- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
I’m genuinely shocked how much Epic poured into the store and it still lacks so much basic features. Sorting games is still extremely barebones, store is filled with NFT/crypto garbage, the store still looks like a college student’s first front-end project, and last time I used the launcher to pick up free games (last year), it was still slow as hell. What were they doing in the past 5 years aside from dropping millions on exclusivity deals?
Epic is going to have to prioritize the store and try some new initiatives while also doubling down on earning pivotal exclusives if it is going to have a chance. I also hope other viable competitors arrive.
I’m far from being a business savvy person, but honestly, from business perspective what exactly is Epic offering that sets them apart from other competitors? Even if Epic fixed their launcher issues, how would they be different to Steam that is already well established for 20 years? That’s why I like GOG as Steam’s competitor. GOG focuses on selling DRM-free and retro games. If a game also happens to be available in GOG, I would prefer to buy it from there than Steam. Moreover, GOG keep old games well maintained and updated to run in modern computers; something that Steam is very poor at doing. What does Epic even do differently, apart from doing exclusives which any companies could do?
It’s slightly cheaper for developers to put their games on there. But that sucks as a business model, because game prices aren’t any lower so for the end user it doesn’t matter. And on features, Epic just loses every matchup against Steam.
Hmm… that’s fair but it seems that Epic even forgot to think of end users-- the gamers-- in that regard before trying to compete with Steam. They prioritised devs first over the actually most important stakeholder.
Specifically, if they’re also wanting to be on Steam (the largest marketplace by far, so you need to be there) your game can’t be cheaper anywhere else. It’s a little fucked up that Steam can wield their power like that, but they essentially have a monopoly so they can.
That’s only true if you’re selling steam keys. Eg you are using Valve’s infrastructure. And they don’t even require the 30% cut in this case. If you sold the game using another infrastructure then you can price it how you want.
Sure, but even Epic exclusives aren’t any cheaper than the games on Steam. These savings directly go to the game developer/publisher, not the consumer. This means there’s no incentive for the consumer to switch to Epic other than exclusive games, which is a pretty poor reason to switch away from a well-established platform.
As the customer, which in a practical sense is the only perspective that matters to me day-to-day, Epic offers me nothing close to what Steam or GOG can give me. Hell, even EA’s and Ubisofts launchers were more useful since they at least had exclusives. All Epic has is Fortnite and for someone like myself that doesn’t care for that kind of game, there is no reason to even consider their platform for anything.
And given my recent switch away from Windows and to Linux full time on my gaming PC to put a further wedge between me and the things Microsoft has been doing with Windows that I don’t like that is a good thing given Epics history of embracing things that will never work as smoothly on Linux as Steam games do with Proton or GOG’s native Linux options do.
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To be honest, I totally forgot about Epic until articles are popping recently that it’s not going well even after all these years.
Also, what’s wrong about discussing this? Epic is a good example of a business venture not doing well for failing to do one of the most basic business philosophy: set yourself apart from the competitors.
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You literally opened the thread. People are gonna talk about anything you can’t stop them. You going in here like this is just foolishness.
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