There really isn’t.
Some of us just have issues with Epic Games. Some others have issues with Valve.
No private company is really “good.”
But the argument with Epic is things like:
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They brought “exclusives” to PC gaming for the first time. Previously, a PC game was a PC game, and it didn’t matter what storefront you bought it from, because it was available at all storefronts. Epic chose to pay companies to restrict their titles just to Epic, in an attempt to move the market towards them.
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In a similar vein, trying to fight Valve’s dominance, they started giving away free games. They have been firing people left and right because their financials are in the toilet, and yet they’re still pissing away money on free games and exclusives to their store.
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People who care about access to music and paying artists hate them because they have effectively put a death warrant on Bandcamp, buying them for two years, doing nothing with the product, and then selling it to Hedge Fund fuckies who already shitcanned half the staff and the site is officially on life support. They basically killed the last place you could buy music and make sure all the proceeds went to the artist and not a middle man (Bandcamp Fridays).
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During all of this, they refused to spend any money on actually improving their fucking game store. Things that have been staples of Steam for a decade now are still on a waiting list of features to be added. The User Experience for Epic Games Store is just bad, bad, bad, bad. There’s no excuse for it, especially when they chose to piss money away on exclusives and free games instead of paying people to produce a better product than Valve has. They refused to even try to release a better product, believing they could buy their way to dominance.
Do you really want to support a company that doesn’t give a flying fuck about your user experience as a customer and has such bad business plans that they’re letting go tons of staff? It’s bad enough that they had a bad business plan, but it also seems like they’re not very good to their employees, either. Compared to Valve’s “flat” management where there are no managers, or where Newell famously paid the writer for Portal to “be sick” for two years while he had a serious disease. “Your job here at Valve is to get better.” This was before he wrote Portal, no less.
One company clearly cares about the user experience that their users experience, and one clearly cares about using every tool at their disposal to be the top of the market, everything from paying for exclusives and free games to suing in court to try to carve out a niche for yourself where you don’t have to pay vendor fees.
cottonmon@lemmy.world 6 months ago
An important detail regarding exclusivity. What made a ton of people pissed off (and justifiably so, in my opinion) is that they bought exclusivity for games that were kickstarted which resulted in the option for Steam keys being removed for these games.
Squid@leminal.space 6 months ago
Heard this had even killed projects