Comment by Tylerdurdon@lemmy.world on Epic Games Admits In Court That Its PC Store Still Isn't Profitable

Sure isn’t profitable from me, I haven’t bought shit from them.

That’s one interesting thing about this: They trained the players so hard to associate their store with the free weekly giveaways and only the free weekly giveaways, that’s all everyone uses the client for now, and never mentally considers it to be usable for anything else.

The effect is pervasive, too. Games factually have not released if they’re epic-exclusive. They’re not discoverable on PC, as nobody would ever imagine checking the Epic catalogue for a game they’re looking for. That’s not what you open Epic for, it’s those 1-2 free weekly games and nothing else.

In their bid to vie for developers not consumers they went so far too far that they have managed to alienate the concept of “selling games to players” in the consumers’ minds, therefor making their store automatically unable to compete at its main intent.

Mind you, there are far more problems with it. Among which is that despite having so little in there, discoverability and navigation are downright terrible! It’s an interesting lesson for frontend/UI design I imagine.

This. I visit the site every week to claim the free games. If a game is epic exclusive, I consider it not released yet.

Protip: isthereanydeal.com has an RSS feed which will also alert you to other givaways.

This is a good point. Everyone harps on Epic’s exclusivity, but there are a huge amount of games that only exist on Steam. Most of these never go on other platforms, and many that do, do so only years later.

When put like this, it sounds a lot like Steam and Epic are similar. Of course the difference is that, as far as we know, Valve doesn’t pay for this exclusivity - except indirectly by visibility.

Won’t even take their free ‘gifts’, worse than Origin when it comes to spyware and data collecting. I can’t understand anyone who willingly puts EGS on their device but complains about advertisers on other platforms collecting info about them.

Yeah let’s not forget this is the client that went through your Steam-installed files on your drive to see what it could offer you.

Free games be damned, I’m not using it while they pay for timed exclusives and limit consumer choice.

Right? Can you imagine what they could have been if they just sold the same games as Steam but tried really hard to just be a really good platform? lol

They’re welcome to release their own games on their platform like EA or Activision.

Because ads are something I dont want to see in general. EGS is something I knowingly use and want on my pc to play games. The choice is what makes it different.

Hold on, a platform-agnostic solution to mod integration (mod.io being one example) is now a bad thing compared to the platform-exclusive one (Steam) we usually get? Isn’t it inherently better if I can get games wherever I want and still get mods instead of them being of course all locked to Steam after Steam Mod Downloader got disabled?

Curse you for offending Lord Gaben!

The free games are 80% shovelware not worth playing, 15% indie experiments that have the potential to become a full game with another development iteration, and 5% AAA games that can be bought on sale for a fiver anyway.

I doubt much of their Fortnite money is actually being spent on licenses for these games. They likely negotiate some kind of “do it for the exposure” deal with the smaller developers in order to keep the flow of free games going.

Chances are the games given out for free will end up in a Humble Bundle at some point anyway. Which is when you acquire a steam key anyway.

So that’s why they’re giving away all that free stuff. 🤔

Probably people who understand how to make their computer do what they want it to? You control who your software talks to.

Well, at least at the application level.

I’m going to guess the majority are people that don’t care that much, rather than people with such good security knowledge that they can stop a games distribution platform from spying on them.

Also, Epic is inherently online. Like, it needs an internet connection to distribute the games. Is it even possible to use it for that whilst also stopping it from phoning home?

Well yes, they don’t care that much, so I’m not see the hypocrisy you implied.

The Internet is a series of tubes. The tubes that deliver you file content are rarely the same tubes that carry usage and telemetry data. You can also open or close these tubes at will. Like a Valve!

I don’t think you understand how the Internet actually works, which is perfectly fine. Just weird to act so confidently giving silly advice

In order to decide if they want to send you the games, they need identifying information in the form of your account, otherwise they won’t give you the games, which may well be in a different “tube” (it’s okay, I know they’re called ports, you can use real terminology).

Any programmer worth their salt will know that the way to prevent this kind of tampering is to make the phone home data go through the same port as the account data. That way you can’t block it and keep using the service. This especially makes sense since the phone home data will necessarily be tied to your account.

It’s nothing to do with ports. Teach yourself how to use a hosts file and you’ll be a happier user

I got Death Stranding…

…It was free. The Epic client runs under Bottles in its own isolated sandbox, so it can’t spy on me.

If it’s free it’s for me, if you have to pay no way.

They had some amazing coupons a few years ago, I remember buying Jedi: Fallen Order for like $4 USD

You never bought a game made with the Unreal Engine?

How exactly does paying for unreal games make the epic games store profitable? Epic would still be getting that money even if the store didn’t exist.

Yeah that’s the point… They said they never bought anything from epic games. I was wondering if they really never bought an unreal game. Why are people butthurt about that question?!

When you buy from Taco Bell, you’re also buying a product made by a farming company, but you’re not buying from that farm.

Same with EGS/UE. People are happy to buy an Epic Games product, but they won’t buy it from EG, because their store is shit.

There aren’t that many comparable situations where a company both makes a product and has a storefront, without that product being exclusive to that storefront. Perhaps buying Honda, but only used, never from a dealership?

But when someone says they don’t buy Honda shit but than buy a used Honda, wouldn’t you say that’s weird?

The Epic Game Store was in part trying to get money in when the Unreal Engine was falling behind with Unity’s popularity. The hatred many people show for Epic Games is irrational, in my opinion. Especially when you consider that all the “arguments” against Epic Games are the same people had against Steam when it was new. It doesn’t really make sense and just seems like hate for the sake of hating.

It just seems so much like hypocrisy. Everytime Steam brought a new feature, like achievements, cards, communities, etc. people were falling all over themselves hating Steam for it.

And know they hate Epic for not offering these features?

The same with exclusive titles. People regularly hated on Steam for having a monopoly on the market and that they therefore could take increasingly bigger cuts from developers. Epic takes less money in exchange for timed exclusivity and many developers like that they get more money for their games. Why do gamers dislike that?

If you dislike Honda as a company (for subscription key fobs, or crappy warranty practices, say), you can still like the cars without giving the company a single dollar, by buying used cars. I suppose this doesn’t quite work, because EG is still getting money for UE.

Perhaps an inversion: Amazon Basics are usually trash, and many consider giving Amazon money distasteful, yet the storefront is definitely quite effective and the shipping fast. Denigrating one while using the other is common.

As for the different treatment, the people behind UE seem to make decent decisions (especially in the light of Unity’s recent decisions), while the people behind EGS have done nothing but aweful anti-consumer crap. They’re both owned by the same company, but behave differently, so different treatment seems reasonable.

That being said, there’s lots of people in gaming communities who whinge just to whinge. No changing that. I don’t get much of the hate for Steam, but I do agree that having a monopoly is bad, no matter how benevolent Valve is right now. EGS should have been the silver bullet to that situation, but the silver was arsenic, the bullet was hollow point, and they tried to shoot us instead of Steam.

When Epic stops trying to kill user fteedoms and divide the market, and instead make a competitive service, they’ll get far less hate. They’ll still get hate, that’s gamers, but winning by damaging the market is always bad.