Comment on Introducing the Epic First Run program
teamchuckles@lemmy.world 10 months agoThe reason players prefer Steam is because the other products are not good. If a launcher wants to compete with Steam, they need to do things that Steam does better than Steam or do things that Steam cannot do yet. Right now, I log into Steam and I am immediately in my library without any ads or recommendations, ready to launch because Steam lets me pick where I load in. When I log into Epic, I am stuck in the store page with a full app rotating banner of a bunch of games I am not interested in. Plus the library is limited in scope and I have to slowly navigate through all the games to find the game I want to play. Same with Blizzard, Ubi, all of them.
I don’t know if you intended it this way, but saying that Steam users are hostile of other launchers makes us sound like we are unreasonable in what we are asking for. If Epic was better than Steam, I would use it. It’s not.
And steam works like a charm in Linux with windows games.
Also works fine with joysticks like dualsense. (Although for some reason they started overriding the native driver with their own steam API after launching steam games even if the game is set to disable steam input).
I’m saying that even if a launcher is good, people will refuse to use that launcher. Pc gamers have extreme brand loyalty to steam.
Okay I’ll play along. What other launchers are good? I personally use steam and gog galaxy so that already personally invalidates your argument to me. But I am curious what launchers you consider good since you’re the one making the argument.
But you don’t know that. You’re only saying that because that’s what you think will happen. Give me a genuinely good launcher and I’ll use it. The problem is that with how much time and resources that’s been dedicated to Steam, that’s next to impossible to even stand as equals to.
Not to mention that in cases like Epic, they don’t really care about actual user experience.
You won’t. You want to think you will, but you won’t. Every time epic games added one of these essential features, endless gamers would come out of the woodworks to announce that its not good enough, and they will literally boycott a game for having epic exclusivity.
Maybe you’re the exception, but not the rule
A launcher has to add value, and not just launch shit. Most of these launchers do not add any value. They just launch my game.
Yeah there’s always some excuse as to why the .exe file that you interact with for three seconds before playing a game for three hours is unacceptable
I agree that the epic launcher sucks, but Steamworks has also refused crossplay forever (both cross platform between PC and consoles, and cross launcher on PC, which is why a lot of the not ancient games on gog didn’t have multiplayer), meanwhile EOS gets you cross platform and cross launcher crossplay support. Pretty much anyone who wasn’t a huge AAA dev used steamworks for multiplayer until epic launched eos.
Cross platform multiplayer isn’t held back by Steamworks. It’s held back, mostly, by Sony and Nintendo. You notice that PlayStation and Nintendo are the only platforms that regularly do not allow cross platform play. Even in games that do have cross platform play, Playstation usually only allows it with other consoles and not PC. Because Sony is fucking stupid.
Carighan@lemmy.world 10 months ago
More importantly, as a consumer you really ought to not be bothered whether CEO #1 gets 100% of the money or has to split 30% with CEO #2. Either way, some rich old farts are getting richer and fartier.
Yeah, sure, indie games and all. That’s nice. But it’s all the company side, and as a consumer we ought to look at consumer values, in which Steam is just strictly superior. It has features that are actually useful, a far far far far larger library, and most of us have a significant portion of our library there already.
Plus, hey: It doesn’t log you out every 2-3 days for not reason. 😑
Nefyedardu@kbin.social 10 months ago
It's all just Epic talking points. "Lower cut means more money for developers! Lower cut means lower prices!" It's never been proven to be true. Shit in some cases I'd much rather my money go to Valve than the developers anyway. Much rather fund Linux/Vulkan/VR development than whatever bullshit Rockstar, EA or Activision are up to.
cottonmon@lemmy.world 10 months ago
A lot of these people who love defending Epic also treat them as if they didn’t do anything to earn their reputation for being shitty back then.
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
And they pretend Epic is the only competition to Steam. Nobody is taking shit about GOG because GOG doesn’t have shitty business practices.