5 ms·
Epic game store is paying a lot for exclusives to compete with steam. We should see a jump in games piracy.
by yvdriess 8y ago
Epic game store is paying a lot for exclusives to compete with steam. We should see a jump in games piracy.
- dleslie 8y agoAbsolutely. Every major game forum I read appears to have an abundance of such sentiment. Timed exclusives on a store that many people outright _hate_ is going to increase piracy, without a doubt.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- TheGRS 8y agoI really don't understand the sentiment since having 2-3 game launchers has been the norm for digital games for years now. I can't buy any new Blizzard/Activision games or EA games through Steam that I know of, and these are some of the largest game companies and largest releases in the world.
- dleslie 8y agoBlizzard and Origin are reasonably good stores and launchers, and their exclusives are that of the publisher who runs the store. Epic Store is... Not a quality experience and its exclusives are not solely from the publisher that runs the store.
- Cyph0n 8y agoOrigin was also “not a quality experience” when it first came out, and it was also universally hated by fans of Steam. So why do you think Epic can’t do the same thing?
- dleslie 8y agoEpic isn't doing the same thing. Origin's exclusives were EA games. Epic's exclusives are not all Epic games.
- gruez 8y agoDoes that make a difference? The end result is the same. Games that that you want to play are locked behind a particular launcher.
- dleslie 8y agoOf course it makes a difference. Epic isn't attempting to make their store succeed on its own merits, or on the merit of their own games; they are buying exclusivity in order to succeed. That upsets people, and rightly so. Epic is using their cash to complete, and are trying to replace something people love with something worse.
- Cyph0n 8y ago> Epic is using their cash to complete, and are trying to replace something people love with something worse. But this is the point: the fact that Epic is making "something worse" might be true now, but will change in the future. This is precisely what happened with Origin for example, at least in the perception of gamers.
- dleslie 8y agoSo it's worse now. Why should I, as a consumer, silently accept that so a billion dollar corporation can get a foothold against another billion dollar corporation?
- gruez 8y ago> or on the merit of their own games; they are buying exclusivity in order to succeed. [...] Epic is using their cash to complete, and are trying to replace something people love with something worse. So? Guess how EA has so many "original" games to begin with? Sounds like people are disgusted because cash bribes sound icky.
- ohithereyou 8y agoOrigin is still not a quality experience.
- simias 8y agoSteam itself was not very well received at first. Always online, resource hog, slow, buggy... They forced CS players to use it even though old versions worked without it. And then of course HL2 released and it was a Steam exclusive, which was a huge bummer for people like me who didn't have an internet connection at home at the time. Gamers have a very short memory, although to be fair many are probably too young to remember Steam's launch. On the other hand they also seem to have very little impulse control so game and platform boycotts never seem to work. I expect that Epic's strategy is going to work perfectly.
- cannonedhamster 8y agoSteam was building something new. Quite frankly it's harder to build a crappy platform since the space has already been pioneered. No one is hating on GOG Galaxy. You have a fair point about many gamers having short memories. Many however do not have short memories. I suspect we're older though.
- ohithereyou 8y agoPC Gaming has really only accepted two major launchers: Steam and Blizzard. Blizzard's launcher is only majorly accepted in my group of friends as it's the only way for some of them to get their WoW fix. Origin is actively avoided (to the point of avoiding EA's games completely), Ubisoft's Uplay will work with Steam, and Bethesda's launcher was immediately uninstalled after the debacle which was Fallout 76. None of my friends (that will admit it, anyway) have the Epic launcher installed. They are all frustrated that games they're excited about ("The Outer Worlds" and "Borderlands 3") are timed exclusives on Epic's launcher. Some of them are very hung up on the fact that Tencent owns a major stake in Epic Games (between 40%-50%). They have seen how China deals with games (WoW in China is the biggest one, game consoles not being legal in the county until recently) and the Internet (Great Firewall of China) and are in no way interested in allowing their software on the machine. Further, it has been observed that the Epic Launcher performs behaviors that behaviors they consider shady[1]. Personally, I won't play any games that are Epic Store exclusives. Not because I have any particular anger toward Epic (I've loved Unreal Tournament for a long time), but because I already have a large backlog of games on Steam, I'd like to keep everything in a single launcher, and by the time I have my backlog cleared, these games should be on Steam and a GOTY version will be out that has all of the DLC included, or if they're not, something else that I care about more will likely have come along. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/PhoenixPoint/comments/b0rxdq/epic_game_store_spyware_tracking_and_you/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PhoenixPoint/comments/b0rxdq/epic_g...
- gruez 8y ago> Further, it has been observed that the Epic Launcher performs behaviors that behaviors they consider shady[1]. you mean behaviors entirely consistent with a browser process? https://www.reddit.com/r/PhoenixPoint/comments/b0rxdq/epic_game_store_spyware_tracking_and_you/eik0h76/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PhoenixPoint/comments/b0rxdq/epic_g...
- ohithereyou 8y agoAs we all know, everyone loves browser tracking and nobody ever uses that data in a shady way.
- kyriakos 8y agoThis is not the same as Netflix and competitors. No one is stopping a steam user from buying from epic store since its an one off purchase , but to watch an amazon exclusive you need an additional subscription.
- dleslie 8y agoExcept that the store itself is a deterrent, for a whole laundry list of reasons you can seek elsewhere. For me, the deal breakers are: 1. No user reviews. 2. Refund system is allegedly horrible and unreliable. 3. No cloud saves. 4. No mod workshop. 5. No forums. 6. No store-provided, NAT-punching, low latency networking. The last three have made for many of my best gaming experiences in recent years
- mises 8y agoFor me, one issue is the forty-something percent stake tencent has. Both in that I don't trust their software and that I have serious ethical concerns about directly supporting china. I know it's essentially impossible to not buy anything from them, but I would say videogames are definitely something people can easily stop buying.
- cortesoft 8y agoYou also can't buy a game for a friend.
- kyriakos 8y agoThat's just a matter of competition catching up though. From a consumer perspective multiple stores should have a positive effect. On the other hand streaming services are not benefiting the consumer directly.
- dleslie 8y agoThose things cost money. It's where a good chunk of Valve's cut goes.
- Joakal 8y ago
- krispbyte 8y agoGame piracy still exists. There's subreddits dedicated to tracking when DRM schemes are broken. Also piracy of region locked and old, difficult to buy now, console games has never disappeared. The games that are out of this are those that need online accounts to play.
- rgoulter 8y agoFWIW, in terms of exclusivity, there have been games exclusive to EA's Origin. (e.g. the 2017 Battlefront II). I'm not sure how significant "any added friction increases piracy" is in terms of numbers.
- dleslie 8y agoThe difference is that people don't really hate exclusives on the publisher's own store unless the store is awful. IMHO: GFWL: awful and hated, dead now UPlay: awful and hated Steam: best in class and loved GoG: second best in class and accepted Origin: good and tolerated Blizzard: good and tolerated Epic: awful and hated
- TheGRS 8y agoPeople hated Origin pretty bad, but EA stuck to their guns. IMO its a pretty awful experience. And to be honest Steam isn't exactly a great experience either. I noticed they're finally doing a face lift on their storefront soon, perhaps from the competition?
- dleslie 8y agoAt least Origin didn't vacuum up exclusives from non-EA publishers. People who hated Origin probably already hated EA, too. The Steam library update had been years in the making.
- indigochill 8y agoI'd personally put GoG ahead of Steam, and not just for "grr Steam" reasons. Steam has a habit of breaking in weird ways like telling me I can't view my own achievements because my profile is private or suddenly wanting to download 0 bytes for half the games in my library. GoG on the other hand has been totally rock-solid for me.
- dleslie 8y agoI prefer GoG, as well. I was attempting to express my understanding of the generally sentiment that I see from gamers I have a cron job that backs up my library every two weeks via lgogdownloader
- sebazzz 8y agoDifference is that it doesn't cost you anything to use Steam, Epic game store, or Origin. You buy the game, you have the game. You can install 5 game stores on your computer and that's it. For movies or TV series you need to have a subscription. That is the thing that costs money, even if you don't use it. People don't want to have 3 or 4 subscriptions, so that is why they pirate. This is not a problem I see happening for games.
- errantspark 8y agoIt's still annoying to deal with any distribution platform that isn't Steam. I understand why things are this way, but it doesn't make it any better from my point of view. I hate having to add my friends on another platform to play Ape Legs or the new Unreal. I don't want to deal with another login, another stupid launcher that wants to be on all the time with incessant updates. I'm not going to end up pirating games because I mostly play F2P hat simulators, and the singleplayer games I care about are all available on GoG. It still all feels quite user-hostile. I can't think of a solution though.
- meditate 8y agoThe solution is to support single-sign-on and to allow data importing/export. These are solved problems, but companies don't receive enough pressure to do them because they are more interested in building moats.