Comment on What's up with Epic Games?

UprisingVoltage@feddit.it ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• Alto@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Valve is what happens when someone who's not just outright fucking evil invents a money printing machine

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  • MudMan@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah, and somehow they managed to invent like 90% of all "evil" MTX and DRM in the process, take a bigger cut than competitors and actively reject having a returns policy until pushed by regulators and competitors, all the while being super not evil.

    It's a fine line to walk, that.

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    • ono@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      somehow they managed to invent like 90% of all “evil” MTX and DRM in the process

      Having worked with DRM systems since long before Valve existed, I’m reasonably certain this is just plain false.

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      • Transtronaut@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Yeah, and I don’t remember Half-life being the game that introduced the world to horse armor.

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      • Chailles@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Not to mention that Steamworks DRM is practically non-existent anyways.

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      • MudMan@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Blending the storefront with a DRM solution? No, that was them.

        That's their entire call to fame. They first turned their auto-patcher into a DRM service, then they enforced authorization of physical copies through it and eventually it became the storefront bundled with the other two pieces. If somebody did it before them I hadn't heard of it, but I'll happily take proof that I was wrong.

        None of the pieces were new, SecuROM and others had been around for years, a few publishers had download and patch managers and I don't remember who did physical auth first, but somebody must have. But bundling the three? That was Steam.

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    • Alto@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I said not outright evil, not good.

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      • MudMan@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Hah. Fair enough.

        I mean, I'd say that's probably true of most companies making videogames. People are really hyperbolic about this stuff.

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    • ElectroLisa@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Their DRM is easily bypassable with SteamEmu, as opposed to other inventions like Denuvo

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      • MudMan@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Ah, so if it's crackable it's fine?

        Somebody tell Denuvo, they're off the hook.

        Seriously, why try so hard to go to bat for a brand name? I get that everybody wants to root for something these days, but I'm too old to pick sides between Sega and Nintendo and I'm mature enough to reconcile that Steam can have the best feature set in a launcher and also be a major player in the process of erasing game ownership and the promotion of GaaS.

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    • Zorque@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      They invented Denuvo?

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      • toroknos_07@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Drm = digital rights protection

        Denovo is a form of drm made by iredto

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• ono@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Epic cons

  Let’s also acknowledge that Epic has already been caught scanning and collecting data from files on people’s hard drives that are totally unrelated to Epic or its games.

  Ties with Tencent (super anti-consumer chinese state-owned megacorp)

  To be more clear about it, Tencent is Epic’s largest investor, so they obviously have a great deal of influence over and access to anything they want from Epic.

  Steam cons: Drm

  Given that DRM on Steam is entirely up to the game publisher, I don’t think that’s appropriate to list that under “Steam cons”. I’m not even sure that any of my Steam games have DRM.

  If you mean that most Steam games expect to find an instance of Steam running, you should know that is not DRM. Also, it’s trivially replaced with the open-source Goldberg Emulator or a similar tool.

  Gog I don’t know anything besides the fact that it has drm-free games

  Another plus for GOG is that they let you download games with a web browser. No special app required.

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  • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Epic was scanning your Steam friends and play history

    Valve was scanning your DNS cache

    So… Maybe we shouldn’t forget to mention the second one if we’re going to bring up the first one

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    • ono@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Valve was scanning your DNS cache

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      • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Funny how if it was any other company you would call bs and tell them to fuck off with their “trust me bro” attitude.

        To me it’s much worse what Valve did, they have no business looking at my browsing history, that’s much more private than the games I own on Steam or the three friends I’ve got on both platforms anyway.

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• Hubi@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Don’t forget that Epic buys up existing licenses to sell them as exclusives. They even pulled Rocket League from Steam after buying the studio.

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  • Rose@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Rocket League is fully playable on Steam.

    The story of most of Valve’s games is finding a mod, hiring the modder, then making the game exclusive to Steam.

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    • Hubi@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      You can no longer buy the game on Steam though.

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    • ChicoSuave@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      The difference between Steam and Epic is that Steam gets modders who mod their Source games. These mods don’t exist outside of Valve games. Valve is paying someone who loves their games and makes content for those games. They are smart in recognizing talent and bringing it to their development teams.

      Epic finds existing games with existing communities and build a wall around it so Epic becomes a gatekeeper to the fun. They stop games from working on other storefronts or pay for “exclusivity” which means stopping people from playing the game.

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  • hh93@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Let’s also not forget that game developers have no choice but to release on steam if they want to have any chance on breaking even since they have that huge of a market share and that Epic challenging that already lead to better deals for developers since Valve hat virtually free reign before

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• MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  A con for GOG is their site is slow as fuck. And good forbid you want to go back to a previous page, you’ll likely lose where you were looking 9 times out of ten. Especially so on mobile.

  Pros: Can be the only place you can get old games that would’ve been unavailable otherwise The older games are often really really cheap, especially during sales

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  • cottonmon@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Another con is that GOG versions are usually not updated as much as other versions are. It’s a shame, because I’d prefer to use GOG when possible.

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  • Grass@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Gog also seemingly no 2fa other than an faq page with instructions that cannot be followed.

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    • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I always get 2FA’d on GoG for an emailed code

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      • Grass@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Do you remember how to configure it? Last I checked I went through every account and settings page on the store site and seemingly separate customer service log in and no clear way to set it up.

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  • SomethingBurger@jlai.lu ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Steam’s, Epic’s, Ubisoft’s, Battle.net’s and whatever-EA’s-thing-is-called-now’s sites are also slow as shit. What is it with these platforms which prevent them from loading a webpage in less than 10 seconds?

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    • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Sadly, it’s likely a lot of tracking. The kind that look where your mouse is and where you scroll and stop etc.

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      • SomethingBurger@jlai.lu ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        What tracking does Epic need? “According to our analytics, 100% of users scroll to the free games banner on Tuesday at 5pm CEST, then leave and don’t come back for a week. What a mystery!”

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      • ono@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        In Steam’s case, the slowness looks more likely just a side effect of it being a Chromium Embedded Framework application with a lot of extras bolted on. It’s simply not built efficiently.

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• Glide@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I want to note that Steam isn’t inherently a DRM platform, as there are many games on Steam which are DRM free.. Even ones that require the Steam backend can be bundled with Steamworks, serving all the same backend requirements without Steam needing to be installed on the machine.

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  • ares35@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    yea, they steam has some drm-free games available... but steam is a drm platform.. one that also helped normalize one-time-use codes and tying 'purchases' to a non-transferable online account. valve did more to shred the used pc game market than any other company.

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  • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games

    The Origin store proportionally has more DRM free games than Steam…

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    • JamesFire@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      So if we just assume this random wiki with no sourcing is correct…

      Steam has more games than everyone else, DRM on Steam is the developer/publisher’s choice, Steam still has more DRM-free games than Origin does, and how many of the ones Origin has are exclusives that don’t count?

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  • Rose@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Epic has a significantly higher percentage of games confirmed to be DRM-free.

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    • JamesFire@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      So if we just assume this random wiki with no sourcing is correct…

      Steam has more games than everyone else, DRM on Steam is the developer/publisher’s choice, Steam still has more DRM-free games than Epic does, and how many of the ones Epic has are exclusives that don’t count?

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      • Rose@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Many of the articles do have references on the DRM status. Here’s an example indicating verification by a staff member. I personally tested a bunch of the games for DRM and noted it back when I contributed. Until recently, most of the games released on Epic were DRM-free. Even the Sony games were notably DRM-free on Epic before they were released on GOG. Nowadays, it’s more common for the new ones to use EOS and have it function as DRM.

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• ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Didn’t know about heroic… Gonna check that out.

  Also, wow. You’re the dude that appears in comment sections with well-formatted paragraphs 💯.

  Appreciate your service.

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• JimmyMcGill@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Steam UI is messy but they have a ton of functionality in their store/system. Epic took ages to even get a functioning cart, Steam has tons of features which are not even tied to the games in their store like remote play and Steam VR. Family sharing is also really cool for example. Also Steam basically killed piracy for a long time due to amazing Steam sales + convenience of use.

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  • Killer@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Steam ui might be messy but you can get custom skins for it.

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• wooki@lemmynsfw.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Steam cons

  • You don’t own the games, they are leased, like Sony
  • store costs to developers/publishers are insanely high for a digital distribution platform
  • early access games have very high volume of abandonware

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  • mcforest@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    store costs to developers/publishers are insanely high for a digital distribution platform

    Isn't the 30% cut what basically everyone takes? AFAIK GOG, Ubisoft, EA and all three console manufacturers take the same share.

    Besides Epic only itch.io with their choose your share system and Discord (do they even still sell games?) take/took less.

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    • wooki@lemmynsfw.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Considering they have bugger all cost with distribution points being hosted for free by service providers it’s an overpriced over glorified website with online payment processing. 30% cut is massively tax for very little

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• darth_helmet@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Another Epic con: they bribe devs to not launch their games on Steam and GoG, because their store isn’t good.

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• MeanEYE@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Steam DRM is optional, it depends on developers to implement it.

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• Radicaldog@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Your first line is straight up misinformation. Epic has remarkably few games with DRM, mostly from big publishers implementing their own. I’ve yet to find an indie that can’t be launched directly as an .exe. Same with Cyberpunk 2077, launches directly without issue.

  The only singleplayer game I can’t play offline is Hitman, just like on Steam, because their publisher sucks.

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• Kecessa@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Eh… A whole bunch of games on Epic are DRM free, more than there are on Steam in fact…

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