this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
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Epic got so much bullshit for - reads annotation - making platform exclusives that were only temporary and helped developers with stable financing with better terms.
After pulling those games off other stores, some of which refused to refund pre orders
Epic halted development of UT4 for Fortnite. They are dead to me.
Blame market demand. Quake was also halted. UT4 was halted 3 years before Fortnite was out. Fortnite wasn't even supposed to be a battle royale, it just coincided with the popularity of one. The original game mode Save the World that it implemented wouldn't even had had any crossover with the fps multiplayer deathmatch shooter genre. Even games with novel mechanics like Titanfall have struggled and failed to survive in it. I think the generation that never got into Minecraft and think of it as just as a joke kiddie game is still resentful of the types of games it encouraged and continues to do so.
They didn’t even make things exclusive
There were no clauses saying you couldn’t release on mac/linux/ps/xbox/switch
They just only carry games for the Windows platform. They did buy EAC and make a Linux version as well as gave all devs the ability to implement crossplay regardless of engine
Beyond a bit of annoyance about Borderlands 3 being temporarily exclusive, I think the only thing I minded about Epic Games Store was a lack of user reviews, but there's the metacritic embed now so I'm not sure was the issue should be.
User reviews are almost impossible to get right. On Steam and GOG, they are easily and routinely abused. Steam took some steps to tackle review bombing, but even when it detects it, there's no protection against marking reviews as helpful or unhelpful, which is sometimes used to the same end as review bombing for reasons that have nothing to do with the game content or technical aspects. There is also no active screening for hate speech and things of that nature, with the word filter often bypassed.
Epic supports user ratings and offers the players to rate games at random as to prevent abuse.
G*mers are too Stockholmed by Valve's monopoly.
Introduction the Epic store to gamers was like introducing vegetables to meth addicts
GOG gave them an opportunity to stand behind actual principles, they choose gifs presented as trading cards and legalized gambling in the form of the Counter Strike market. The one thing Valve does good is not acting like a complete asshole like most people in the publisher sector (EA, Ubisoft, etc.) but they've certainly spear-led some horrible consumer practices under an effective monopoly. While EGS isn't anything revolutionary and are basically better terms of those horrible consumer practices, they can't even tolerate competition in that regard. The critics can call me out when I can play Half Life 2 and Portal on the Epic Game Store. Valve didn't even consent to having accounts available as inheritance even though at that point anyone who's not a greedy asshole trying to squeeze out as much money as possible as quickly as possible would have realized that that would sell them more games in the long term.
Valve has treated linux as a first class citizen for gaming. GOG can't even be bothered to build a launcher. EPIC pretends and fucks around in the end.
Only Valve has been consistent, keeping their platform available and simple. I am sure one day they will Netflix and go from hero to villain, but as of right now they are still the good guys.
Valve still doesn't try and stuff anti-cheat into Kernal space, and that says something right there.
Acting like gamers suddenly care about Linux is a bold strategy. Valve has been going SteamOS when they began considering releasing their own consoles. Wanna compare the statistics of Steam gamers playing on Linux versus other platforms? Incidentally, you basically still have to jailbreak out of their cushy covers to play Linux games outside of their library in their consoles. This is better than what SEGA and Nintendo has done, but it is still tied to a profit incentive.
Their platform is anything but simple. Anytime I want to play a game, I get bombarded with community features I don't want that attempt to tie a portion of that game's community to their platform. Buying games literally rewards me with bullshit points to try to tie me to their platform's community "features". Valve has plenty of games within its library that has kernel level protection, but yes, they aren't going to be pushing it if they have to rely on Linux for their console OS.