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this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
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Tim.. suing everyone else wont make epic store a great place to buy games
Look to GOG for inspiration…
He’s just salty because the only games people “purchase” are the weekly free ones.
I don't even bother with those anymore. I never play the free ones I have, because I'd have to use Epic's software.
Playnite is the better choice if you're on Windows, but either way, don't let Tim's dumb store stop you from ruining his day by generating a bunch of metrics that show you're only playing freebies!
Keep collecting them. Each one you get costs Epic money and helps counter some of that Fortnite cash that lets Epic keep paying for exclusive contracts. Keep bleeding them and eventually they won't be able to keep buying exclusive releases.
Epic pays a flat rate to offer games for free, they don't pay per download.
Downloading them just helps Epic inflate their "active users" number when talking to investors.
And here I thought I was special, seeing as other people actually bother enough to redeem those free games every week. I stopped doing it a long time ago and I'd rather pay for those games on steam/gog offers.
I can't be bothered with epic even for the free ones.
I thought I would use the free games on epic as a demo for games I would like to buy at steam, turns out I just buy them at steam, I never play them on epic, I think I tried out two games in the beginning of the whole give away but that is it
Thanks for the reminder.
It's Definitely Not Fried Chicken.
He's still right in this instance.
Exactly. The number of people on Lemmy who simp for Valve’s monopoly just because Epic (along with every game developer, big or small) stands to benefit is kind of shocking.
It doesn't have anything to do with Epic, it's because Steam provides a great service with a ton of features nobody else offers, and Valve has demonstrated time and time again that they make policies that benefit consumers.
It would be great if Steam had some competition, but Epic ain't it. What people want is another service of equal quality to Steam. Instead the best we have is GOG and that still falls well short of feature parity nevermind the anti-consumer cesspool of Epic.
Suing Valve isn't going to do anything to improve the situation. Realistically what could Valve do to be "less of a monopoly"? Lower the percentage they take of sales? Consumers wouldn't see any benefit from that only developers. Ironically it would also increase Valves monopoly because if they took a smaller cut there would be even less reason for companies to sell on Epic as Epics lower cut is literally the only reason developers (outside of Epic literally paying some of them mounds of cash by way of exclusivity contracts) pick Epic over Steam.
If Epic really wants to do something about Valves monopoly it's simple, they just need to offer all the same features that Steam does. Things like family sharing, streaming support, a cross platform store and launcher, and an excellent review system so people can better understand the games they're thinking about buying. Until that happens yes people will stick with Steam because it's the objectively superior experience.
You know what annoys me about the people defending Epic's lawsuit? The fact that there are actually legitimate issues with Valve and somehow they're hyper-fixated on the non-issues. If they were instead talking about CS2 gambling, lootboxes, etc, I would be in support of it. But no, it's about how they're a "monopoly" because they're one of only two stores that seem to care about their customers...
It's not a reason to charge 30% The $500 million Gabe Newell's superyacht is here to remind you that prices are too high.
Sure but it's also a badly done lawsuit for that. It's a class action of Valves customers when the percentage almost entirely impacts developers and publishers not customers. If this was really about Valves cut it would be a class action by developers. The reasons it isn't are that that's a much smaller group, consumer protections don't apply to them so that would be a much harder case to win, and finally they would struggle to find developers willing to join that lawsuit. There's also the slight problem that the 30% cut is the industry standard. Both Apple and Google take a similar cut. I'm not sure who originated that as the standard, could go all the way back to brick and mortar stores or it might have originated with one of the games consoles, but Epic is actually the odd one out in this case not Valve.
As someone else pointed out there are things that Valve could be better about, things like lootboxes in some games or the frankly predatory CS item markets. The issue of course is that none of that is actually illegal even if it is anti-consumer. It would also be nice if Steam had some actual competition, but there isn't anything Valve can do about that, rather it's everyone else that needs to get on Valves level.
It isn't a monopoly because they don't require you to use their store. Epic has a monopoly of epic exclusive games.
And ecommerce sellers don’t “have to” sell on Amazon, so they don’t have any market power they can abuse to extract 40-50% fees from sellers, right?
They don’t. My small business sells direct from our site instead of in Amazon, and we do okay.
Anecdotes are not data!
While that’s true, counterexamples are great ways to disprove overreaching implications like “companies must sell on Amazon to be successful”.
It is not a requirement. It might be the most profitable way to run an e-commerce business (in which case you’re obviously benefiting from the system Amazon created).
Nobody thinks that it’s impossible, which is incredibly rare, but rather that it’s very costly not to comply, which is the source of every monopolist’s power. Could Pepsi refuse to sell at Walmart to avoid the huge wholesale discounts they demand over smaller stores? Sure, but it would shoot themselves in the foot, and that’s the source of Walmart’s anticompetitive power, which coerces Pepsi (and lots of other suppliers) and hurts lots of smaller businesses who don’t get the same discount.
Amazon requires price matching for most sellers, which is shit and makes this an apples to oranges comparison.
Could Steam back down on their 30% cut? Sure, but not a monopoly.
It’s not apples to oranges, because the network effects (and coercive pressures they create) are in fact incredibly similar: sellers have to go where most customers are, and most PC gamers begin and end their search for games on Steam, just like most online shoppers begin and end their searches on Amazon.
Its an effective monopoly, that's not really disputable. This lawsuit isn't even about them having a monopoly, its about them allegedly abusing it.
How do you call a corporate driving 75% of the digital distribution market for PC games ?
true