I by no means have a raging hate-boner for Epic or anything, but they’ve definitely done enough to irritate me to the point where I haven’t even bothered with the store for the free games.
It started off poorly with the store launching in such a bad state that it would’ve failed the HTML class I took in high school (it didn’t even have a cart. How can you launch a shopping site without even having the ability for people to buy more than one item at a time? I learned how to program that in 2007!) and it went downhill from there with stuff like the exclusivity deals and that sale they did where they marked 30% off on games that hadn’t even released yet, without even telling the developers or asking permission. Then they’ve rushed to embrace pretty muchthing I’ve praised Valve for refusing to deal with, from NFT games to AI that may or may not be violating copyright laws with the stuff making up the learning databases.
Plenty to criticise, but I’m getting tired of watching them try to shove their foot back into their mouth.
You gotta look at the good and the bad for both Epic and Valve, though.
The bad that Valve did is largely in the past, but they really, really pissed people off when they forced Steam upon people back in the day. They took games that people had already bought, and were already playing, and then suddenly moved them behind a service that required an account, removed consumer rights that were present when the games were originally sold, and was (at the time) horribly unreliable and generally shitty. Consumers at the time wanted Steam to die off, similar to how they’re hoping for EGS to go away now. Would we have been better off if Steam had died off when it pissed off all those consumers?
Valve has of course done a lot of good since then, but Epic has done a lot of good in the past and presently as well. Their grants are quite generous, and Epic has generally been viewed as a force for good in the gaming industry for years (see old interviews with other industry figures like Carmack, notes from when Sweeney received his Lifetime Achievement Award at GDC 2017, etc.).
I by no means have a raging hate-boner for Epic or anything, but they’ve definitely done enough to irritate me to the point where I haven’t even bothered with the store for the free games.
It started off poorly with the store launching in such a bad state that it would’ve failed the HTML class I took in high school (it didn’t even have a cart. How can you launch a shopping site without even having the ability for people to buy more than one item at a time? I learned how to program that in 2007!) and it went downhill from there with stuff like the exclusivity deals and that sale they did where they marked 30% off on games that hadn’t even released yet, without even telling the developers or asking permission. Then they’ve rushed to embrace pretty muchthing I’ve praised Valve for refusing to deal with, from NFT games to AI that may or may not be violating copyright laws with the stuff making up the learning databases.
Plenty to criticise, but I’m getting tired of watching them try to shove their foot back into their mouth.
You gotta look at the good and the bad for both Epic and Valve, though.
The bad that Valve did is largely in the past, but they really, really pissed people off when they forced Steam upon people back in the day. They took games that people had already bought, and were already playing, and then suddenly moved them behind a service that required an account, removed consumer rights that were present when the games were originally sold, and was (at the time) horribly unreliable and generally shitty. Consumers at the time wanted Steam to die off, similar to how they’re hoping for EGS to go away now. Would we have been better off if Steam had died off when it pissed off all those consumers?
Valve has of course done a lot of good since then, but Epic has done a lot of good in the past and presently as well. Their grants are quite generous, and Epic has generally been viewed as a force for good in the gaming industry for years (see old interviews with other industry figures like Carmack, notes from when Sweeney received his Lifetime Achievement Award at GDC 2017, etc.).
They’re both kinda assholes and good guys, IMO.