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What's up with Epic Games?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2023
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Epic cons:
Epic pros:
Steam pros:
Steam cons:
Gog
I don't know anything besides the fact that it has drm-free games and that it's owned by CDPR (the guys who developed the witcher series and cyberpunk)
I personally purchase my games on steam, since I think their contribution to linux gaming is crucial for linux to go mainstream
Choose what you will knowing this. If someone else wants to add something to this list you're welcome to do so.
Valve is what happens when someone who's not just outright fucking evil invents a money printing machine
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.
Having worked with DRM systems since long before Valve existed, I'm reasonably certain this is just plain false.
Yeah, and I don't remember Half-life being the game that introduced the world to horse armor.
Not to mention that Steamworks DRM is practically non-existent anyways (and that it also wasn't necessary to use, it's rare, but some games just don't protect their game with any DRM).
I said not outright evil, not good.
Hah. Fair enough.
I mean, I'd say that's probably true of most companies making videogames. People are really hyperbolic about this stuff.
I mean, do you have any good examples though? Because most of those things are blatantly false and/or happened 9+ years ago. If that's that's the worst you've got then Valve is must be amazing.
Loot boxes were, if not invented by them, definitely popularised.
That was like 15 years ago hahaha
It’s not a trend they abandoned - Counter Strike is still a huge source of deceptive digital item trade. It also spread to Team Fortress 2 in the meantime.
See what I mean? That's nuts. That's a nuts sentence right there. Imagine having a brand so sticky that people go "but did they do something really bad recently?
For the record, Valve's games run loot boxes today. Like, right now you can buy loot boxes from Valve. CS gambling is also still happening, although I'm not into it enough to know how much better it is these days.
They invented the battlepass, too, that's a Dota 2 thing. Hey, remember how people refer to buying cosmetics for games as "buying hats"? That one's from TF2. Oh, and technically the trading cards you get for purchases are NFTs,, since the term doesn't require the tokens to be stored in a blockchain.
And then there's the dev side. Everybody was super pissed with them on that end while they were figuring out greenlight processes, which... I'm not sure if they did or people just kinda got used to what's there. And if you're around devs you'll know that Valve's whole deal is to tell people what to do and give them zero support to do it. And there are other horror stories about shadowbans and Apple-style manual rejections and delistings and stuff, but at that point you're getting more into inside baseball and I wouldn't expect it to be shaping public perception at all.
Well I'm not going to be eternally mad at Coca Cola because they put cocaine in their soda a century ago, there's got to be a cut-off point somewhere. If I'm going to hate them it's because of the things they are doing right now. Valve over the last eight years has been pretty well-behaved considering their market position gives them the capacity to be way worse. There's nothing stopping them from
buying up exclusivity contracts
making a DRM that actually functions
developing only proprietary software
making their games pay-to-win
I will be eternally mad at Coca Cola because they took the cocaine out of their soda a century ago.
They straight up don't want people reselling games they own. They could do it easily, they just don't want to.
Yeah, Steam does cool things, but the moment you start thinking that very huge corporation somehow cares about you, you're doomed. Companies don't care about people, they care about numbers. Especially huge companies like Valve.
I don't know if many companies allow you to resell your digital goods in the first place (other than, funny enough, Valve themselves who let your resell digital Steam assets).
Valve's DRM prevents the resale of physical PC games, as Steam codes are single-use. They singlehandedly killed the used PC games market.
They invented Denuvo?
Drm = digital rights protection
Denovo is a form of drm made by iredto
... right. And it's also considered one of the premier "evil" DRMs.
So I ask again... they invented Denuvo?
Oh, is that the bar? I hadn't received the memo. That's cool, then, because Activision, Epic, Microsoft and Ubisoft didn't invent Denuvo either, so we're all good.
All their platfomrs support it and sell games with it, though.
For the record, Steam actively suggests using multiple online features and multiple layers of DRM to minimize piracy:
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/drm
Technically, Denuvo isn't DRM, it's anti-tamper. It protects the actual DRM from being modified or removed. It's closer to an anticheat, as it ensures the game wasn't modified.
Fun fact: my autocorrect changes anticheat to Antichrist.
Their DRM is easily bypassable with SteamEmu, as opposed to other inventions like Denuvo
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.
Since I can almost guarantee you major publishers would not publish on steam without some sort of DRM, yeah Im fine with them having an easily crackable form of DRM. Especially since they're not exactly jumping to prevent people from doing it.
Also:
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 (likely including user data) and they directly benefit from Epic's growth.
Also:
Given that DRM on Steam is entirely up to each game publisher, I don't think it's appropriate to list 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, and it's trivially replaced with the open-source Goldberg Emulator or a similar tool.
Another plus for GOG is that they let you download games with a web browser. No special app required. (I think Itch.io does this as well.)
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
The story I read was that they didn't collect or report anything, but just flagged a user if the cache contained a known game hack site, and that they stopped doing that years ago.
Not comparable to what Epic was caught doing, IMHO. Still, if there's an article with more detail, I wouldn't mind reading it. (Maybe it was part of their anti-cheat system of the time?)
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.
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.
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.
You can no longer buy the game on Steam though.
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.
Steam have DRM free games too, you don't have to launch them through steam even.
steam drm is so easy to bypass that it almost doesn't count
A con for GOG is their site is slow as fuck. And god 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
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.
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.
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.
Epic has a significantly higher percentage of games confirmed to be DRM-free.
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games
The Origin store proportionally has more DRM free games than Steam...
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.
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.
Another Epic con: they bribe devs to not launch their games on Steam and GoG, because their store isn’t good.