Community Rules
You must post before you leave
Be nice. Assume others have good intent (within reason).
Block or ignore posts, comments, and users that irritate you in some way rather than engaging. Report if they are actually breaking community rules.
Use content warnings and/or mark as NSFW when appropriate. Most posts with content warnings likely need to be marked NSFW.
Most 196 posts are memes, shitposts, cute images, or even just recent things that happened, etc. There is no real theme, but try to avoid posts that are very inflammatory, offensive, very low quality, or very "off topic".
Bigotry is not allowed, this includes (but is not limited to): Homophobia, Transphobia, Racism, Sexism, Abelism, Classism, or discrimination based on things like Ethnicity, Nationality, Language, or Religion.
Avoid shilling for corporations, posting advertisements, or promoting exploitation of workers.
Proselytization, support, or defense of authoritarianism is not welcome. This includes but is not limited to: imperialism, nationalism, genocide denial, ethnic or racial supremacy, fascism, Nazism, Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, etc.
Avoid AI generated content.
Avoid misinformation.
Avoid incomprehensible posts.
No threats or personal attacks.
No spam.
Moderator Guidelines
re: this article.
The title is a joke. "Free, but you have to make an EGS account" is a bit too rich for me.
Not on Steam? No direct release? Steam released, but with a bunch of bolt on EULAs/Denuvo/3rd party launchers?
The seas will provide.
i don't get the "steam good, other launchers bad". it's still a launcher and drm...
Ever other platform is just ass. I have played games on Epic, Battlenet, Ubisoft and the EA launcher but they all barely have basic functionality. Meanwhile steam has:
Steam seems to be the only one that actually puts any effort in providing a good user experience. It's more than just a store / launcher and noone else is even trying to compete.
Don’t forget non-profitable free-to-use features such as:
And there’s probably more that I’m forgetting. These things cost Valve money to make and maintain. Only a small portion of users actually use these features and yet it’s not locked behind some subscription or whatever and instead can be used by all users of the platform.
Theres also steamvr link to make meta's quest headsets better and also all the steam for linux stuff like proton and gamescope
What do you mean "no forced ads"? It throws up a separate window with store sales every launch?
Those are promotions, really. Not advertisements. Steam is showing me relevant video games that are available, not a sale on Coca-Cola.
no other platform gives as much of a shit as valve does about linux gaming. proton made pretty much every windows game in my library Just Work™ (and no, just wine still isn't enough), meanwhile tim sweeney is actively hostile to linux as a platform.
The DRM is optional for use by the devs. Rimworld is one game I know doesn't use it, you can just zip the entire thing up and put it somewhere else and it'll run fine. It's still a launcher. But the only better alternative to a launcher is plain installers to download and hold onto like GOG provides as an alternative to its Galaxy launcher.
To be fair, "it just works" and they haven't tried to screw us over, which is almost unprecedented.
Man, I want whatever MiB forget beam they have at Valve. I remember plenty of "trying to screw us over", starting with rolling out Steam in the first place.
Maybe you had to be there before all the Gaben memes and the digital distribution.
The thing is, the OP's meme is right, all these arguments always devolve into bashing Valve in a reactionary manner... but man, it's because the cultish memory holing gets so weird that it's not about whether Epic is successful or good software or about any other store. Whether you want to or not you end up reality checking the Good Guy Valve myth.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to criticise Valve. I still strongly disagree with being forced to update a game before I can launch it. Greenlight and Steam Direct were/are consistently a pit of scum and shovelware. I still haven't forgotten their attempt together with Bethesda to introduce paid mods to the Workshop. I wasn't around when Steam itself was introduced (we still traded game CDs on the playground at the time), but I understand it was a horrid service and software. Then there's the matter of actual gambling in Counter-Strike and TF2 and the massive secondary market attached to them that Valve refuse to acknowledge.
Nothing's ever only one way or the opposite, though. There's always a spectrum of what a customer is willing to put up with, weighed against what a customer gains by putting up with a company's behaviour. For putting up with Valve's bullshit, as a gamer, I get a reliable service, a massive library of games, unparalleled download speed, free cloud storage for saves and settings, content management, community integration, and benefits too numerous to recount. As a Linux gamer, I get all of their work on Proton, on upstream Wine, Gamescope, DXVK and VKD3D, many of which I use even outside gaming, for free.
When Steam's quasi-monopoly was threatened by the EGS, Valve did not try to lock down developers. The only policy change they enacted was requiring games that are advertised on Steam Steam to actually launch on Steam, after people who preordered Metro Exodus were shafted, in order not to become an advertisement platform for their competition. Then they released publicity videos about the Steam Deck that appealed to Linux enthusiasts, handheld gamers, and right-to-repair advocates. Even as a "DRM platform", they've captured that niche.
I've said many times that success is not illegal. I was excited and hopeful when I heard that Steam was getting a competitor with a company backing it that had a chance of challenging the status quo. Epic and the EGS were given the best opportunity anyone was ever going to get and they fumbled it. They alienated their potential customerbase when they poached Metro Exodus and early third-party-exclusive titles, showed that they did not have a solid foundation when Borderlands 3 was launched without the ability to preload, gave us reason to question their security practices when a data scraper was found in the installed application, and drew further criticism when they would only accept indie titles if they were made EGS-exclusive while allowing Cyberpunk 2077 to launch on multiple platforms. Since then, it's become a haven for AI and NFT shovelware that Valve have rejected based on legal/moral issues.
I will acknowledge that some good came of their actions. Apple was forced to remove their anti-competitive policy that prevented developers from placing links and buttons that directed users to other payment processors. Still, it is the fruit of the poisonous tree: they intentionally broke ToS and had an eighty-page lawsuit and an animated short film prepared, acting like they were the innocent "for the players" party set upon by the evil corporations, rallying children as their uncritical lynch mob.
In conclusion, Valve has done things I dislike, but I have reason to conditionally accept and tolerate them; as I have reason to distrust and dislike Epic and the EGS. My choice whenever possible, though, is GOG, which I didn't mention as it was not part of the conversation and is mostly doing its own thing.
I rambled too much, and I'm too lazy to proofread, so I hope I make some kind of sense.
Steam is good mostly because the competition is unbelievably incompetent. I cannot see a single good reason for EGS to be a fucking Unreal app, for starters, and a couple of reasons that it shouldn't (the store is just web pages, the text rendering sometimes gets blurry, it uses too many computer resources to run).
Even GOG, which I always shill for, has some pretty dumb faults, like how it lists different editions of the same game, like a base/deluxe/platinum, as completely different: if you own the platinum version, you might still see the base game on the store page without the "Owned" sticker; more than once I added a game to the cart only to double check and realize that I already owned it. This also happens to games that GOG sells in bundles.
Steam's DRM is not mandatory to release a game on Steam. Its there in fact to provide a necessary lesser evil than to encourage every developer/publisher to produce their own. They still unfortunately do, which Steam at least warns customers about, but them providing their own minimal DRM is a good thing, given the context.
(That said, I still respect gog)
Most games on steam have no drm. Once you've installed them, you can do whatever you want with them. Steam isn't adding drm to everything. The number one best thing about steam is the social integration, the pure simplicity of being able to right click on a friend and hit join game to be able to play with them is amazing. Basically, steam makes things simpler, and other "launchers" are simply ad platforms forced in as a layer between you clicking play and the game opening.
i honestly believe the biggest part to this is steam having been around for a long time, and being a kind of the default video game store. people dont like being forced to get another launcher for a game, so whenever a game isnt on steam, they get mad at the whichever launcher its on.
i dont think there is very much critical thinking about drm, expoitative store platforms and capitalism going on.
I think if a Dev decided to only release their game on GoG because they prefer GoGs business practices there wouldn't be a lot of complaints about it.
G*mers are Stockholmed crazy style.
Fun fact:
The origin of the term "Stockholm Syndrome" comes from a hostage situation in which the police did not seem to care about the well being of the hostages and were actively taking actions that were dangerous to them, while the hostage takers started taking actions to protect the hostages from police.
Instead of running the story "police fucked up" news outlets exaggerated the behaviour of hostages that were just trying to survive.
Seeing the console wars play out on the basis of which DRM platform you want to put in your PC is wild.
mmm... delicious fish
Epic: It's not right that if you want a game on your smart phone you have to go through Apple or Google!
Also Epic: if you want this game you have to go through US!
Tbf, devs don't have to, and in fact Epic will pay them to be exclusive, unlike Apple who makes devs pay for it and gives no choice.
Though it's still annoying that Epic does that, from a consumer standpoint. I can't play any Epic-exclusive games because their CEO has a personal vendetta against my platform (Linux), so their company can die for all I care.
Fair, but it shows that Epic only cares about Developers (like themselves) and not Consumers (their customers).
"It's not fair to force Devs to use a specific service. It's perfectly fine to force users to use a specific service."
Better than Apple in 1/2 ways at least ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Oh sure, I do want Epic to win that fight for sure. I just also want EGS to fail.
I'm not as salty about EGS as a lot of PC gamers seem to be.
......... But god damn is their default client trash.
Thank fuck for Heroic Launcher on Linux (I think it even got a Windows version?)
But honestly, people complain about exclusivity, and seem to not realise (or care?) that certain games would not exist without this kind of funding deal. They are only funded by the platform that pays for their exclusivity. If you want to be mad at something, don't be mad at the devs, don't even be mad at Epic, be mad at Capitalism as an institution, which rules that art needs money to exist.
You point out that the game wouldn't exist without exclusivity but then immediately point out that it totally could exist if the profit motive did not run our economy.
The existence of exclusives is a form of cultural capture by capitalists (As is copyright). I would argue that it would indeed be better if Alan Wake 2 was never made if it meant that exclusives stopped being made entirely, and Alan Wake 2 looks like a game I absolutely want to play.
Epic paid them a bunch of money for the exclusivity. Money they needed to produce the game. Remedy needs the money upfront. And Epic takes less of a cut than Steam.
I feel like you're mad at the wrong people?
The formula goes like this:
Sony's had great success when they started bringing first-party titles to PC. Square is feeling the squeeze after the disappointing sales of the FFVII remakes. DARQ's developer rejected third-party exclusivity and was met with praise and sales exceeding expectations.
The fact is, some people will never consider buying on EGS. Whether their reasons are legitimate or not is irrelevant. It is only by the choice of one ~~man~~ overgrown man-child that both Epic and Remedy are kept from greater sales and greater profits.
Sony releasing games on PC yet region locking them to countries with PSN access is beyond absurd.
It's almost like they hate money.
"epic takes less of a cut" yeah but they're getting 0 right now because they don't get any money at all from it until the money upfront is earned back by epic which at this rate they're not going to so while remedy got the money to make the game I don't think they'll ever see another penny for it
store simping is really cringe ngl
Is it simping when Steam is just better though? So many useful things that Epic doesn't have. Especially on the Linux side.
Call me crazy, but I don't like it when somebody tries to hold me hostage and force me to do things their way..
My main gripe with it being on EGS is I just don’t know when it’s on sale. For Steam games I can add to my wishlist and get notified when a game comes on sale. If I can’t do that for a particular game I tend to forget it exists.
I can imagine Epic aren’t too concerned about sales, the funding probably comes from the same bucket that funds all those free games. The long term vision of getting to make EGS a think trumps short term profits.
From the article you posted nobody at Remedy complained that the game was underperforming because of Steam nor does Epic grant them any continuous revenue stream that they would rely on beyond AW2 shipping.
Remedy employs 300+ highly skilled and paid people in one of the countries with the highest standards of living while having no access to your live service cosmetics battle pass skibidi money. This means they HAVE to have upfront cash somewhere in the loop because they happen to make very technically bespoke, well crafted titles take years to make. That's the same reason why Tencent has a minority share in 80% of VG companies you know at this point - including Remedy - one time purchases just don't do the trick anymore if you want to even ship a game, especially if you don't crowd it with scammy monetization.
It's one thing not to like some frontend (and yea EGS is ass on many accounts) but blaming a company for making a sound business decision by safeguarding their ability to produce games that are very much a lost best from a purely financial standpoint is seriously odd. It's not just Alan Wake - do you know the proportion of game time players have spent on titles released in 2023 or 2024 during those same years? It's less than 10% - nearly all the rest is live service. Within that same group you're fighting against your BG3s (you know, the same game that was nearly cancelled because Larian was strapped for cash) and any other solo game that happened to be successful. It's dire.
Nobody at Remedy is pretending EGS is the better platform, seeing this under any other lens than basic business logic is honestly weird. Wanna know why anyone would sign an exclusivity deal with Epic? Just look at the state of the games industry.