Epic made headlines when Metro Exodus that was set for a steam launch and even had physical copies with the steam logo, abruptly decided to pull their launch after entering into a deal with Epic.

https://old.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/aqyjac/physical_copy_of_metro_exodus_for_pc_has_a/

Then came the contracts to not release on Steam. And from the DARQ dev turned out that also included GOG too.

I was contacted by the Epic Store, proposing that I enter into an exclusivity agreement with them instead of releasing DARQ on Steam. They made it clear that releasing DARQ non-exclusively is not an option. I rejected their offer before we had a chance to talk about money.

https://medium.com/@unfoldgames/why-i-turned-down-exclusivity-deal-from-the-epic-store-developer-of-darq-7ee834ed0ac7

Free games are nice, but that doesn’t guarantee affection when it comes to paying customers. It wasn’t like this was some small indie company but another billion dollar company trying to pull a Walmart, so some people just weren’t won over by the free games into being happy with the exclusivity deals. Those people weren’t happy having choice forced away.

I still haven’t spent money on epic but I do claim the free games. Yet I will probably never spend money there even though I’ve spent money at GOG, uplay, bnet, and origin because the first impression and approach they took rubbed me the wrong way. So even people who don’t only buy from steam were turned off with the strategy they took.

Now some people don’t care and will buy from there, so this just the point of view of people who dislike Epic.

I bought Alan Wake 2 because I read it’s drm-free which is sort of true. I bought it and I even bought the deluxe upgrade only to realize the game will refuse to recognize the dlc unless it’s launched though the EGS launcher which I refuse to use. Conveniently they won’t refund game add-ons. Fuck Epic Games, they can suck a fat one.

I personally never hated it, I just prefer Steam, because it has stuff like dedicated game workshop, forums, screenshots, achievements, cards, etc. Even when I got something for free in Epic Games Store I would later proceed to buy it in Steam and play there to have all those features.

1. It was insecure. It leaked credit card numbers and personal information like a sieve.
2. It used CCP money to bribe companies into throwing away sales. An act that while was short term good for the companies, permanently poisoned them afterwards.
3. They didnt have basic functionality like preloading games. They had to pay Gearbox to do that for them
4. They still dont have feature parity with Steam, even for the few features they have

Oh, it’s still hated.

Epic couldn’t make a superior product, so instead they bribed lots of game developers to make things Epic exclusive.

On top of that, even after being around for years, the Epic software is missing tons of features that Steam has had for years.

Epic bleeds obscene amounts of money to build a separate set of infrastructure, rather than actually trying to improve things for gamers.

Epic’s ostensibly biggest benefit is that it charges less money per transaction to developers. But Epic has, at this point, given away hundreds of free games, and Steam has so many more people with a long history of buying games. So there’s an argument to be made that Steam is still the better value, because it provides better exposure and a larger paying player base.

I can’t speak for anyone else but I can at least share why I didn’t care for it.

Steam already exists and there isn’t a lot I feel is missing from the Steam store. Not to mention there isn’t anything that Epic does better than Valve for their storefronts. Epic doesn’t provide any new value that Valve doesn’t. In fact I’d argue that Epic causes negative value for several reasons:

1. They essentially fragmented the PC market as now I can’t access all of my games in a single location. The same reason for example that I hate that Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, etc … exist. It just makes the overall experience less convenient and more expensive.

2. Several features that Steam already has working are either broken or missing in the Epic Store. Especially around the shopping cart, etc … I haven’t gone to look recently to verify if any of these have been fixed and probably won’t until the other points are addressed, if they even can be resolved.

3. There’s no level of trust with Epic compared to Steam. I have a massive Steam collection and Valve has shown time and time again that I can trust that my data is relatively safe with them. When was the last time you saw Valve in the media because of a data breach? When was the last time your Steam account got hacked. Epic is just new here so they haven’t had a chance to earn that trust.

4. Their motives for wanting to create a new store wasn’t to improve the customer experience. Instead it was to improve their bottom line. The court cases against Google and Apple prove this. If they at least tried to have a PR campaign to show how Epic is innovating compared to Steam especially for making the customer experience better, the Epic Store might have sit better with me.

5. Timed exclusives. Similar to point 1, but they were just trying to use their massive cash reserves from Fortnight to buy their way into the market rather than earn the trust of customers. This again resulted in fragmentation of the PC market.

Anyway, just my two cents.

Fuck Epic… And while I’m here, screw Valve as well. You own nothing from all these “Leasers”. If you truly want to archive, preserve, and hand down your games in your will to future generations, you will need GOG offline installers. I burn these on to M-Disc Media that is supposed to last hundreds of years!

I just can’t with Steam anymore… Social media is cancer, Mmos are just about preening about and showing off your fashion. Essentially all the amazing features and functionality of the Steam Client really isn’t needed for the Anti-Capitalist, grumpy old people that generally hate other people, companies, FOMO and silly achievements like I’m a fucking child again.

When Epic first launched, they didn’t have payment processors in a number of countries. Want to play that Epic exclusive game? Well too fucking bad because you can’t buy it. That one frustrated me as someone who lives outside of some of the major countries. Also, the people behind it are absolute tools in my opinion and I’d rather not support them.

Gamers are a bunch of entitled babies