this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2023
164 points (84.7% liked)
Games
35842 readers
814 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Weekly Threads:
Rules:
-
Submissions have to be related to games
-
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
-
No excessive self-promotion
-
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
-
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
-
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here and here.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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
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.
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.)
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
Gog also seemingly no 2fa other than an faq page with instructions that cannot be followed.
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.
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
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
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.
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.