. I already read that Outer Wilds was another one that took the exclusivity deal.
Epic's CEO has a hateboner for everything Linux.
No linux support. Actually, in the case of games like rocket league, they REMOVED linux support.
They bought the game and changed out the graphics API to kill the Linux native builds, then after the community got it working via Wine, they added anticheat. Epic went further than incompetence on that one.
I've been able to play it in heroic launcher. Didn't realize it was it was this bad
I personally don't like Epic for paying developers for exclusivity deals, keeping games off other PC platforms for a year or more. Artificial scarcity is bad for consumers.
Even worse is that they do this while trying to paint themselves as the underdog against the Steam monopoly. It's not only hypocritical, but also deceitful. A new monopoly is not a solution to an existing monopoly, but a solution to investments paying off.
Don't forget them being hypocritical again for suing google/apple for being monopolistic because they don't want to have to go through them for payment.
You guys don't understand what a monopoly is...
I do know what it is, and I don't actually think Steam is one. They have a considerable market share, but they are by no means the only way to get games on PC, nor do they exercise their dominance in a way that stifles competition.
I'm pretty sure Tim Sweeny knows this as well, but he still calls it a "monopoly" whenever he has the chance.
They were sued in the EU for violating anti trust laws, lost and decided not to cooperate.
They're currently getting sued for forcing devs to not sell their games at a lower price on other platforms.
Their marketshare is more than enough to consider them a monopoly, you don't need 100% of the market to be one, you just need to be so implanted that you become the default solution. Google doesn't have 100% of the market, it still is considered a monopoly for search engines
Definitely a terrible idea.
Using money to jump ahead in the line is a terrible mindset. Provide good features, you'll get your recognition.
Which they don't do. Their platform has very few features, and doesn't even have a cart. (Well last time I booted EGS like a year ago).
They have almost no features and of the features they do provide, none of them are great. Their only "feature" is operating at a loss, subsidized by megacorps, for many years like Amazon to gain a bunch of market share.
Luckily for gamers, steam already existed so they couldn't corner the market and enshittify the entire industry like amazon did.
No it won't - people are lazy
Even CDProjekt sold many more copies on steam than GOG when you
Don't tell me people are choosing the better deal when it's all just steam having the might of "I have most of my games there already" on their side...
It doesn't really bother me since it's still on pc anyway, it doesn't matter massively where you get a game from (unless you specifically want drm free copies).
Especially when Epic is funding development with those deals.
Why not say fuck the developers instead? They're the ones accepting guaranteed income in exchange for exclusivity, maybe you should be mad at then for not taking a chance at the "influencer making your game popular enough that you recoup your cost" lottery.
Por que no dos?
If I'm not buying anything on Epic then I'm also not buying from developers that agree to Epic's exclusivity. Two birds, one stone.
They got paid for the exclusivity, after that if they don't sell as much then so be it, but just releasing on Steam is like choosing to play the lottery as a retirement plan and signing an exclusivity deal is like having a job, one might pay tens of millions or nothing, the other you're sure will let you buy food for the next couple of years.
There's tons of games on Steam that the devs have put everything they had in it only to never see any success and then you've got games like Vampire Survivors where nothing happened for months until suddenly a YouTuber started playing it and it became a major success. And I mean, good for Luca (and eventually for his team), but for every successful small dev there's tens of unsuccessful ones...
While this is a concern I generally share, I doubt the overwhelming majority of players even give it a single thought. Most don‘t care about things like human rights when the product is nice. Only once did I hear someone bring up Tencent owning 30% of Larian (Baldur‘s Gate 3) for example. The masses really don‘t even want to hear it.
Average .ml lemming
The multi-billionaire owner with the backing of the Chinese government is claiming that he's the underdog against a popular company/piece of software/GabeN. He's made some poor choices interacting with the community.
Yes, it's probably nice for a publisher to have a guaranteed income, which is why they sell exclusivity. It leaves a sour taste in my mouth, so I choose not to support it.
The rest about the launcher being bad sounds unhinged to me, but some people are really into that.
They bought Rocket League and actively made it worse.
I don't disagree with everything you said here but come on, Steam is basically a privately owned PC games store monopoly that has now been going on for 25 years. Since it's not public we can't really know for sure but there's a very real possibility that Epic is the underdog here
Who cares about the backing if it has no effect on anything? I'm more concerned about Valve having a separate Steam client for China, censoring their games specifically for China and even reportedly banning for bringing up Winnie the Pooh.
Epic is the worst of the 3 platforms for a user. It is a drm like steam, but with less games on it, and even less optimized (so even more wasted resources and time loading useless advertising).
Steam has it that is makes game run on Linux smoothly, and the biggest library of games. Gog is drm free. Epic has absolutely nothing a user may want, except for free games so that you are now captive of their shitty platform.
Pretty much every single decision you can see from their history since the inception of EGS is either stupid or blatantly destructive to gaming industry. Just some examples: better revenue shares for developers? Sure but this translates into worse platform. Money bonuses for exclusivity is great for developers? Sure but the game is then stuck at the platform that gives no means for users to interact and let developers know how they could improve their product. Cross platform multiplayer platform that works? Sure but then we have to deal with stupid requirements like having an account on additional platforms we may not want to use, even to play single player modes sometimes.
You can also check Tim's Twitter and see how ignorant and hypocritical he is. I wouldn't mind it but his decisions seem to actually affect the whole platform and therefore the industry so... too bad.
Don't forget how he abandoned PC gaming when Unreal Tournament 3 bombed after they released shitty mid tools and the modding community they built up over UT 2k3 and 2k4 dissolved.
It actually goes to publishers, so the only way devs see that extra cut is by self-publishing. So I guess for smaller indie devs it can be a good deal.
It can. Doesn't save those games from being forgotten faster than they release elsewhere though. Only a few managed to overcome this effect somewhat.
No support for Linux - steam has it built in and the DRM free nature of gog games means that they're not too tough to get running via wine.
aside from what everyone else said, they killed the beloved Unreal Tournament series, which is a huge sour spot for older gamers who fondly remember those. Then there's the excessive microtransaction demand inside Fortnite, a game with a large playerbase under the age of 18. That alone led to two major lawsuits that they both lost
Aside from TF2--and even that I got a bit bored with--most all of my interest in multiplayer FPS died along with Unreal Tournament. Doesn't feel like having fun is the goal anymore.
They are killing rocket league too
In short, Epic is anti-consumer. They claim better support for developers, but in reality consumers are the one paying for that. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but you the consumer have no choice in it. You are forced through exclusives and other limitations to use inferior service for the same price. Even free games they give are there to drag you into their ecosystem and abuse.
This is why Valve doesn't feel threatened, I assume, and is not likely to feel the pressure from Epic anytime soon. For that to happen, Epic would have to get on par with features and customer benefits equal or better than Steam and that's not happening anytime soon. Epic would rather throw hundreds of millions on exclusive deal with some developer and force you the consumer to buy the game on EGS than actually improve the service.
Epic doesn't see gamers as their customer - they see developers as their customer and shape the customer experience around that. For example, Epic said that if/when they add reviews, developers could choose to opt their games out of reviews. That's very pro-developer, but very anti-consumer, whatever you might think of the value of reviews. Informed customers can rattle off a long list of reasons they don't like Epic and why they're bad, but they are a small minority of PC gamers. The "silent majority" doesn't keep up with this kind of stuff or really care about it, so they are literally judging stores on their merits and Epic is a bare bones platform that doesn't offer customers a good reason to spend money in their store because they don't think they need to.
Instead of offering anything to be a better platform they are burning money on the platform in hopes they can pay their way to dominance by paid exclusivivity and giving away games. One of those isn't bad for users. Now consider what Epic offers beyond being able to buy and download a game. Nothing. Epic is only a storefront and they've had years to work on this at this point. Steam has gained dominance and maintains it in no small part due to all the additional features available to everyone. Do you use the steam workshop for any of your games? Have you used the steam community forums to troubleshoot a problem? Do you use big picture mode for a more console like experience? Do you customize your controller settings with the pretty expansive controller support built into steam? The overlay? How about the custom profiles and badges and trading cards? Epic is only a storefront. That's it. That's all that's on offer. So they supplement it with bribing devs to be exclusive to their store and giving away games to try and attract users.
I love the steam chat, as someone who doesn't use discord very often at all. Having the chat is an easy to too flick a message off to someone while i play
Not only that, the storefront runs atrociously slow and the privacy policy is invasive.
These are true criticisms, but I'm not sure if they're fair. To the best of my recollection, Steam had none of those things in 2008, either, about the time they were the age of the EGS, now.
You could say they should (be able to) compete on the merits alone, without free games or paid exclusivity, but that argument wouldn't reflect reality: you need a hefty carrot to lure people away from their comfort zone.
Yes, true. But it's not 2008 anymore. It makes no sense for companies to compete based on features and functionality equivalent to their age.
If someone starts a company today offering only old 1960 color TVs, I'm not going to say "Well they're new, and that's what TV manufacturers would have had at the time". That makes zero sense.
If Epic wants to compete with steam they need to actually compete. They offer nothing of value presently. They have the money and the technical talent to make a good launcher. They just appear to choose not to.
This is completely the case. You can't tell me the makers of Unreal Engine couldn't figure out how to replicate at least some of the more commonly used features of Steam. Of course they can do it. Someone somewhere in the corporate ladder decided they don't need the extra features to compete with steam. Maybe burning money on the exclusivity contracts and game giveaways will work out in the long run, but I doubt that when they flat out said they're spending more money than they earn in their 800+ person layoff just a few months ago.
Personally my main gripe is their aggressive strategies to force people into their garbage-tier launcher. Compared to Steam it's just miles behind, and it's yet another app to run on your PC. All my friends are also on Steam, and Steam had Linux support. However, if all you want to do is launch singleplayer games, you don't mind the Epic launcher, and you get a good deal, then do whatever you want to.
This.
I fundamentally have no issue with the Epic Games launcher. Steam needs competition to keep it in check. Without alternatives, Steam can and will strangle Dev profits, which is a problem. But Epic is a mediocre service, another app to be running, and actively going out of their way to prevent games from being on the platform of the consumers choice, which I am not a fan of.
Related note: does Epic have any DRM free games? Even Steam has a fair portion of games that are DRM free and work perfectly well from a flash drive on a computer that doesn't have Steam installed. As far as I am aware, Epic does not.
There's just a series of minor ways in which epic is worse, and I don't like having front-end clients for my games as is, so a second, competing alternative going out of its way to push me into using it rubs me the wrong way.
Where can you find what steam games are drm free?
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam
Thanks!
Steam DRM is optional and implemented by the developer.
Hmm...
I have never used a launcher before (for obvious reasons as mentioned in my post), so I found the idea of a separate launcher dumb in the first place. I have used it in recent times thanks to Epic's free games. Finished two of the Tomb Raider trilogy.
Like, I'm fine with a store, but I gotta open the launcher to launch the game? On Windows, with the Tile based Start Menu, I kind of thought it was a terrible idea NGL. I gotta open, wait for it to load, open the library, then click to run, THEN it'll open...
Plus, if I want to track progress, it's a hassle because I can't track without the damn launcher...
You don't need all store fronts running at once on your pc though. Just boot up what you need for the game you want and it's just six and two threes, whether it's steam or epic, or any other launcher.
The issue is that I miss features when using Epic. Additionally, games from Epic are not visible in my steam library which leads to me forgetting that they even exist. And also nobody uses it, so there's no community feeling like I have with all my Steam friends.
I don't mind it for free games though. If they give me a game for free, they deserve me using their launcher for that game haha.
You don't understand, it's ok if the extra app you need to run is Steam, it's not ok if it's Epic!
I'm pretty pragmatic. While I appreciate what Valve has done for PC gaming, I like the idea of them having some legit competition in the space. So when the Epic store started, I bought a bunch of games there to give it a shot. Outer Worlds, Control... And of course I grabbed up a bunch of free games, too!
...and then, over time, I've repurchased all of the games I liked on steam anyway.
Make of that what you will.
I might be on the same trajectory too if my experience worsens 🫡.
Epic is not a competition to Valve. They are long ways from that position. If Steam ever was afraid of competitor it was from Windows Marker Place or whatever the name of built-in windows crap is.
The only thing I make of that is that you are bad with money.
Ha ha - I mean, you're not wrong!
Edit: for the downvoters - as OP, I officially congratulate Kecessa on their sick burn. It made me lol. So... If you were feeling conflicted here, go with the upvote.
One reason is that Epic are very dismissive of Linux, while Steam go out of their way to be supportive and GOG are supportive when it's convenient
Another is trying to lock games into exclusives with them, which other distribution platforms don't do so much
That said, if you don't play games without cross platform multiplayer and don't care about Linux support or see yourself caring any time soon, there's not a huge reason to push you towards steam and away from epic. GOG is more of an anti-DRM thing, however barring sales the price and the cut for the devs is identical on all of them and it's the same game aside from DRM.
For me it's entirely self-centered and I'm dispensing with all the aspirational and political feelings that people have about the way businesses operate.
Quite simply I recommend Steam because it is a product with so many killer features, it's really hard to take anybody else seriously.
It's just shy of 2024, and Epic is still a non-realized alpha product. Their website, store, and launcher/library is a perfunctory effort at best. The most recent feature they added that I even consider to be an improvement would be the ability to look at my own games library - that should sound like a pretty funny joke but it's said deadpan. They don't even have proper controller support for PC, whereas Steam for example recognizes that PC gamers come with a variety of input hardware.
I mean it's so simply that steam is such a mature product that offers so much to the gamer, and epic just wants money and they're not really doing anything to compel me to want to use that platform.
GOG is great, it's a simple system that gives you the power to own your own games and I very much appreciate that. Personally I don't like to splinter my collection across different services so I'm mostly avoid them but I can't say anything really negative.
Anyways this is just my opinion, I feel like steam has tons of killer features, the otherS simply don't. There's lots of valid discussion in other areas about ethics and things like that but really I'm just looking at it from the perspective of what do I want from my money. Steam gives me the most, and the others don't even hold a candle.
Does the EGS store even have a shopping cart feature yet?
I think they finally got it after like 3 or 4 years, but 5 years on and they are still not profitable
I try so hard to be a rational consumer and not an emotion-driven zealot for any company or product. I just look at Epic and what they tell and show gamers/devs/publishers about who they are as a company. They don't hide it.
Epic doesn't seem to add any killer (and at times rudimentary) features while they focus their pitch down to more money for publishers now but we own your soul; By comparison Valve says here's a robust and trusted, feature-rich platform you can deploy upon and we're improving it constantly.
Valve engages in continual expansion of their Steam ecosystem (look at the Deck alone and how much value that added overnight); Valve does continual short-lived research projects like the Steam Link / Steam Controller, which don't survive as stand-alone products but pound one novel killer-feature after the next into the platform; Epic treats their product like an afterthought and their customers as wallets.
This is really what is at the crux of it. I am not sympathetic to Epic's way of doing business where the customer is last, the developers and their art are the pawns, and publishers are plied with sweet, predictable short-money in exchange for souls.
I've seen enough enshittification to know at this point that doing business with a bean-counting, value-wringing company hurts us all, and perhaps I'm out on a limb here but I feel like this sentiment is becoming highly solidified among many.
It just how the way the world capitalism works baby. If you don't like it best move to some communist state like China or something.
They've had it for years now.
The whole idea of digital licenses are stupid and risky. If you can find it on GOG, it's preferable to get it there. The games are DRM-free, and you can directly download the installers and make an offline backup of them.
Thankfully, there's not too much reason to worry about this yet. Steam is a money-printing machine, and it's not a public company or beholden to investors who demand increasing profitability every quarter. As long as Gabe Newell is still alive and doesn't sell out by taking Valve public, things probably won't change much.
This is where I'm often torn. My sentiments lean fully to the principle of the user owning his/her purchased software.
But I want Valve to have my money and I trust them, because their entire business model is giving me the power to play my games in the most ways possible, and in ways that having the OG installer on my Desktop can't do.
I can stream my entire 900 game Steam library to my phone and when my Deck gets here I'll have access to it all there as well. Muahahaha. Take my money. No GOG RAR Installer is going to give me that, ever. This doesn't seem to get talked about enough. Valve adds so much value, they make it so I don't even want to pirate.
It's important to note that just because you got it on GOG does not guarantee it is DRM free but they do try. (Unless things have changed since I last looked)
They also supposedly have a plan where everyone will still have access to their games in the unlikely event that Valve shuts down.
Exclusives suck for everyone. Especially when Epic started out, they only had payment processors in certain countries. This meant that some people literally had no legal way to play the Epic exclusives. I'm not sure where they stand today, but that annoyed me enough, along with other shenanigans by Epic and Sweeny, that I avoid the whole ecosystem.
Paid exclusives locking content away from other online stores. Basically trying to force me to use it is a sure fire way of making me refuse.
Most of the salt I have for this behaviour from games that were pulled from Steam because Epic threw cash at the developers, or they’re exclusive despite there being no reason to be.
I have no issue with Epic releasing their own games in their store, just like valve do, or EA/Actvision did.
Irrelevant.
For me it's simply EGS paying developers to lock games only their store.
If they were just competing, trying to deliver a better product I would massively support them, similar to how I support GOG, however when you start locking content to your storez you end up with "PlayStation vs Xbox" devision of content.
I don't like when huge, rich corporations pretend that they are an underdog.
On top of that, I don't like when a platform bribes developers to limit their game to one platform.
Yeah, man, screw Nintendo.
Brand perception is a universal mystery.
Generally the only games that are de facto exclusive to Nintendo are the ones they make themselves or those that choose to stay on Nintendo (I haven't heard of exclusivity deals, but I won't discount the possibility).
A better comparison might be Sony with Playstation (and maybe Microsoft with Xbox, though I haven't heard of as much from them on that) paying for exclusivity for a limited time.
Epic, on the other hand decided, at least at the start, to buy out almost finished games (some of which even had pre-orders on other storefronts) to have on their platform for at least a year. Then decided to try and play the victim, claiming that they had to do it to gain market share. Then claimed they were morally superior because they didn't charge as much to publishers for putting games on their storefront. While also charging just as much for the games to the consumers.
Microsoft don't pay for timed exclusivity. Instead they buy the companies and get exclusivity from them now being first party.
Sony have very, very few straight exclusivity deals these days, they have a super robust first party network. Nintendo and them are very comparable, in fact. Especially in that Nintendo works with more third parties or partially owned "second parties" than you'd think, since people presume anything using their IP is their game, even when it's not.
In any case, they're both as not-comparable, in that Epic games run on the same hardware and platform as Steam games, Linux compatibility aside. You don't have to pay any extra money to switch back and forth.
Epic legitimately hasn't done anything Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft haven't done on the regular. In fact, the current "boo, we hate non-Steam PC launchers" trend overlaps with the old "boo, we're pissed that former console exclusive X is going multiplatform", which was a surreal few years there.
Also, hell yeah, it's morally superior to give more of the money to the dev while charging the same up front to consumers. 100%. Every time. Epic is not doing it because they're nice, they're doing it to attract talent to their platform, which is exactly why you want competition between multiple storefronts instead of a monopoly. But that doesn't take it away from them, that's the better answer.
Fuck Nintendo to death, after listening to the abominations they committed in the Team Xecuter episode of Darknet Diaries I’m never giving them another cent.
Luckily, Yuzu runs games infinitely better than my switch anyway, so that’s awesome.
Fuck Nintendo, but fuck Xecuter more.
Anyone that follows the homebrew and CFW scene knows that Xecuter repeatedly and unapologetically ripped off the GPL-licensed components in Atmosphere and its various bootloader stages. On top of violating the licenses of and stealing from the homebrew community, they also added console-bricking DRM to their CFW. They're not heroes supporting the ideological cause of piracy; just shitbags trying to profit off of it.
ABSOLUTELY. But the guy whose life they fucked over had almost nothing to do with development. He was like a news site… guy.
Oh yeah, he was totally the fall guy and had his life ruined over it. He was made an example out of, while the rest and worst of them made bank and got away with it.
Absolute bullshit. But you’re totally right, Xecutor was mostly corrupt and shitty. I forgot about the switch bricking thing, what fuckery to do to people.
Oh, there's a ton to say about why Disney get a reputation for being a litigious nightmare but Nintendo gets more of a connection to beloved franchises in a lot of the gaming community, but that's precisely why they're a good counterexample to Steam when you're talking about branding associations.
They do the same thing that the horde of shitty streaming services do: Hold content hostage through exclusivity deals so they can gain market share without actually providing a comparable technology or service as their competitor.
The problem is that without those exclusive deals noone would change
Most people didn't buy EA games at origin or Ubisoft games at UPlay even though you needed those launchers anyway. They even didn't buy CDProjekt games at gog despite the games being dem free there.
Excluding deals on sought after games is literally the only way to get a majority of the players moving away from there comfortable "I have ally games and friends there already" position
People are lazy and hate change - without force it's not going to happen
They don’t even try to be competitive on technology or service though. If they were making a comparable or even superior product and people were sticking with Steam anyway for the network effect I’d agree they’d be justified in doing more to attract customers. But they just want to use their pile of money to buy their way into a market without putting in the work to design and develop a superior product.
Aside from the other scumbaggery that Epic does, if you do wanna play their free games then atleast use heroic so you don't use the wasteheap that is the epic games launcher.
For starters: complete lack of features and user support. EGS gives you the game and basically no way to interact with the community around that game. They don't support Linux, which is huge for some people, but also makes some peripherals like Steamdeck that operate on Linux entirely incompatible.
Because their user support is so bad, nobody really chooses EGS to buy/play games from, so Epic tries to take that choice away buy giving payouts to publishers to only let the game be on their store for six months or longer, meaning anyone who wants to play such a game has to come to them. This is also why you see a lot of free games, EGS trying to lure people to their "service".
Which is where the real big problem comes in. Instead of user beneficial features, most of the storefront and game launcher is bloat ware that would rather show you more and more ads for other products on their store than let you get into the game you want to play. And if reports are true, advertising games already in your library. So they aren't even trying to tailor a custom user experience, they are just blasting you with a bunch of shit till something sticks (or you uninstall)
There have also been allegations of EGS scanning personal computer files outside of its install directory, which is scummy enough on its own but its also transmitting that data back to their central server, which gets handed off to Tencent, the Chinese owned company that is a big investor in Epic and has their own history of scandal and anti consumer behavior. So if this all is happening, its hard to say just what data on your computer is behind handed off to Tencent and the Chinise Government because you wanted to play a silly game on an inferior game service.
One of my biggest complaints with the EGS is their anti-competitive actions. Rather than try to out compete, rather than try to be the better choice, they pay developers to only release games on their platform, flat out barring them from releasing on any other store. They don't try to win your favor, they don't try to be a pleasant experience, they just shortcut their way to being the only option, without a care for improving any of the other faults or shortcomings.
My next complaint is that Tencent has a 40% ownership share in Epic Games, and I make active efforts to not give them a dime.
Epic wanted exclusives by pulling games from other platforms. I will never spend a single cent on Epic Games. I'm happy to spend it on Steam, especially games that I have pirated before (Commandos series for example) or indie games (Banished anyone?).
For bigger games such as Civilians, I'll purchase it on Steam and then pirate so I don't need to run Steam. I am a big fan of patches to remove the intro screen.
Intro screens and the like can usually be dealt with easily in many games. Look up the game on PCGamingWiki — it's usually much easier (and less malware prone) than pirating.
Fun fact, many intro screen can be disabled via program flags, those are put there due to faster testing, and usually not disabled due to either laziness, the way the SW is tested, and/or because the devs have some empathy for the players not wanting to watch 15 minutes of crap - like it's "made for Nvidia"
My partner has a bunch of AC games and it's pretty much a ritual at this point to delete the launch screen logo files from the game's data folder.
For other games like CS, there's a flag to bypass the whole launcher which is really nice 👌 if only more games did that
I like the way steam looks better and try to avoid spending money on software belonging to chinese companies like Tencent.
Steam also releases pretty cool stuff, and continues to support them way after release... My steam link got an update about three weeks ago, despite being discontinued back in 2018
Also, the steam link can run custom apps (like Moonlight for those who would want to use it for generic low latency streaming without a Steam account) and has the ability to enable a SSH server and root access. There are some limits though on what things you can modify, particularly relating to the boot sequence and the included kernel, as it has a hardware secure boot implementation. The OS is on GitHub anyway.
I will happily give my money to companies like this that actually provide value to their users, even years after the fact. Doubly so if they are domestic or western - it is so rare nowadays to find a western company that isn't blatantly and purely leeching their users
I wouldn't have much reason not to buy from Epic, but I also wouldn't have any reason to buy from it either. Other than free games I don't see why pick Epic over any other place. Steam has more features and GOG is DRM-free, even ItchIO has the benefit of being more supportive of smaller and upcoming game devs. Epic doesn't do anything but the basic.
Valve is viewed in an extremely favorable light in the PC world (and Valve deserves it). Therefore plenty of gamers take Epic throwing around their Fortnite money to get exclusively for their barebones launcher and game store very personally.
Their exclusives , the anti linux stance and the store is crap too
Epic gives better cuts to devs and games have to opt into DRM
Enjoy the free games if you cant afford them
Tim Sweeney hates linux so that's why I prefer Steam over it. Even though Epic gives people free games, the games were always free anyway (unless you want multiplayer), I know you said piracy isn't an answer though.
Issues I can think of in the order they occur to me. These are off the top of my head refections not researched.
Group think: If I shop where most other people shop I have outsourced research and decision making. Is there a good reason? maybe, maybe not but I'm going to follow the masses because I can't research everything.
Stability: neither store offers physical assets so if the store shuts down my purchases could also vanish. Steam is a bigger player and appears to be more stable and GOG is DRM free.
3 The shopping experience: I personally find the layout of steam better for discovery and finding reviews. With the current epic coupon available I have looked on epic for games and if you're just browsing it is not a intuitive experience. GOG similarly has a variety of sorting tools available.
This all could be insane ramblings but these are the things that motivate me to spend my money on Gog or steam in general.
Fair enough I guess... I only use Epic for the free games, so I can't say I've spent much time genuinely looking at the user experience 😅.
Epic Games paid big money to make some games platform exclusive.
Their launcher is, just like Origin and Ubisoft's one, features wise vastly inferior to Steam.
Smaller indie level multiplayer games do not have crossplatform play with Steam, or other issues like DNF duel breaking player room ping indicators.
None of these explain the amount of frequency of anemosity towards Epic for their store. It seems some are in a parasocial relationship with their Steam launcher. A bit like console fanboy wars. And for some reason they prefer a monopoly without alternatives than one with alternatives. Perhaps some see the installation of another program as an intrusion to to their private comfort. Not rationally like Microsoft's ill willed
spyingtelemetry, but emotionally led. I encountered a few people who just don't want to install new programs and perhaps see Epic a threat to their habits.But I dislike them for dropping Unreal Tournament.
I dont use them explicitly for reason 1.
Buying out a game after it was already set to sell on other platforms, and after people had already preordered it from those platforms, because your store lacked such basic functions as a check out cart so no one wanted to use it put them on the curb for me permenantly.
In a capitalist system, companies get worse in quality as they think they can get away with it to improve profit. Starting your store off at such a low point for your customers tells me that they are going to drop much lower once they think they have the stable playerbase to get away with it.
So I am completely disinterested in building a library of games on a platform I see as destined to become worse than the starting line of in the gutter.
Your points are very valid and it was a terrible thing for Epic to do, but they backpedaled on that and have never done the removing a product from Steam afterwards ever again.
Yeah, because Steam changed their terms of service to prevent companies from doing said bait and switch schemes.
No, they have never done it so far. Because it cost them a large amount of public opinion when they had almost nothing else to lean on. It was a decision that they survived only because their other products like unreal and fortnite funded it.
Once they think they have enough dedicated users, who are unwilling to leave their libraries, and they believe they have earned a steam equivalent customer reputation? They will do it again.
Epic client is a spyware.
The issue with Epic isn't as bad as people imply, but it's very real. They produced an incredibly shoddy launcher and store, frequently engage in anticompetitive practices like exclusives, and are happy to frequently update their launcher with new unhelpful bullshit without addressing its core problems.
Me, I'm not upset that Epic exists, even as a Steam user I would not like to deal with them as a true monopoly. But, they give me zero reason to use the store.
The problem is that it's a half-baked product.
I just don't like the launcher. It's absurdly slow and bloated even though it doesn't contain many features. On fast hardware, it takes 30s to open and lags harder than Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. It also eats up my CPU for no reason and has an invasive privacy policy. I try to use the open source Heroic launcher instead, it's much better.
Although recently Steam has moved from slow to within a stone's throw of the launching speed of the Epic Games Store. I'm now looking for an alternative to launch my Steam games.
I personally don't give a shit about whichever store I use for gaming because I have no loyalty to Steam like a lot of the people in this thread. It's just a store and launcher. I wish people would get a grip.
I buy games where it's cheapest, whether that's GoG, Steam or Epic or anywhere else. I use the wishlist functions to make sure I can price compare on sales etc.
Basically Epic like every other publisher has created their own launcher/store.
They aren't trying to compete on features and instead using profits from their franchise to buy market share (e.g. buying store exclusives).
The tone and strategy often comes off as aggressive and hostile.
For example Valve was concerned Microsoft were going to leverage their store to kill Steam. Valve has invested alot in adding windows operability to Linux and ensuring Linux is a good gaming platform. To them this is the hedge against agressive Microsoft business practices.
The Epic CEO thinks Windows is the only operating system and actively prevents Linux support and revoked Linux support from properties they bought.
As a linux user, Valve will keep getting my money and I literally can't give it to Epic because they don't want it.
Yeah, what is up with that? What's wrong with Epic and Linux?
I remember reading that they bought Rocket League and then removed Linux support. Really dumb strategy.
The owner is a piece of shit who's convinced he's smarter than everyone else and has been hostile to Linux for decades.
There needs to always be multiple game stores to keep prices in check. Steam can not be the only option or prices will skyrocket. See game console stores for reference. I use Playnite to seamlessly bridge my game libraries from Steam, GOG, Epic, Amazon Prime, itch.io etc. This is the way.
I just don't use Epic myself but do use Gog and Steam (with the ultra shitty EA launcher and Ubisoft Connect bundled with some of my games) and Playnite has changed everything unifying it all into that single launcher.
Full screen mode in Playnite works fine on my HTPC and as a launcher it does consolidate all of them into one place easily. Worth trying if you use multiple stores.
As for why I'm not using Epic, the whole paying for exclusivity with third parties really didn't appeal to me at all.
If the free offerings from Epic do appeal to you, or if they do better deals on localised currencies (especially if you do struggle to pay for things), don't worry about using their services. I wouldn't want you to deny yourself some entertainment just because other people have issues with them as a business.
My first purchase when I'm earning enough to spend on entertainment will be a good device. The second will be games that I can either physically keep or digitally store on physical drives.
Let's hope that happens next year 💯
Gog is the main place for that, since their principal stance is DRM-free downloadable installers. They have a launcher too, but it's optional and only meant as convenience. Itch.io does DRM-free too, but they're often more about very indie and often experimental games. They have a few all-time indie classics though.
Steam technically doesn't require the games to implement DRM, so a part of their library is DRM-free once you've passed the installation process (they don't need steam to be running). This is on a case-by-case basis though. Lots of Steam games use steamworks (Steam's very own DRM) and a lot more use third party DRMs (and even require external launchers like Ubisoft's or EA's).
For years I have been a bit pissed at Steam for opening themselves to all and every shitty fake game/quick buck asset flip there is out there, refusing to do any kind of curation. Instead they opted for letting the almighty Algorithm do that for them. I doesn't work, their store is a discoverability catastrophe full of shit.
That said, I still buy from them in some cases, and these cases are mostly down to one point : the workshop, the integrated mod and user content interface. It's for a handful of games that profit a lot from it, but it's undenyingly convenient.
What I often do if it's a possibility is buying directly from the developer, which often includes a Steam key. That's what I did for Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress (through Itch.io). It gives you everything Steam has to offer for the game and usually a DRM-free version too. Only "down point" is that your Steam review doesn't count for the game's Steam score when you have activated it from an external key. I don't care much for that.
In the end at that point you've noticed I talked about a lot of different platforms and launchers, and it's not even all of them. Like the previous poster, I can't recommend Playnite enough. It's a meta launcher that makes all of your libraries united in the same place, with a lot of options. You still require all the platforms installed, but you're not using them directly most of the time.
I've got Steam, Gog, Humble, Ubisoft, EA, Amazon, Xbox, Itch.io and yeah, even Epic through it (though I only use EGS to get the free games, I don't plan on buying anything from there).
Honestly, if their launcher wasn't so buggy and didn't refresh itself every 10 seconds, I would use Epic a lot more. They have given out a bunch of great games over the last few years I'm trying to play.
Enshittification.
Not sure you should.
I hear GoG tends to be less DRM-y.
We're in the phase of the meme where use is broadened more and more until it ceases to have any connection to its origins.
They're trying to enshittify PC gaming.
Fair enough.
I'll have to take a look at GoG anyway... I don't remember but I heard it's like an aggregator of some sort too, right? Like, you can access games from your steam account too or something?
Edit: Bruh this is dope.
GOG the store is just that - a store. They only sell games that have no DRM at all, which means a couple of things. One, they almost never get AAA games at release (the exception being games developed/published by CD Projekt, as CDP owns GOG), and two, there's a high likelihood that GOG will offer game versions that are out of sync with or missing features from the same game sold on other platforms (for example, if a game uses Steamworks for its multiplayer, many devs will just strip out multiplayer altogether for the GOG version rather than patching something new and store-agnostic in).
What you're thinking of with the aggregator is GOG Galaxy, which is their (completely un-required) launcher software. Unlike Steam and EGS, GOG's DRM-free nature means you can just buy games on their site, download the installers directly, and go on about your business. Downloading games, starting games, etc., is all just done manually. If you want a dedicated launcher software similar to the Steam and EGS clients, that's what GOG Galaxy is for. And as a value-add, they implemented aggregator features where you can have it pull in your library from Steam, EGS, EA/Origin, Ubisoft, etc., and just view and launch everything from the one spot. I've generally found Playnite to be a little better at being a one-stop launcher, though everyone's mileage will vary of course.
This isn't really true anymore.
Yeah after using both Playnite is better but GOG works a bit better as a ready made experience tbh. Both are great!
What installer? You mean like apps?
The actual .exe that installs the game.
Playnite looks interesting.
Does it have support for linking Backloggd accounts or similar such platforms?
GOG Galaxy let's you combine most of your game library in to one but it has it's issues. GOG, Epic and Microsoft Store all work great but the other clients aren't officially supported.
Epic doesn't have the game time sync, but that's an Epic issue I believe.
Playnite is a better free option for a library manager and the steam integration doesn’t break constantly.
https://playnite.link/
Edit 2: (replied because I got some error when editing comment a second time...)
Okay nevermind. Thought it was too good to be true... why open with an in-app browser?
This is to be expected and don't let it turn you off using Galaxy. Once set up you can automatically launch (and close) the game and client from here without seeing the other apps.
It does work with Steam, Ubisoft etc but the login will expire every week and need reconnecting.
Oh yeah. No, absolutely not... I logged in...
I installed one game, uninstalled another.
Waiting to get time to play using GoG soon.
Also, do we know if there's any integration with services like IGDB?
It's the only way they can ensure it works, I suppose. They might need to control specific cookies and reported supposed clients depending on plugins, and so a packaged in-app browser for the login is easiest. Playnite does the same thing.
GoG isn't terrible, but is a little bit of a pain with Linux. They don't have native support with the desktop client. Although, there are things like "Heroic Launcher" and "Lutris" that work well as a substitute. Granted most of my experience with those are on my Steam Deck. And it just caused too much pain to get CP2077 working for me. That I got it again on Steam when it went on sale.
To be clear, it's not less DRM-y, it's straight up DRM-free.
They had a poll at one point asking the community whether they were fine with DRM-enabled games and/or modern releases. As I understand it, the community said yea to modern games, nay to DRM, so now they do games of all ages but only if they're willing to give up on DRM.
I'm amazed they haven't turned back on that, because a couple years ago they were bleeding money and you can tell they really need to cut costs or increase revenue somewhere. But hey, at least you can back up your library.
Epic Games is useful for the free games they giveaway every week, some weeks better than others. And I know the topic of ownership of these "free games" is another conversation, but I'll take advantage of it while it's there and also while giving them little to no money.
Just my personal opinion
The good clearly are the free games and that some games go cheaper there, they have better sales sometimes. The bad is that the store is badly optimized. The UI is annoying, no cloud saves for a lot of games. As of recently there were no achievements or even a cart, but they have that now which is good. The friends tab is bare bones still. They have aggressive DRM. For some reason it's a pain in the ass to log in, but that might be just on my end.
Now with GOG, you don't have DRM, you can integrate all launchers so you can launch all the games from one, which for me, is pretty useful. GOG has great deals. The bad is that the ui as well is kind of bare bones, but i don't know, they are not trying to take over the market and their store works very well.
As of steam i don't need to say anything, everything is in there. If you play on linux you basically will get every game from steam. They have the most robust launcher with the most options, etc.
That said, personally I use the three of them. Gog primarily since i can launch everything from there and if i find a game in there, i'd rather get it from them. But i've found sales on epic too good to let go so i play those games there. For me it depends on what they're offering, but for some reason i really dislike Epic's layout and ui, i feel like it is very annoying and that it is missing a lot.
Fair points.
Nothing is wrong with it. It is just another games store.
Epic’s customer service sucks. Consider my last experience from a prior xmas sale:
So, fuck them. I only claim free games from them now.
And I concur with problems other people have mentioned.
The names of their support agents is truly odd. I’ve seen people post complaints about their support that is little more than this:
Hilariously bad.
That sounds about right. I’ve gotten a few replies back then that I would assume were AI generated if I received them this year.
I refuse to patronize Epic until they continue working on UT4. I've been playing their games for 25 years and they make fortnite then decide to just drop all of their long term fans.
UT = Unreal Tournament, yes?
My dad got me that game on his old laptop when I was a kid. It barely ran, but boy was it exciting ❤️.
The Plasma gun was my favourite 🫡. Especially in that space level... The one where you could jump outside the windows.
I have a bone to pick with Epic regarding Unreal Engine as well. Terrible optimisation. Any game I play, if made using UE, is terrible.
I've played the first two of the Tomb Raider trilogy on medium on my 4GB GTX 1650, i7 9th Gen, 16GB RAM laptop. This device has pushed me through my engineering and still continues to run most of my work. It also runs Forza Horizon 4 and Red Dead Redemption 2 good enough.
Yet I install Deliver Us Mars, a game with a much smaller scale, and my beautiful beast starts to stutter. 🫠🫠🫠
Yeah. They had an alpha out for a while and just deserted it after fortnite took off. I really enjoyed playing it, too.
The optimization is kind of up to the devs. It's fairly accessible to all sorts of people with varying levels of skill, but you still have to identify bottlenecks and move to c++ sometimes. Making it easy to implement in the editor means some people will make shit they can't optimize or support.
As someone who seldom plays with friends (I have very few who want to play online), I just pick the store where the games are the cheapest or there's a sale or something. It doesn't really affect me that much.
But if all your friends are on steam, then check before getting a game on Epic, sometimes they don't let you play together. Most of the time they do, though.
As for minor issues, EGS does not have feature parity with Steam or GOG. They don't have user reviews, for example. This makes it a worse user experience.
More importantly, Epic has a habit of anti-competitive or anti-consumer behavior. When EGS first launched, they were keen on doing console-style timed exclusives, even for games that were already purchasable on platforms like Steam.
Lastly, Epic has a history of neglecting or shutting down games. A few of their older games were taken offline permanently when Fortnite started gaining traction. They then purchased a few studios, namely Psyonix (makers of Rocket League), Mediatonic (Fall Guys), and Harmonix (Rock Band/Guitar Hero series). These studios seem to be a shell of what they used to be. Psyonix's first major project under Epic was Rocket Racing in Fortnite, and this project seemed to be prioritized over Rocket League and even caused the removal of core features of Rocket League. Harmonix worked on Fortnite Festival, but that came at the cost of Fuser, which shut down and was delisted about a year after launch. As for Mediatonic, I don't think they worked on anything else yet, but a large portion of the studio was recently laid off. Needless to say, fans of the affected studios aren't happy with Epic as they're being treated as 2nd-class citizens compared to Fortnite players.
There's not really a good answer other than convenience. Folks view Steam as the benevolent convenient monopoly. They want it to be their store for everything, their launcher for everything, their friends and social networks for all gaming on PC and what not. Epic is behind on feature parity and function, but even if it did have parity, I think gamers still want the convenience of one store/library/friends list.
They're partially owned by Tencent, a big Chinese company. And as Chinese companies are, the government has direct influence over them. And while Tencent is not a majority owner, Tim Sweeney happily took Chinese money and now pays his co-owner a portion of the profits which then go to pay for Chinese gulags.
There are many things, especially hardware, where it's impossible to avoid Chinese companies but simply buying games somewhere else is super easy. It's obviously not a perfect system because even on GOG there are games using UE, but just buying games somewhere else is such a low barrier, it's not an inconvenience at all.
That said, claiming the free games doesn't help them. It helps the developers making those games because Epic has to pay them and won't get anything in return if that doesn't result in users leaving money in EGS for other things.
The first major issue for me was that the launcher was a crypto miner and they didn't tell anyone.
Since then, I have 0 trust in them and refuse to install the launcher. I don't care for the "free games"
Was there any actual proof of this, aside from someone posing the question on Reddit because of high CPU usage? At least give genuine reasons.
Whatever it is, the launcher is just bad in general. May I reccommend Heroic Games Launcher instead? You log in, get authenticated, and then it can download the games directly from the source, without ever having to run this god awful launcher.
Is this true? AFAIK the reason sometimes the launcher took a lot of resources to run is because Epic actually uses UE to make EGS.
No, of course it's not true. Somehow people still upvote some random conspiracy theory from a fortnite subreddit...
Steam and GOG are simply better platforms overall. If you really care about being DRM free and owning your games you go GOG route, otherwise Steam is the king. Epic does not even have a review system.
Epic however is the best source of free games on PC. A lot of the latest games I have played have been from Epic giveaways. Right now they have Outer Worlds and yesterday it was Ghostwire: Tokyo, both of these games I played few months ago after purchasing them through Humble Bundle.
Will I ever buy a game on Epic? Probably not, I prefer Steam, but those that simply refuse to redeem freebies and install their launcher while shouting things like it being spyware are weird.
Pure speculation: of the people who don't like Epic, maybe 25% are legitimate, principled objections to their business practices. The rest are split evenly between people who just want to manage their entire library on a single platform, and folks just going along for the hate-ride because it seems like the "safe" position to take.
From a technical stance, Steam and GOG are superior platforms (for different reasons). For equal-price purchases, I can't think of a single reason to choose Epic over other options. But claiming a game for free? That doesn't make anyone a bad person.
Hmm...
I'll be honest, I definitely prefer having everything on one platform for convenience. This is in second place; right after letting me play a game directly from the icon without having to open the damn launcher in the first place.
Also, I am not well educated about the technicalities of Steam or GoG, so all I can say is I'm enjoying the cool factor of GoG combining my accounts in one place. Kinda bummed that Epic's integration doesn't have game time and achievement sync... But that's probably an Epic thing.
Also also, fuck yeah! If it's free, I'm in 😂.
Playnite can do game time from Epic and Steam, plus its own accounting for any .exe you can launch through it.
Nothing really. Just pick whichever platform is cheapest/where your friends.
It's just another competitor in the games marketplace. Some people like it, some people don't. It's the same as with any other brand/item.
You can use all of them, or none of them, at the same time.
There are issues with every platform so all anyone can do is make their own decisions.
... and OP is asking for perspective so they can make their own decision.
Yeah I was a bit vague with that comment. I guess whenever this topic comes up it, at least to me, feels like most of the comments are I'll informed.
I guess so... Unless a company is objectively terrible, I guess it does end up being "subjective".
For example, I like the idea of Linux, but am happy that things work on Windows. And MacOS is too restrictive for my tastes.
Now, surely there are objective reasons for why Linux is better than the others. But the entry point issue for me is that each distro is different, and while I love customisability, I cannot expend energy on setting up my distro at the moment... (Soon.)
Plus, games work on Windows. I do plan to dual boot when I get a better PC, but not yet.
And fuck Apple (subjective, but I don't wike em). So, yeah 🫡.
ITT: Steam shills pretending that their platform is better.
I personally do not care at all, I only buy physical games or wherever it's cheapest.
They're both amazing and independent, and one day we'll realise this was the golden age.
I think you forgot to add "/s" to the end of your comment.
Independent? Theyre the guys who own unreal and fortnite.
Epic doesn't play nice with Linux, and lemmy is a Linux-centric place - that's nearly all of the hate. I find Linux to be a pain in the ass because everything else I use, and am of my games, are Windiws native. I click the install button and never have to worry about which version of proton will work. It's the second worst thing about my Steamdeck (the first is, of course, that atrocious keyboard).
You will be able to tell how rabid the Linux continent is here by the number of down votes I get for saying that windows is simply a better gaming platform and Epics nose-thumbing at Linux causes me exactly zero worries because I play on the OS these games were made for.
This has nothing to do with Linux. Gamers in general, the cast majority being in Windows, hate EGS. It makes contracts for exclusivity, the launcher is apparently atrocious and there's an almost inherent bias against any launcher/storefront that isn't Steam. You'll find those three reasons in just about any conversation about EGS.
And, to actually address your Linux theory, all I have to do is to open Heroic, sign in if I haven't already, download the game and run it through Proton, in exactly the same way I do on Steam. Epic's hate for Linux isn't really that much of a problem.
"Gamers in general"
No. Gamers in general aren't on gaming discussion platforms to see the minority complaining about the things that bothers them, the vast majority of gamers are playing games wherever they are.
What do gaming forums have to do with it? Anecdotally I know plenty of people who would never be on a gaming forum who also hate EGS. I mean it's no secret the store hemorrhages money, there must be some reason for that. The UI is slow and the feature set is basically non-existent, it's pretty obvious spending 5 minutes with it that it really doesn't have anything to offer over Steam.
The opinions shared in gaming media and on gaming social media doesn't matter to the vast majority of gamers that doesn't look at them. Fortnite is one of the biggest video games success story ever, these players don't care about the opinion of a minority that's mad that a company is trying to break the Steam monopoly.
It's self-evident to anyone that uses it that the software is severely lacking, they don't need social media to form their opinions.
About 80% of Fortnite players are on console, and it's not like those playing on PC have much of a choice in the matter. Fortnite's success doesn't magically make EGS not shit, but it does imply...
...that Steam doesn't have a monopoly. Fortnite, Minecraft, ROBLOX, League, Valorant, WoW, Genshin Impact, Crossfire, Freefire, DNF, Ragnarok Online, Sudden Attack, FIFA Online? All of these are not on Steam and most of these games have playercounts that completely dwarf anything on Steam. Remember the top PC gaming market by users is Asia and Steam has a very limited presence there. Shit, League of Legends alone has a higher MAU than all of Steam (132m to 152m). How can you have a monopoly and not even beat one singular game in MAU?
Steam as a game store has a monopoly, just like Google as a search engine has a monopoly, other options exist but their reach is small enough that Valve and Alphabet can decide what happens with the market.
"They have a very limited presence in Asia"... Yeah, just like Google, we're not talking about Asia.
EGS is perfectly fine and I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks it's Steam that's bloated and has a load of useless stuff that's only there to monetize whales (cards, tradeable items...)
Of course we are talking about Asia, lmao. Why would we just arbitrarily leave them out, because it makes your argument look bad? Their money is just as green as any other place. And considering the multitude of extremely profitable Asian PC gaming platforms, no: Steam as a game store does not have a monopoly. Not even close. They are not even the market leader! The Riot launcher is also a PC gaming store/platform, and has higher MAU than Steam. Just calling Steam a monoply over and over again doesn't just magically make it true.
My main issue is that Tim Sweeny has repeatedly shown that he really doesn't know that he's taking about when it comes to Linux and how it works. Like if you're gonna diss something at least have valid reasons. Windows is a better gaming platform right now, but that's only because companies like epic refuse to pay any service to it. Hopefully that changes soon.
Real answer is branding. Steam has cultivated an absolutely stellar image of being the "good guys" of gaming, and it's super hard to counter that. Epic came on the back of publisher-specific launchers getting a bad reputation for both legitimate and illegitimate reasons, so you end up with a weird, paradoxical defense of Steam's quasi-monopoly.
I guess tehcnically GOG is exempt, in that they also have a good reputation and they're objectively more radically pro-consumer than Valve by a huge margin, so the lines get blurred there.
How are they cultivating this exactly? I mean other than just doing consumer-friendly moves like free updates, supporting open source, etc. This makes it seem like Valve is out there pushing out pro-Steam propaganda or something, but does Valve even market Steam at all? They don't do interviews or put out commercials or buy billboards. They put up a few silly YouTube videos to advertise a sale or new product and then it's radio silence for the rest of the year.
Exactly. Steam didn't invest in marketing nonsense and gimmicks to get people on their platform. For consumers it is simply the superior product, DRM not withstanding.
They got their issues, no doubt. But I have never seen a quasi monopoly be more consumer oriented than steam.
Well, that's cultivating an image.
I have this conversation weirdly often around here. Steam launched under a TON of pushback. They effectively did what people criticise Epic for doing and locked down Half-Life 2 under Steam, and in turn under always-online DRM. People were very angry, nobody wanted that crap and it was pretty controversial. As I recall, Valve didn't react much. They just kept going, adding more first and third party content until they were the de facto storefront. They targeted their publishing and purchasing strategies to keep content first and consistently avoided controversy via the silent treatment, outside of having Gabe talk in public here and there and keeping his persona out there, along with a couple of select employees, although once they phased out game development for pure publishing even that went away.
They are very careful to not demistify themselves and to keep that semi-accidental conflation of being the de facto monopoly with being pro-consumer. It's kind of insane how resilient to speaking publicly or being perceived as speaking publicly they are, especially with how much they had to let go of that in regards to the scandals related to CS gambling grey markets, game greenlighting processes and a few other key snafus. But it works. The brand is sticky and they know if they don't say anything the community will do the job for them, so they just... shut up, avoid constructed corpo PR when they can and favor having their content makers handle communication whenever they can, including product launches.
By the numbers Valve is a fairly standard tech upstart: comes from Microsoft vets, uses traditional disruption tactics, throws everything against the wall to see what sticks, fixes broken things later. Their branding is up there with Coca-Cola, though. Hell, Disney wishes they looked as squeaky clean as the "we had kids gambling on gun skins" guys. It's kinda nuts.
I mean, good for them. I don't know why they aren't more of a mainstay in PR and marketing degrees. It's kind of amazing.
This image you are painting of Valve is just... funny to me. Anybody who plays Valve games could tell just how oblivious they are to PR or marketing. This is a company composed almost entirely of engineers that basically only communicates in patch notes. If they are trying to cultivate an image, they are doing a hilariously bad job at it.
That's a hilarious thought. Valve is primarily an online storefront company that runs organized sales events multiple times a year. Their marketing arm is ruthlessly efficient. They invented maybe half of the GaaS strategies in the books and are arguably still one of the best at deploying them.
And they do have at lest one more vector of PR. Normally you'd think third party relations is a different category, because it's a business-to-business thing, but when you get as big as Steam and have effectively removed or crowdsourced all greenlinghting and discovery you're in a different space. Like Unity, Valve has a small ninja army of dev relations guys they send around the world to events and gatherings to deliver the good word of our lord Valve and ensure that indie devs know what they're supposed to be doing to fit within their strategy. I assure you you haven't heard more refined PR-speak in your life.
But again, they're amazing at being quiet and keeping up that image of "just a buncha engineer underdogs in a room fixing the games industry, ya know?" I don't hate them, or even dislike them. I don't hate any game publisher. Games are games, it's an entertainment industry, it doesn't warrant love or hate of companies or corporations, beyond the larger questions of how copyright and IP work in an online world. But this idea that Valve is a magic wonderland with no agency on how their image is handled or moneymaking strategy or community management is... a lot.
"Their marketing arm?" So... Kaci? The person they hired about a couple years ago to film silly minute-long YouTube videos about 5 times a year? Yeah she's really ruthless...
Just look at the guys they send out to do Steam Deck interviews and tell me Valve has PR people working for them full-time. No offense to Pierre-Loup Griffais but there's a reason companies hire good-looking celebrities to push their products.
jfc lmao does this "ninja army" sneak some shurikens pass the TSA so they can take out employees of rival PC gaming stores!? This doesn't even sound remotely nefarious, just sounds like Valve sends out some guys to consult companies on how best to use their products and do a little salesmanship and networking. The horror.
So give me some proof of Valve's "ruthless" marketing arm then? So far most you can say regarding Valve's "image handling" is that Valve sends some devs out to talk up Steam to developers. Meanwhile, most companies spend BILLIONS UPON BILLIONS on marketing and PR. Can you not see the insane difference between these?
We already know a little how Valve works (here's an old employee manual). Note the line "There are not different sets of rules or criteria for engineers, artists, animators, and accountants." So yes, even Valve's marketing team (which so far as we know consists of one person) has a flat structure. So it's a little hard to see without any sort of management apparatus how "Valve" (as a whole) makes any concerted efforts towards these things.
Hey! Somebody brought up the "leaked" employee manual, I think I have bingo now.
The guys they have doing dev relations aren't talking development, they're talking business.
And just so I'm clear on how you think this works. You believe that Valve sets up what? Five sales a year? Plus the International. Plus coordinating and financing the CS Majors. Plus actually negotiating all the distribution deals for store placement with third parties. Plus shipping multiple hardware and software products, including setting up preview events and sending out review samples. Plus all the press relations for both games and press queries...
...with zero sales/PR/community management staff.
Am I getting that wrong?
Man, messed up as it is to refuse to put proper credits in games, you certainly see how that feeds into their, again, very carefully curated public image.
EDIT: To be clear, it's hard to know what anybody does at Valve if you don't work at Valve, or at least routinely with Valve. I'm not gonna stand here and say that all of the guys working on that don't also... I don't know go build 3D models or code store features when they're not doing that. But they absolutely do that. And they absolutely have a PR strategy, which is mostly "shut the hell up, keep the black box a black box". Again, so much to learn from them about how to handle PR, especially in tech and gaming.
I'm making a best effort guess based on the evidence to understand how the company works but yes, you can't prove one way or another. All I can really say is
So I'm just putting 2 and 2 together here. If Valve actually has a community relations team, please God let me work there because that must be the easiest job on Earth.
As someone who bought Half Life 2 when it was released ..
I only remember people being excited about Steam, Web stores weren't a thing back then and they were the future! (It was the following years of audio and ebook stores locking stuff down and evapourating that taught us to hate it).
Game/Audio CD DRM hacking the kernel and breaking/massively slowing down your PC was pretty common back then and Steam' s DRM didn't do that.
The HL2 disc installer didn't require you to install Steam, once installed it asked you to setup Steam and there was a sticker under the DVD with the Steam code for you to enter.
You were then rewarded with a copy of HL2 Deathmatch and Counterstrike Source.
Steam wasn't always on DRM, back then ADSL/DSL was relatively new and alot of people were still stuck on Dial Up modems.
Steam let you sign in and authorize your games for 30 days at which point you would need to log into Steam again. This was incredibly helpful feature for young me.
I was there, I was an adult. I was mad and I was online enough to know I was not alone. In fairness, some of the being mad part was from people being locked out by login and server issues, which is a slightly different kind of mad.
But I personally did not play HL2 for a while because I was boycotting Steam. I remember so distinctly holding the box in my hand and going "hell no" at seeing the "Steam mandatory" sticker on it and putting it back.
You're technically right that I wasn't always online, though. It required you to go online to authorize it, as you say, but that was more than enough. I already had a standing veto on anybody attempting it.
I pirated HL2 when it came out entirely in protest of Steam. I don't know how long it took me to relent, because I don't have my Steam account on hand at the moment, but I think it was a couple of years at least. Honestly, to this day I still default to GOG, so I'm still a bit testy about it.
Your post and further explanations are excellent. Don't let the down vote fool from people with parasocial bonding to their game launcher fool you. Valve introduced account bound DRM, unregulated lootbox gambling, skin gambling and for the better part of a decade their UI was crap, there were no user reviews etc.
Epic's current approach to reviews is arguably better anyway. There's no toxicity, incentive to troll to farm points, and it's randomized, so it doesn't enable review bombing.