In most countries this is illegal practice and akin to bribery and market manipulation. Their aim: destroying Valve.
I think you have some very, very, very skewed ideas of the power relations in play here. "Destroying Valve" is a ludicrous idea given their size and entrenched market position. Epic has made essentially zero inroads on this. Also, bribery? By giving away games? Is there a condition of not buying games off Steam attached to the giveaway? Because otherwise it can't be a bribe... As for market manipulation: again, that requires having the power to meaningfully affect the market. So far there's zero indication of this being the case. While Valve isn't a publicly traded company and we thus know nothing specific about their finances, they are massively, overwhelmingly profitable, and there is no reason to believe this is changing.
It might be the reason, I don't know. It is certainly my reason for not wanting it.
As for the hate campaign, it all fired up when Epic announced Epic store exclusivity of certain titles - mainly Metro: Exodus, which upset me too, to be honest. In the end, I decided to boycott Epic and bought the game on Steam a year later. I'm not protecting Gaben, or anyone else's wallet (other than my own), but since around 80% of my games are on Steam (15% on GOG and 5% on Origin), I do not wish to register for and install a game launcher that brings absolutely no value to me. Making this (or any) decision should be my right, just as much as it is yours to look for the best deals among storefronts.
I can use both. I can also use a bike, or walk to make my 12-mile journey to work every day. It doesn't mean that I want to. Also, we all know that alt+tabbing can completely wreck certain games.
Exactly. Let it be mind-blowingly good! If the guys at GOG managed to create a DRM-free online distribution service, I'm sure Epic can come up with something too. I acknowledge their fight, but making titles exclusive is the wrong means to their goal. It's like flipping the chess board over to declare victory - and hide the fact that you don't know how to play chess.
I'm (over)stating it because it currently outweighs what Epic has to offer. Once Epic starts innovating and incorporating features that are actually useful to gamers, we can talk about pros and cons. So far, not a single pro comes to my mind when I'm comparing the Epic store to Steam or GOG (don't mention revenues and where the money goes, because those things are ultimately useless facts for the average gamer).
To me, that sounds like a very low bar for an outright boycott. Which begs the question of biases affecting the decision. I completely understand people having a positive view of Steam - it's been an incredibly useful application for a long time after all - but I don't see how that can extend to a default negative view of alternatives unless they offer something meaningfully different beyond variety. That's outright irrational. Steam being a reasonably good application doesn't make anyone not at feature parity automatically bad, especially considering the 15-year development advantage. I would love it if EGS had remote play and a few other features, but ... meh. It's really not a big deal (and there's always AMD Link). And given the popularity of Discord and other third party apps for social features and the like, neither does it seem like it is for a huge swathe of "gamers". If Alt+Tabing out of games was such a huge deal, those apps wouldn't be as popular as they are. Of course Discord has a launcher-agnostic in-game overlay, entirely bypassing issues like that.
Btw, you comparing
using EGS at all to biking or walking 12 miles to work rather than driving - that necessitates some fleshing out. How much do you use Steam's in-game features? How often? In how large a percentage of the games you play? Are you constantly using Steam chat, browsing the forums, or doing something else with the overlay? If not ... then all you're doing is demonstrating bias. If using another launcher for some games feels like that much of a hassle for you, that's a mental block on your side, not an issue with the launcher, particularly when you are already using several others.
As for EGS bringing "absolutely no value to [you]", well ... a lot of people would say free high quality games constitute something of value, as does a competitive game sales market. Or just more sales, coupons, and opportunities to get games cheaper? Some of us would even say that fairer compensation to game developers is valuable too, though that is of course less tangible and directly beneficial to customers in the short term. But again, your bias is showing.
And my entire point of the "how good would that feature need to be?" rhetorical question was to illustrate that
it's really damn hard to come up with something like that. What would it be, exactly? Can you name something that your gaming experience is sorely lacking right now? Or something brand-new, never heard of before that would tangibly improve it? Something that would convince you that EGS is valuable? Because that's an impossible ask for a single feature. And, again, given both your demonstrated bias and what the hate campaign against them has shown, adding a feature that Steam already has would do nothing to shift things in their favour - rather, it would likely be mocked and derided as a me-too effort, copying Steam, etc.
And again, as to "outweighing what Epic has to offer" - the main point is a storefront, no? A place to get access to games? I'll gladly admit that the EGS application is ... pretty mediocre. But so what? It covers the basics, lets me buy, download, update and play games. That's the
important part. Everything else is a bonus. You're of course welcome to value other features higher than I do, but again, treating those as make-or-break features of a game storefront and launcher is ... pretty out there. Even social features, important as they are. There are free, functional and trivial to use alternatives. And the "not a single pro comes to mind" line of thinking just shows that you're not starting from a baseline of "choice is good for us" or anything like that, but a tacit support of monopolism as it provides everything you need. Which is deeply, deeply problematic.
Also, the "don't mention revenues and where the money goes, because those things are ultimately useless facts for the average gamer" line - I would really hope for a tad more perspective than that. Does it help gamers when buying games, here and now? Obviously not. But is it beneficial to gaming overall in the long term? Absolutely. Or are you actually saying that you're entirely fine with developers - the people actually making the games! - getting a maximum of 70% of the sales price (though likely less as publishers also take a significant cut), with 30% (seriously, consider that this is nearly 1/3rd of the price!) going to the company providing the storefront, file hosting, cloud saves, a chat function and some forums? Is that fair in your mind? Are those features worth nearly a third of the money for every single game you buy? Because if so ... that's stunning to me. Utterly and completely incomprehensible. Even if the infrastructure you build is
fantastic, it does not deserve 30% of the price of anything sold through that infrastructure. That's an absurd idea. What that massively skewed split does, is enrich the owners of Valve, allow them to operate as a "game developer" despite making ... what, a single semi-notable game in the last decade? and let them rest on their laurels while their account balances balloon. Sure, they do some good stuff. The Steam Deck is really cool (I'm signed up for a 512GB one, and in this case think Valve is indeed actually providing something of value), and over the past 17 years Steam has gained a decent collection of good features. But have they actually deserved 30% of everything you have ever spent there? That's absurd. In my case - and I don't have the biggest Steam library by any stretch of the imagination - that would amount to nearly 350€ over the past 13 years (I know I had a Steam account prior to 2008 as well, but apparently not with this email). Has Valve deserved 350€ of my money in that time? ~2€ a month? For a tiny amount of server bandwidth and (mostly) some extremely basic software, developed long ago? Not even close. The value for money in the features provided is
terrible. And knowing the vast majority of that money goes straight into their pockets, giving nothing of value back to me? That's a travesty. That's why I welcome competition. And why I'm very, very positive towards any efforts towards directing that money towards
the people actually making the games. Why? Because
they are the ones providing value to me, not the platform owners.
Pure PR BS. Feel sorry for us, we fight nasty Apple FOR THE GAMERS!
Wait, what? This is information presented
by Apple in court, from documents Epic had to present them as part of the lawsuit. Are they doing PR
through Apple? Don't be absurd.
