Why the Epic Games Store receive much dislike compared to Steam?
All of the ethical reasons listed by the top post are true, but the real answer is that the epic game launcher is severely lacking in its featureset compared to steam, and people don’t want to be forced to buy games through a different storefront from where the rest of their library lives.
Also Tim Sweeney tweeted this, which technically isn’t wrong as long as you accept that the US govt is also owned by private corporation and interests.
It is just a store. People want to buy games from a social platform for some reason.
My reasons are as follows:
- The feature parity with Steam’s social functionality is bad. There’s no Messaging, no Friends list with the ability to join their games, No chat, no stats page, no achievements, no screenshots, no streaming, no trading cards, nothing to make the experience interesting outside of buying games.
- The IAP experience is not there, and if it is, they are not holding vendors to it. When I played Zenless Zone Zero, I was quickly funneled to Hoyoverse’s launcher for all of that. Its incredible Epic is letting the 1-2% they could make here slip from them, and it means Hoyo needs my Paypal or whatever (i’m not comfortable with this).
- Developer API support is not there, which means that any additional EGS integration is, well, half baked. See Satisfactory for an example
- Steam offers better game discovery, family sharing, matchmaking, and so forth. EGS provides none outside of what it plans campaigns for.
- Steam provides a better API for game controllers, EGS assumes the game will use XInput which works on a per-game basis. Its nothing compared to how with Steam, I can remap controllers easily, especially on KBM only games like Factorio.
- Epic Games acquisitions of exclusives means they have little financial runway, and projects that I liked (Alan Wake 2, World of Goo 2) will probably never see the light of day outside EGS. This means the developers took a constantly shrinking advance over genuine sales and WOM, many are still not profitable. Its already unsustainable for Remedy: They’ve killed the deal with Epic and are now going to a shaky Annapurna. Gearbox didn’t profit off Borderlands 3 off its advance, and they aren’t getting any further profits from the shrinking advances.
Most importantly: EGS is supported by Fortnite money from parents who don’t know any better. If Fortnite collapses (which can happen easily if regulators hold Epic to task), EGS will keel over.
It is very slow
They have gone about this in a really stupid way. Instead of doing this exclusivity shit, they could have made games 10% cheaper for the enduser across the board.
Also their launcher sucks
Their stated goal is to monopolize games so you can’t buy them from GoG, Steam, or the Windows store.
Exclusives are anti consumer
Sinophobia. There are valid complaints about the platform, to be clear (and I personally don’t like or use it!), but the reason is recieves so much dislike is Sinophobia. We even got a dweeb saying “Chinese spyware” in this very thread.
Nah they give plenty of reasons to be disliked only the crazies go to “Chinese spyware” conspiracy bullshit.
I already said there are valid complaints (and again, I dislike it and don’t use it), I simply believe that the hate being so emphatic is because of sinophobia, though a lot of people wouldn’t say it openly (though the “crazies” do, as you say, and there are a lot of “crazies” on Steam and Reddit").
There are more chinese companies that gamers could go with the “chinese spyware” bullshit like mihoyo or Riot games(with that bullshit anticheat), some people accuse of “chinese spyware” of course(the reptilian brain of gamers can’t go without some racism) but the majority play their games. But Epic? I bet that if they did anything positive the “chinese spyware” against them would almost disappeared from the internet.
The hate comes from gated software exclusives and a dogshit service platform. Does China have something to do with Epic? Whatever it is, they’re not making Epic any better.
I think it’s that a Chinese company owns significant stake in them. I agree that they certainly aren’t improving the platform
Because it’s a web browser that doesn’t even run natively on my platform
Because it’s dogshit software that’s only worth using because you get free shit
Wow, and I consider steam to be utter trash. It uses more resources than the games I want to play. A web browsing engine, in the software that’s the only way to launch the game you paid for, just to show bargain bin shit. But I’m not interested in that, I just want to have a place to shop, and then the ability to use the things I bought. I don’t want to drive to Walmart to play the music I bought, I don’t want my computer to load Walmart just so I can play a game. It’s crazy how bad Steam has become.
Are we using the same software?? Are you sure your not using uplay, ea or epic games store?
If you are using Steam, you likely have the resources for its overhead + Chromium.
Believe it or not, Steam used to take longer to start, due to pre-loading shaders for Source games, but its been phased out.
What on earth games are you trying to play that are less resource intensive than the Steam Client?
I have old laptops that can run it without seeing any impact.
This is a bad take in general, if your computer can’t handle running steam it probably can’t handle many games to begin with. It’s the least intrusive option presented so far in terms of DRM, and steam has done more for the Linux gaming market with Proton than any other company afaik. You have to launch steam to avoid games wanting to do things like denuvo or kernel level anti-cheat which is WAY worse, and those of us on Linux need steam running while we game for additional reasons. This complaint about not wanting to look at a storefront is just petty, especially when I’m pretty sure there are settings to open it directly to your library.
GoG Galaxy is pretty decent for that
It’s hard to shake the taint … of Chinese spyware.
Beyond how its a inferior product in every way? Exclusives.
Anyone want to talk about GoG?
I like GoG for the idea of getting games DRM free. I buy from them when I can.
But there’s some key features of Steam GoG just can’t compete with:
- multiplayer infrastructure
- gifts and other interactions with friends
I bought BG3 on Steam instead of GoG solely to make it easier to play multiplayer with my friends.
And these features of Steam you can take advantage of even if you buy from GoG (but where would we be without Steam?)
- VR support
- controller support
- linux support (proton)
Also there’s a much better selection on Steam. But sometimes that’s a bad sign. If a game is present on GoG and Steam, that’s a good sign there isn’t a dedication to shitty DRM, even in the Steam version. If a game is present on Steam only, you have to watch out because that game might be DRM-ridden.
I wish they had an official Linux client since while heroic launcher works for downloading syncing saves can be buggy and it would be nice to get achievements.
That was what surprised me the most. The storefront that claims to buy games that won’t ever break due to DRM doesn’t have a Linux launcher.
They promised one years ago, but never delivered. My main reason for supporting Steam even over GOG.
Steam doesn’t kick me out of my single player games when my internet connection drops for a split second. I quite like that
I bought Rocket League because it had a Linux version, and Linux games were scarce before proton. Epic bought the developers of rocket League, and made it Epic exclusive. People who bought the steam version got to keep it, except for Linux users because Epic cancelled Linux support.
Epic loves to act like they’re anti monopoly, but they only care about that when they’re competing for market share. They’re extremely pro Microsoft and anti Linux.
Also one of the biggest concerns about Valve having a monopoly in the PC gaming space is that they could use their marketshare and money to block rival stores from getting popular games, making it hard to compete and removing user choice. In reality, Valve hasn’t done this, but Epic is leveraging their big pile of fortnite money to do this. It makes people think that if Epic ever gets into a dominate market position, that they’ll absolutely be an abusive monopoly that makes the market space worse for everyone else.
Just in case you (or anyone else) weren’t aware, Rocket League can still be played perfectly on Linux via Steam by just force enabling Proton - however nonetheless I 100% agree.
Yeah, but when this happened proton wasn’t a thing yet, and running windows games through wine was very hit or miss.
Ah gotcha, fair enough!
It doesnt make us think, it shows they will.
In addition to the exclusives issue, the client and store were not particularly well made and were missing pretty standard features stuff like no shopping cart so if you wanted to buy multiple games at the same time you had to do them as separate purchases and stuff like wishlisting.
I remember Valve got quite a bit of dislike when they first introduced Steam as a requirement to play Counter Strike Source and HL2 (of course back then it was only for Valves own games).
