I can’t seem to find that one comment explaining the issue with them…
But for the sake of promoting conversation on Lemmy, what’s the issue with Epic, and why should I go for Steam or GoG?
Note: Piracy is not an answer. I understand why, and do agree to a certain extent… But sometimes, the happiness gained by playing something from a legitimate source is far greater 🥹… coming from someone who could never ever afford to purchase games, nor could my parents… Hence I’ve always played bootleg, or pirated games.
TL;DR
What’s wrong?
- Their launcher has a terrible UI AND UX.
- They make exclusive deals with studios to prevent other platforms from getting games. (Someone mentioned that Steam did the same thing in their infancy. Also, I have another question; why is it ok for Sony and Microsoft to make exclusive games for their consoles but not ok for these PC platforms to do so?)
- They have been invested in by a Chinese company, Tencent. (Someone mentioned that it isn’t that big of a deal, but idk.)
- They are actively anti-linux for some reason.
Epic is the worst of the 3 platforms for a user. It is a drm like steam, but with less games on it, and even less optimized (so even more wasted resources and time loading useless advertising).
Steam has it that is makes game run on Linux smoothly, and the biggest library of games. Gog is drm free. Epic has absolutely nothing a user may want, except for free games so that you are now captive of their shitty platform.
This. Steam also offers reviews, achievements, workshop, communities, groups, streaming, etc, etc
Epic doesn’t have to be as good as Steam; it has to be better than Steam. People don’t up and leave platforms they like for new platforms for no reason. Epic can take a smaller cut on games but if that doesn’t carry to the end user why should I care.
At this point, I don’t know if Epic can get better than Steam in the ways that matter simply because they are clearly trying very hard to gain a dominant market position in ways that make it seem like they would abuse such a position, while Valve has had that dominant position for decades without abusing it. Valve is one of the few companies I trust these days. That trust is Valve’s to lose, not any other competitor’s to gain, though I am open to other adjacent providers (like I’ve got an xbox game pass sub, a ps5, and switch).
So much this!
I have zero experience with epic or gog, but steam got incredibly bad lately. It’s not uncomon for it to consume 2 entire CPU cores just by animating some store page background.
Steam has always been rather bad on performances, but epic somehow managed to do worse.