this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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I personally get most of my games from GOG and itch.io these days. And I've never bought anything from the Epic store whatsoever.
I will say though that I find it kind of weird how much hate Epic gets for their store. Like, I understand that someone prefers Steam, or doesn't want to buy stuff from Epic etc. - but what we see goes way beyond that. Epic has people actively campaigning against it, as if its mere existence is insulting. I don't really get why.
As for the 30% cut... Developers will try to price their games competitively, and within customer expectations. So with or without Steam's 30% cut, you can expect games to be similarly priced. The large 30% cut from Steam is basically coming out of the developer's revenue rather than from your pocket. (I'm under the impression that GOG also has a similar 30% fee. Epic has a lower fee. And on itch.io the seller gets to choose how money goes to itch.io anywhere from 0% to 100%. So itch.io is the best deal for developers in terms of fees.)
The reason people hate Epic is fairly obvious – they don't give a shit about the gaming industry nor about players. At some point their client contained literal spyware, they tried to brute force market share via sleazy exclusivity contracts, their software doesn't have one tenth of the features Steam has, their CEO is a piece of shit, etc.
What do you mean by that? For developers, they take a much smaller fee than Steam or GOG, and for players they're constantly giving away free games.
That sounds like a decent reason to campaign against them. I haven't heard anything about that before. What was the story behind that? (As in, when / why / how / what? Perhaps you have a link or something.)
I've heard people talk a lot about exclusivity contracts... but can you name even a single game that has such a contract? When people have discussed this the past, the relevant developers basically said "there is no contract". But maybe there is some different case I don't know about. In any case, that personally doesn't bother me anyway. If some developer wants to take money to be on one store rather than another, they can do that at their own peril. As for customers, we're only talking about a store. It's not like anyone is in danger of not being able to buy / play their favourite games. So it seems like a bit of a nothing-burger to me. Like, is there actually something bad happening here? Or are people just speculating that something bad might one-day happen if Epic got bigger?
Steam has more features, yeah. Steam is very good. But Steam has been around for some 20 years. It's hard to catch up with that so quickly. In any case, although missing features is a good reason to prefer Steam, it certainly isn't a reason to campaign against Epic.
... So from your list, I'll keep the spyware thing and the CEO complaint. I don't know enough about either of those to say much though. I don't recall who the CEO of Epic is right now, so I won't say whether or not I think that's a good reason. And the spyware... I take that kind of stuff seriously. Right now I'm posting this from Linux - because I'm fed-up with Windows spyware. But as I said, I've not heard any details about any Epic spyware thing.
Incidentally, I've found that Steam is very good for Linux gaming. ... But obviously that doesn't mean that I'm going to start making posts trash-talking Epic. I don't find it weird that people prefer Steam. I just find it weird that people put so much energy into attacking Epic.
Also adding to other people, they "poached" games from other platforms.
eg they wanted Rocket League, which I have on Steam and am happy to continue using there, to be completely removed from my account and available through the epic launcher some 3(?) years after I first bought it. Eventually they backpedaled, only due to community backlash, people that owned it on steam can still play it there.
If you're serious about not knowing about all this stuff take a look at https://steamcommunity.com/groups/EpicGamesSucks/discussions/0/1796278072844560561/ Obviously Steam biased, but a very good index
Are you saying that Rocket League was removed from the Steam accounts of the people who already owned it? That sounds like a big deal, and surely must be illegal. But I didn't see mention of that in the link you posted. Most of the things in the list seemed to be just saying that they didn't think the Epic store is high quality. (eg. prices too high, not enough features, difficult to use return policy, etc.) Those are all fair complaints, and good reasons to not use the store - but again, they are only good reasons to not use the store. They aren't really good reasons to crusade against it. There are heaps of crap online stores, and generally people just ignore them.
The Rocket League thing you mentioned would be a good reason to get upset at Epic beyond just not wanting to buy from them. So I'm kind of surprised to see it missing from such a comprehensive list of grievances.
Others have mentioned spyware, and like I said, I care about that. That's a big red flag. But I looked at the links in the post you gave, and as far as I could tell they were all speculation. Things like Tencent owns 40% of Epic, and Tencent is bad - so Epic is probably bad. ... Which is quite possibly true! I certainly wouldn't want to trust Epic with my personal info. But it's still a big step away from them having spyware built in.
I personally think that many gamers put up with too much privacy invasion and 'telemetry' in the form of online accounts and especially 'anti-cheat' software. The "anti cheat" software that some games require explicitly demand access to see every program you have installed, every program you have running, and in some cases even read RAM outside of what the game is allocated. That's an enormous security risk and privacy breach... but people install that crap all the time with barely a whisper - but then complain about the risk the Epic will share its telemetry data with Tencent. I'm certain that some of Epic's online games have software like that, but that wasn't mentioned in thread you linked to.
Maybe I just don't care about the same things that other people care about. Like, if Epic has a crap store... I just don't care. It makes no difference to me how crap it is. It makes to difference if they say it is going to be great, and it falls short of what they said. I'm not going to go around telling people how crap it is, because I don't think it matters. I don't intend to use the store anyway; and if other people like the store for some reason, then fine. I don't think it matters. They can like it, and I won't try to convince them otherwise. But if they are somehow removing games you've already bought elsewhere - then that's a big deal. That would be worth telling people about. I hope you can see what I mean.