It’s interesting that when a company fires a bunch of employees just to increase quarterly profit, the employees no longer feel any duty to keep the company secrets. Which hurts company profits even more.
Good.
Is this a secret though?
No, it’s one of those things everyone assumes or guesses. When it’s confirmed by someone by name that has insider knowledge, the theory carries a lot more weight. Enough to alter stock prices, if it’s damning enough. Or in this case further hurt public perception, which hurts revenue.
I think valve does same too but different approach, they just don’t hire anyone for keeping paychecks for themselves
I wouldn’t mind more competition but there’s literally no reason to use egs over valve.
An example is instead of having a better review system than steam’s basic good or bad they could of had a good, maybe, bad then had separate reviews for reviewing specific patches or something. But no the CEO said reviews are bad for devs LOL.
On top of that he’s been vocal about being anti Linux and is full of garbage hot takes. And it really says a lot when he lays off staff that are part for Fortnite’s $1.1 billion made
Yeah, competition is great but they aren’t competing lol. Gog competes with Steam with no DRM. EGS tried to do it by getting exclusives onto their platform, which is just anti-consumer. I’ll never touch their store because of that, even for free shit. I’d rather pay for games than even give them a single datapoint to report to their investors.
I have so many free games from epic, but absolutely nothing is interesting to me.
I got Prey from them years ago. One of the best free games ever.
Subnautica as well. Such a great game
I mean what did they expect? With all those free games on a set frequency they basically trained their users that this is what Epic is for. That was their entire marketing. I don’t know a single person IRL who has an Epic account and has actually bought a game there.
I think I bought Hades there when the discount was more than on steam. One game in years of collecting free ones.
Maybe they were thinking that people would see cool stuff every time they clicked over to get the free games, but they’re lacking most of the stuff steam has so no one wants to spend any time in the epic environment
Oh hey it’s me
I collected the free games almost religiously for maybe a couple of years, mostly so I had something of a backup library in case something terrible happened to Steam
I stopped after realising I was literally only interacting with that store literally to collect the games, I don’t think I put a single minute into any of them
This is me.
Every year there’s one free game that interests me. Otherwise eventually I’m going to give my Epic account to one of my nephews/nieces.
I did get to play death stranding and both turnip boy games, which were both good. Also I played ghost wire Tokyo and Calypso protocol and found out they weren’t for me. Whoever did the environmental design for Calypso protocol deserves an award though- it’s all gorgeous. The actual game and story are dull as fuck.
Calypso protocol
Callisto Protocol?
Caliban Protocol?
Pelican Control?
LMAO yes
I wish GOG Galaxy and Playnite were good launchers. I don’t like Epic and I don’t like the stranglehold Steam has on the market. Basically I want a launcher where I can see all of my games, but I also want to be able to open as many stores as I want, and then be able to compare prices and then buy from each of those stores within the same launcher.
So basically isthereanydeal.com that’s also a launcher? I suppose I wouldn’t be mad at it
Apparently Playnite has a ITAD plugin you can use, but it’s limited to your wishlist, and doesn’t have an all-in-one browser, and it doesn’t look like it’s very well maintained.
What’s wrong with steam? Tons of reasonably priced games with good accessibility and versatility.
Monopolies tend to be bad. The more my game library is on steam, the more fucked I am if my country decides to ban Steam for some reason or another, or the US decides to fuck everyone else over.
They can be bad and that absolutely could happen, but I think steam is a rare example of a customer benefiting monopoly right now. Monopolies make the market less efficient and right now the most efficient market for computer games is enshitification galore, but valve is sitting in the way of that, manipulating the market and making games be less economically productive (by forcing them to be more pleasant for customers).
If we had 20 equally viable launchers/stores, it’d be a race to the bottom on price, which would force them all to enshittify or die
Right now
Yeah. Worries me too. Maybe a more stable option would be to grow gog galaxy and other “opinionated” launchers so there’s competition but nobody is trying to burn the market down to earn a few more pennies…
Build one!
I dont even want the free games, they can keep their grifty service.
EGS is unironically one case where changing to Electron would be actual progress. The launcher does NOT need to be a fucking UE5 app
I get free Epic games from Prime Gaming, but I refuse to redeem them on principle. You couldn’t pay me to use Epic, or even give them an inkling that I support them.
I considered it briefly when they launched, and then they pulled the bullshit of game exclusivity on PC, which is why I left consoles behind. Because of that, I’ll never purchase from them.
1st paragraph - a mirror. As if I’m writing this.
2nd paragraph - even tho I hate exclusivity that they have established, it is not primary reason why I would never use EGS. For me, primary one would be them having a downright crap launcher. The rest is just more reasons to skip using EGS.
Reminder: Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has defended child pornography, saying that stopping it is “gatekeeping”.
ITT: pedo defenders
Man, you really need to have something to back it up when you say shit like this; it’s just good practice. This is the quote.
Few will click through, so I’ll copy the part where he actually talked about child pornography below. First of all, both times the term “gatekeeping” was used in that link were specifically connected to “censoring political opponents”. He was not talking about pornography. He was talking about censorship.
Bringing up pornography is always the bludgeon of anti-free-speech people. If I say, “People should have the freedom to express themselves,” some idiot will inevitably say, “This evil person said that everybody should be allowed to make child porn!” This sort of rhetoric is the death of thinking.
Asked if he realised “what [he was] defending” - which is essentially Grok being used to generate non-consensual pornographic or sexually explicit images of women and girls and child sexual abuse material (CSAM) - Sweeney said: “I defend open platforms, free speech, and consistent application of the rule of law. The bad stuff people do with AI, I do not defend, but I staunchly oppose the wrongdoing of a few from being used as a pretense to undermine the freedoms of all”
When challenged and given examples of Grok generating “CSAM content and doxxing people’s IP address”, he replied: "1) That is bad. 2) Every significant AI has instances of this. 3) Every significant AI company makes their best efforts to stop it. 4) All are imperfect.
Every significant AI company makes their best efforts to stop it.
Someone should have told him that Elon “stopped” it by trying to make money from it.
I know you’re not saying it to disagree with me, but I would like to clarify that I didn’t think he was factually completely right. I honestly don’t even think his argument is necessarily sound. The thing I do like is that he was arguing from good fundamentals.
My reason for making the first comment is that I have a strong belief that we should argue against things that people actually say and do, like you’re doing bringing up Elon’s actions. Yours is a great example of an honest argument.
And I dislike all of these straw men that fly around all the time.
“Marginally profitable.” Profit is profit, and their end goal of giving people a library to drive sales has worked.
Competition is good, for end consumers, but not a chance I’m going to be using EGS. They had no interest in making things better for consumers, especially with trying to create exclusivity in PC gaming.
Bad logic on “profit is profit”.
Opportunity cost is huge here.
Its existence and with Gog they offer an alternative to steam if steam bans a game and to prevent its theoretical rise to evil after gaben dies.
Well no shit, 3 years of Epic have over 300 games haven’t spent a dime on their platform. Games I really want and willing to spend money goes to Steam.
I dont have quite as many, but I only spent about 5 dollars on a dlc for cities skyline. That is the extent I have spent on egs. Steam on the other hand…
It’s not even that EGS is terrible, it’s that Steam is much better
Its also that EGS is terrible.
The most recent “feature” they added that made a difference, was the ability to view my own library.
8(?) Years after launch it still operates like a prototype I’d cobble together in an afternoon
Plus we all know that if EGS ever achieved market dominance, they’d enshittify in no time.
That was surely always the plan right. Lure users with good prices and free games, grow the platform, then extract profit.
But the plan didn’t work, and so after all this time they’re still stuck on “best behaviour” mode trying to lure users who aren’t coming.
100%
The plan was just to keep throwing money until they trampled the ecosystem and came out on top, well this didn’t work for shit.
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I keep forgetting to check their free games regularly, just did, cause of this post and was reminded, why it’s not a priority for me lol
Sometimes there is good stuff.
Now is not one of those times.
I use it for Alan wake and I use gog for cyberpunk because I got a better price for it on gog.
Also I still have to run everything through steam because neither of those have controller support that actually works.
That’s one of the biggest issues I have. They don’t even have basic functions like controller support.
Ridiculous.
