Games

Epic Games is useful for the free games they giveaway every week, some weeks better than others. And I know the topic of ownership of these "free games" is another conversation, but I'll take advantage of it while it's there and also while giving them little to no money.

Nothing is wrong with it. It is just another games store.

Just my personal opinion

The good clearly are the free games and that some games go cheaper there, they have better sales sometimes. The bad is that the store is badly optimized. The UI is annoying, no cloud saves for a lot of games. As of recently there were no achievements or even a cart, but they have that now which is good. The friends tab is bare bones still. They have aggressive DRM. For some reason it's a pain in the ass to log in, but that might be just on my end.

Now with GOG, you don't have DRM, you can integrate all launchers so you can launch all the games from one, which for me, is pretty useful. GOG has great deals. The bad is that the ui as well is kind of bare bones, but i don't know, they are not trying to take over the market and their store works very well.

As of steam i don't need to say anything, everything is in there. If you play on linux you basically will get every game from steam. They have the most robust launcher with the most options, etc.

That said, personally I use the three of them. Gog primarily since i can launch everything from there and if i find a game in there, i'd rather get it from them. But i've found sales on epic too good to let go so i play those games there. For me it depends on what they're offering, but for some reason i really dislike Epic's layout and ui, i feel like it is very annoying and that it is missing a lot.

As someone who seldom plays with friends (I have very few who want to play online), I just pick the store where the games are the cheapest or there's a sale or something. It doesn't really affect me that much.

But if all your friends are on steam, then check before getting a game on Epic, sometimes they don't let you play together. Most of the time they do, though.

As for minor issues, EGS does not have feature parity with Steam or GOG. They don't have user reviews, for example. This makes it a worse user experience.

More importantly, Epic has a habit of anti-competitive or anti-consumer behavior. When EGS first launched, they were keen on doing console-style timed exclusives, even for games that were already purchasable on platforms like Steam.

Lastly, Epic has a history of neglecting or shutting down games. A few of their older games were taken offline permanently when Fortnite started gaining traction. They then purchased a few studios, namely Psyonix (makers of Rocket League), Mediatonic (Fall Guys), and Harmonix (Rock Band/Guitar Hero series). These studios seem to be a shell of what they used to be. Psyonix's first major project under Epic was Rocket Racing in Fortnite, and this project seemed to be prioritized over Rocket League and even caused the removal of core features of Rocket League. Harmonix worked on Fortnite Festival, but that came at the cost of Fuser, which shut down and was delisted about a year after launch. As for Mediatonic, I don't think they worked on anything else yet, but a large portion of the studio was recently laid off. Needless to say, fans of the affected studios aren't happy with Epic as they're being treated as 2nd-class citizens compared to Fortnite players.

Epic’s customer service sucks. Consider my last experience from a prior xmas sale:

• had multiple games in the cart with discounts applied, checked out with paypal, but for whatever reason the communication broke and didn’t go through
• my cart then got stuck in a limbo where I couldn’t check out with any method to receive the discounts, everything was full price again
• opened a customer support ticket to get the problem resolved, then went through 3 days of back and forth, explaining the situation over and over because
  • each of your replies are handled by whoever the next agent is
  • who apparently don’t read any history of the ticket, so they provide feedback or advice that already didn’t work
  • and it can take a full 24 hours or more to get a reply that ignores all previous replies
• by the time the error was resolved by a competent person, the sale was over by only a few hours
• despite the fact that I only missed the sale window because their reps were incompetent, they refused to make any exceptions to apply the sale prices I had been trying to checkout for 3 days

So, fuck them. I only claim free games from them now.

And I concur with problems other people have mentioned.