Epic game store is a weapon for attacking other game developers. It was never to make a profit. It's just to provide an sealed off area for Epic to buy competitors/etc and cut them out of more open competitor ecosystems. Like when they bought Psyonix, said they wouldn't change anything in Rocket League, then 6 months later unreleased(!) the game for multiple operating systems removing all online play (the only real game mode). They claimed this was because of Direct X transition problems. But they still support Playstation which uses the same old Direct X. It's all lies.
And lets not forget the innumberable times Epic has cloned games made by other companies in their engine and released them for "free" on "epic game store".
To this day, and for close to 20 years, Steam is one of the only applications I allow to run in the background (of my Windows PC). It's always been a remarkably lightweight application. It seamlessly keeps itself and my installed games up to date. And the 'workshop' is fantastic for most modding needs. Hard to think of a complaint really, aside from the occasional pop-up ad, but those have never been too obtrusive and they haven't gotten worse over the years.
This is the trust that Steam has produced and why no other store will ever come close. This long standing trust that they won’t muck with your running apps, that they won’t just throw popups on your screen (except when launching, tisk tisk), and that they will support the infrastructure required to keep those games and apps up to date.
Second would be Microsoft’s Store. On Apple it would be the other way around: Apple Store over Steam store. But aside of the native OS “store”, steam is the only 3rd party store I allow on my PC.
With their migration to Chrome/electron/not sure what it is, Steam isn't as light weight as it used to be.
Especially on older PC's. It noticeably slows down the start up, does eat a lot of ram. It's definitely noticable on a friend's 2014 laptop with 8GB ram and a slower SSD.
On my gaming PC I went into the Windows 10 Task Scheduler and added a task to run "steam.exe -silent" when the machine is idle for 10 minutes. That way it doesn't slow down booting but it does eventually get around to the updates if I fire it up and walk away.
> It's always been a remarkably lightweight application.
Don't know if I agree. I remember having to turn it off a lot in the early days - but that was ~20 years ago. I will grant that unlike a lot of software it hasn't bloated too much in the intervening years, while hardware has gotten a lot faster.
Steam consistently draws CPU resources. I make sure to disable it on startup. The storefront webview-wrapper also chugs hard and is much slower than just opening the site in a web browser. It updates every time it's launched. It always shows some kind of popup/advertisement... It's software I begrudgingly install.
I installed Steam because Valve bought Counter-Strike and made Steam a requirement to update it or play it online. Since Counter-Strike was originally a free mod, Steam only allows me to access what it took from me in the first place.
Alexander wanted to fulfill a wish for Diogenes and asked him what he desired. Diogenes replied, "Stand out of my light."
I haven’t bought a single game from EGS yet I get the free games every week. I wonder how much profit they would make by turning off the free game spigot.
I used to grab those also, but I never played them, so I stopped bothering. I'd rather just play them on Steam, especially now that I have a Steamdeck.
I used to buy games on Epic Store during sales, but don't anymore since I got Steamdeck, and I've also repurchased those games on Steam. I don't care about Steam Community points - I'd rather pay a few bucks extra for the convenience.
And it will continue to be unable to do so because they are only targeting making it a better experience for developers, not consumers.
The app is less usable than Steam (in general), and most user's experience with it is just being forced onto it because certain devs hopped over on an exclusivity contract. So it's already soured in most people's mouths. No one is interested in investing in another walled garden when they've invested thousands of USD in one that generally works better.
Better for developers? Hardly. Epic game store is a weapon designed to attack other game developers. Especially the ones foolish enough to use Epic's engine which allows Epic to easily clone the game then release it for free on their walled garden.
I was referring specifically to the only thing they've done being to charge a slightly lower dev cut, while having a worse client, support and library with all the same problems (walled garden, potential of losing library due to shut down).
I can speak anecdotally to the fact that I invested in an alternative platform once (Impulse) and already had to migrate to Steam (repurchasing much of that content) once. I'm not willing to do it again without a significant benefit in doing so.
I only hopped onto it for Sins of a Solar Empire. As soon as it was sold to GameStop, stardock rereleased all their library on Steam and I just repurchased there. So now if something is exclusive off of steam, I either wait or don't buy it.
Whenever I open the Epic Store, I'm in disbelief that the company behind Unreal Engine is okay with having such a sluggish piece of software.
It has a fraction of a fraction of Steam's features, and yet feels 10x bloated. The visual response to clicking anything in the interface takes what feels like hundreds of milliseconds. It feels worse than any Electron app I've ever used, and I can't imagine why. I know that's not a main reason of why it's floundering, but I also wonder if it's a bigger turnoff for the average PC player than Epic's willing to admit.
Funnily enough, heroic games launcher - an electron app with support for multiple stores , including epic, feels faster than whatever the epic app/store is.
It's a weird world where a third party, more feature rich Linux app is more performant than the official Windows app on Windows ...
I honestly feel Steam is also incredibly slow compared to just opening their site in a browser. All of these game launchers are just janky DRM and some of the worst software our industry has to offer.
This is actually really common, I don't get it really, with Warcraft 3 Reforged they swapped the UI to WEBUI because they didn't know how to use legacy FDF files.
Not only did they get rid of the cool 3d menus made with actually rendered 3d models (mdx) but they swapped them to webms instead (lost a lot of unique animations).
Anyways, the UI loads incredibly slow, it's very laggy, yet if you open it in browser, it is actually fairly smooth, what is going on? nobody can tell.
An application launcher adding like 20 billion CPU instructions of overhead to every application's launch is just incompetence. And on macOS it's 34 seconds.
It's really Microsoft/Apple's fault. Their app stores come pre-installed and start apps 10 or 100 times faster, yet Steam is able to exist because you can install across operating systems, it has an identity that works across games, the sales, faster and better game discovery, and the achievements (for the people that works on).
Well before Steam's latest update, it was terribad too, their web engine they used could hardly handle a simple website, but I'm pretty happy about the latest update, took them 12 years or so, so maybe Epic will get on it on 2030?
I admit I don't use the in-app browser much, but the times I have I haven't ever noticed problems opening websites. What sort of trouble did you run into?
I play a lot of games where you need the wiki, so I use it regularly. Before the new update it was slow as molasses, I don't know if it was the rendering or some memory management issues, but it was like IE 11 in experience, especially when the site has heavy javascript, but it's decent since the latest update.
Good. Anything to dissuade a future computing dystopia where every application developer has its own "store" that you need to install in order to get their applications which are exclusively offered on their store. I don't want to have to install N stores to obtain (approximately) N applications.
Ideally, I don't want to install a "store" onto my PC at all! I already have an application that allows me to download bits from your site: A browser.
Bandwidth issues aside, how would you sync your local data with updates and such via the browser? This isn’t 1998. You don’t just download an installer and play anymore. There’s DLC, there’s updates, there’s extras.
But those things existed in 1998 (well, at least by 2000). Half-life had updates, expansion packs, mods. Doom had all of that back by 1995. Woldfenstein probably did as well.
I used to keep a folder of downloaded updates should I need to reinstall in the future.
I don't know, I kind of like that I don't have to download an installer for every single game I download and go to dozens of websites to download the games, which all would need to input my credit card credentials, and potentially make a separate account. This sounds far worse to me.
I have conflicting feelings about the Epic Games Store. On the one hand, Valve definitely needs to have competitors to avoid the kind of "enshittification" we see in other tech products. On the other hand, Epic's tactics - especially securing exclusives - have been quite anti-consumer. Epic's Fortnite has also popularized a bunch of monetization tactics that, frankly, suck.
I guess what I'm saying is: use GoG whenever possible.
Valve is a private company, and therefore much less susceptible to enshittification, at least in theory. That's bound to come crashing down when GabeN retires, though.
This is the real worry. Steam and valve are extremely consumer friendly and many of their decisions feel like they take the user into account before the accountants, contrary to many other video game products today.
I really worry when GabeN leaves that the company will either go public or be bought out by PE/VC and then the last bastion of goodwill in video games will die and fast painful death.
Gog's market-share is not substantial. Considering that non DRM software is very compelling, the Gog example actually just proves my point, you need exclusives to move the needle. It's a fact.
Broadly speaking I agree, but as it stands as a privately held company, they seem to be the antidote to enshittification and anti-consumer behavior brought on by publicly traded conglomerates.
Speaking of which, GoG Galaxy. Certainly hasn't gotten better.
It's been interesting to me to watch this "fight" from a user perspective. I say fight in scare quotes because it seems to mostly be EGS whinging and splashing about and Steam just ignoring their existence entirely.
But it's interesting to me because I've always felt like Steam's moat was weird. I mean, it's PC. There's no moat in the same way that Android or iOS have. Prior to steam, people just put their items on their dang desktops, for crying out loud. Still can. Still do, for most software that's not games. And there's obviously ~0 cost to installing multiple launchers. It's what, a few bits of disk space (nothing compared to the size of even a small indie game, which will easily be 1GB nowadays) and an icon in your app tray, if you even let it run on startup.
AND people already use multiple launchers! It's not an fdroid vs playstore scenario, where grandma isn't going to install fdroid. Grandma is already installing random exe's from all over the internet. And gamers already have company-specific launchers - battlenet, EGS for fortnite, and so on. And they have an existing install base, from fortnite! Though I suspect most of their users are mobile. But it's a big leg up vs trying to crack the chicken and egg problem of no games = no installs = no games.
And yet, here we are. They can't even hardly give away games for free! They offer half the fees and frickin pay popular up and coming double-A titles for exclusivity. And yet still Steam is huge and games will release on EGS and on Steam and literally (there's a tweet with an example somewhere) games will see <1% of sales come from EGS.
So - what's Steam's moat? It's CLEARLY there. And I think it's simple that it's just brand and trust. Gamers (sorry, forgive me use of the term) are used to being jerked around and treated like crap, and they're tremendously suspicious of big game companies, since they're so good at ruining everything just to eke out more profits even if it kills the dang thing long-term.
But Steam has their trust because 1) they have a very good track record of not f'ing people over and 2) people trust Gabe because they know Valve is privately held and Gabe is in control. So there's this capitalist/shareholder capriciousness that's simply not a factor in Valve's business but is literally the entire business of EGS. Do people think Valve is here for charity? Certainly not. And yet there's absolutely this perceived difference between Valve and Epic where Valve is the "I make money by making customers happy, just like I have done for twenty years" type of money-making company and Epic is clearly driven in a much more stereotypically slimy sort of capitalist fashion.
I'll throw in one random anecdote: I'm sure everyone else saw the HN threads about the OLED Steam Deck? Where they're like, making screws easier for people to tinker with in the newer revision? That's the kind of thing I'm talking about with Valve. Gamers love Valve and Valve loves gamers loving valve (especially since it drives so much revenue).
I'm not sure I see the problem with EGS business model compared to Valve/Steam.
Epic Games isn't a public company either, it's controlled by Tim Sweeney with Tencent being a large (but not majority) owner.
To my knowledge, Epic Games hasn't done anything slimy actually. Fortnite is a great game, and free. Unreal is a solid engine. EGS gives away a ton of free games and is trying to break down the crazy margins/taxes of the main stores.
Maybe not as cool as advancing Linux gaming, but still seems cool to me.
When it launched all I can remember from the press was ‘steam takes too much money from developers and we will take less’.
That’s not really a selling point for me, the person who buys games to play them.
To this day I can’t name a single gamer-facing feature epic game store has over Steam that would entice me to give up 20 years of built up trust. I buy games on GOG a bunch, I buy games primarily on Steam and have a steam deck. What’s in it for me on EGS?
The publishers are just pocketing the extra cash, and why wouldn't they?
Looks like even in situations where Steam isn't in play (Epic/Console exclusive games) the publishers just sell it at the same price as other platforms that take more of a cut:
Epic gives away a game (or two) every Thursday, often older AAA titles. I have over 100 games on EGS and don’t know if I’ve ever made a purchase there.
I don’t think free games are much of a draw once you have a stable and disposable income. Maybe all the jobless school kids and skint college kids of today will grow up to be EGS loyalists but the platform itself doesn’t do much to be ‘sticky’ when you start spending money.
Most people I know have hundred game deep steam backlogs from the endless sales.
5 years and it still lacks some of the basic features that steam has (some by choice, who wants to moderate forums)... They got landlorded by apple and valve and got bigmad and tried to landlord .. but their landlord game is weak.
It’s super popular to hate on the Epic Store for a bunch of reasons, but let me break from the crowd and give them some credit: directly due to Epic competing with Steam, Steam actually improved drastically over the last 5 years. For almost a decade before that Valve had been asleep with the monopoly, I’m personally grateful someone forced them to improve.
epic has one good multiplayer game, steam has none. both are doodoo platforms, and only run on a doodoo operating system that serves you ads before it’s finished booting. we can definitely do better.
in the mean time, i’m glad for steam and epic and windows. at least we have one good game to play while we build a better tomorrow.
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadAnd lets not forget the innumberable times Epic has cloned games made by other companies in their engine and released them for "free" on "epic game store".
Second would be Microsoft’s Store. On Apple it would be the other way around: Apple Store over Steam store. But aside of the native OS “store”, steam is the only 3rd party store I allow on my PC.
Especially on older PC's. It noticeably slows down the start up, does eat a lot of ram. It's definitely noticable on a friend's 2014 laptop with 8GB ram and a slower SSD.
On my gaming PC I went into the Windows 10 Task Scheduler and added a task to run "steam.exe -silent" when the machine is idle for 10 minutes. That way it doesn't slow down booting but it does eventually get around to the updates if I fire it up and walk away.
Don't know if I agree. I remember having to turn it off a lot in the early days - but that was ~20 years ago. I will grant that unlike a lot of software it hasn't bloated too much in the intervening years, while hardware has gotten a lot faster.
Early in it's life it was not known as a lightweight application, I'm pretty sure it gave Java a bad reputation for Desktop apps.
Alexander wanted to fulfill a wish for Diogenes and asked him what he desired. Diogenes replied, "Stand out of my light."
I've only spent money on Steam and GOG.
When the spigot is turned off. I'm not buying anything.
The app is less usable than Steam (in general), and most user's experience with it is just being forced onto it because certain devs hopped over on an exclusivity contract. So it's already soured in most people's mouths. No one is interested in investing in another walled garden when they've invested thousands of USD in one that generally works better.
I can speak anecdotally to the fact that I invested in an alternative platform once (Impulse) and already had to migrate to Steam (repurchasing much of that content) once. I'm not willing to do it again without a significant benefit in doing so.
Haven't thought about that one in a long time. I remember it was pretty OK until GameStop bought it.
It has a fraction of a fraction of Steam's features, and yet feels 10x bloated. The visual response to clicking anything in the interface takes what feels like hundreds of milliseconds. It feels worse than any Electron app I've ever used, and I can't imagine why. I know that's not a main reason of why it's floundering, but I also wonder if it's a bigger turnoff for the average PC player than Epic's willing to admit.
It's a weird world where a third party, more feature rich Linux app is more performant than the official Windows app on Windows ...
Not only did they get rid of the cool 3d menus made with actually rendered 3d models (mdx) but they swapped them to webms instead (lost a lot of unique animations).
Anyways, the UI loads incredibly slow, it's very laggy, yet if you open it in browser, it is actually fairly smooth, what is going on? nobody can tell.
From a cold start, to open Epic store on my PC: 1 minute and 19 seconds of staring at a loading bar before getting to the landing page.
It's really Microsoft/Apple's fault. Their app stores come pre-installed and start apps 10 or 100 times faster, yet Steam is able to exist because you can install across operating systems, it has an identity that works across games, the sales, faster and better game discovery, and the achievements (for the people that works on).
Ideally, I don't want to install a "store" onto my PC at all! I already have an application that allows me to download bits from your site: A browser.
I used to keep a folder of downloaded updates should I need to reinstall in the future.
For GOG I wish I didn't have to install it, because it's so rare that I play that one game I got from there.
For Steam I'm happy I have most of my games there, because I only need to install one program to access them.
I guess what I'm saying is: use GoG whenever possible.
I really worry when GabeN leaves that the company will either go public or be bought out by PE/VC and then the last bastion of goodwill in video games will die and fast painful death.
So perhaps it's a more accurate to say that the exclusives cost Epic much more than they ever returned. In money and trust.
Speaking of which, GoG Galaxy. Certainly hasn't gotten better.
It's been interesting to me to watch this "fight" from a user perspective. I say fight in scare quotes because it seems to mostly be EGS whinging and splashing about and Steam just ignoring their existence entirely.
But it's interesting to me because I've always felt like Steam's moat was weird. I mean, it's PC. There's no moat in the same way that Android or iOS have. Prior to steam, people just put their items on their dang desktops, for crying out loud. Still can. Still do, for most software that's not games. And there's obviously ~0 cost to installing multiple launchers. It's what, a few bits of disk space (nothing compared to the size of even a small indie game, which will easily be 1GB nowadays) and an icon in your app tray, if you even let it run on startup.
AND people already use multiple launchers! It's not an fdroid vs playstore scenario, where grandma isn't going to install fdroid. Grandma is already installing random exe's from all over the internet. And gamers already have company-specific launchers - battlenet, EGS for fortnite, and so on. And they have an existing install base, from fortnite! Though I suspect most of their users are mobile. But it's a big leg up vs trying to crack the chicken and egg problem of no games = no installs = no games.
And yet, here we are. They can't even hardly give away games for free! They offer half the fees and frickin pay popular up and coming double-A titles for exclusivity. And yet still Steam is huge and games will release on EGS and on Steam and literally (there's a tweet with an example somewhere) games will see <1% of sales come from EGS.
So - what's Steam's moat? It's CLEARLY there. And I think it's simple that it's just brand and trust. Gamers (sorry, forgive me use of the term) are used to being jerked around and treated like crap, and they're tremendously suspicious of big game companies, since they're so good at ruining everything just to eke out more profits even if it kills the dang thing long-term.
But Steam has their trust because 1) they have a very good track record of not f'ing people over and 2) people trust Gabe because they know Valve is privately held and Gabe is in control. So there's this capitalist/shareholder capriciousness that's simply not a factor in Valve's business but is literally the entire business of EGS. Do people think Valve is here for charity? Certainly not. And yet there's absolutely this perceived difference between Valve and Epic where Valve is the "I make money by making customers happy, just like I have done for twenty years" type of money-making company and Epic is clearly driven in a much more stereotypically slimy sort of capitalist fashion.
I'll throw in one random anecdote: I'm sure everyone else saw the HN threads about the OLED Steam Deck? Where they're like, making screws easier for people to tinker with in the newer revision? That's the kind of thing I'm talking about with Valve. Gamers love Valve and Valve loves gamers loving valve (especially since it drives so much revenue).
Epic Games isn't a public company either, it's controlled by Tim Sweeney with Tencent being a large (but not majority) owner.
To my knowledge, Epic Games hasn't done anything slimy actually. Fortnite is a great game, and free. Unreal is a solid engine. EGS gives away a ton of free games and is trying to break down the crazy margins/taxes of the main stores.
Maybe not as cool as advancing Linux gaming, but still seems cool to me.
That’s not really a selling point for me, the person who buys games to play them.
To this day I can’t name a single gamer-facing feature epic game store has over Steam that would entice me to give up 20 years of built up trust. I buy games on GOG a bunch, I buy games primarily on Steam and have a steam deck. What’s in it for me on EGS?
In an ideal world, that means Devs would've been able to pass those savings to end users and Epic could've competed on at least game prices.
Not sure if it is some price parity rule by steam (there was a lawsuit) or something else, this hasn't happened so far..
Looks like even in situations where Steam isn't in play (Epic/Console exclusive games) the publishers just sell it at the same price as other platforms that take more of a cut:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/05/why-lower-platform-fe...
Most people I know have hundred game deep steam backlogs from the endless sales.
in the mean time, i’m glad for steam and epic and windows. at least we have one good game to play while we build a better tomorrow.
you can’t just code 24/7. it’s not healthy.
Also SteamOS doesn't serve any ads when it finished booting