Been saying this for years. Valve has brainwashed gamers and gained a monopoly using the same tactics people decry Epic for using.

[Relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/979/)

> not leeching, Valve mostly lucked into this monopoly because of how grossly incompetent competition was at the time. Just to be clear, the majority of the *current* competition is not only incompetent but actively malicious. The ones that don't suck already have a toehold and I would like to see flourish because competition is good for everyone, but this picture you paint of steam is honestly ridiculous.

Consumers aren’t the only consideration. Even if Epic sucks in many ways they’re much more better for smaller devs because they don’t take anything until you make $1M. One would think that this would be enough for indies to publish there but they don’t want to split sales between platforms (they need all sales to happen on Steam so that they rank better there, it’s the only store that matters). It’s a viscous cycle where smaller competition like GOG or Itch.io have no chance in hell to compete. I’m pretty sure anyone considering competing with Steam has done this math, hence you get only competition backed by big $$$, which usually is the worst people imaginable.

I edited my comment. Yes. It totally helps.

I've said this in the past but I think it's worth restating. I'm amazed that EGS is willing to even front the cost of these free games. Like I would expect some form of arbitrary restriction like requiring periodic actual money purchase to be eligible. They have posted income reports that state the free program just isn't working. Sure it's increasing numbers, but that isn't very helpful when your revenue is still decreasing ontop of the cost of the program. for perspective: my last purchase was void train in super early stages of the game (2021 I think?) and prior to that was satisfactory somewhere around 2018 or 19. Meanwhile I have collected a lot of decent games from the program. And I'm one of the better cases. I have /tons/ of friends who have zero intention of ever actually buying anything on the shop, they only use it as a log in, claim the weekly freebie, log out or play the freebie system. Heck, there are programs that are dedicated exclusivley to log in as you, and claim the weekly freebies so you never even have to log onto the storefront. It isn't a sustainable model. I feel like they would be better off forcing an annual payment history check on the platform, something stupid small like "if total paid is > 5$" or something cheap, or even like how steam does it where once you purchase something once everything unlocks. From a financial/business mindset, I don't get their intent on the current program. It only encourages people to grab games and never actually spend money on the sinkhole.

Sure, try the buggy Epic version then buy the usable Steam version.

>(the 3rd one is out soon-ish? if not now?) End of Feb (the 26th?), these sales seem to be to promote the launch of Part 3. I played the 2nd one with a friend for a few hours last night. I appreciate the humor, the music selection is above average, the movement feels good and every time we died it was due to us being dumb. No bugs (playing on Linux, with GE-Proton10-27), runs great on maximum settings. We were having an easy time by going on a murder spree, then we noticed that the game gives you rank medals for speed, avoiding kills and avoiding detection so we started playing to maximize the end-score. Those constraints make the puzzles a bit harder and I can see wanting to run a level multiple times in order to get it right. Overall, it's a fun experience, does the stealth thing competently and the graphics/music/animations/dialog is good.

I swear by Heroic for the other launchers now I'm on Linux

I use legendary (the command line backend for epic bundled with heroic) on windows as well. It's just so much better and faster than the epic store.

I said this when they first started the free game thing: Instead of giving games away they should subsidize their prices in certain regions to get loads of customers in poorer countries. If they built a massive community around the world the rest of us would be incentivize to participate to play with our friends around the world and we would happily spend money on the platform that made our friends happy.

Eeeeehhh, I don't even have the Epic Launcher installed. I keep claiming the freebies out of the habit, but I can't remember what games I have there. Last time I checked you can't even see your library via the website. Fun thing: Kind of the same thing happening to me with Xbox Game Pass. Try out games, buy it on Steam later on sale

That would cause compliance issues on steam though publisher wise. They would need the title to be off steam since one of steams publisher terms is that the sale price of an item must be at least equal to the lowest price available on other platforms. Meaning that if you have a deal like described there, steam would be the higher price and it would violate their publisher terms.

Okay that makes a bit of sense. I said what I said was from when they announced free games on epic the consensus was that it was anti-competitive business practice so I was trying to find a middle ground. But if steam is going to be anti competitive too I am not going to care what their competition do. I wonder why they can sell games for $0 tho because you go through the process of a checkout, you don't simply redeem a code or something.

yea looking into it, the steamworks policy doesn't mention price parity outside of product keys via steam being sold on other storefronts, being said it does look like steam has submitted to the courts evidence of them communicating via email threatening studios that if they actually went through with it, that steam would just choose not to sell their game at all, this was uncovered during deposition during the Wolfire & Dark Catt’s U.S. antitrust lawsuit against Valve. They went on record admitting to the email and explaining that the steam key page was meant to be for all products as a whole. It sounds like it's a situation where on paper they have it one way, but in practice it's meant to be the other.

heh, yea, my approach is also full on murderhobo in Styx, but I do it so nobody notices anything if at all possible. Levels can take several hours with this method so ... uh, it's not really optimal way to play but damnit that's how I roll. Admittedly the near constant presence of the void/cliffs/etc bottomless pits makes it fairly easy to get rid of bodies. Never really felt the need to chase the time bonuses, just collectables etc are enough for me. Admittedly I have not finished either of the games, but played pretty darn far in both.

I, for the life of me, cannot figure out how to set up just the UnrealStore, FAB, whatever its called now, on Bazzite. My latest attempt saw me setting up a Debian container and ending up with 100GB of trying to compile Unreal from scratch. As far as I can tell, if you are running an atomic linux distro, it is onerous to be able to figure out how to just download like, a free material set or model from FAB. I've barely managed to get it reliably working for Unity... and then Unity goes and basically merges with Unreal and FAB. Yeah like, Heroic works for playing a game, but **_fuck you_**, apparently, is Unreal's stance on trying to access content I legally own that isn't a game.

This is the same effect which makes piracy beneficiary for developers. The EU financed a big study on it, expected to confirm claims that i causes high losses for creators. After they got unwanted results they shelved it silently. [The Pirate Party then brought it to light](https://iptango.blogspot.com/2017/10/eu-piracy-study-finds-no-connection.html). Free advertising is always good and many people who have a no hassle option to own the game and to reward the creator will do so.