this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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Game Development

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[–] NightOwl@lemmy.one 22 points 1 year ago

Guess being so hostile and arrogant to customers thinking they'll cave and buy from you doesn't always work.

[–] Granixo@feddit.cl 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They gave GTA V for freaking FREE.

What did they expect?

[–] snowe@programming.dev 9 points 1 year ago

It’s not people taking free games, it’s that the free games aren’t working. People have told me for years about all the free games they give away and I and everyone else I know still refuse to even download the app much less download free games because of their bullshit.

[–] dpkonofa@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They did that years after it was released. I’m pretty sure they’ve been unprofitable for longer than that and it’s more likely that it’s because they’re forcing their bullshit on users.

[–] Granixo@feddit.cl 3 points 1 year ago

Yes, but also remember that the game's price (on Steam) hasn't lowered that much in comparison to other games the same age.

And more importantly, because of GTA Online, GTA V is now a +100GB game. That isn't very friendly to Epic's servers and bandwidth.

[–] qwertyasdef@programming.dev 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I might buy more from Epic if their launcher weren't So. Freaking. Slow. Even claiming the free game is such a chore that I can't be bothered to do it. It takes several minutes to load, responds sluggishly, and lags everything else on my computer the whole time it's running. The only game I play from them anymore is Celeste because I can start it without ever going through the launcher.

[–] AaronMaria@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Also that they make the free game a "Purchase". In Steam and GoG you just add free games to your library with a click and get a confirmation. In Epic's Store you have to confirm to not being able to return the free game within 14 days and go through that slow confirmation dialog.

[–] xilliah@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm an avid pc gamer and I've never tried Epic. What's so bad about steam? It's a cool company. OK gog is cooler for having no drm.

[–] MJBrune@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

As a game developer, Epic gives more profits than Steam can to developers. That said from a consumer standpoint, the store is slow, laggy, unintuitively laid out, and overall, I don't think most consumers enjoy their time on the Epic store. I can say the opposite about Steam and Itch. I have many memories of browsing Steam before it got far too big to browse nicely. Steam's system now makes it harder to just dig in and find gems. They have created tools that attempt to do it for you but it's not worth it in my opinion.

Itch is much nicer to browse and everything you find is likely some small gem and it just depends on the level of polish to that gem.

[–] Scrollone@feddit.it 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't know about Itch. It always seems full of horrible or pointless games.

[–] MJBrune@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Try sorting by paid games only and filtering out based on genre preference.

[–] xilliah@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've been with steam since the start. I used to play the pirated version of half life 2 ( I bought it when it came out ). You could do lots of funny physics things with their new engine, it was just so cool. Anyway yea it's difficult to browse steam. Whenever I press back, it forgets where I was in the list..

[–] MJBrune@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I've been with Steam since 2003. I'm not going to give up my 2 decades of games but I do love Itch's browse system and its very open and reasonable platform. As a developer, it even lets you set how much of a percentage you want to give itch, you can pick 0 (but I highly recommend 30% so they survive). On top of that, most itch games give Steam keys.

[–] frog@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I can hazard a guess as to why. Might be something to do with the fact that I only actually paid for three (heavily discounted) games in my entire Epic Games library. The rest of my library were giveaways. I suspect a lot of customers' Epic libraries are similar.

[–] Scrollone@feddit.it 4 points 1 year ago

I have zero paid games on Epic. Only a huge collection of free games. I've never even played many of them.

I wanted to play Untitled Goose Game but it was an Epic exclusive. I waited for it to come out on Steam and then I bought it there :)

[–] kornel@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I buy everything I can on GoG due to lack of DRM. If something is not on GoG, I buy from Epic simply because they pay a bigger share to developers than Steam. When I buy a game I want that money go to the devs, not middlemen.

GoG also integrates well with Epic, so I can have all my games there.

[–] preposterous@programming.dev 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I support gaben simply because of what he has done for linux gaming. Epic CEO is openly hostile to whole ecosystem and that's why his company wont get a penny from me. And thats the joy of the whole PC gaming industry - we have a choice of who we want to support and how we want to support, and in the end we, as a consumers, will win, because of competition.

[–] snowe@programming.dev 8 points 1 year ago

Epic is hostile to everyone. Even the Apple bullshit was a host of lies. Epic won’t ever get a dime from me

[–] pivot_root@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

You mean publishers, not developers.