[fonix]

What is with people and not wanting to install EGS on their pcs? Is it just the hip thing to do, they've seen it plastered all over reddit so they've decided to jump on board? It's another game store... they have 1-2 free games every single week, and they're not junk games. Get the free games on the website and when you come around to installing it someday you'll have a huge library. There was backlash against Steam when it first came out too, look now.

[vaer-k]

Because it's a terrible client with virtually no features, yet their business tactics strongarm players into using it. Nobody likes to be forced to use a certain product. EGS doesn't even offer a fraction of what Steam can do. Here's what I can come up with off the top of my head; I'm sure others can chime in with more.

Steam has a robust marketplace, with user reviews and a slew of sorting and shopping cart features.

Steam has friends, chat, voice chat, and group chat.

Steam has built-in, turnkey stream broadcasting of games.

Steam allows friends to drop in and play a game cooperatively with you, even if they don't own the game too.

Steam has remote play with friends.

Steam has remote streaming to devices around your home, and big screen mode so you can plop on the couch and enjoy an optimized UI and a gamepad.

Steam has robust gamepad support and configuration.

Steam has industry-leading Linux support.

Steam has VR mode, with custom spaces, interfaces, and a market of useful tools and mods to enhance the experience.

Steam has a music player and a built-in web browser.

Steam lets you add non-steam games to your library for convenient access.

Steam has customizable user profiles and fun social features, like card trading.

Steam has experimental mods and features via Steam Labs.

Now, ask yourself, how does it feel when EGS coerces players into using their inferior storefront through strongarm business practices.

[skocznymroczny]

Well, Steam also started by strongarming players into it if you want to play Half Life 2. Also Steam is still strongarming players by Steamworks integration. Half of AAA games use Steamworks, and if you don't want to use Steam, you can't play the game, even if you buy a boxed copy.

[govg]

Asking genuinely, what are these AAA games that require Steamworks? None of the big publishers require use of Steam (EA / Ubisoft / Activision), most of them have their own launchers that get launched anyway when you open their games via Steam.

[revolvingocelot]

A hugely important addendum: Steam is owned by Valve, which is not a publicly traded company. GabeN's private hat empire can do whatever it wants.

[Arrath]

This feels like a positive, to me. After watching so much quarterly profit chasing races to the bottom across so many aspects of the economy.

[revolvingocelot]

Oh, absolutely! It's fantastic; Valve and Steam regularly do things that The Shareholders would never allow.

[scubbo]

(Not the person you're replying to) These are all reasonable complaints! I, personally, barely care about _any_ of them (in particular, I don't think I've ever read a review on Steam, I almost-never play multiplayer or modded games, and I would hate to stream my games), so, for me, Epic is exactly as fully-featured as Steam is - but these are reasonable reasons why other people might feel a gap.

(EDIT: in particular, I always find the complaint that Epic lacks a shopping cart to be hilarious, because I hadn't even noticed that Steam _has_ a cart until that was pointed out. I can't imagine ever wanting to buy more than one game at once!)

[revolvingocelot]

EGS still doesn't have a cart?!

IMO it speaks to a disturbing implication of priorities on the part of EGS. The concept of a cart isn't exactly groundbreaking in ecommerce, and its absence suggests to me that the store's primary purpose isn't to easily allow humans to purchase games.

[vaer-k]

Exactly right. This is it right here. It's openly hostile to users, especially considering the broader context of Weeny's pejorative comments about his customers.

[scubbo]

I respectfully disagree. I'd bet a large amount of money that an overwhelming amount of video-game purchases on Steam etc. are single-item purchases - that is, in the vast majority of cases, adding a cart doesn't help the user experience (and, without the presence of a one-click-add-and-checkout button, actually slightly harms it by adding another step in the purchase flow). So, for most users/use-cases, a cart is much lower priority than many other features.

There may be many other gaps that indicate a nefarious or incompetent direction to EGS' development (and, indeed, vaer-k listed many) - but "The absence of a cart implies that EGS are not prioritizing making it easy to purchase games" does not hold.

[revolvingocelot]

I don't see why. You haven't provided any reason for this other than your insistent assumptions about the needlessness of carts in digital purchases -- but all other digital games stores have them, as well as almost all other ecommerce platforms. If literally all your competition are doing something, and you're not, that's probably meaningful.

>"The absence of a cart implies that EGS are not prioritizing making it easy to purchase games"

Despite your use of quotes, I didn't write that. I said "its absence suggests to me that the store's primary purpose isn't to easily allow humans to purchase games", which is entirely different. Don't put words into others' mouths, or don't feign respect.

[scubbo]

I was using quotes to indicate a sentence that I was referring to[1] as an example of a particular position, not to attempt to indicate that you'd said those exact words. I apologize that that was unclear - and I'm particularly sensitive to being misquoted, so I also apologize for giving the impression that that was what I'd done.

That said, I still don't see the functional distinction between the example position I described, and your statement. Are you saying that there is an effective difference between those two, or simply calling out (correctly) that what I wrote was not a direct quotation of what you wrote? What is a situation that would be described by one but not by the other?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinctio...

[vaer-k]

That's all well and good, and if you like EGS, that's your prerogative. My response is to a question of why people don't like EGS. The point is not even that Steam is better (it is); instead the point is that nobody likes to be forced to use a platform they don't prefer, and this is made especially onerous when the forced platform is so very, very inferior.

[scubbo]

> My response is to a question of why people _don't_ like EGS

Yep, and you communicated that very well, and I appreciate it - thank you! Apologies for giving the impression that I was disagreeing with you - I was giving another perspective, while recognizing that I'm in the minority and that your points are valid.

[vaer-k]

No, my apologies if I came off defensive or aggressive. I just wanted to clarify. Thanks for your comment.

[pseudalopex]

Can you imagine wanting to buy a game and its expansions together?

[scubbo]

That's a great example, thanks! I don't think I've ever done so (usually I'm buying games late-enough that they're being sold as a single bundle), hence why I didn't think of it - but that totally makes sense, thank you!

[jagermo]

I mean, I remember back when people were outraged that they had to install steam. Relax and take the free stuff.

[kgwxd]

Because it's Epic. They bought up my favorite game, ended Linux support for it, pulled it from Steam, turned it into another cosmetic money-grab, and continue to make it worse every update. The latest changes excited the community a bit but I'm positive they're part of a plan that the community is going to be absolutely furious about and then, to kick a dead horse, they'll add EAC, even though it's impossible to cheat.

Petty reasons? Yeah, but they haven't offered anything worth changing my mind over yet.

[scollet]

Tangentially related, but they killed party match-making with rank disparity requirements. Not sure if this was to prevent smurfing, but I can't play with friends who are over one rank higher.

Personal grudge of the week.

[officeplant]

It's a crap client that isn't up to the standards of modern game clients. I still can't move my game downloads to a backup in instances where I reformat my machine (or move to a new machine) and expect them to work when moved back. Meanwhile that kind of thing has worked in steam for a decade, and games I install via GoG don't care anyway because they don't need a client to work. IIRC Epic still doesn't have a working cloud save feature either. I get really tired of having to download 400GB of games just because the free games from Epic don't like being moved around.

They offer no value to the end user other than the free games to bait people onto their store.

[dcastonguay]

For me it’s just because I don’t want another piece of software on my machine that adds essentially no value on its own running in the background that I also have to manage to ensure that it’s not running in the background when I don’t want it to.

I’m resistant (and I think this is the case with others as well) to the idea that games must exist inside of their creator’s special portal; it’s a level of abstraction that I wish did not exist. Every modern desktop OS has some way of directly installing applications and many of them also provide their own stores (Mac App Store, Windows Store, etc.). The only thing “game store competition” is doing is creating a “now you have [x] standards” problem where the pitch of “all your games are located in one place” ends up becoming “all your games are in a bunch of places which you’ll be able to access after you’ve installed several different applications”.

[Karsteski]

Yea it's a bit odd although I understand it. People want all their games in one place. That being said, as much as I love Valve, Steam and what they're doing for the gaming community, I definitely want more competition in the PC game market.

Competition is ultimately beneficial for the consumer, after all :)

[Tomte]

GOG's client can be connected to Steam and Epic accounts, so you have all games in one place.

[Karsteski]

O, I didn't know this. Thanks for the tip!

[baumandm]

But it only runs on Windows, unfortunately.

[pseudalopex]

macOS too.

[setpatchaddress]

I use a PC as gaming console for my 4k TV. The EGS windows app is unusable on a 4k TV. Steam, GOG, and Ubisoft Connect all work fine on the same TV.

On top of that, I don't like Epic's business and legal practices. Can't buy my soul with free games.

[naikrovek]

what practices are those? paying publishers for temporary exclusivity? not sure how that would buy a soul, but ok.

[999900000999]

I really really hate what Epic does.

No one wants to use their store, so they pay for games to appear exclusively. I hate this so much for certain games I'll just buy it on console.

[favorited]

Console manufacturers do the same thing...

[pseudalopex]

People don't like when they do it either.

[programd]

I understand people having ideological issues about not wanting to deal with Epic, but don't let dogma stand in the way of experiencing some real innovation.

What I mean is that besides the free games, one big reason to install Epic is to play around with Unreal 4/5 game engine. There's some very impressive innovation going on in the game engine space, and whatever you may think of Epic the company, Epic the engineering organization is knocking it out of the park here.

From zero experience you can build a photorealistic open world game environment in about a week of watching Youtube tutorials and downloading free assets from the Unreal marketplace. Anybody who hangs out on HN should be able to pick it up very quickly. Frankly it's pretty amazing what you can do with Unreal in very little time. Unreal 5 (still early access) looks even more impressive in its capabilities - watch some Youtube videos about it.

I firmly believe that entertainment is heading in the direction of anybody being able to create their own worlds to play in, with multiplayer to host their friends no less. Unreal (and Unity) are the adult version of the tools kids are already using on Roblox and Minecraft and both engines are improving by leaps and bounds. Think of using those tools as the gateway to the non-Meta metaverse, where anybody can create and run their own huge, quirky, and amazing virtual world.