PC Gaming

Alright I know people rag on Epic all the time... but it's truly incredible how hard they keep dropping the ball. It's been SEVEN YEARS since it was created and it still feels so basic and terrible to use.

The store is drab and uses huge chunks of space just to advertise fortnite and f2p rewards. Discovery is terrible and the store is full of crypto scams and AI spam shovelware, which is ironic because Epic started off being very selective about what's allowed to be published there. The store also feels like adware because it keeps spamming random notifications and ads unless you turn it off.

The best part is that Epic constantly blames users for not wanting to leave Steam instead of admitting their store sucks. They keep spending tens of millions buying exclusives and giving away games for free rather than spending any time improving the store. Seriously, what are they doing over there?

I don't engage with the community at all. I don't buy games on Epic because their launcher is ass. And last I checked they don't even have reviews for games. They don't require disclaimers for anti-consumer measures either like Valve does for 3rd party accounts, Denuvo, etc. and they even had the balls to criticize Valve's requirements for AI disclosure.

The fact that their CEO is openly anti-Linux is another good reason.

They just come off to me like a very anti-consumer company, like most all other corporations.

The meme of "Valve maintains dominance by doing nothing but waits for competition to trip over itself" is funny but they do put part of the billions they make towards beneficial products for their customers.

• Remote Play (stream your own game from another PC)
• Remote Play Together (can stream a game to friends without a copy of the game and play together)
• Linux, Proton
• Well designed hardware innovations

Not out of the goodness of their heart but to drive sales and foster a customer base willing to return.

GOG and itch do try in their own way so I have bought from them, IMO they are the only competitors making serious efforts to build a mutually benefical gaming ecosystem.

Epic, Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA and the rest are like a trapdoor with a wooden board over it. Tim Sweeney is standing there hoping you won't think he's trying to find the right time to swipe the board away and get you to fall in.

Does EGS have reviews yet? It didn't last time I visited for a free game.

I'm (probably) not going to buy a game from a platform that doesn't have reviews.

Tim Swiney said on the game product page there should be no disclosure of Ai usage in the games, in response to Steam "forcing" the disclosure of what is being used Ai for. Just shows how I will avoid Epic Games Store even more than before. There are plenty other reasons. Epic will not buy me as a "user" by giving me free games (however I do not blame anyone else doing so, free is a great deal to be honest).

Steam is easy to use. Egs always feels slow and bloated even though it doesn't have things to load.

Just as a reminder you still can not see the games in your library for Epic without getting the desktop app or looking at your past purchases.

Absolutely dense how bad and how little you can do with their game store.

Sweeney is overly opinionated and will dictate to you how you will use your products. Valve largely short of the app's drm just gives me the games and the app just sits in the background, this is why GOG is the true contender to Steam as they have a similar approach.

We don't want to be told how to play our games, give us services to help do so by all means, but otherwise it's a take money and leave situation.

I don't use EGS because it they actually locked in significant market share they would enshittify so fast your head would spin.

From what I remember back when EGS started appearing in the headlines, its main intention was to replace Steam. Besides barely delivering anything relevant other than freebies, and I could argue what people would want/expect after being fed so many "treats", but something born only to destroy is fated to destroy itself. Perhaps due to being stores from other times, but even places like GOG and Itchio understood engagement is important (even if execution is not always pristine).

It's a moving target. Everything I care about video game stores now I did not care when it was new. Steam itself in 2003, need it to update to latest counter strike. By 2014 years later, I'm done managing updates for individual games by looking on websites online for downlads. I want a store client like Steam to handle that. Didn't care for the first half of Steams life. I was still buying physical PC games when I could up to 2014. That's why I said 2014

Didn't care about linux Steam because it sucked until Proton. Since Proton I care. Didn't care about big picture mode because steam machines bombed the first time and I didn't use remote play. Now I use remote play and regularly use big picture mode because I buy big phones with OLEDs and remote play is great now because of that. Phones are why I care about 21:9 support as much as I do now.

Didn't care about Steam Input because I was kb/m all day type of person. I play with gamepads more now. Steam Input is major. Indie games were less common in 2008 and a lot less complex than they are today. Easy to get the good ones because everyone talked about them. Now most good indie games have no reviews on open/metacritic. Steam reviews and curators point me to the majority of my purchased indie games. Also even the studio/publisher pages that Steam has now showing what they have released. That's the other way I find games. Steam has brand pages for a while now. I actually use those like here for koei tecmo

https://store.steampowered.com/developer/KOEITECMO

Or smaller game XD. Played Icey and ended up trying a couple games under them through the publisher Steam page

https://store.steampowered.com/developer/XD

Library organization. Did not care about the collections feature until this year. Same with the user submitted store page tags. The collections feature can create from those tags and I make custom collections too to organize my big library. I just recently learned you can drag and drop rather than right click add to collection.

Sounds simple but it sucks on pretty much every PC store platform software besides steam. Managing multiple drives. Moving game folders between drives and the store client handling it well

numerous other things that come in handy from time to time. Like user created guides. SteamOS is more featureful than the OS's on a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series before even exiting out to the desktop mode. Remember Mixer on Xbox. Steam has broadcasts and has had it for a long time now and it's never been popular but they never killed it and now I occasionally use it to check out how a new game looks. MS would have killed broadcasts like they killed Mixer when it didn't become a mega hit. Steam keeps it's niche features ongoing and generally improves over time even if at a snails pace. MS and other companies, they just kill the feature

Latest thing that is just as much Valve as it is community. PC gaming on Android. Valve initiated funding for Fex emu and it's paying dividends now that you can run a lot of Steam games on Android now. Same with recent versions of Proton/Wine that now have ARM builds for them. Major boon to Android PC game emulation. Eventually going to be a major plus for Steam in user friendliness compared to the storefronts not putting resources towards easy x86 to ARM translation support

Almost a decade ago I was playing a game called paragon in development by epic games. The game was amazing, and then epic forced the devs away from what the game was, a MOBA, and forced the devs to make it more like a brawler with smaller and smaller maps. Epic ignored the community playing the game and acted shocked when the community left. While all this was going down, they were alpha testing fortnight, which was a plants, zombies clone with base building. When PubG took off, they killed Paragon, rolled the assets into fornite, and abandoned what fortnite was to turn it into a PubG copycat. (Highly recommend predecessor, a fan made remake from the released paragon assets with og heros, it's on steam.)

Epic doesn't have an original thought rattling around in the heads of their MBAs and C-suite. They copy what others are doing, and pray that some of the shit they fling against the wall will stick. They don't want to take chances or innovate. Plenty of other options out there besides their game engine too. I'm looking forward to the fall of epic and EGS.

The launcher is still just awful. Its only purpose is to give me free games. It has never felt polished or finished at all.

Why would I want to use a worse product?

I mean, I got a bunch of free games off epic, and have never touched any of them.

I've gotten more free games from EGS than buying anything and I don't think I've ever bought anything on EGS. that's all it's good for to me.

They don't even do the shop or library right or well. Come on, their whole app is a joke. I'm glad their (epic's) anti-competitiveness hasn't worked so well.

Epic also has a shitty UI. Steam's isn't great, but at least it's mostly intuitive.

I mean isn't replacing community with consumerism one of the main goals of modern capitalism?