Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford says his hopes on Epic Store were 'overly optimistic or misplaced'
(www.tweaktown.com)
from simple@lemm.ee to games@lemmy.world on 31 Aug 23:02
https://lemm.ee/post/41129991
from simple@lemm.ee to games@lemmy.world on 31 Aug 23:02
https://lemm.ee/post/41129991
I’m genuinely shocked how much Epic poured into the store and it still lacks so much basic features. Sorting games is still extremely barebones, store is filled with NFT/crypto garbage, the store still looks like a college student’s first front-end project, and last time I used the launcher to pick up free games (last year), it was still slow as hell. What were they doing in the past 5 years aside from dropping millions on exclusivity deals?
Epic is going to have to prioritize the store and try some new initiatives while also doubling down on earning pivotal exclusives if it is going to have a chance. I also hope other viable competitors arrive.
threaded - newest
Epic store not being profitable and despite the backing of Fortnite and Unreal Engine surplas being at the state that it is shows that it is probably much more expensive than expected to make a feature rich launcher. What epic has is more a glorified storefront like humble bundle or Fanatical but worse because it isn’t even selling keys for the platform of your choice, and they have to handle server costs of storing all the games too.
They didn’t invest in features.
They “invested” in paying out the ass for exclusivity and loss leaders thinking that buying users would result in users ignoring how terrible their store was and buying more games there.
In a way it like trying to enter the smartphone market and paying for app exclusives then ignoring the part about polishing the OS experience as much as possible and putting out something that is from the flip phone era.
I own a handful of games on Epic that I actually play. But whenever I see one of those games under $5 on steam sale I buy it. I think I’m down to two games left. Playing Fallout London on GOG gives me the same heebie jeebies
You at least actually own your games on gog
A lot of Steam games actually ship DRM free.
At least you don’t have to downgrade it there, you aren’t missing out on anything with that next gen “update”
And the fact that they are a multi squillion dollar company suggests they know what the fuck.
I like how many games they give away for free, but tbh I’ve never played any of them there. Some of those games I decided to buy later on Steam anyway just to do achievements (epic launcher doesn’t have achievements, cards, any meaningful statistics, etc).
Sorry if this comes across pedantic, but in case anybody isn’t aware there are some games that offer Achievements (Alan Wake 2 is one I know).
I do agree though, Epic just doesn’t have the features Steam does. I don’t think their barrage of free games idea is a bad one, but it feels like an afterthought when it’s just not as fun to play them there. (Better Linux support would be nice too, at least there’s Heroic.)
They have achievements on all games, it’s been the case for two years
Edit: to be more specific, on all games on-boarded after March 9th 2023 (need to have the same achievements as on other platforms) and available at the dev’s discretion since May 2022
I just checked this again, first for game I had there for free but bought later on Steam - City of Brass - and couldn’t find achievements anywhere. I then looked into Fortnite and League of Legends - also no achievements. I then found there is “my achievements” link somewhere in my profile, from where I could click “browse games with achievements” and turns out, from few dozens games I own there not a single one has achievements.
I admit that I should have been more specific, the change wasn’t retroactive, so I should have said that achievements have been available since early 2022 and since early 2023 games can’t release without the same achievements as other platforms
www.exophase.com/platform/epic/page/27/?q=&sort=a…
Over 1300 games with achievements
If achievements haven’t been added to some games released prior to that it’s on the devs though.
shacknews.com/…/epic-games-store-unlocks-achievem…
They’ve had achievements for over two years… I swear all the anti epic crowd knows nothing about what their launcher is like at this point and just keep repeating what they read back when it launched… Just like the Steam boycotters back in the early 2000s
Are you serious? Obviously people don’t care about achievements on a platform that has almost no community-related functionality.
The person I was replying to said there’s no achievements on EGS, I showed them the proof that achievements are supported and they’re now mandatory.
I don’t care at all about community shit on Steam and consider all of it to be bloat, I still love the challenge from achievements.
I see. Still, I can see that for many people achievements with no value are no better than their absence. Platform provides value, and for now only steam provides a lot of it with almost each purchase.
I’m willing to bet all I own that most Steam users don’t care about their profile or people seeing the achievements they got but they still care about achievements as a form of optional challenges they wouldn’t have thought about otherwise.
If you mean just the percentage of users I might agree. But those people don’t really correlate with the users who provide most of the profit of the platform.
Pretty sure you underestimate what the average gamers spend, you’re in a bubble if you use the social features and it makes it seem like most people do, Steam has 132m monthly active users.
What has community got to do with achievements? My Steam profile is entirely private, the achievements are for me.
My profile is also not public but it’s visible to friends. Also I can make it public when I want.
There are also achievement statistics.
Fair, but my point is that plenty of people care about achievements without any community integration
Well did it help Epic when they added achievements? Guess not much. Either they never marketed this feature enough or most spending users never cared about achievements on Epic.
I’ve bought one game on the epic store.
I then immediately had to install the EA app, because you… didn’t buy it on the epic store? You bought a license that you have to activate on EA’s shit instead.
Kinda thinking there’s no point to that, and I should have skipped epic (I had a coupon).
That’s the same on Steam.
Oh so it’s just EA sucking, then. Well, it’s nice to know nothing ever really changes I suppose.
I also bought one game on Epic, it was Fenyx Rising, that Ubisoft Greek Breath of the Wild. I also had to launch it in the Uplay launcher to even play it, even though I got it on Epic.
I see some larger publishers bemoan the fact that Epic hasn’t caught on, but it should be pretty obvious why. Markets that favor the buyer more than they favor sellers will typically attract the largest user base, and the sellers don’t have a choice to not sell where the buyers are.
Epic giving away free games is a nice buyer friendly action, but literally everything else they’ve done, from paid exclusives to poor client experience isn’t favorable to buyers. They’ve created a market that no buyers want to use unless the product is free or literally not available anywhere else.
Giving publishers/devs better cuts is great, but it does nothing for you if all the buyers are on Steam instead.
Advertising better cuts to publishers doesn’t mean much when the price is the same across platforms. If epic was consistently 10% cheaper than steam it would get better traction.
They do often have better sales, but you have to launch the store to know and personally I would rather pay the extra $1 to buy on Steam…
Steam also has a lot of other stores selling their games though. Unless epic is giving it away for free, I’m probably going to get a better deal through a fanatical bundle or someone else than I would on epic.
This is true, here in Brazil we have an official key seller called Nuuvem that has prices so good TikTok banned their ads thinking it was a scam, since they often have small discounts even on new games.
Just have to be careful because sometimes the key is for Uplay instead of steam.
They still have to sell for what the publisher/devs want to sell the game for, a bigger share goes to them if it’s the same price as it is on Steam.
Which I as a buyer don’t care about. That’s the whole point of the parent.
Just saying that it’s not Epic’s fault
They can’t sell the games cheaper than steam as the steam’s conditions doesn’t let devs sell games on steam if the game is available for cheaper somewhere else.
This is only true for steam keys. partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
That doesn’t apply to exclusive games which also don’t have lower prices.
How could it apply to exclusive games if they don’t exist in steam in the first place
Industry standard prices exist. If an exclusive matches them you aren’t getting a discount.
I don’t even get their free stuff. And if it’s only epic, I won’t even bother checking it out or well…ya know.
I hope it’s okay to ask, because I am being genuine, but why is using the Epic Games Launcher such a deal breaker for you? I have Steam, Epic, Ubisoft, Xbox, Battle.net and I’m sure more that I’m forgetting and I honestly don’t mind at all. It’s never been an issue for me but I think that I’m in the minority on that so I was curious to hear your thoughts.
Thank you! Ever since the start of the Epic Store, I’ve always thought this whole “exclusive” scandal was blown out of proportion. There is a MASSIVE difference between a game being exclusive to a $400+ console vs to a free launcher that you can install in 5 minutes and add your already multi-launcher platform.
No official Linux support, which means no Steam Deck support as well. Yes, there’s Legendary but I shouldn’t have to jump through those hoops.
It just doesn’t appeal to me? I dunno. Epic just felt bleh compared to steam.
All good! Just curious, truly.
Funny thing is, I mostly agree with you, but in Epic’s case, it’s a launcher written by a company that’s 40% owned by a Chinese corporation. I can sometimes stomach running their executables while playing something, but not having it constantly running.
Personally, while I do use Heroic to access games from the epic games launcher, I will probably never buy anything from them because of Epic buying exclusivity and removing Steam as an option from games that were crowd-funded.
That makes sense. Sounds like more of an Epic Games thing than specifically an anti-games launcher sentiment, or maybe a little of both? I hadn’t heard about the crowd funded game exclusivity thing though, I’ll have to read up on that. Deeply lame thing for them to do, for sure.
I’ve also run into a few issues with the epic games launcher (i.e. game wouldn’t patch, so I had to reinstall the launcher. Having to reinstall a game because the launcher doesn’t see it anymore, launcher is slow, etc.) which is why I use the Heroic launcher.
I’ve heard a lot about Heroic but honestly never looked into it. Not that I’m old or anything but it reminds me of Trillian from back in the day.
I always say the reason they give so many free games is because the real price is in having to use that goddamn launcher
It does what it needs to do, you open it, your installed games list is on the left, click and play.
It really doesn’t, I tried finishing Industria while I had no internet and that electron piece of shit refused to open even though I set it up to work offline in the settings, thankfully the game had no DRM so I was able to finish it just by opening the exe.
LOL the Steam launcher is basically just a web browser. Literally the same concept as Electron. It’d be Electron if it were built today, but it was built before Electron existed.
Never had an issue with offline play, so there, my anecdote is just as valid as yours
No, you don’t need a launcher to run an exe. lol
You realize there’s more DRM free games on Epic than on Steam even though there’s less games overall? If your standard for a good launcher is being able to start the game from a .exe then I’ve got bad news about Steam…
What bad news about Steam?
You can’t just launch Steam games without Steam running, Steam itself is DRM.
not true; that’s a developer thing, not steam itself.
steam offers it as an option, it doesn’t force developers to use it.
plenty of games bought on steam can be run entirely without steam.
Presumably Kecessa is alluding to the fact that, unlike GOG, Steam games open however the developers / publishers want them to. Which is sometimes just a plain exe, sometimes it’s an exe that starts Steam so that it can use its API / DRM, sometimes it opens the publisher’s launcher, and so on. Bit irritating on Linux when you want to pass some options in to the command, and a bit irritating generally when you never want to see the launcher again, but it’s no disaster.
I also think that developers/publishers don’t care about the % cut that much, they would rather just sell a lot of games. Which comes back to your point, the value proposition of EGS isn’t appealing to the buyer.
It’s like I make a competition to Uber with better cuts and working conditions to drivers. That is nice, but if the consumer has to wait 25 mins for my taxi while the Uber is there immediately, than they will not pick me for the same price.
I want to point out that Valve won’t allow games to be sold on Steam and be cheaper anywhere else. With the lower cut Epic takes games could be cheaper there, but Valve uses their dominant market position to force developers to set the same price on other marketplaces if they want to also be on Steam, which is essentially required.
I get some of the hate, but the “fuck Epic” crowd always annoy me. It’s such an ignorant position. That said, I don’t use the Epic store because it sucks to use. Fuck monopolies though. Steam has too much control. We need competition or we’re going to suffer in the future.
I’ve heard that brought up, but I’ve never seen actual proof of it. It clearly doesn’t apply to sale prices though, because other stores basically always have lower sale prices than steam itself.
Guild Wars 2 expansions are cheaper on the company’s storefront than on steam, without sales. Not sure if they get an MMO pass, but it’s not a hard and fast rule.
That’s because the versions sold on the company site are for ArenaNet keys, not Steam keys.
The rule is only for selling Steam keys.
As has been pointed out by many other people in this thread, this is untrue.
If you are providing a Steam key, it has to be the same price as Steam. Otherwise, you can set whatever price you want (e.g. if you were selling on both Steam and Epic - like Borderlands 3, which frequently had sales on Epic where the price dropped below the Steam price)
partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
It’s even fine to sell your Steam keys at a lower price in another place - as long as you’re planning to have a similar sale on Steam at some similar time.
TL;DR: Games sold on Epic could be any price they want. They’re no different to Steam, in general, because that’s what publishers choose.
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Using Junk Store on my Steam Deck (and redeeming free games on the mobile website) to completely avoid the Epic Launcher 😎
Please tell me more about this Junk Store, I’d been using Heroic for Epic games but it’s been a bit dodgy recently
Sure, it’s a plugin through Decky. It allows you to log in to Epic and it displays your library in its separate window, allowing you to install them as Non-Steam Games. It’s quite easy
I’ve not used Decky before, it always seemed like one of those things that needed constant tinkering. Is it still a bit bleeding edge or has it reached the “it just works” stage yet?
Decky itself is fine, some plugins are buggy. If you install it and Junk-Store, you should be fine with no problems. I run like a dozen plugins and I only ever had problems with the UI customization ones: css, and animation changer. I uninstalled those and it’s all passive now.
I’ve only had problems with one game from Epic. The rest worked just fine with no tweaks
Cheers, I’ll give it a go if Heroic is still not working the next time I try to use it
Fuck Epic. I will never forgive them for buying Rocket League and ripping it away from my Linux library on steam. I will never do business with them, never play any of their games, never give them a dime, never even sign up to claim their free slop of the week. Fuck Epic with a cactus.
To be fair, Rocket League runs fine in Proton.
Also, to be fair…agreed. Fuck Epic.
Tbh without epic I doubt the game would’ve survived 2020. If you recall, the whole fanbase was unhappy with how things were stale. Epic didn’t improve anything obviously but the free to play did boost it’s active nunber of players. Nevertheless fuck epic.
Wasnt it already a PS+ game years before epic? It literally had millions of players on day one.
I dropped it after my steam copy first time asked me to register an epic account, but till then I didn’t see huge issues with the game apart from the DLC milking.
I haven’t played it in years, how is it doing now in 2024?
It’s pretty much the same in terms of maps and gameplay. Had some regressions like removal of trading system and other things i forgot. Has voice channel now. Servers are the same except there are more now. It’s still fun for a quick match or two.
Fair enough.
Thank you for the response!
I own the original CD release of Unreal Tournament 2004, made by Epic, it includes a native Linux installer on disc, you get the full game, and it worked fine.
It makes me so sad that they did a complete 180 on this.
My theory has always been they wanted to keep the door open for Microsoft if things just go under. When you think about it, they were struggling quite a bit in the early 2000’s until gears. Microsoft really propped them up with that franchise, then they made fortnite, lost a lot of money until they pivoted to the BR mode and now they make millions every damn day.
EGS was always shit, I've said it since the beginning, and if they totally shut down and a bunch of dipshits lose their free libraries, all I'll do is laugh. Every downvote I've ever gotten for saying Epic is shit is just another tear for my collection.
You should have been able to see this coming the first (and every) time they bought a dev studio and immediately blocked game sales on Steam, or set games to exclusive for no reason other than locking out people who don't use their shitty store. Companies that can compete on their own merits don't have to do that, and being a fanboy because they gave out free games you probably already bought is fucking stupid.
I mean, you can get banned from Steam and lose all your games at well…
You know, the centralization around Steam isn’t a thing people should be wishing for…
I've heard of people getting banned from online play on steam, but haven't heard of anyone losing their library. I guess if you only play online, it could be the same effect (so maybe don't be a douchebag when playing online?)
I don't play multiplayer, except the rare occasion, and it's usually direct connect (which you can't be banned from), so I wouldn't care.
At any rate, I'm not saying steam is perfect or should be the only store, just that EGS fucking sucks. I agree with Randy Pitchford; We should have many viable competitors. Options are good. Epic is not a good option.
How in the world can you get banned from steam proper?
help.steampowered.com/en/…/4F62-35F9-F395-5C23
Thanks
Unless you are also building a gog library you have no place to talk.
I have a large library of non-DRM games from multiple sources, to say nothing of physical releases and homebrew.
Even if I didn't, I have every right to say that an anticompetitive shitbag company's hack-job store sucks ass. Same goes for the Nintendo eShop. They don't care about their customers' experience, they only care about making money.
Maybe when GOG supports Linux properly.
I mean, you can run any game through Proton. You don't even need to buy anything, just open steam, add the non-steam game, select proton compatibility, and off you go. This is how I play a lot of my Itch.io games on Steamdeck or my laptop (I don't have a windows install on any of my systems).
I’ve said it before, but until Epic adds some way to provide feedback to others, I won’t spend any money on it. Being able to read if a game is buggy, runs on my hardware, etc, is too essential to the experience to not have.
Epic wants to be the pro-developer storefront, but since that seems to involve being anti-consumer, I as the consumer have no interest.
Which is key, since we, as the consumers, provide all the money!!!
This CEO may think it’s developer-friendly, but I highly doubt if Epic will keep such developer-friendly stance if Epic becomes a giant in this industry.
Epic burnt so much money on Epic store these years. If it succeeds, it’s very likely Epic will try to earn it back. From player? Will players willing to pay more in Epic store than the others? If the answer is no… Sometimes it really makes me wonder if these CEOs are really that stupid…
It burned money on exclusives. The free games are a much cheaper marketing tool than advertising.
They burn a ton of money on free games too. They’re only free to us. Epic pays for them at wholesale rates.
Yes, and at wholesale rates it’s a pretty good bang-for-your-buck, as an advertising scheme. Advertising is a numbers game about getting as many eyeballs as possible on the product, and I know I actively check for free games on the Epic launcher most weeks. Even if I don’t ever buy anything because of that specifically, it keeps the app on my computer and keeps me checking back in.
Edit: And I shit you not I just opened it to check 'cause I can’t remember if I looked at this week’s free game. Turns out it’s a good thing I did too, the Fallout collection is free right now!
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a56b293a-f5ea-4518-85c5-897c6e14f82e.png">
(dammit, see what I mean?)
“Even if I don’t ever buy anything” is why I doubt it’s going to work out. Epic is publicly right now saying that it’s great at acquiring users. Yeah, I’ll bet it is. People love free stuff. Is it great at turning those users into paying customers? Even at wholesale rates, I’ve gotten hundreds of games for free from Epic, which means they spent thousands of dollars on me, and I can’t foresee an instance where I’ll ever give them a cent back.
Yeah, obviously they’d want to earn it back and yeah, obviously from customers. You make that sound malicious. Steam is doing the same thing. With the amount of money Steam makes, they could drop their share in half and still make a killing. Epic wouldn’t have to do anything that Steam isn’t to recoup costs if they were competitive with Steam.
That said, Epic does take less revenue from developers, which is nice. This doesn’t translate to less for the end user though because Valve uses their market dominance to force the same price across marketplaces or you aren’t allowed on Steam. It’s fucked up.
Just pointing out, once again, that games sold on the Epic store can be different prices to Steam. “Valve uses their market dominance to force the same price across marketplaces” is a nonsensical, incorrect statement.
I am always suprised that people expected anything differently.
Epic was from the start doing things the wrong way, and I will not support any store that has exclusives.
Making a good gaming platform that could rival Steam would take A LOT of time and money and dare I say - no company is willing to lose that for a chance of one day perhaps being only slightly worse competitor that still can’t convince people to migrate.
I can support a store if they keep their own games exclusive. Completely fair game. But fuck the gobble up companies.
There are only a few companies that could even hope to take on Valve, at this stage. The likes of EA and others. But by definition, their company culture means they’ll never be able to take on Valve.
Someone else made a comment about what will happen when Gabe steps down and I suddenly realize what a short-term golden age we’re likely living in, even with all the bullshit.
EA tried about a decade ago to compete with steam. It didn’t go well for them either.
Making a platform that was simply a copy of all of Steam’s features would certainly take a lot of time. That’s why to break into the space a new platform would need to actually innovate a killer feature that brings early adopters to it even without having all the bells and whistles Steam has. Then the user base can and will grow as you fill in the gaps so the ‘sacrifice’ of using your platform is lessened.
All exclusive games do is build resentment in your customers at being forced to use an inferior product.
If Borderlands 3 had released on Steam, I’d have probably bought it when it came out because I still had a lot of goodwill for the series at that time. Instead, I had to wait until the Steam release when the game already had loads of negative press. Exclusive deals are idiotic
I also waited and because of that when I bought it, on sale, a year later, I didn’t even care anymore. The hype was dead and I barely played it.
I’m far from being a business savvy person, but honestly, from business perspective what exactly is Epic offering that sets them apart from other competitors? Even if Epic fixed their launcher issues, how would they be different to Steam that is already well established for 20 years? That’s why I like GOG as Steam’s competitor. GOG focuses on selling DRM-free and retro games. If a game also happens to be available in GOG, I would prefer to buy it from there than Steam. Moreover, GOG keep old games well maintained and updated to run in modern computers; something that Steam is very poor at doing. What does Epic even do differently, apart from doing exclusives which any companies could do?
It’s slightly cheaper for developers to put their games on there. But that sucks as a business model, because game prices aren’t any lower so for the end user it doesn’t matter. And on features, Epic just loses every matchup against Steam.
Specifically, if they’re also wanting to be on Steam (the largest marketplace by far, so you need to be there) your game can’t be cheaper anywhere else. It’s a little fucked up that Steam can wield their power like that, but they essentially have a monopoly so they can.
Sure, but even Epic exclusives aren’t any cheaper than the games on Steam. These savings directly go to the game developer/publisher, not the consumer. This means there’s no incentive for the consumer to switch to Epic other than exclusive games, which is a pretty poor reason to switch away from a well-established platform.
That’s only true if you’re selling steam keys. Eg you are using Valve’s infrastructure. And they don’t even require the 30% cut in this case. If you sold the game using another infrastructure then you can price it how you want.
Hmm… that’s fair but it seems that Epic even forgot to think of end users-- the gamers-- in that regard before trying to compete with Steam. They prioritised devs first over the actually most important stakeholder.
@TankovayaDiviziya aren’tyou guys tired of talking about steam vs epic etc ?
Same discussions for years.
Move on.
To be honest, I totally forgot about Epic until articles are popping recently that it’s not going well even after all these years.
Also, what’s wrong about discussing this? Epic is a good example of a business venture not doing well for failing to do one of the most basic business philosophy: set yourself apart from the competitors.
@TankovayaDiviziya it’s an endless discussion where people are only divided by their opinions about each company.
You literally opened the thread. People are gonna talk about anything you can’t stop them. You going in here like this is just foolishness.
@Xenny darn
As the customer, which in a practical sense is the only perspective that matters to me day-to-day, Epic offers me nothing close to what Steam or GOG can give me. Hell, even EA’s and Ubisofts launchers were more useful since they at least had exclusives. All Epic has is Fortnite and for someone like myself that doesn’t care for that kind of game, there is no reason to even consider their platform for anything.
And given my recent switch away from Windows and to Linux full time on my gaming PC to put a further wedge between me and the things Microsoft has been doing with Windows that I don’t like that is a good thing given Epics history of embracing things that will never work as smoothly on Linux as Steam games do with Proton or GOG’s native Linux options do.
Randy is not known for being very smart.
There was a point I tried to switch to Epic, just to try it out - it is so unbelievably slow & oddly hard to find and organize my own games. They NEED to start putting $$ into the UI otherwise all those free games are for nothing if idetest opening the client itself.
They don’t have a chance. Steam and gog not only don’t suck, they’re actually nice to use.