PC Epic Games Store - Wave 1 Lineup

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Ashen by A44 and Annapurna Interactive (now available)
Darksiders III by Gunfire Games and THQ Nordic (available Dec. 14 - THQ Nordic is gonna list this game EVERYWHERE!)
Hades by Supergiant Games (now available - early access)
Hello Neighbor: Hide and Seek by tinyBuild (now available)
Genesis Alpha One by Radiation Blue and Team17 (coming soon)
Journey by thatgamecompany and Annapurna Interactive (coming soon)
Maneater by Tripwire Interactive (coming soon)
Outer Wilds by Mobius Digital and Annapurna Interactive (coming soon)
Pathless by Giant Squid Studios (coming soon)
Rebel Galaxy Outlaw by Double Damage Games (coming soon)
Satisfactory by Coffee Stain Studios (coming soon)
Subnautica by Unknown Worlds (available for free from Dec. 14 - Dec. 27)
Super Meat Boy by Team Meat (available for free from Dec. 28 - Jan. 10) 
Super Meat Boy Forever by Team Meat (coming soon)
World War Z by Saber Interactive (coming soon)

 

Ashen, Satisfactory, Hades, Journey, The Pathless, Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, and Maneater are Epic Game Store exclusives (not available on other PC storefronts).  Ashen was originally listed to be included in Microsoft's PC Game Pass, but it appears that at the last minute an exclusivity deal was struck with Epic and it was subsequently removed from the PC Game Pass listing.  Also, Ashen's Steam Store page release date description went from "Coming Soon" to "TBD".  Satisfactory had its Steam Store page completely removed.  Rebel Galaxy Outlaw developers did indicate that the game could come to other storefronts.  Eventually.  Maybe.

 

 

It really does seem that Epic "moneyhatted" a whole bunch of PC exclusivity to open the store with a bang.

[Brian]

Good luck to the devs. I personally won’t be using Epic’s store. 

 

Ashen is still on the Xbox Game Pass

[ALIEN-gunner]

People are not happy with that Rebel Galaxy developer. I want to get the game on PS4 but this sheds some light on the shady mindset of that guy. 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

2 hours ago, ManUtdRedDevils said:

Ashen is still on the Xbox Game Pass

THIS THREAD IS ABOUT THE PC, NOT THE XBOX!!!

 

DO YOU SEE THAT PURPLE TAG?!?!

[AbsolutSurgen]

1 hour ago, ALIEN-gunner said:

People are not happy with that Rebel Galaxy developer. I want to get the game on PS4 but this sheds some light on the shady mindset of that guy. 

I had never heard of it before.  Do you have any details?

 

After seeing the screenshots, I was thinking of picking this one up.

[Keyser_Soze]

We now have PC wars.

[Brian]

4 hours ago, SFLUFAN said:

THIS THREAD IS ABOUT THE PC, NOT THE XBOX!!!

 

DO YOU SEE THAT PURPLE TAG?!?!

 

[Massdriver]

I welcome the competition. It's good for us all.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Looks like Ashen will make its way to other PC storefronts.  Eventually.

 

 

[DemonEyesJason]

15 hours ago, Massdriver said:

I welcome the competition. It's good for us all.

See I'd agree with this if it was competition of features that Epic was offering over Steam that made it worth using and benefited the consumer.  Instead, this competition is keeping us from having games on a service (or even other services if we are talking outside of Steam) that has a lot more function to it and benefits us as the consumer in no way.  Exclusivity is one type of competition where the consumer never wins and only benefits the platform holder.

[ALIEN-gunner]

On 12/7/2018 at 1:19 PM, mikechorney said:

I had never heard of it before.  Do you have any details?

 

After seeing the screenshots, I was thinking of picking this one up.

It's a spirital successor to Wing Commander Privateer much like the first Rebel Galaxy was but Outlaw will be much closer in design.  

[Xbob42]

I fixed the Tweet.

 

[Brian]

@Xbob42 - Basically Epic has started a cool kids club. Rebel Galaxy is a cool kid and other devs can get fucked. 

 

Quote

Q) So that means it’s not going to launch on Steam or GoG? What gives?

A) Yes, Rebel Galaxy Outlaw is going to be exclusively on the Epic Store for a while. Eventually it’ll make its way elsewhere. (Console releases are not tied to this)

Q) You’re being a coy bastard. How long, and don’t be a weasel.

A) 12 months from launch.

Q) Exclusives are anti-consumer, why would you do this? (you monster)

A) OK, so that’s a little complicated. And our answer is long-winded. Bear with us.

So, before Valve and the 70/30 split it was pretty darn rough to be an indie (both in terms of royalty share and in terms of the ability to sell things without a publisher). We can all thank Valve for using their leverage to make that happen, and usher in the era we have now. We think it’s safe to say that a large percentage of the games made today wouldn’t exist without it.

Epic is using their leverage to push that even farther, to 88/12. That’s another whole strata of developers who can survive.

Would we like that to become the new standard?
Yes.

Can that be done without leverage?
No.

Is some form of exclusive content required to get the momentum to make that happen?
Yes.

And we’re willing to get on board to make that happen. The only way this gets any traction is with some exclusive content and we’re willing to be one of the canaries in the mineshaft.

Do we hope there is a big upside for us? Sure. That’d be amazing. But we also hope this is the start of establishing a new standard.

Q) OK, maybe this is good for developers, but how is this good for customers? (still a monster)

A) From our standpoint as customers, a curated store with a more limited selection of quality games is a plus. Having the ability for you to share your emails with us (optionally) so we can communicate directly with you is hopefully also a plus for you. Competition for Steam is a plus. And in the longer term, achieving Epic’s goals on the royalty front means more developers succeeding and surviving and making more good stuff. That’s a longer play, but we think it’s still meaningful.

Moreover, it doesn’t remove Steam or other stores from the equation. We’ve all got big Steam libraries that aren’t going anywhere. Yes, this is exclusive right now, but that’s all sort of bound up in the store’s launch and this specific point in time.

https://rebel-galaxy.com/rebel-galaxy-outlaw-launching-on-epic-games-store-qa/

 

[Xbob42]

Quote

 From our standpoint as customers,

 

1. a curated store with a more limited selection of quality games is a plus.

2. Having the ability for you to share your emails with us (optionally) so we can communicate directly with you is hopefully also a plus for you.

3. Competition for Steam is a plus.

4. And in the longer term, achieving Epic’s goals on the royalty front means more developers succeeding and surviving and making more good stuff. That’s a longer play, but we think it’s still meaningful.

1. Is it? Lack of consumer choice is good for the consumer? I guess there's definitely a selection of people who believe that. What happens when a great game you're looking forward to isn't "a good fit" for the store? Who determines quality? How? What metrics are used and how can I trust these gatekeepers? A limited selection does not mean all the games currently being made are no longer being made, so someone still has to play them to determine whether they're worthy. This is a Herculean task even when you've got the entire Steam userbase, how is a tiny team at Epic arbitrarily deciding what's good and what's not going to benefit me? Oh? They're just gonna choose the ones that look the best based on trailers or whatever? Great. Wonderful.

 

2. Fuck you.

 

3. Theoretically. If I see someone competing with Steam, I'll let you know. Buying a few exclusives and launching an inferior storefront is not competition. Stop using this fucking line.

 

4. Possibly. But if the difference between you surviving or not is an 18% bigger cut... well, you're really living on the razor's edge. But I get it, it's hard for indies, and 18% more still isn't anything to sneeze at, that's a significant number. This one is at least the most viable answer. On the other hand, if the market's too crowded, then this directly contradicts #1. Devs dying off is a good thing because us dumbasses won't have to figure out what the good games are and we'll have a more limited selection!

 

I do like the roundabout admission of them having zero power over the console market so "whatever none of this applies there, we just take it up the ass and that's that."

[Keyser_Soze]

The split is larger but do you make more money when you put it out on a platform less people will buy it on?

[Xbob42]

12 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

The split is larger but do you make more money when you put it out on a platform less people will buy it on?

Of course not, you have 150 million less pairs of game-buying eyes looking at it. But you do make more from Epic giving you a sweet bonus for going exclusive for a year.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd be happy to sell out if it meant I could be guaranteed some income as an indie, I don't really blame them, I just don't think I need sunshine blown up my ass about it.

[Moa]

I like that they failed to address the reasonable assumption that Epic is paying them quite a bit of money for exclusive status, and that this is likely an unsustainable practice for Epic. I would say let the bidding wars begin, but I doubt Valve is going to play ball given their commanding position. 

 

Also the bit about a curated store is hilarious, I don't need Epic or Valve to help me find games. 

[Paperclyp]

12 hours ago, DemonEyesJason said:

See I'd agree with this if it was competition of features that Epic was offering over Steam that made it worth using and benefited the consumer.  Instead, this competition is keeping us from having games on a service (or even other services if we are talking outside of Steam) that has a lot more function to it and benefits us as the consumer in no way.  Exclusivity is one type of competition where the consumer never wins and only benefits the platform holder.

Meh this is certainly more true when it comes games on separate consoles, but the games are available on the same platform. At worst, it’s a little annoying to have to put up with multiple launchers, but it’s a minor inconvenience. 

 

In this day and age it’s a bit obtuse to make like the “different friends lists” argument as well (not that you did, it’s just a common gripe i see). Everyone uses discord or their own other application to chat, and it takes all of 10 seconds to add a friend. 

 

Likely someone will develop an app (discord is already doing it) that consolidates all of your games regardless of apps and you can launch them from a singular service. 

 

At any rate, what I guess I’m saying is that Steam has become far too complacent and frankly kinda shitty about how they handle their storefront on a variety of levels. The competition this may spur is well worth any kind of inconvenience imo. And your same machine plays the game regardless of the launcher. 

[Xbob42]

56 minutes ago, Paperclyp said:

frankly kinda shitty about how they handle their storefront on a variety of levels

Liiiiiiike?

And, after that, what competing storefront addresses these issues in a significantly better way?

[HGLatinBoy]

Well this is the first year many companies have started to make launcher exclusive games. Activision didnt need to make BOIIII and D2 Battle.net exclusive or even sell it on their store front but we all knew it was gonna happen i was expecting it to happen with BOIII.

 

Then Bethesda doing their thing. Fornite could've come out on Steam but they didnt and it worked out for them.

 

The real issue is that Valve has sat on their ass content with doing NOTHING to improve Steam on their own everything seems reactionary to the industry as a whole. They tried copying discord for whatever the dumb reason they have they have no content developers that are constantly updating the store and making it look modern. It still looks an updated version of steam 1.0

 

If steam dies in the future this year would mark the beginning of the end. 

[Xbob42]

1 hour ago, HGLatinBoy said:

The real issue is that Valve has sat on their ass content with doing NOTHING to improve Steam on their own everything seems reactionary to the industry as a whole. They tried copying discord for whatever the dumb reason they have they have no content developers that are constantly updating the store and making it look modern. It still looks an updated version of steam 1.0

But --and this is important-- no other stores look any better. In fact, all of them look worse and perform worse and have less features. What is there to "react" to? Yeah they updated chat to be like Discord, but Discord wasn't even "competition" when that happened. They lowered their fees for certain devs in response to this, but that's got nothing to do with the storefront.

 

This all comes back to it not being competition because no one is doing anything better than Steam. There's no significantly better looking stores, there's no stores with equal functionality, let alone more, there's no stores with as much information about the games you're buying or the amount of user reviews or any of that stuff.

 

It's like everyone is yelling "This pizza SUCKS! It's not keeping up with the modern age!" and then they all just go to fucking Little Caesars and get a worse pizza with a dude jacking off in the corner and somehow everyone's supposed to be impressed. And the response is ALWAYS "Well they just launched!" as if they launched in a bubble, completely unaware of Steam's feature list that apparently hasn't been updated in 20 years. Origin launched a long time ago and it's still a big piece of shit, yet still one of the best alternative stores.

The sentiment that Valve hasn't done a tremendous job overhauling their own launcher is fairly accurate, tacking on other stores to that statement to prove a point does the exact opposite.

And while we're at it, what the fuck are people even looking for Valve to update here? Maybe it's just that most overhauls I've seen over the year have been ass, but I dunno, I think Steam's pretty functional and not really very ugly? What kind of design are we looking for? Giant banner images with minimalist info for a clean, sleek, modern look? What kind of features are we looking for?

I feel like everyone has this vague anti-Steam sentiment, but very little substance to their arguments or ideas. Just this feeling of "it needs to be updated more." Which, sure, I'm good with more features. Separating DLC and software from the list of games was a great move, the ability to throttle your downloads took way too long and was a hugely welcome addition, etc. But what, specifically, are we hoping they add now? Are we looking for them to innovate for innovation's sake, and then giving every store that pops up a pass despite being a piss-poor Steam clone that also, surprise surprise, hasn't innovated on jack shit?

Here, I'll even make you a little sort of scavenger hunt list, see how many items you can check off when using the Epic Games store:

 

- Add Ashen to your wish list.

- Tell me Ashen's genre and whether it's single-player, multi-player, co-op, etc, and whether or not it has controller support

- Add Rebel Galaxy Outlaw to your ignore list

- Make a thread in the Hades game forums

- Report to me the metacritic (or similar metric) score and general user reviews for Hello Neighbor Hide and Seek

- Join a Community group for Subnautica

- Go into your settings and throttle your download speeds

- Report Satisfactory for racism

- Set your friend list to invisible or offline

- Assign a friend to a group

- Give a friend a nickname

- Send a message to an offline friend

- Invite a friend to voice chat

- Enable a controller-friendly mode

- Tell me which of your friends own Darksiders 3

- Tell me the patch notes for Shadow Complex

- Tell me the languages (text and voice) Maneater is available in

- Perform a search to find Super Meat Boy forever

- Sort games by genre

- Change your store or library to be grid-based, tile-based or text-based

- Navigate to a game's install folder via your library

- Look at a friend's activity feed for screenshots, videos, reviews, etc

-Send me a gift copy of Hades

 

All this innovation, I can't handle it!

 

I feel like the pro-Steam nutjob around here, just yelling into the void every once in a while at the backlash Steam seems to get, but I'm totally open for something to come and kick its ass; but only if it's something that's actually going to kick its ass. Not just be a sad imitator buying exclusives with an unsustainable business model because they lucked out with a fucking Battle Royale. If my library's going to be fractured again and again, there better be some damn compelling reasons for it on my end, not just so some fucking indie dev can make a little more money.

[TheLeon]

I’m not that passionate about, well, anything, but I agree with Xbob.

[Paperclyp]

7 hours ago, Xbob42 said:

Liiiiiiike?

And, after that, what competing storefront addresses these issues in a significantly better way?

Opening the floodgates and throwing their hands up saying they’re going to let every game through and not police them at all. Which is bad for both consumer and developer. That’s the biggest thing. 

 

[Paperclyp]

3 hours ago, Xbob42 said:

But --and this is important-- no other stores look any better. In fact, all of them look worse and perform worse and have less features. What is there to "react" to? Yeah they updated chat to be like Discord, but Discord wasn't even "competition" when that happened. They lowered their fees for certain devs in response to this, but that's got nothing to do with the storefront.

 

This all comes back to it not being competition because no one is doing anything better than Steam. There's no significantly better looking stores, there's no stores with equal functionality, let alone more, there's no stores with as much information about the games you're buying or the amount of user reviews or any of that stuff.

 

It's like everyone is yelling "This pizza SUCKS! It's not keeping up with the modern age!" and then they all just go to fucking Little Caesars and get a worse pizza with a dude jacking off in the corner and somehow everyone's supposed to be impressed. And the response is ALWAYS "Well they just launched!" as if they launched in a bubble, completely unaware of Steam's feature list that apparently hasn't been updated in 20 years. Origin launched a long time ago and it's still a big piece of shit, yet still one of the best alternative stores.

The sentiment that Valve hasn't done a tremendous job overhauling their own launcher is fairly accurate, tacking on other stores to that statement to prove a point does the exact opposite.

And while we're at it, what the fuck are people even looking for Valve to update here? Maybe it's just that most overhauls I've seen over the year have been ass, but I dunno, I think Steam's pretty functional and not really very ugly? What kind of design are we looking for? Giant banner images with minimalist info for a clean, sleek, modern look? What kind of features are we looking for?

I feel like everyone has this vague anti-Steam sentiment, but very little substance to their arguments or ideas. Just this feeling of "it needs to be updated more." Which, sure, I'm good with more features. Separating DLC and software from the list of games was a great move, the ability to throttle your downloads took way too long and was a hugely welcome addition, etc. But what, specifically, are we hoping they add now? Are we looking for them to innovate for innovation's sake, and then giving every store that pops up a pass despite being a piss-poor Steam clone that also, surprise surprise, hasn't innovated on jack shit?

Here, I'll even make you a little sort of scavenger hunt list, see how many items you can check off when using the Epic Games store:

 

- Add Ashen to your wish list.

- Tell me Ashen's genre and whether it's single-player, multi-player, co-op, etc, and whether or not it has controller support

- Add Rebel Galaxy Outlaw to your ignore list

- Make a thread in the Hades game forums

- Report to me the metacritic (or similar metric) score and general user reviews for Hello Neighbor Hide and Seek

- Join a Community group for Subnautica

- Go into your settings and throttle your download speeds

- Report Satisfactory for racism

- Set your friend list to invisible or offline

- Assign a friend to a group

- Give a friend a nickname

- Send a message to an offline friend

- Invite a friend to voice chat

- Enable a controller-friendly mode

- Tell me which of your friends own Darksiders 3

- Tell me the patch notes for Shadow Complex

- Tell me the languages (text and voice) Maneater is available in

- Perform a search to find Super Meat Boy forever

- Sort games by genre

- Change your store or library to be grid-based, tile-based or text-based

- Navigate to a game's install folder via your library

- Look at a friend's activity feed for screenshots, videos, reviews, etc

-Send me a gift copy of Hades

 

All this innovation, I can't handle it!

 

I feel like the pro-Steam nutjob around here, just yelling into the void every once in a while at the backlash Steam seems to get, but I'm totally open for something to come and kick its ass; but only if it's something that's actually going to kick its ass. Not just be a sad imitator buying exclusives with an unsustainable business model because they lucked out with a fucking Battle Royale. If my library's going to be fractured again and again, there better be some damn compelling reasons for it on my end, not just so some fucking indie dev can make a little more money.

I think this is unfair. Nobody was necessarily stating (that I saw) that Epic’s store was going to immediately be more innovative and functional than steam. I think it’d be crazy to assume that would be the case. 

 

The hope is is that this puts a little pressure on valve to police their stuff a little better, help out content creators (which in turn hopefully gets us more games from talented people), and make improvements to the app itself. 

 

I like steam. I’m not anti steam. 

[Xbob42]

12 minutes ago, Paperclyp said:

Opening the floodgates and throwing their hands up saying they’re going to let every game through and not police them at all. Which is bad for both consumer and developer. That’s the biggest thing. 

I consider that a massive benefit. I don't need anyone telling me what games are OK or not for me to buy. Again, just about anything on the front page of Steam is going to be of either a fair level of quality or of general interest to a significant portion of people. So you'll see a mix of popular games, top selling games, trending games, games on sale, and... that's kind of about it.

The good games still sell just fine and get popular (as much as other stores, at least, sometimes good games fall through the cracks no matter what). The kind of bad games you'd want to "not be on the platform" are almost exclusively only available if you go digging for them, as they won't make it to the front page or to the top of any searches. The one sort-of exception to this is hentai games... but they show up from time to time because they're very popular. Just like how Dynasty Warriors will show up on the front page of PSN or XBL despite being a huge pile of shit. There's an audience for it.

The hand-wringing about "the floodgates" has yet to produce any evidence that I've found anywhere near compelling. The store is already massively curated -- except it's front-facing curation. You only see what's likely to be of some interest to you. Digital Homicide games ain't gonna show up in your feed unless you buy them. (Well, they won't at all anymore for anyone, but you get the idea.)

And I don't understand what people want Valve to do "for creators." Give them money? Give them a bunch of free advertising? Kill all the competition so the store is hyper-curated? That'd be amazing news... for 0.1% of developers.

 

I just cannot fathom how people demand curation. Again, who are we trusting to curate to an acceptable level? Most people barely even trust professional reviewers for fuck's sake, let alone some guy judging games based on screenshots, trailers or 10 minutes of gameplay.

 

And even then, we still see the occasional hit like this on the official Playstation Youtube channel, and I believe it was during their E3 press conference as well? I can't recall:

 

 

Anyway, the only sustainable part of Epic's efforts are the 88/12 part. Which is great, but the "supporting creators" thing is only going to last so long. Either the store will get enough games to where devs have the same exact issue, the store won't have enough games and thus they're NOT supporting a bunch of devs, or something to that effect. And they certainly can't keep buying exclusives in perpetuity, that's for damn sure. MS and Sony can barely afford that kind of spending habit on a handful of titles. Epic's in a slightly easier position because they're buying indie game exclusivity rather than AAA, but, again, even Sony and MS don't buy that many indie exclusives.

[Paperclyp]

6 minutes ago, Xbob42 said:

I consider that a massive benefit. I don't need anyone telling me what games are OK or not for me to buy. Again, just about anything on the front page of Steam is going to be of either a fair level of quality or of general interest to a significant portion of people. So you'll see a mix of popular games, top selling games, trending games, games on sale, and... that's kind of about it.

The good games still sell just fine and get popular. The kind of bad games you'd want to "not be on the platform" are almost exclusively only available if you go digging for them, as they won't make it to the front page or to the top of any searches. The one sort-of exception to this is hentai games... but they show up from time to time because they're very popular. Just like how Dynasty Warriors will show up on the front page of PSN or XBL despite being a huge pile of shit. There's an audience for it.

The hand-wringing about "the floodgates" has yet to produce any evidence that I've found anywhere near compelling. The store is already massively curated -- except it's front-facing curation. You only see what's likely to be of some interest to you. Digital Homicide games ain't gonna show up in your feed unless you buy them. (Well, they won't at all anymore for anyone, but you get the idea.)

But I’m not concerned about us directly when it comes to policing content. I’m talking about developers who may have their game ripped off and the ripoff becomes the popular thing. It’s already happened several times on mobile. In general I don’t think the curation is all that great on the steam storefront, but for now I’m well informed enough that that doesn’t bother me. 

[DemonEyesJason]

7 hours ago, Paperclyp said:

Meh this is certainly more true when it comes games on separate consoles, but the games are available on the same platform. At worst, it’s a little annoying to have to put up with multiple launchers, but it’s a minor inconvenience. 

 

In this day and age it’s a bit obtuse to make like the “different friends lists” argument as well (not that you did, it’s just a common gripe i see). Everyone uses discord or their own other application to chat, and it takes all of 10 seconds to add a friend. 

 

Likely someone will develop an app (discord is already doing it) that consolidates all of your games regardless of apps and you can launch them from a singular service. 

 

At any rate, what I guess I’m saying is that Steam has become far too complacent and frankly kinda shitty about how they handle their storefront on a variety of levels. The competition this may spur is well worth any kind of inconvenience imo. And your same machine plays the game regardless of the launcher. 

And yet none of the things you're pointing out says how going to the Epic launcher benefits people as a consumer for using their service.  These services are also more than friend lists.  How they allow for user content to be consolidated and make modding easier for those that aren't Lucian levels into modding.  How they match regional pricing (this isn't a thing for US, but means a lot to those that are in other countries).  The drive they have to included all sorts of control inputs that make it easier for us to use our favorite control schemes.  All things Steam has done to make the consumer experience better.  I'm not against competition for Steam, but so far, these companies have not really tried to compete, just made it worse by anti-consumer competition methods.  If Epic wanted to really compete, they would have launched with all of the features Steam had and more which Epic, with Tencent backing is all the more capable to.  Instead they launched with about the capability I would expect a small upstart company to do, which isn't how you compete this late in the game.

 

From the subsequent posts I've seen you've made since I started typing this response though, it seems a lot of your beef is around the store portion, which for me, I can't think I've really had a problem with.  I'm like Xbob in that I like the openness they've done and I don't want people to tell me what I may want to play or not.  I've not felt I haven't been able to find the games I've wanted to play and in a lot of cases, Steam helped me discover games I wasn't aware of based on the algorithms they built into that.  I've not run into this deluge of crap unless I only look at the new releases list.  I can see some developers frustrations as now they actually have to compete and try and stand out instead of just making a game and putting it on a service, but if anyone remembers the complaints about Greenlight, this is what they wanted in a lot of cases, but now they can't get lucky and just expect sales.  Really when I hear the complaints about sales, it's always the devs that make some game that does something we've seen thousands of times and they don't try to reach out at all and promote the game.  Not only that, but they are so absorbed in their passion, they never once think if they made a good game.  I ran into a number of these people at a developer's expo here in Columbus call GDEX where a lot of the people were trying to show off their games, but a lot of them felt sort of meh.  But they were unaware of it in a lot of cases.

 

I would recommend you watch this video from Steam Dev Days at least for the first 8 minutes from a few years ago.  It talks about some of the issues they had when they tried to curate and how they almost turned down some huge successes.  Stardew Valley for one would have been not on Steam and probably never become the success it did if they had curated it.  
 

 

 

[Paperclyp]

4 minutes ago, DemonEyesJason said:

And yet none of the things you're pointing out says how going to the Epic launcher benefits people as a consumer for using their service.  These services are also more than friend lists.  How they allow for user content to be consolidated and make modding easier for those that aren't Lucian levels into modding.  How they match regional pricing (this isn't a thing for US, but means a lot to those that are in other countries).  The drive they have to included all sorts of control inputs that make it easier for us to use our favorite control schemes.  All things Steam has done to make the consumer experience better.  I'm not against competition for Steam, but so far, these companies have not really tried to compete, just made it worse by anti-consumer competition methods.  If Epic wanted to really compete, they would have launched with all of the features Steam had and more which Epic, with Tencent backing is all the more capable to.  Instead they launched with about the capability I would expect a small upstart company to do, which isn't how you compete this late in the game.

 

From the subsequent posts I've seen you've made since I started typing this response though, it seems a lot of your beef is around the store portion, which for me, I can't think I've really had a problem with.  I'm like Xbob in that I like the openness they've done and I don't want people to tell me what I may want to play or not.  I've not felt I haven't been able to find the games I've wanted to play and in a lot of cases, Steam helped me discover games I wasn't aware of based on the algorithms they built into that.  I've not run into this deluge of crap unless I only look at the new releases list.  I can see some developers frustrations as now they actually have to compete and try and stand out instead of just making a game and putting it on a service, but if anyone remembers the complaints about Greenlight, this is what they wanted in a lot of cases, but now they can't get lucky and just expect sales.  Really when I hear the complaints about sales, it's always the devs that make some game that does something we've seen thousands of times and they don't try to reach out at all and promote the game.  Not only that, but they are so absorbed in their passion, they never once think if they made a good game.  I ran into a number of these people at a developer's expo here in Columbus call GDEX where a lot of the people were trying to show off their games, but a lot of them felt sort of meh.  But they were unaware of it in a lot of cases.

 

I would recommend you watch this video from Steam Dev Days at least for the first 8 minutes from a few years ago.  It talks about some of the issues they had when they tried to curate and how they almost turned down some huge successes.  Stardew Valley for one would have been not on Steam and probably never become the success it did if they had curated it.  
 

 

 

As I said before, I never (and never saw anyone else) claimed the Epic store was coming in polished and ready to go head to head with Steam in features or anything of the sort. I also think Steam is a great service.

 

I’m not shitting on Steam. I think it’ll be a net positive to have competition.

[Keyser_Soze]

39 minutes ago, Paperclyp said:

As I said before, I never (and never saw anyone else) claimed the Epic store was coming in polished and ready to go head to head with Steam in features or anything of the sort. I also think Steam is a great service.

  

I’m not shitting on Steam. I think it’ll be a net positive to have competition.

 

Not sure why you keep saying "coming in" the Epic store has been around for a while.

It's just they've sold very few things and killed off a lot of games (Unreal Tournament, that MOBA they had, regular Fortnite) for Fortnite.

[Paperclyp]

1 hour ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

Not sure why you keep saying "coming in" the Epic store has been around for a while.

It's just they've sold very few things and killed off a lot of games (Unreal Tournament, that MOBA they had, regular Fortnite) for Fortnite.

That’s true but it seems like this is a relaunch of sorts, a very focused effort to attempt to seriously compete. 

[Brian]

I’m all for fair competition, but paying for store exclusives that forces a consumer to use a shittier service? Fuck off. 

[Zaku3]

My only complaint about Steam is Valve should have kept developing games. I know Artefact is out but we should really have a Day of Defeat, HL3, etc. They need to start development back up. It is just logical the big pubs would eventually open their own stores. 

[AbsolutSurgen]

 

[crispy4000]

I'll install the Epic launcher for free Subnautica, and some other free games down the road.

Like Uplay and Origin, I'll likely never purchase anything for the client unless the deal was insane or part of a good bundle.

[SimpleG]

If Epic thinks this is ok , they are not gonna make it.