Because they have to, because their store is based in bribing developers for artificial exclusivity in an attempt to hurt Valve for proving that Pig Swiney was a moron a decade ago when he said PC gaming was dead.
This is all a vain attempt by a man child to get back at Gabe, and it’s abso fucking lutely a hilarious delight what an abject failure it all is.
Garbage store with no customer services struggles and burns money, because that’s what’s lazy customer fucking cash grabs should do - burn. Fuck epic, fuck Swiney, and fuck you if you defend them.
Care to elaborate further on specific events or even just link some articles for a lazy bones like me?
(I only get free games from epic and then never play them)
Completely unrelated, but is your username a reference to the movie Can’t Hardly Wait?
No just a play on the name amanda
Cool
Epic Games store and Tim Sweeney are both still peices of shit.
And yet, still, they can go fuck themselves.
I can’t wait to get more games on my Epic deck, oh wait it was Valve who pioneered an incredible platform that can play AAA games on a handheld running Linux and made compatibility a reality for thousands of games.
They didn’t pioneer it, companies like GPD did. Not shitting in the Steam Deck, love that thing. Just wanting to get the facts straight.
I think it still counts, due to all the work they did on the software side.
Cool, still fuck em though
100% of $0 is still $0.
I’ll spend my money on platforms that have proven to respect their customers.
What’s epics problem? I only log in to get free games but I think competition should work out better for the consumer
They could literally just copy steam, add their “we take less of a cut” thing, and be in a good place.
Instead, using their storefront sucks, their customer service sucks, they lack features you’d expect of a major platform, and they’re pretentious dicks about it. Instead of fixing these obvious problems, they’re bribing devs for exclusivity, pumping their marketing with bullshit, and litigating apple over their app store (actually that last one is kinda great). The epic store today would be competition to steam if steam was still as it was 20 years ago when everyone hated steam.
Competition is usually always a good thing, but sadly no launcher has ever brought anything new to the table that Steam hasn’t already been doing (they usually just bring headaches).
Epic doesn’t want to compete fairly (by providing a great user experience, etc). They want to compete by paying for exclusives & bribing users with free games. Obviously this hasn’t worked because they are loweri g fees, likely to try to get the growth they just aren’t seeing.
For the consumer multiple platforms sucks. There’s already competition for selling steam keys as well. Epic doesn’t want to pay other platforms for anything fortnite, anything else they do is to justify why they shouldn’t have to pay like every one else.
They don’t got a problem. Someone on reddit a while ago pushed for epic=bad so now years later people just parrot the same shit over and over like monkeys.
These people in their minds are “friends” with steam. They gotta stick up for their buddies on the internet.
I don’t think “epic bad”. But right now, I don’t see why I should use their platform when all my stuff is on steam. They should bring either: better experience or better value. Right now they don’t really do either. Sure they give you free games but I have 10x the amount on my platform of choice. I’m not married to steam I just want epic to give me a reason to use them.
Good for them, but until EGS starts being more pro- consumer, I’m not spending a cent there
even if they do become pro-consumer you shouldn’t spend there. because it’d be a temporary affair and soon as they win market share from steam it’ll disappear.
At least Valve takes some of the money that they make from Steam and use it for Steam. You cant run an entire gaming platform based on developers alone, you also need to make it at least somewhat bearable for consumers.
How many layoffs does that take? /s
TBH I haven’t seen evidence that layoffs generate capital. It just fudges cost to revenue ratios to emulate quarterly gains in hopes of appeasing shareholders.
It s a good start ngl.
What about taking a different route altogether and not be greedy? what about charging a flat fee (your costs plus some profits to run the infrastructure like yearly or monthly). What about not being evil?
There is a huge business opportunity IMO to do just that. Have a store, charge a flat fee, add whatever percentage wire transfers take (1-3%). You make money, you out-compete everyone and you are the good guy.
That would require having a platform worth something. Currently, they sank millions into the community - but in the wrong way. The client still lacks basic features and yet they spend money to buy exclusivity.
Fuck them, they don’t deserve shit - praise or money.
I agree with this. What would make people jump from an evil corporation abusing its users and creators to another evil corporation abusing its users and creators.
Like Steam is doing?
I don’t think their cut is them being greedy.
Your plan might not be economically feasibile, because companies need money for growth (new products, R&D, etc), so only charging enough to run is not possible.
Steam is probably doing a kindness by not charging an infrastructure fee every year to developers, that shiz would probably really expensive.
The cost of the cloud features they provide is likely, usually, understated. Just the bandwidth costs alone of allowing your game to be downloaded whenever the user wants and however many times they want is expensive enough. Add on cloud saves and all the other niceties…
All that is just to say that Epic is likely losing a lot of money here just to try enticing more developers to move over, and maybe bring some customers too, but it’s not gonna work. They are lucky the fortnite piggybank lets them do this, but it’s not smart by any means.
… and it still won’t dent Steam’s de-facto monopoly.
I would rather buy a game on steam, or better yet on gog, than giving my money to a company that is trying to make store exclusive games a thing.
Eventhough I adore GOG, they really need to step up their linux support, which is non-existent
Heroic launcher works well with gog and shows what games are supported.
I agree but heroic has nothing to do with gog…
Wait, I’m confused. The article is about how Epic won’t take a cut to a point. Surely, you’re not giving money to Epic if you buy the game on EGS?
If my purchase on Epic helps the game reach $1 million in revenue then I am giving money to Epic.
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Yes, because they still allow you to spend your money elsewhere if a new storefront appears on the market. Epic is actively preventing that.
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Yes, that’s what exclusive access to games mean. You can’t buy them from other stores because Epic is actively preventing the developers from doing so.
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So we can’t complain about Valve’s 30% cut, then? Because its a legal agreement that game companies willingly enter into, is it not? What about game companies overworking their developers? It’s all dandy because the devs willingly agreed when they enter into the employment?
You’re also forgetting about games that Epic pulled from other stores after buying the company making them. That’s even shittier than releasing games exclusively on Epic.
I mentioned two stores in my comment, what exclusive access to money are you talking about?
Steam is good, but competitors can only make it even better. Worst case it doesn’t change.
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I am against monopolistic competition practices and that includes exclusivity deals and predatory pricing.
And as far as I know, Epic does this more than Valve or GOG. Granted, Valve doesn’t need to, because they are already the main player, but they also mostly avoided enshittyfication for now.
Granted it is hard to enter a market that is already dominated by another company, but instead of doing those business practices they could offer a better service.
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Valve is private and already takes a 30% cut.
Yes. That is rather high, but AFAIK the same on Xbox, PlayStation and GOG. Itch.io is on 10%.
It’s not possible for valve OR epic to enshit according to the definition of the word.
What do you mean by that? Enshittyfication is when companies try to offer a good platform first to reach many content producers and consumers and then, once the consumers and producers depend on the platform, it goes bad for them in order to favor profits of the company owners or stakeholders.
Just because a company is private, it can still change to favor short term money extractions from all their customers.
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I don’t really understand what it is I would be wrong about. Is it about the word “shareholders” in the wiki instead of “owners”, what I called them?
Shareholders of a private company is often a small group of individuals or just one person, and they can also be called the owners. “Private” means the shares are not traded publicly.
A shareholder (in the United States often referred to as stockholder) of corporate stock refers to an individual or legal entity (such as another corporation, a body politic, a trust or partnership) that is registered by the corporation as the legal owner of shares of the share capital of a public or private corporation.
You can’t tell me that if epic somehow wins this war that they won’t immediately enshittify the platform. Valve has my trust.
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in this case you can.
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Steam is a monopoly because it is the only one of these platforms to actually be good.
Epic can even beat them if they just improved their store, but they would rather fight other stores so that it would be worse for everyone.
It’s more than the store they need to improve.
They’re not just playing catch-up either.
no, it’s because they had about a 15 year head start. you think steam started the way it is now? it started as a launcher for steam games and it was worse than ubisoft’s launcher.
Also, folks fucking hated it at the jump. Whats wild to me is that Epic could factor in all the lessons Steam learned over near two decades resulting in a relatively equal product, but instead… doesn’t.
eh it’s currently second only to steam imo. and don’t come at me with gog galaxy, it’s absolutely awful, and feels like it’s also abandoned.
GOG doesn’t need a launcher, because the games don’t have DRM. It is just nice to have, in order to keep games up to date.
Steam, Epic, Origin and the Microsoft thing needs a launcher, because DRM. The non-optional part is what is annoying, it is not a choice, if you buy something there, you have to use their launcher software, that needs to run in the background all the time (Sure it doesn’t need to run all the time, but just having to start it in addition to the game, is annoying).
With Steam being the first one to require a launcher, it was annoying at first, but became useful and people started considering it the standard game delivery solution. Now we need another one for Epic and all other stores that peddle DRMified games.
If Epic would be just another store, where you buy and download games, nobody would complain, but Epic created (reinvented) an additional incompatible game delivery solution that required their launcher, that is what people are mostly annoyed about.
If the industry would come together and create a vendor neutral and compatible software and game delivery mechanism, where people are free to choose where to buy their software and games, and with which launcher they want to keep it up to date, that would be awesome, but sadly capitalism favors short sighted, wasteful and monopoly building competition instead of cooperation.
epic can have a seat at the table when they actually start competing with valve in terms of features and customer service.
so they can keep feeding a monopoly that licenses drm keys to them.
I guess I don’t understand Epic’s model. How is Epic different from Steam in this regard?
Steam fans are a cult lol. Invested too much money they hate to admit so now they sing it’s praises till they die.
Can I like and dislike a comment at the same time?
Am just gonna like yours to show my split opinion.
Invested too much money
If Steam turns to shit I have no problems reacquiring my collection through Piracy. There is no sunk-cost here. Epic is actively anti-consumer so I refuse to use it.
Steam wins again by doing nothing
How are they affording this? It can’t be a sustainable model, right?
Fortnite, and it’s not. The store loses them hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
That’s the kind of competition I want. Not a plucky newcomer with fresh ideas, but an industry titan able to burn more money than some companies ever see in an attempt to undercut the competition. They surely aren’t factoring this as a deficit to recoup when they pull a massive reversal after securing market dominance. That’s never happened in the history of capitalism.
Epic can huff my huffables.
Dont they also get royalties from Unreal Engine?
Here’s the details on the financials
https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/exclusive-the-numbers-behind-epics
They’d been paying a fortune for other ways to get more titles which never panned out. Steam said fuck the little guys so they’re trying to capitalize on that right now.
Easy. On EGS most games don’t sell at all, so 0% of $0 is still $0. They get most of their money from Fortnite.
