Epic fails to compete with Steam because “EGS is a shop, Steam is a community”, says Witchfire lead, as Epic has “nothing to do but to buy”

[peruvian_skies@sh.itjust.works]

It’s called shortsighted management.

Valve has had success with Steam because they ask themselves “What do gamers want, and how can we turn a profit by giving it to them?” For example, many of us want to mod our games. Enter the Steam Workshop. It’s free, convenient and exclusive so it fidelizes (is that a word in English?) customers and indirectly makes them money while improving their image in the market.

Epic’s management instead asks themselves “How can we make money off of gamers?” without trying to understand the market. They see that there are many free games on Steam, and many console exclusives, and their tiny MBA brains decide that the only way forward is with free games to lock us to their platform (that’s what Valve did, right?) and exclusives so we have no choice. And they have no idea why Valve waste their time with Workshop, Community forums for each game, Proton (Linux and Mac are such a tiny share of the market!) or any of that not-obviously-profitable filler that is in fact what sets Steam apart as a service rather than just a storefront.

[magnificentsteiner@lemmy.zip]

The only written reviews it shows are industry ones from OpenCritic.

It shows a user rating out of 5 stars but no idea how that is derived.

It’s just perfectly anti-customer.

[rozodru@pie.andmc.ca]

I’ve gotten more free games from EGS than buying anything and I don’t think I’ve ever bought anything on EGS. that’s all it’s good for to me.

[dan1101@lemmy.world]

I always go to Steam to read the reviews for the free games that Epic gives away.

[ulrich@feddit.org]

I don’t engage with the community at all. I don’t buy games on Epic because their launcher is ass. And last I checked they don’t even have reviews for games. They don’t require disclaimers for anti-consumer measures either like Valve does for 3rd party accounts, Denuvo, etc. and they even had the balls to criticize Valve’s requirements for AI disclosure.

The fact that their CEO is openly anti-Linux is another good reason.

They just come off to me like a very anti-consumer company, like most all other corporations.

[jesus_666@lemmy.world]

The reviews are a part of the community, even if they’re not found in the “Community” part of Steam.

But yeah, EGS has many failings, pretty much all of which were pointed out right at the start. They weren’t improved upon because Epic don’t want to deliver the best possible experience or promote the capability of the PC as a gaming platform. They just want you to buy digital shit, get bored of it, and then buy more digital shit at the lowest possible cost to them. Effort costs money so they won’t make any.

[karashta@piefed.social]

The launcher is still just awful. Its only purpose is to give me free games. It has never felt polished or finished at all.

Why would I want to use a worse product?

[trousersmcpants@lemmy.world]

Yeah it felt like they literally marketed themselves as exclusively pro developers while having nothing for the consumer, which I’ve always thought was a really fuckin weird stance to take if you want to compete with Steam.

[glimse@lemmy.world]

If you look at steam reviews (text or even just ratings), you do kind of engage with the community!

Steam is very “community-focused” in that regard as opposed to the top-down corporate “buy what I’m selling, trust us it’s good”. Posting two review scores (recent and all-time) is not something most stores, games or not, will do

[rentlar@lemmy.ca]

The meme of “Valve maintains dominance by doing nothing but waits for competition to trip over itself” is funny but they do put part of the billions they make towards beneficial products for their customers.

• Remote Play (stream your own game from another PC)
• Remote Play Together (can stream a game to friends without a copy of the game and play together)
• Linux, Proton
• Well designed hardware innovations

Not out of the goodness of their heart but to drive sales and foster a customer base willing to return.

GOG and itch do try in their own way so I have bought from them, IMO they are the only competitors making serious efforts to build a mutually benefical gaming ecosystem.

Epic, Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA and the rest are like a trapdoor with a wooden board over it. Tim Sweeney is standing there hoping you won’t think he’s trying to find the right time to swipe the board away and get you to fall in.

[feyd@programming.dev]

I don’t use EGS because it they actually locked in significant market share they would enshittify so fast your head would spin.

[washedupcynic@lemmy.ca]

Almost a decade ago I was playing a game called paragon in development by epic games. The game was amazing, and then epic forced the devs away from what the game was, a MOBA, and forced the devs to make it more like a brawler with smaller and smaller maps. Epic ignored the community playing the game and acted shocked when the community left. While all this was going down, they were alpha testing fortnight, which was a plants, zombies clone with base building. When PubG took off, they killed Paragon, rolled the assets into fornite, and abandoned what fortnite was to turn it into a PubG copycat. (Highly recommend predecessor, a fan made remake from the released paragon assets with og heros, it’s on steam.)

Epic doesn’t have an original thought rattling around in the heads of their MBAs and C-suite. They copy what others are doing, and pray that some of the shit they fling against the wall will stick. They don’t want to take chances or innovate. Plenty of other options out there besides their game engine too. I’m looking forward to the fall of epic and EGS.

[ryathal@sh.itjust.works]

EGS isn’t really even a store, it’s sole purpose is to avoid giving anyone else a cut of fortnite.

[lfrith@lemmy.ca]

I think Epic was very arrogant in their approach assuming consumers have no self control over buying things, so assumed they’d get them no matter what if they made things exclusive to their store. That pissed off vocal people would still not be able to resist not buying games.

Which actually is not a bad bet to make, but turned out to surprisingly not work as well as they hoped it would. And led to lingering animosity towards them that is still around years later.

And they still seem lost when it comes to trying to figure out how to win consumers over. It’s like they got advice from Randy Pitchford from 2K telling them the way to win consumers over is to berate them and attack the competition.

[sirico@feddit.uk]

Sweeney is overly opinionated and will dictate to you how you will use your products. Valve largely short of the app’s drm just gives me the games and the app just sits in the background, this is why GOG is the true contender to Steam as they have a similar approach.

We don’t want to be told how to play our games, give us services to help do so by all means, but otherwise it’s a take money and leave situation.

[mountingsuspicion@reddthat.com]

Honestly, remote play together has probably sold me more games than all of the summer/winter sales combined. I don’t play multiplayer games much, so I don’t really invest in them. If my friends are enjoying one we will remote play it together and I can make a decision to purchase after that. Otherwise, I would just never purchase them. Because of that, I’m also now incentivized to purchase any remote play together games that come across my feed and I think would be even a little fun so that I can return the favor. If they enjoy it then I will often just buy them a copy and they will get to share the experience with their go-to multiplayer friends who also go on to purchase the game. That may not be everyone’s experience with remote play together, and it’s possible that they are missing out on more sales than they are generating, but I doubt it from my personal experience.

Being the go to gaming platform really just means you’re a money printer at a certain point. I have quite an extensive friends list on Steam, often adding people from conventions on steam and nowhere else. I have never once met somebody at a con and exchanged epic information with them. But because of my extensive friends list I’m introduced to a bunch of games that I would never have heard of or seen otherwise. It’s basically free advertising for all of those titles. I might not personally be interested in any of those games, but if I notice I have friends with a similar gaming history, I will look into whatever other titles they are playing as possible gifts for topics to bring up next time we’re chatting about games.

[lwl@lemmy.world]

And even when people do buy the exclusives on their store, what reason do they have to buy anything else there?

Just like the free games, it would work as advertising, to initially attract people that then decide their product is worth using. But it will never work for making people use their store for anything else as long as it’s as terrible as it is.

[wolflink@sh.itjust.works]

• Steam multiplayer networking
• Steam Input

[pressedhams@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

I have never had remote play together work smoothly enough to actually play. Even when on the same network the input lag is problematic.

[quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world]

Meanwhile if you’re part of Steam’s partner program you know that Valve are constantly improving things on the backend for devs and publishers. Just about the only “developer-friendly” thing Epic does that Steam doesn’t do better is asking for a smaller cut.