> But you're all rabid to hate on epic If I had to pick between buying a game on Steam or Epic, I would pick the one which did some good things for consumers over the one that stuck their middle finger up at us. There's no denying that Valve's contributions to DXVK, WINE, KDE, and Linux are a self-serving way to ensure Steam remains relevant after Microsoft locks Windows into a walled garden. Even so, the end result was an overall benefit for consumers. We would have had something like Proton eventually, but it would not have come nearly as quickly without their financial backing. What has Epic done? A bunch of free games that I still don't have enough time to play, great. That doesn't make up for the rest of their anticonsumer practices like making exclusivity deals to railroad people into using their store by denying them the option to choose otherwise. Fuck Epic, and fuck Tim Sweeney's self-aggrandizing attitude. If he actually gave a shit about anything other than money, he would have spent his time challenging the "Steam monopoly" by providing a better customer experience, not posting on Twitter acting like the messiah of PC gaming.

You couldn’t pay me to play a game on epic. It’s not even a boycott. They just suck and I’m not broke. I can buy my own games and I’d rather pay than put their software on my pc let alone play on their platform.

You make some good points about Valve's bread crumbs, but my point still stands that this is an article with no other purpose than to reinforce the opinions of those who already had their minds made up about this. The dev possibly included, or inciting the options of those who have. It's a circlejerk post and article. Just because Valve sucks slightly less doesn't mean we need to treat them like god's gaming storefront. If people weren't already on the "fuck Epic" bandwagon this is a non-story.

Literally it's just a storefront. If Epic offered you $100 and you didn't take it because "they suck" you're just an idiot.

Agreed on both points. If it was GOG and not EGS, the reaction would probably be very different. But, because people already hate Epic (for good reason), writing an article that appeals to schadenfreude makes for some easy ad revenue. People also shouldn't be idolizing corporations. They're not our friends; we're only a means to an end for them. Even if one of them doesn't overtly make that clear through its actions, all it takes is a change in leadership or a change in circumstances for enshittification to start.

While I do like the first 2 Styx games (the 3rd one is out soon-ish? if not now?), they are quite the "quicksave/quickload trial and error patience games" and quite deep in the eurojank spectrum. The climbing in the first one is pretty jank, and in both games the character breaks 4th wall deadpool-style pretty often, enemies are dumb as bricks but will absolutely murder you once alerted enough. But on the upside, it's one of those rare stealth games where murder is not penalized at all. That said, the games are great!

Sometimes the DLC for the free game on epic costs the same as the full package on steam. So epic is an extended demo really

It's easy, but at least for me Epic forces me to login again on deck frequently, which is very annoying for quick sessions while commute. Doesn't happen on desktop, which is weird

I bought a game on steam once that I already had on epic for free. It was on sale for like $5 on steam(Hunter: Call of the Wild), and I was curious if all the shader pre-caching and optimizations steam does with the Steam Deck would have it run better with the steam version, compared to the epic games version.

An Epic win for Steam!

I’ve done some in this community it repeatedly over the course of ~2 years. If you don’t want to make an effort why would I.

Nobody cares about Linux, it has user share close to a margin of error in a poll of 1000 people. Valve employing 3 Linux devs doesn’t offset damage to consumers and devs.

There’s GOG, there’s Itch. What’s wrong with them?

Did it run better?

and the bulk of the users can enjoy being forced to upgrade to ~~hardware with even more spying being the only difference just to run a shittier version of their old operating system~~ rental cloud compute and game streaming. I'll reassess when gabe dies or if they start firing off u.s. politics level red flags but worst case I have drm free/stripped copies of every game I might play again or recommend on offline hdd and tape.

„Gabe wouldn’t do that to me”.

I hope their Android store offers a good experience and succeeds since Play Store just sucks. But Valve pretty much made Linux gaming, if you saw what it looked like before they got involved you would understand. And they are the only big video game company that still does some good stuff in addition to the bad stuff. Epic burned 95% of their good will among gamers, if not all of it. They allowed play 2 earn and other crypto shit just to be contrarians, delisted and ended support for old Unreal games and are pretty much just The Fortnite Studio at this point, which itself is seen as an amalgamation of everything wrong with gaming by some, they struck exclusivity for highly anticipated games so that people have to buy it from them, stories of crunch and Tim defending and supporting every new technology gold rush [including Grok producing fucking CSAM](https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/epic-games-ceo-tim-sweeney-185520504.html?guccounter=1). It's not hard to see why people have so much animosity towards them.

GOG recently got on my radar since I heard they'd be focusing more on Linux support

I saw what it looked like. We had native ports and Wine (rebranded as Proton by Valve so that it looks like their own product). EGS is just one store. Devs don’t even bother releasing games outside of Steam and you can’t make the same argument against GOG or Itch.io.

Even if GOG gets Linux support it won’t make the devs come there.