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What's up with Epic Games? (lemmy.world)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world

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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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[-] Hajotay@kbin.social 13 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.

[-] MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 13 points 9 months ago

Loot boxes were, if not invented by them, definitely popularised.

[-] Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 9 months ago

and/or happened 9+ years ago

That was like 15 years ago hahaha

[-] Katana314@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 9 months ago

Didn’t TF2 have it first?

I made soooo much money off’a TF2. Bought an index!

[-] rikudou@lemmings.world 1 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] Hajotay@kbin.social 7 points 9 months ago

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).

[-] SomethingBurger@jlai.lu 1 points 9 months ago

Valve's DRM prevents the resale of physical PC games, as Steam codes are single-use. They singlehandedly killed the used PC games market.

[-] MudMan@kbin.social 0 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] Hajotay@kbin.social 9 points 9 months ago

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

[-] MudMan@kbin.social 2 points 9 months 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.