They both suck and neither deserves your money.
I disagree. The amount of support Valve gives to Linux is not something you can ignore. They ultimately do it to sell Steam decks but Linux users still benefit from the work Valve does. If you want to believe they both suck then feel free to believe that, but don’t forget that one of them (Valve) sucks significantly less than any other online store.
Redeem all free games from Epic. Never install their launcher. You get a free library to use with Geforce Now.
Got 347 games on there atm. I paid for four of them (Outer Wilds + DLC, Journey to the Savage Planet, Untitled Goose Game and Tetris Effect).
Duuuuude this is the way
GeForce
cries in Radeon
I’m still gonna take it though. Free is free.
And for that price I’ll jump through some minor hoops to get them onto my Steam Deck.
It’s surprisingly easy. Just install Lutris and than Epic via Lutris with Proton as runner and you’re good to go. I wouldn’t have thought it works just like that.
Never going to be able to play more than a small percentage of my library anyway, might as well add another game to the pile.
I’ve got so many free games at this point that when a favorite YouTuber like Oboeshoegames does a video on an old game and it looks good, quite often I already have it.
yeah i don’t get the hate for the epic store, who tf is annoyed by free games. And the Store isn’t that bad sure it doesn’t have as many functions as steam, but thats not necessarily bad steam has a lot of useless stuff. As a store the experience with epic is much more streamlined
Epic Games hasn’t done it much lately, but when they first launched they paid a few big games to be Epic Games Store exclusives which is obviously anti-consumer behaviour. That and they’re owned by China, so the chances of your data being funneled out to China is practically 100%. Also, Epic has historically been critical of gaming on Linux with the CEO going so far as to say that Linux users are a bunch of whiners and that Epic will never support Linux just to spite them. A very immature response to say the least.
Ah yes the completly new anti-consumer method of exclusives that Epic invented and only Epic does, it totally hasn’t been around since the start of gaming or something.
…so because Epic didn’t invent the anti-consumer practice, that means it’s fine for them to use it? Weird take.
Tencent owns a 40% share of epic. While that is really considerable, it does not mean they are “owned by China”. Tim Sweeney is the majority shareholder.
How much of Steam is owned by China?
How is that relevant?
Epic Games hasn’t done it much lately, but when they first launched they paid a few big games to be Epic Games Store exclusives which is obviously anti-consumer behaviour.
Exclusivity deals on their own were pretty bad, but what really pissed people off was that some of the games that were made exclusive were crowdfunded.
The Data collection would be a solid point, but the people who loudly voice that concern are normally the people who have 500+ hours in LoL, Valo, Clash of Clans, Clash Royal etc., all of them from companies that are mostly/ completely (Riot Games 100%,Supercell 85%) owned by tencent, while they own less than 50% of Epic, yet for some reason the possibility of data collected by China is only a big problem for people, when it comes to Epic Games.
Also as a european, i don’t really care if the Data gets funneled to the USA or China, both equally bad imo.
Also as a european, i don’t really care if the Data gets funneled to the USA or China, both equally bad imo.
This is super off-topic but since you have a more reasonable stance on this than I usually see in the wild, I need to ask: Do you truly think the US is no worse than China or are you speaking in terms of impact on your life personally? (the latter would be fair in this context too, just wondering)
That and they’re owned by China, so the chances of your data being funneled out to China is practically 100%
a) Tencent has a minority share b) what the fuck is China going to do with my data? Target ads a little more precisely the one time a year I go on newegg or whatever? Shouldn’t you be much more concerned about an entity like Amazon, Google, or Microsoft having that information? And it’s not like at least two of those don’t have a history of working with the US government and others, i.e. governments that actually impact your life.
You can only like one thing, thems the rules
Xbox or playstation, coke or Pepsi, dicks or puss
Then you have to go online and talk shit about the ones you didn’t pick.
It’s in the bible.
First impressions matter and Epic fucked up big time when they launched the store. There were a lot of missing features that were available on other storefronts and it was a pain to use. Another thing that really pissed people off was when they made exclusivity deals for games that were crowdfunded. A lot of people did not like that they lost the ability to play on a platform that they preferred when they directly contributed to a game being made. It was also scummy to make deals for games that were already announced on Steam (i.e. Metro: Exodus, Darq) While the store is better now and they’re funding games instead of making exclusivity deals, there is a reason why a lot of people do not trust Epic or continue to dislike them despite the free games.
Yeah… I still remember when they gave a game away by mistake (it simply had a price tag of 0 dollars) and took it back right after saying that they would have let users keep it if they did such mistake. That’s funny
For me, the main concern is that Epic doesn’t have a system of purchasable keys, even after all these years. Most stores in PC have had a system with keys that has allowed users to purchase games from 3d party sites such as GreenManGaming and the like. That system has been one of the key reasons why prices have stayed in check in the platform, and why cool stuff like HumbleBundles exists.
Without this kind of system, every time a game is exclusive to the Epic platform, it, in effect, has a single price point with no possible competition or alternative, which is no different than a console ecosystem… And a lot of the pricing on those is not great, to say the least.
Until they have that, supporting the growth and consolidation of that store would be potentially shooting myself in the foot as a consumer.
EDIT - Turns out, I had my info somewhat outdated, this was introduced at some point recently, at least with some retailers.
However, on second check it doesn’t apply to games with Epic Store exclusivity, apparently (or at least the ones I’ve checked). It seems to only apply to games that are not exclusive. So concern still valid, unfortunately.
If someone has more info about it I’d love to hear it because it looks unclear at the moment.
And being against them is centralising the market in Valve’s hands, which is exactly what people feared would happen when they released Steam and started having games release exclusively on their platform.
They give a better share of sales to the devs and also guarantee revenues, which means some games would never have seen the light of day/some devs would have gone bankrupt without Epic supporting them.
So by not supporting them you’re also sitting yourself in the foot.
Oh and by the way, Epic’s free games are DRM free in the vast majority of cases… Guess that’s a bad thing too for some reason?
Store doesn’t even work on Linux
No offense but if you’re seriously using Linux for gaming than then idk what to tell you most games don’t even support Linux and those who do normally stop after a while f.e. Rocket League even years before Epic got involved
Steam Deck runs on Linux, maybe think for a moment before pulling bs arguments from your behind.
PS5 runs on BSD
Where have you been the last couple of years? Thanks to steam and their fork of wine you can play a large chunk of games on Linux.
Just use the store in the browser. And if you meant the client, it’s garbage anyways. I’m happy with Heroic Launcher. I take the free games and just never spend a dime with them. Fools
Oh my fucking god Lemmy, enough with the Linux. Every thread with the Linux.
You are annoyed that an open source website populated by nerds has a lot of Linux users?
i use pop os btw
What do you think Lemmy servers run on? What do you think the developers who made Lemmy use? I’ll give you a hint, it’s the thing you want people to stop talking about
No.
WE NEED MORE LINUX
What’s the issue with it?
Go use xitter or threads then.
yeah Linux makes sense in an Tech/IT working environment, but thats it. And people here act like it’s a wonder thing that can do anything, when its in reality lacking a lot.
Are industry standard programms like Microsoft Office or Adobe Suite etc. supported No? then it’s completely useless for 90% of the working environments. Do games support it? Only some? most of them in a inferior version than the windows counterparts, well then its useless for gaming too.
UX is way better on Windows too because it’s less complicated
Some of us are more than willing to deal with rough edges to not be spied on and dicked around by Microsoft and other “black box” software. I’ve been using it on my personal desktop for 20 years just fine. There are enough open source PDF viewers now that I don’t need Adobe’s bloated horseshit, and LibreOffice opens MS Office shit just fine.
Proton for gaming is only getting better every day, not worse. You should have seen the scene in say, 2002. Where in 2023, 90% of them will run mostly fine, back then it was basically zero except for Quake and Unreal Tournament native ports.
Completely wrong. Most people don’t need any of those software for their day to day life. Everybody needs freedom though…
This whole thing runs on FOSS.
The Linux, must be cousin of the Gary
The Lord Commander
Thats news to me since I am using it just fine on Linux through bottles.
You can usr Heroic Launcher. Works fine on Steam Deck.
Oh no! It doesn’t work on a platform that’s used by… let me check… 1.44% of Steam’s userbase!
Get over it, Linux users don’t represent a big enough base to bother, that’s it, that’s all.
Steam Deck begs to differ
It’s public data… It has increased 0.4% in a year and was going down from 2014 to 2018. Heck, is only 0.3% higher than in 2014!
Now, how much work and money did it require to get that 1.44% and how many of them are people that wouldn’t have otherwise installed Steam on a Windows partition?
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam
No, Linux support is not worth the trouble, nor is OSX support, except to be the only platform to cater to that market.
Yes Linux support is not worth the trouble until you see the Epic Games launche is a CEF, that is literally a web app running in a browser and hear me out CEF is designed to be cross-platform.
The only thing they should do is ship the app for linux and maybe add a proton menu in the settings and that’s it! Valve as done most of the work for them.
Totally. Let’s just stick with our corporate overlords. Market share can’t be changed by people making better decisions.
Edit: also, “market share” in the context of FOSS is pretty silly. For all we know, most Linux users spoof the user agent.
For all we know, most Linux users spoof the user agent.Really? That’s the argument you’re going for?
Okay but like, you asked why people don’t like Epic Store, then told them to get over it… now you see why people don’t like Epic Store bootlickers either
I never asked why, try to follow the discussion, someone else was.
Tencent, a Chinese company is a major owner of Epic. Westerners simply hate Chinese owned tech due to political reasons. Huawei and especially TikTok are other examples.
I hate Tiktok because it’s spyware. Show me the source code to prove me wrong.
I hate Epic because they abandoned the Unreal and Unreal Tournament series, delisted from any store(including single player games) and turned off the Master Server preventing official multiplayer.
I hate AAA game developers because of what the MBAs did to milk every cent of out of their customers.
Y’know, back in the day, we’d have friends that were Muslim or gay, that would have bullies around at school trying to beat them up. We’d call the bullies assholes, break their legs, and tell them to change their stance or have their arms broken next.
Now, because those bullies happen to wear a suit and make speeches on government TV, and also want to ship our gay and Muslim friends off to prisons, hating them is considered “political”. Or, they highlight their own race and say we’re being “xenophobic”. Or, they simply lie and say that there is no genocide going on.
Man, can’t we just go back to breaking legs when assholes become religiously intolerant?
Or, they simply lie and say that there is no genocide going on.
Even state department mouthpieces have walked back the lie of there being a genocide in Xinjiang. Leave it to Redditors to be to the right of the state department.
Yes, purely political reasons, there is no other reason to be wary of proprietary chinese software.
Of course there are other concerns but politics is the main one. There’s little reason to think for example Samsung, Instagram or even Steam are any more safer than the previously mentioned Chinese owned alternatives. They all collect, store and sell every bit of data they possibly can benefit from.
Your examples are a bit odd, people constantly bitch about everything Samsung and Meta do, to the degree that even tech philistines are aware of it. Tencent is, in most of the ways that matter, just a branch of the Chinese government and a severe privacy violator in more tangible ways than ad space profitability improvements. Steam rarely jails people, Chinese companies phoning home helps do just that.
China is going to put me, an American in America, in jail using a game launcher?
Do you intend to visit china after disparaging it?
hmm, I guess it depends on your definition of disparage, but the thing is that even if I was out here in America hawking the most shameless bullshit, China wouldn’t do shit when I visited short of question me a bit harder in customs because arresting me for pretty benign actions I took in another country as someone with no affiliation with China would typically be considered kidnapping under international law. Of course, America calls most instances of its enemies arresting its citizens kidnapping, but China rarely arrests Americans (including when tourism to China was higher) or foreign citizens in general.
Reddit geopolitics work a lot better when they stick to vague insinuations and cartoonish hyperbole, because when you drill down and try to set realistic expectations based on the information available, it falls apart completely.
Mass surveillance and flagrant human rights violations are now “”““political reasons.””“” In other news, nothing happened at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.
Lots of things happened in the square at that time, as the Chinese government discussed on TV the following days. One thing that did not happen was people dying, though some were struck with batons to force them to disperse after they declined to follow the demand to disperse (most left peacefully).
Oh, those must have been massage tanks.
Redditors will believe anything that supports “China bad,” even silly lies that were debunked decades ago. Here are some different testimonies from student leaders of the protests. You tell me what seems credible.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=Vu3zmbFGwQA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Also wanting to paint any company negatively compared to motherfucking lootbox/DRM Valve the demon is hilarious XD
First-class Linux support from Steam means they’ll get my support every time over Epic.
deleted by creator
Even worse, Epic’s been dropping linux support from games they buy and then they prevent others from implementing it by not supporting it in their launcher and EAC
deleted by creator
I know what he wants. I also know that I want candy.
More like Costco selling hotdogs at a loss to get people to leave the store with a television.
Just get the hotdogs and leave.
Then you’re still driving to Costco just to get hotdogs, which means you’re putting more resources into using their deal than would be needed to just buy and make your own hotdogs.
Are we still in the analogy or are we strictly talking about Costco now? 🤔
Yep. This would be installing and dedicating space to the Epic launcher, and maintaining an account and its credentials.
Wow, so much work for thousands of dollars worth of games!
Man, if only there was another way to get free games…
C’mon now. 🤨
You people are nuts lol. I don’t like Epic either, but if you think buying a $60 game is somehow less work than just claiming a free game, you’re delusional. $60 is at least several hours worth of literally working for the vast majority of us, whereas a miniscule amount of hard drive space and a one-time affair of setting up an account is a non-issue. Especially if you use a password manager (as you should), then you don’t even need to remember the password.
There are plenty of reasons to hate Epic, stop making up bad ones.
But the hotdogs are right next to their hvac guy, and tubes of meat and regrettable decisions tend to go hand in hand for me.
Now that’s relatable.
Can’t hear anything over the exclusives
Remember folks, if the product or service is free to use, it’s likely the actual product is you and your data.
In this case I think it’s mostly to get people to use the App regularely and so expose more people to the store.
It’s usually both. It’s like cable TV; pay money for the service and still watch ads.
That’s not mutually exclusive to datamining though*. Yes they have a product in their stores, but the customers are unwitting products (to another customer-group) themselves (tbf this happens a lot, which does NOT make it ok however)
*not saying this happens, I don’t know if the EPIC store datamines, I have never used it as I am on linux so I may as well not exist to EPIC
Honestly though, peoples priorities are wierd. Refuse to use Epic while handing over waaayy more sensitive data to Google.
If you’re concerned about data collection, start with changing your search engine. Then maybe your browser. Then your email provider…
(Written from GrapheneOS)
I have a Epic acciunt and claim all the free games. No play time. The intention is just to do what I can to hurt them economically. Hopefully the creators of the games akao get something.
They either get a cut per game, which is unlikely, or they get a flat rate regardless. Either way, it won’t hurt the developers. Also even if it isn’t actually hurting epic, these corporate ghouls will still look at each game as a loss and get butthurt. So it’s really a win win.
Still i will take it even if the small % of game(s) will be paid by Epic (essentially it will be paid by parents of all fortnite kids/teens). Btw I’m not sure if the money offered for being an exclusive is enough to compensate the sale that it would make on steam. Even blizzard is moving to steam at this point.
Hasn’t Epic mostly stopped the exclusivity program? I think a couple publishers like Deep Silver still do timed Epic exclusivity, but I don’t remember them making any new deals in a long time
I think they’re funding games now so that there’s less backlash to exclusivity.
Star Trek Resurgence is a recent Epic exclusive but you’re right they’re not too common thankfully.
Good: Steam offers you a discount.
Bad: It’s only for an EA or UbiSoft game.
When I had an old slow computer I hated using extra launchers for everything, heck I even kept steam closed when I didn’t need it to save resources. But now I have something half decent I don’t mind having a couple running in the background
I’m old and out-of-the-loop. What are they giving away? I dont see it on their website. But again, I’m old. And kind of stupid.
You have to install their launcher afaik.
They periodically give away games in the store there.
Right now it looks like Elder Scrolls Online.
But they occasionally give away halfway-decent games like in the past I’ve seen The Witcher 3, Civ 6, Death Stranding, StarWars Battlefront II, etc.New one every two weeks. Some good games too, never buying anything from them but I’ll keep the games.
Pretty invasive company. Im with you though. Take what you can get. Makese curious what they do with personal data, though.
I don’t think personal data has much to do with it, if anything at all. This is just their marketing budget meant to get you on the store, so once you grab a couple of free games, you might start buying games from them, too.
Every week
It’a a no-brainer when they’re legit buy-to-pay games and not games-as-service. My only problem is that they keep giving away games that I already paid for on Steam, like Witcher 3, Civ 6, Mordhau. I missed out on death stranding, apparently.
You don’t need to install the launcher anymore. Heroic launcher can run most of your epic store games. (both on Windows and Linux!)
So enjoy the games without the major privacy concerns
don’t be so hard on yourself. over time, we all just stop paying so much attention to every single internet drama, it’s tiring and we have better stuff to do.
and the point is that epic games has been really liberal with the freebies for their users ever since they set up shop as a competitor to steam. they give away a game every couple of weeks and even more on certain special seasons, including triple a games. someone following them since the begging must have a library well over a hundred games now, completely for free. despite that, they are finding very hard to find sympathy and market share among certain sectors of the gaming community, because their store is just not at the level of steam and some other questionable practices, even so far as to still be operating at a loss even now years later. you can see the giveaway games just below the current discounts at the home page or in the free games page almost at the top https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/free-games and of you use telegram there’s a channel that notify you every time there’s something new for free https://t.me/epicfreegames
Epic gets respect from me for fucking with Apple but that’s about it.
Thanks for taking the time to explain, that was very informative. I’m not hard on myself, btw. Im a 45 year old white guy who thinks he’s hot shit. Thanks for the encouragement, though.
This is great information, thanks for sharing. Could you elaborate on “questionable practices”? I’m aware of locking certain games out of steam for some time (borderlands 3 for example). Is there more I didn’t know about?
Key statement here - “operating at a loss”. Interest rates are climbing and cheap capital is a thing of the past now. They need to become profitable. If they don’t, the Epic Store and all those libraries of free games might just disappear.
Any one company is at risk of this as well, but Valve has been doing this for a long time, so they’ve built trust.
I remember a comment on reddit years ago where someone was saying they’d rather buy a game on stadia than geforce now, because hey, it’s not like google is going anywhere, right?
I tried to warn them.
I think that I forgot to say it at the time, but thanks for your response. You helped to clarify the issue for me.
There’s lists online of all the titles if you are curious. You might be lucky and see some of them again, it happened a few times that they brought back previously given games, too :)
“every couple of weeks”
As in…a new game ever Thursday for years with a couple of repeats here and there?
They also don’t operate at a loss, it’s the marketing budget that they redirected.
On the Epic Games Store they always have one or two games that users can claim for free (and keep forever). They change the games they offer for free every few weeks or so (or on some holidays even daily). Sometimes these are really awesome ones and sometimes they suck :) Currently you can get The Elder Scrolls Online for free. They are doing this for some years now and now I have a huge selection of games that I haven’t payed a single dollar for.
Thanks, man. Shit, I had no idea. I need to get in on that
It’s been going literally since it launched. It’s given away some truly excellent games
I am not a smart man and I rarely adopt new things, so I want you to know that I am not trying to be ironic or shitty when I say that I aoreciate your help.
Every week
Currently: Murder by Numbers and Elder Scrolls Online
Tomorrow: Home World Remastered Collection and Severed SteelThey give away two games every week https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/free-games
Steam: supports all PC platforms
Epic Game: supports only cringe
Compared to stuff like GoG, where multiple open source launchers exist. Those launchers work with steam too, but you are required to have the proprietary Steam launcher installed.
Epic Games murdered Fall Guys
Valve murdered half life.
Each and every one
