To my knowledge you still can’t easily discover / reuse existing game files, the launcher usually redownloads them anyways.
Even the Xbox app supports this (for most games)
Comment on I'm a console gamer so, Why the hate on the Epic Games Store?
commander@lemmy.world 2 days ago
It’s been I think about 7 years and it’s not feature competitive for end users with 2011 Steam even though they definitely make more money than 2004-2011 Valve and by 2018 had 14 years of history to look at and feature target based off what competition offered
The CEO was regularly on Twitter complaining about Windows but refused to help grow Linux adoption. Valve has been doing that since like 2012. He constantly talks about standing with small developers but then in the Apple court case admits they would have been quiet if Apple gave them a special revenue split deal. He complains about Steam and mobile store cuts but doesn’t complain about consoles having the same.
Exclusive deals in lieu of providing a better experience for the end user. Talked up so much about being superior because they’re developer focused; didn’t have self publishing tools until the end of 2023 - 5 years after EGS launched. It’s been 7 years. They haven’t made PC gaming any better. They made it worse for a time when they were throwing cash at exclusives rather than store platform feature development
Recent example of how bad they are with pushing minimal viable products. EGS mobile store was launched the beginning of this year with no library view. You just scroll up and down, side to side looking for games you own mixed among games you don’t own. Their concept of minimal viable product is insanely mediocre for how vocal the CEO is and how much money they make and their turnaround time on improving these stores is awful.
There are numerous Android storefronts that don’t have Unreal Engine and Fortnite money keeping the companies funded and somehow Epic comes out the gate mediocre again where it’s marketing is free games but it’s mobile games so what’s available is way less headline worthy. They learned nothing from 2018 about the difference between what they consider a minimal viable product and what the market would consider a market competitive minimal viable product
Years ago Epic put out a kanban board to display a public feature development tracker to assure people they were working on improving the store. They abandoned that quick and I’m pretty sure what few they had on that, most still haven’t been implemented
Their support for handheld is at the level of GOG which barely markets itself and is pretty low revenue as it rarely gets any games that aren’t years old. Whether Windows or Linux, Epic for all their billions haven’t created a gamepad/TV centric interface
The CEO is a regular blowhard virtue signalling about liberty/freedom on Twitter but can’t be bothered to try and pioneer anything for users as a storefront. Since 2018 EGS has been so stagnant while Valve has been expanding Steam as a platform, that EGS is less relevant to me today than when they were throwing out major free games every month. I have no faith in the platform to integrate WINE/Proton, put together a TV/gamepad interface, do something like Steam curators, comparable user review system, crowd sourced game tags - a lot of useless stuff makes it in those but I find them regularly useful at a glance as it’s usually pretty obvious which are probably jokes and which are probably legit
To my knowledge you still can’t easily discover / reuse existing game files, the launcher usually redownloads them anyways.
Even the Xbox app supports this (for most games)
I just went through this yesterday! I did a big upgrade on my wife’s computer, fresh install of Windows on a 2TB NVMe drive replacing the aging 120GB SSD that somehow didn’t completely fill up, etc. Etc. really loved pointing epic at the installs on the secondary drive and it just ignoring them and instead spending 3 hours downloading Fortnite after we just spent 1 hour applying the last update yesterday (and another hour on a different update the day before too!) on the drive that’s RIGHT THERE IN THE COMPUTER!
I’m pretty sure Steam has been able to do that since launch, though I do remember the legendary loading bar that would progress then regress then progress and regress all with the same text message there so it wasn’t perfect in 2003. Roller coaster early on but by like 2007 it was pretty solid
I’m pretty sure EA Origin was able to do that day one or within a year of release. Origin was OK from what I remember just that it took stayed stagnant and I’m guessing onboarding games to the platform being a terrible process considering how sparse releases were on there
Steam is a mature platform. It doesn’t roll out new user facing features often. Yet somehow I think the gap has widened since 2018 vs EGS
And Epic has had a lot more financial resources available when they launched their store. Estimated valuation of $15 billion in 2018, Valve’s was half that in 2022.
I don’t really see an excuse for Epic to have ever had missing features, they entered the market with plenty of templates for what does and doesn’t work
Iirc the epic store didn’t even launch with a cart
Monomate@lemm.ee 2 days ago
I find EGS launcher to be incredibly slow, so I don’t even bother claiming their free games using it. I use the browser instead. The annoying part is EGS launcher will prompt my 2FA if I don’t open it at least monthly, which is also too much of a bother.