It’s an incentive for devs to put their back catalogues to EGS, after they just laid off 800 employees because they spend too much money. Is it just me, or does everyone besides Epic know what the problem is with EGS?
Rather than paying devs for old or new games perhaps Epic could put that money into making their launcher/store good?
The Epic launcher is intensely slow, I've got a 13700k, 32GB RAM, RTX 4080, stupid fast nvme SSD etc. Everything on it should be instant, why does it take ages just to load my library? Why can I not select the library to display by default?
Why is the interface so slow and horrible? Where are all the features of its competitor steam?
Why after all these years has it not seen any real improvement at all?
Does Epic allow you to set your homepage to your library yet? Or does it still unnecessarily keep you to their store or some other useless page?
Nope, it stills drops you straight to the store.
Finally.
They should have done this from day one. Instead of buying exclusives and ruining Bandcamp.
They bought Harmonix and bandcamp around the same time. Yet… Nothing.
I feel like EGS is a wash for anyone older than the elder Z generation. They might get the Fortnite kids to stick with em if said kids grow up and want to play anything else. Giving out free games is a way to solve the "all my games in one place" problem. If I started PC gaming 2 years ago on Fortnite and collected every free game I'd have about a hundred games in my library now., whereas I may not even have a Steam account.
The one true way to beat Steam would be to undercut them in price across the board but from what I hear Valve will ban your ass if you sell a game there for $70 but EGS at $50. (Full price, not on sale), so that's not an option at all which leaves it to exclusives, which wouldn't been as hated if Epic was publishing/funding them.
And yet the games on EGS are not cheaper, even if they are exclusive, taking the exclusivity deal and have less to pay to Epic Games. They still cost as much as on other platforms. So no, publishers would not sell the games for less, even if they could, even if it's a viable option. So exclusives does not solve this issue with pricing at all. The thing people "hate" is, that Epic forces exclusivity, taking the option to buy on their favorite platform/store, without giving the player anything in return. It's the same price. These deals incentives the publisher, not the player to sell/buy the games on the Epic Games store.
In example Epic does not even support Linux. Why would I pay money on their store then? On the other hand Valve actively developed and improves gaming on Linux; improving the situation against he Windows gaming monopoly. I would have supported Epic Games to build an alternative, but if the alternative they provide is like this, then I am not interested into it. I want to buy and play on Steam, because it is better. From my perspective, another game goes exclusive to Epic and I have to wait. If the game does not come to Steam, well, there is plenty other to buy and play for me. My money and time is limited anyway.
What's sad is Epic used to consider Linux a top tier support. My copy of Unreal Tournament 2004 has a tux logo on it and the Linux installer is on Disc 1. I never even played that game on Windows. Valve was very anti-Linux back then too.
Solution for Linux: look into Heroic Game Launcher. It'll solve all your EGS Linux issues by not even using EGS client. It's great I use it for GOG as well.
I know about Heroic, but I refuse to support a company that is so much against Linux. They purchased Rocket League and took away the perfectly functioning Linux version back then (and made it unplayable for a while for me). Why would I pay Epic Games money, if they don't support Linux, while Valve actively pays developers to program and help the Linux world of sides?
I'm not interested into Heroic Game Launcher. It does not address the problems I have with Epic and does not support everything Steam has, when I purchase it on Epic Games.
Just so you know, Heroic also supports GOG and Prime Gaming, you can still find some good use for it.
For some reason Lutris gives me trouble when downloading GOG games quite often, so I was forced to look for alternatives and that's when I found about Heroic
I get the sense that people still won't take kindly to exclusives that they publish, which we'll see when Alan Wake 2 comes out. For me, they still don't answer the question of why I should shop with them instead of Steam if the same game is on both stores. There are answers to that question, but they think the problem is that we need to get all of our games on the same launcher.
Of course we won't. It's too late.
The day they stole games that already had a steam page and had sold steam copies to be Epic exclusive, there was no path to any Epic exclusive for any reason ever being forgivable again.
Fortunately there's GOG Galaxy and Playnite that does a decent job consolidating all PC stores into one app.
Yes, Valve requires price parity across platforms. Sales may or may not matter. The wording is vague enough that sales would in fact need to be paritied too but they don't seem to go after people for it.
sales are supposed to matter. You aren't supposed to offer a bigger sale on another site than you will offer on steam in a reasonable time frame. Funny that never applied to the makers of the Witcher when they gave that away for free. I never saw valve force them to make it free on steam. What you'll find is a lot of steam's policies only apply to smaller indie devs, not big companies.
The ones who spent money on the store are the users, not the devs. And they are failing at bringing the people who would give them the money they want
by not having a service as good as the competition, thanks to having no devs working on it…
