Games

Sweeney (the CEO of Epic) says that he wants competition with Steam, but many of his actions point toward that he really just wants to be the guy at the top (ie, he wants to be the monopoly instead of Valve). He's taken a fair number of anti-consumerist stances, which vary from understandable to clearly anti-competitive.

Epic is known for making exclusivity deals with 3rd party studios in which Epic bribes the studio with money, and in exchange, the studio does not release their game on Steam for 1 year.

At several points, this occurred after a studio already said that they will release on Steam, and the studio would have to walk back and delete their Steam listing.

Iirc, at one point Epic bought out a studio and had them remove the Steam listing for an already-released game, causing the game to be unplayable for people who had already bought the game

Edit: this apparently happened twice (Unreal Tournament and Rocket League), but it appears that the games still work for the people who bought it. I think the concern was actually that Steam players would lose functionality due to not being supported anymore after the unlisting

The Epic Game Store released in a non-functional state, and development on it is extremely slow. The first impression of the broken store likely still influences many people's impression of the store. But it's still missing many features that many gamers want to see in a store.

There were various rumors when the store first launched that it contained spyware. My understanding is that those rumors never fully got disproven, especially since some of the claims were supported by at least some evidence

Epic does not support Linux, and Sweeney has openly said that he does not plan to support Linux until it becomes more popular. He did immediately jump on board with supporting Arm though, which caused a lot of Linux gamers to think that he just doesn't want to support Linux

Sweeney is a pretty abrasive person and iirc he made a lot of concerning statements on his social media. Several of them (as mentioned above) indicate that he wants to dethrone Valve so that he can be the monopoly instead

Overall, many gamers are in support of more competition in the game store space. Unfortunately, many gamers also think that Epic is an untrustworthy competitor, and they believe that Epic has a serious chance of making the gaming industry worse if they become more popular. As a result, many would prefer for Steam remain the monopoly rather than to take a bet on Epic.

There are a few layers to it. I'll start with the legit reasons and hope the jackasses don't read too deep in:

1. EGS was built around the idea of providing what people need/want rather than EVERYTHING. Some of that was truly asinine (no shopping cart for like 2 years?) and some was a conscious choice based on everyone saying they don't want their video game store to be a social media network. Unfortunately... people apparently DO want their video game store to be social media.
2. Every store handles regional pricing and distribution differently and, allegedly, EGS had worse coverage in a few of the countries The Internet actually knows exists.
3. Tim Sweney is a complete and utter dipshit and always has been and it is REALLY hard to not hate everything he touches.
4. EGS rapidly entwined itself with Fortnite because Fortnite makes more than the GDP of some small nations. But we are hardcore gamers so we all hate Fortnite.
5. Sweeney/Epic actually accidentally argued for consumer rights against Apple which, in turn, led to the full force of Apple running smear campaigns against Epic to make sure that we all realized how much we love walled gardens
6. Sweeney/Epic ALSO kind of picked a fight with Steam by pointing out how little developers get from any given sale. Which... because we all love Valve means that Epic are assholes and developers all actively want to strive to get the negotiating power of a Call of Duty or Rockstar.
7. Speaking of. EGS isn't Valve and any alternative is inherently evil because we all love Valve.

So what was a mediocre store with a lot of free games and a tendency to give developers a giant sack of money for one year of exclusivity became The Devil.

Here are my reasons:

• no Linux support - Heroic works, why doesn't Epic do what GOG do and revenue share w/ Heroic?
• exclusivity deals, which reduces options outside of EGS
• Epic's anticheat works on Linux, but their own games that use it don't, that's a pretty big slap in the face

I certainly want more competition to Steam, but that competition needs to do something other than exist for me to use it. GOG is that, and if they properly supported Linux, they'd get most of my gaming money. But they don't, so they only get some of it.

Yeah, this probably reads like a Linux fanboy post or something, but I've been using Linux longer than Steam supported it with its client, and I'll still be here if Steam leaves. It's my platform of choice, and a vendor needs to meet me here if they want my business. Valve did, so they get my money. I honestly don't need much, I just need games to work properly on my system.

I don’t really know all the details other than Tim Sweeney seeming like a shit head. I just collect my free games sometimes and have never bought a thing on there, I don’t even think I have payment info on there.

It's very simple, valve is a gamer company. Epic is a money company. Every single thing each respective company does shows that. I'm not a bitch, I'm never going to let those Epic cunts have a penny of my money. Fucking with the games industry, fucking with gamers, locking exclusives, it's all bullshit & they can suck my cock

Tim Sweeny can eat shit.

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 its 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. EGS is about at the level of GOG Galaxy which because of its DRM free policy will probably never be a big money maker. That's just insane to me how badly managed EGS is to have so much more money backing it and so little to show for it in the product

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, user gamepad mapping repository, I've used the guides before. Steam forums are not a place to browse, they're a place to find when you Google a question and the answer is in a Steam forum thread Google/other shows you

I'd be happy with a suitable competitor. It's just EGS has been terrible at it. I was sad that GameStop did nothing with Impulse. I had higher expectations for EA Origin. Ubisoft/UPlay was always garbage from day one AC2 always online DRM nonsense. I was hyped on GFWL before I learned they were charging for online multiplayer until that failed, also the install limits GFWL had where you had to call support when you reinstalled the game too many times. I was even excited for Windows 8 store until it was eating up peoples storage only reclaimable with a reformat of the drive

Only GOG exists with a unique selling point, DRM free. Every other competitor has existed just to try and have exclusives to make more money rather than try to attract users with a good service. In the end it turns out there's so many solid to great games released every year that exclusives aren't such a great point anymore. There's not enough of them and exclusives not varied enough to make a storefront platform better than the total Steam package

People are going to list all the features Steam has over Epic, ignoring that Steam has had ~22 years to get to where it is. The original Steam experience was garbage, and lots of us older gamers knew what would happen and hated that Steam would be the primary catalyst to killing off physical media for PC games back in the mid-2000s, especially as broadband internet access was becoming far more accessible.

Don't get me wrong, Valve has done alright so far in terms of game ownership, but once Gabe dies/retires, it's only a matter of time before some greedy fucks force Valve to go public and the pure enshittification process begins.

I do both PC and console gaming, and I’ve personally never gotten the Epic hate. As a store it’s not amazing but it’s fine. I will generally go to Steam first but I’m also not going to boycott a game just because it’s Epic exclusive.

As others said, EGS is just a fucking cancer, not a competition. A good competition to Steam is actually Microsoft App Store. It's a very streamlined mobile-like experience.

It is a good thing to have competition. The hate is because they are doing things people don't generally like. Exclusivity deals for one thing. Epic can't really compete with steam because they are too far behind on features, so they resort to exclusivity deals which aren't really good for any consumer. One could argue it is the fault of publishers taking them, but that is just looking at it from a purely business perspective. As a consumer, I don't really care about the business side.. I don't profit from it. So I don't really wonder why gamers are mad at epic for it.

I rather gladly take my free games from them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckepic/comments/ij48bf/rfuckepic_for_dummies_2020_edition/ old but gold

There's A LOT to talk so you better check there. If you don't want to check, wait till your account get hacked and try ask support to get it back! You can give all the info you want but 99% of the times they just say "fuck you" and you lost everything

Edit: Can you customize your profile pic there? :)

Granted not everyone cares, I remember them giving away a pfp with Sifu but there's still no pfp customization. Why? They don't care about you but about your money

Couple other things to add to this beautiful list others have: meta gaming and chat.

They barely added achievements and only for a couple games, while steam has that, guides, community art, and even a newish notes feature in case you're playing an OG game that makes you track stuff. Guides have kind of been better than more traditional sources.

Chat is... better on steam, although discord kind of supplanted it. Game based emoji, stickers, etc. It's actually very good, though, with support for couch coop stream gaming, etc, with voice comms.

One could also point to the generous family sharing function, but I'm not sure what Epic does in that regard. DRM is DRM though. Do keep in mind, though, the philosophy behind Steam is to make DRM palatable by adding features. Epic philosophy (on paper) is to give devs a higher cut, although I've heard devs feel more supported by steam-- especially since they aren't afraid to throw obscure indie games into a users discovery queue.