The stupid piece of shit software doesn’t tell me anything about the games. That’s the problem with it.
I go to Steam and it tells me all sorts of info regarding the game. More videos. More screenshots. The data on the right side describing if it’s coop/single/mmo/whatever. All the reviews.
HOW HARD IS IT TO COPY SOMEONE ELSE’S HOMEWORK?!?!?!?
The excuse was (from Tim Swiney) that Steam also started barebones.
Epic is still barebones 8 years in. Steam wasn’t by that point.
They took a look at Steam and decided the forums were the big thing missing? The community reviews of games are on some occasion useful, and the steam workshop is great, but the actual forum is just about the most useless feature of Steam I can think of. There are so many places on the Internet to talk about games, chat with people while playing games, post about games, etc.
To be honest, I think the forums in Steam are a good addition, and worth having it. And in my opinion every game store should have such a community feature builtin.
My experience has been far less valuable. The steam forums are typically very poorly moderated, and bigotry runs wild in basically all of them.
It’s not inherent to Steam or forums as a concept, but unless the people running it take care to invest in resources for proper moderation, forums will just naturally trend towards toxic behaviour because it’s easier to be an asshole and harass good people out than it is to do the opposite.
So basically like any other forum. At least there is not much over moderation compared to Reddit or worse, Discord in example. I am reporting posts and comments all the time, and get messages from time to time that action has been done. I can see the accounts being banned (public info) and comments or posts being removed. But usually I am only active in forums with lot of activity, so not sure how this compares to less active communities. There is a screenshot of a confirmation reporting a discussion post:
The more active forums are where most of the problems are. It’s easy to moderate slower smaller discussions, but where Steam really lacks is in those more active forums where basically any game that has any real hype around it will turn into an absolute shitshow, especially if topics like lgbt people or women come up, or if the game happens to attract a really horny incel fandom.
Epic decided to enter the market by bringing the trash console exclusivity model to PC. Furthermore, they stated they will never support GNU/Linux. I will never touch this rubbish.
K
Special K
Some of us have already been burned by EPIC and we aren’t going back.
A decade ago, I was playing a game called Paragon that was being “beta” tested via EPIC. (I would say it was an alpha release because there were SOOOO many changes to gameplay and map, no sane person would consider it a BETA test.) Steve Superville was in charge. Early iterations were pretty sweet, match length could go 40-60 minutes because there were lots of mechanics that could dramatically shift the flow of a match. This is because the game was being designed as a MOBA, and it was a true MOBA. As someone who enjoys strategy and MOBAs, the early product was amazing.
Then the bean counters entered and forced production to reduce map size because they felt a 40-60 minute match was too long, despite no one from the community complaining about it. The bean counters forced more map shrinkage in an attempt to make the game play more like a brawler, when it was clearly not. They were just trying to ride the overwatch hype train because brawlers were successful at the time. Eventually Steve Superville was forced out of the project and they brought in Donald Mustard, because he was willing to turn the project into a pay to win riddled with microtransactions piece of trash.
These corporate bean counters alienated their entire customer base and acted surprised when the product failed. The best part is that while it was in BETA, they were fucking charging money for skins. When they closed the product you couldn’t get a cash refund for the skins you bought. You got refunded in credits you could spend on their other products. I was alpha testing Fortnite at this time too. It was a plants/zombies type game with building. When they axed paragon, they rolled tons of those assets into fortnite, and redesigned the whole product to mimic PubG, because they wanted to ride the PubG hype train. No way was I willing to accept anything less than a cash refund for what I spent while I was beta testing their product.
Epic’s corporate overlords don’t have an original thought rattling around in their collective heads. Their entire business model is to flail around, copy anything that seems remotely successful with a reskin, and hope it sticks. Not even free products will convince me to download their laucher, or anything they put their mierdas touch on. /rant
Some of us have already been burned by EPIC and we aren’t going back.
First they took Linux support away from my Rocket League and then completely away from Steam. I don’t know how the current state is, but that was a huge burn for me. There are and were other issues too, this is just the one I am most angry about.
Full official Linux support or GTFO.
Now I’ll collect the free game I’m never playing.
Ooh the Botany one sounds cool, thanks for reminding me
I do occasionally play the free games, I just do it through heroic games launcher.
Heroic tends to log me out if not used for a bit, (or sometimes, at random it seems) and login with the deck while commute is annoying.
Epic giveaway is just a moral justification to download from torrent and add to steam, honestly.
When I used windows and had EGS, I had to log in nearly every time because it was so rare that I launched it. So not even a Heroic issue, yet another Epic issue
Was going to say this. There was an entire month and a half in mid-2020 where the launcher SAID I was logged in, but any time I tried to collect a free game or play something I had already installed it would stick me into a login loop. Customer Service was mystified. I was on windows 10, but the crash logs said I was on an unsupported OS. I uninstalled and reinstalled and that didn’t help. Ended up wiping the drive it was installed on and that fixed it?
Well…“fixed”. Every time I would shutdown or restart my pc I’d have to login again.Compared to that bs, having to login on heroic once in a while is positively smooth sailing. Seems to be mostly when heroic updates.
👍 good for you.
Epic can finally add all the features they want but until they stop the BS of PC exclusivity deals, I’ll continue to never buy from them and will stick to Steam, GoG, and Itch.
Epic can take “some money” by selling third party indie and AAA games… or take “all the money” when people spend in Fortnite. It’s a conflict of interest: Epic don’t want a good store that do the job for other companies, Epic want advertisement for their single product. They give free games with the same logic you get free merchandise to gather people around place that cost money… they don’t give the customer free stuff to make them happy, they don’t give “free money” to publisher/developers because wants them happy (well, aside for the purpose to have happy business).
They want as much as people possible, regardless of their role as customer or publisher, to bring their business in their pocket.
The wrong direction. Repeating Steam’s mistakes won’t fix it.
