It’s so cool how they’re shedding employees when their game store doesn’t even have basic features like product reviews
I really don’t understand how people still hang on to defending EGS. It’s been shit since release, it’s still missing basic features years later, and it’s been found doing tons of shady shit.
I’m all for more competition in these spaces, because, you know, competition pushes the companies to one up each other and build compelling features. But EGS is just blatantly missing shit and is explicitly user-hostile by buying exclusivity to their vastly inferior platform. Steam hasn’t had to react at all because they’re still so far ahead, and Epic is just fucking trolling users by forcing them onto their platform without working cloud saves or even non-buggy installs.
The irony that they flag-wave “user choice” while doing this just totally baffles me.
But they are great for indie developers. They’ve done a lot to serve the indie community by buying their games and distributing them as a free game. It gets indie studios out of the hole and into the public eye.
EGS itself is a graveyard for indie games, game discovery is complete shit and they have no plans on improving it..
When it introduced Steam Direct, Valve prioritized the development of Steam features that helped users discover games they might be interested in, such as the Discovery Queue. The Epic Games Store will continue to get interface updates, but as a matter of principle, Allison says that Epic will not track user behavior and use it to algorithmically recommend games. Epic has said in the past that it’s more interested in supporting the game discovery that already happens outside of stores, such as on Twitch and YouTube.
Steam has great features to advertise indie games such as dedicated events and such so a lot of indie hits have come from it, like Valheim, Fall Guys, Among Us, Terraria, Stardew Valley, Rimworld, Factorio, The Forest, etc.
It may have been great, but not in a sustainable way.
For Epic those exclusive contracts were part of their advertising budget.
I honestly wonder how many indie games that started as an epic exclusive are still around today because of that exclusivity deal or if they only survived because eventually the exclusivity expire and they were able to list on other platforms
You don’t have to love them but they’re still the closest thing to any competition at all. You can complain but they’re most likely to improve if they’re profitable, and it would definitely hurt end users if they shut down. I get the “buying exclusivity” complaint, but honestly it’s fucking impossible to get a foothold, I would do the same thing if I were them.
You don’t have to love them but they’re still the closest thing to any competition at all.
That’s arguably true. But as I said above, the only reason competition is good is if it actually is a reasonable alternative and the companies and products they’re competing with have to make changes to keep customers, which in turn benefits customers of both platforms. Steam hasn’t had to do a thing to deal with EGS. It’s brought no benefits so it serves no purpose Because of this, GOG is better competition in many ways.
On the other hand, as I said above, it has brought many disadvantages and actively harmed customers with unclear game ratings, lack of things like cloud save, fragmentation in their game libraries, and legitimately broken games and wastes of money.
You can complain but they’re most likely to improve if they’re profitable, and it would definitely hurt end users if they shut down
How would this hurt customers? There wouldn’t be EGS exclusives. People would have consolidated purchases. Steam wouldn’t change. GOG wouldn’t change.
The only argument you could make is the lost purchases on EGS, which wouldn’t have existed if EGS hadn’t started in the first place. That’d be a loss EGS created. So it only furthers the point. EGS pretty much only harms customers.
I get the “buying exclusivity” complaint, but honestly it’s fucking impossible to get a foothold, I would do the same thing if I were them.
Okay, sure, the company is working in their own best interest. And? It still actively hurts the consumer. There is no value they are providing to the consumer. If there was an exchange in which the company provided some value in exchange for that detrimental action, it would be warranted.
But EGS offers literally nothing but problems to the consumers.
Instead of shelling out millions to shadily buy themselves into exclusivity, maybe they ought to have invested in their platform? I feel the state of the Epic Games Store reflects their view of gamers - mindless moneybags drooling for the latest releases, not as customers using a platform to play games. I don’t think we’d be better off with them in the game.
It’s not missing features if you want a launcher to launch games and not to accumulate cards and hats.
…if all I wanted was a game launcher, Playnite and pirated .exes are 100% free. Steam at least has features that you are paying for, nobody is forking over $60 for games on Epic just for the privilege of using their shitty launcher unless they are an idiot (or they got a lot of cash to spare I guess).
Oh no! Having to check reviews elsewhere! The agony! How did people live before Steam having reviews on their platform? 😱
Okay, so where do I go to leave a review on steam for a game that I’ve played on the epic store, smart ass?
What?
That’s completely idiotic.
Leave your reviews wherever you want and check your reviews wherever you want, there’s tons of websites to do so, you don’t need to leave your reviews where you own the game.
Fucking hell, what you guys want is for Steam to have an absolute monopoly over everything related to PC video games! Here’s hoping no one ever takes the helm off Valve and makes decisions you disagree with because we’ll be stuck without any alternatives if it were only for you guys!
How old is Gaben? 60? He’s obese and has been for ages? Yeah bud, I don’t want to be a bringer of bad news but I wouldn’t expect him to be in control for the next 15 years!
fuck whoever originally owned bandcamp for selling it to epic. I have a really bad feeling about them selling it to a music licensing firm. I’m wondering if a lot of musicians are going to find a change in TOS that signs copyright over to songtradr or something.
whelp, grab those free thursday games while you still can
Doubt they are folding. It’s probably one of those “fire these people so we have bigger income on next quarterly report” kind of schemes.
Maybe someone’s bonus depends on it. Someone who’ll probably move to the next company for the next quarter.
I doubt they’ll fold anytime soon, but they’ll probably cut back spending where they can, and the writing on the wall is already there based on the quality of the free games offered lately. Next week is like “Overcooked: Cannibal Edition”
My husband was a producer at epic for 8 years. He got cut yesterday. We’re not even exercising our stock options, imho tim is spiraling and epic isn’t going anywhere good. Going to the supreme court isn’t cheap and then there’s that abandoned mall they bought 🤷♀️
Bought bandcamp just to shelf it? Thanks.
Good thing they removed the e from trader, they must save so much money on branding.
I know they’re not literally throwing it out, if that’s what you thought I meant. I know they’re selling it to someone else, but how often does this result in a good outcome? I’m predicting this is the start of the end of bandcamp. It wasn’t even good to begin with, but it was the only unified place to buy music.
I found this article which states
The company is also selling Bandcamp to a music licensing company called Songtradr…
I didn’t know about their ownership in the first place.
I stopped using Bandcamp when Epic bought them. Looks like they’ve sold it to Songtradr, who also bought 7digital (another music store that offered DRM-free FLAC files).
I’ve never heard of Songtradr. Does anyone have info on their history or ethics? I would love to have Bandcamp back as an artist-friendly, customer-friendly, relatively independent source of music, but I don’t want to get my hopes up.
https://rocknerd.co.uk/2023/09/28/bandcamp-has-been-sold-to-songtradr/
They’re making quite a lot of acquisitions, despite Bandcamp unionising earlier this year. It’s one of the biggest licencing companies in the world, so it probably won’t be great for the current services of Bandcamp when Songtradr wants to start monetising its users more meaningfully to make back the acquisition cost and break even.
Maybe good growth, maybe an attempt to gauge users as deep as possible before they just shutter the company. Could go either way.
