Why the Epic Games Store receive much dislike compared to Steam?
Their stated goal is to monopolize games so you can’t buy them from GoG, Steam, or the Windows store.
It is just a store. People want to buy games from a social platform for some reason.
People’s first impression of it was Metro Exodus being pulled from Steam close to launch and becoming exclusive to Epic despite even physical copies having the Steam logo.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/aqyjac/physical_copy_of_metro_exodus_for_pc_has_a/
Turned out people don’t really like a company going out of its way to try and remove purchasing options from consumers for third party titles. This not only affected steam but releases on GOG too.
A lot of people requested that DARQ be made available on GOG. I was happy to work with GOG to bring the game to their platform. I wish the Epic Store would allow indie games to be sold there non-exclusively, as they do with larger, still unreleased games (Cyberpunk 2077), so players can enjoy what they want: a choice.
Epic is anti-consumer and also anti-Linux, they don’t make any effort to support other platforms, the app is shit.
Meanwhile, Steam is
- Actively working with the FOSS community to help preserve old games
- Kernel improvements for better graphics performance
- Lots of VR and HDR work
- Many contributions to the open-source AMD drivers
- Has been supporting Linux gaming for a decade with no signs of backing down
- They have a portable Linux gaming console experience, and it’s intentionally left wide open for users to mess with
- They’ve taken several community features and built them into the OS
- Their DRM is weak and unintrusive
- Their anticheat is ununtrusive
- The sales are pretty good
- They have tons of features for users:
- Family sharing
- Remote Play Together
- Remote Play
- Streaming
- Community forums for every game
- Mod workshop
- Matchmaking
- Steam Chat / Voice Chat / Streaming
The only appealing thing for EGS is, EGS takes a lower cut from the developers who just pockets it and doesn’t even result in lower prices for users. As a Linux user, praise our Lord GabeN for all the good Valve has done for gamers. Even for the developers, most are quite happy with the services they get back from that 30% cut.
I’d say the dislike is mainly that for the users, EGS doesn’t bring in anything new or interesting or useful that Steam didn’t already do well, and goes directly against a lot of the good Steam has been doing. It’s just a store that makes big developers slightly more happy.
Epic is anti-consumer and also anti-Linux, they don’t make any effort to support other platforms, the app is shit.
Also to add context, Tencent (Chinese tech conglomerate) owns 35% of Epic and helped them pivot to GaaS and aggressively push into the game store market.
most are quite happy with the services they get back from that 30% cut.
I agree with most of that, but this part just isn’t true. 30% is highway robbery. It’s a scam. But PC gamers are trained that Steam is where the games are, with few exceptions. If you don’t pay steam their cut, your game doesn’t sell at all.
Consider all that goes into development of a game and compare that to the effort/infrastructure to host a download and display a webpage. Is Steam really providing 30% of the game experience?
I think Steam could be profitable at less than a 10% cut.
effort/infrastructure to host a download and display a webpage
Except that’s not all Valve does. Game files and updates need to be distributed, and that alone is a massive task at the scale Steam operates on, both the storage and transmission of data, and the operating cost of the CDN. Steam Cloud is also not free, it’s covered by the 30% so the players don’t have to pay. Add to that the cost of sales where the discount is covered by Valve.
The EGS isn’t profitable either, it’s kept alive by Fortnite money.
And all that forever too. The developers don’t pay a dime after Steam’s cut to keep the game alive and downloadable and playable. Even Steam keys, you can sell as many as you want outside of Steam, for free.
The devs can just raise the price by 30% if they feel they really need the money. I’ll pay the extra to have it on Steam and just work out of the box in Proton. Unlike Apple, it’s not a monopoly, nothing stopping anyone from just distributing on their own.
The devs can just raise the price by 30%
Actually they can’t. Steam’s TOS has a “most favored nation” clause that forbids developers from charging less for their games on other platforms (at least this is how I understand it, I’m not a lawyer). From a small developer’s perspective, it sucks that they can’t unburden the player from the 30% where it doesn’t apply. From Valve’s perspective, that would turn Steam into an advertising platform for other stores.
This is only true for steam keys sold on other platforms afaik
That only applies for steam keys afaik. You can not sell your steam keys cheaper anywhere else, since steam is on the hook for the cost and services. That is fairly logical.
A dev can charge whatever if they deal with all that themself on their own webpage forinstance.Check isthereanydeals for deals on steam keys that aren’t gray market and lower than Steam. How do they get around it? Well it seems to more apply to retail price and not sales price.
Game files and updates need to be distributed
You also recognize that 30% of each game sale applies to each game sale, right?
Do you really think 30% of developing a game is hosting not just the original game, but also the updates and the save files? CDNs only make it cheaper.
Steam is able to charge 30% because they effectively have a walled garden on PC games. Very few publishers are well known enough to successfully sell their game outside of Steam.
It’s not as egregious as the Apple or Google stores, but they’re basically all in this together. It’s like the old mob families where they split territory.
Consequence of what you are proposing is that companies with economies of sale or are willing to operate at a loss due to other sections of the corporation being their main source of profitable revenue would be only ones left. Ironically ensuring higher barriers to entry than there already is. The 10% is more realistic for key resellers than those trying to launch a profitable mainstream platform hosting and distributing everything as opposed to side project that can lose money.
The CD Projekt-owned PC gaming storefront GOG just released a “facts and figures” breakdown of 2022 in an official blog post. The upshot? GOG experienced steady growth in its user base and library while also turning a tidy $1.2 million profit. It’s a heartening turnaround to see as the service actually lost money—$1.15 million to be exact—the previous year.
https://www.pcgamer.com/gog-looks-like-its-in-a-much-healthier-spot-after-a-hairy-2021/
The cut GOG takes is 30%. Epic operates at a loss and is more a side project they are willing to lose money on, since Fortnite and Unreal is there real money.
https://kotaku.com/epic-games-store-pc-profitable-google-court-case-apple-1850996972
GOG also started to limit cloud storage per game to 200 MB
As the size and number of games increase, so does the demand for Cloud Storage. These limits ensure that all players have access to sufficient and manageable space for their game progress, and that we keep the associated costs under control. By optimizing our storage allocation, we aim to continue providing a reliable and user-friendly platform for everyone.
You’re right. Hosting files is more difficult than creating art for the game. Steam deserves a bigger cut than artists.
Have you ever seen the interview with game devs that said something along the lines of Steam cut justifying itself just from the fact that hosting your own webstore and selling your game there can result in so much shit just from people refunding and such that the steam cut is actually cheaper in the long term for smaller devs.
Tim Sweeney himself has said his 12% cut on EGS isn’t sustainable on its own
It certainly isn’t when you’re spending more than that just to get exclusives.
To be fair, 30% cut probably wouldn’t be sustainable. They were hemeraging money last I checked thanks to exclusives and “free” games.
Your game doesn’t sell at all because Steam adds massive value. Steam is the reason PC gaming is what it is.
Retail gets paid for a reason. Distribution has huge value. There isn’t a game out there that doesn’t make way more money paying Steam a 30% commission than they would by not taking advantage of their massive reach.
Steam taking 80% would be a much better offer for developers than Epic taking -50%. You’d still make more on Steam.
Have you ever seen the interview with game devs that said something along the lines of Steam cut justifying itself just from the fact that hosting your own webstore and selling your game there can result in so much shit just from people refunding and such that the steam cut is actually cheaper in the long term for smaller devs.
I completely agree with what you said. It’s been years since I bought any games and yet my experience just gets better and better on Steam, especially as a Linux user.
On top of all this, what really irritates me about epic is they talk like they give a fuck about consumers, but never act like it.
This! That falsehood is so disgusting. And erodes all goodwill they may have accidentaly aquired
- Actively working with the FOSS community to help preserve old games
I prefer how information dense and responsive steam is.
Epic is laggy, logs me out constantly, and is inefficiently organized (at least by default). I don’t want to scroll through cards or change my sorting filters/layout each time I want to find something. When I open steam, it has a permanent tab that says LIBRARY at the top, and when I click on that, it gives me a massive scrollable list of my games, defaulting to A-Z. Simple is better.
Plus, user reviews are really nice to have when considering dropping $ on something.
The constant logging out on epic is just so damn infuriating.
The UI sucks
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).
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.
It doesnt make us think, it shows they will.
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!
Beyond how its a inferior product in every way? Exclusives.
Anyone want to talk about GoG?
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.
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.
It’s hard to shake the taint … of Chinese spyware.
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.
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
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.
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.
Because it’s a web browser that doesn’t even run natively on my platform
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
