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Tim Sweeney doesn't hold back: if you think the Epic Games launcher is bad, it's because it is
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This post did not contain any content.> Despite these inconveniences, Sweeney remains optimistic and predicts that, over time, his strategy will better connect players across different platforms, thus surpassing Steam in the long run. And what's that strategy? Bribe users to come to Epic and but exclusive rights to games to force users to come to Epic to play them? Really? How has that been working so far?
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Given that they offer half the fees of Valve, it's more like 'we don't want to keep having to pay Valve 30% of the *of our entire Revenue* on every game we want to sell when we can make a profit charging half as much*.Good thing that most publishers don't pay 30% on Steam, they get a better deal the more they sell. And Valve does a lot to help games sell better, such as not having an awful client.
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> Despite these inconveniences, Sweeney remains optimistic and predicts that, over time, his strategy will better connect players across different platforms, thus surpassing Steam in the long run. And what's that strategy? Bribe users to come to Epic and but exclusive rights to games to force users to come to Epic to play them? Really? How has that been working so far?
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Didn’t anti-virus, spyware and/or malware apps flag Epic as malicious when it first launched?Idk, I have never installed EGS but have claimed hundreds of free games, and played several through Heroic.
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Idk, I have never installed EGS but have claimed hundreds of free games, and played several through Heroic.I've given up on the free games. I'm sure some are great, but I have enough of a backlog on Steam, I don't need more indie games. Plus I may as well pay for indie games - it's the AA and AAA games I want to grab for free. Now they still have some great AAA games every now and then that I would actually like to grab for free, but due to how much stuff they put out that isn't interesting to me, I've given up looking at it. Doesn't help that I have to re-login every time, regardless of whether I'm using EGS or Heroic (which is a way better launcher and the one I have installed right now). At this point I think I need to invest some time in getting an RSS client set up and getting notifications for EGS free games and other things I enjoy that I keep forgetting about. I guess I had notifications when I had the EGS client installed on Windows and it ran on the background, now I only fire up Heroic when I realize it exists.
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I've given up on the free games. I'm sure some are great, but I have enough of a backlog on Steam, I don't need more indie games. Plus I may as well pay for indie games - it's the AA and AAA games I want to grab for free. Now they still have some great AAA games every now and then that I would actually like to grab for free, but due to how much stuff they put out that isn't interesting to me, I've given up looking at it. Doesn't help that I have to re-login every time, regardless of whether I'm using EGS or Heroic (which is a way better launcher and the one I have installed right now). At this point I think I need to invest some time in getting an RSS client set up and getting notifications for EGS free games and other things I enjoy that I keep forgetting about. I guess I had notifications when I had the EGS client installed on Windows and it ran on the background, now I only fire up Heroic when I realize it exists.Eh, I have repurchased some games on Steam after getting them free from Epic. I rarely play them, but sometimes it's fun to dig through and find something I claimed. It takes like 30 sec on the web, so I do it when I'm in a meeting or something. > I have to re-login every time Really? I don't. Maybe that's why I've bothered claiming them nearly every week. I just open the web page, click the free game, then check out. New games drop every Thursday at 9AM PST, so it's easy to remember. I WFH Thursday and Friday, so it's easy to remember to claim it in the morning. But honestly, any day of the week works since it's one drop per week. It's more frequent during their Christmas sale, and I always forget when it starts, and I don't care enough to figure it out. So around Christmas, I check the next drop date and when it says the next day, I go on every day.
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Oh yeah, let's all repeat the playbook of GoG, first you just have to spend a decade establishing yourself as the only publisher able to get former Soviet gamers to pay for games rather than pirate them, then turn that trust that you built with two third party developers into a storefront selling their classic titles for them for 6 years, then use your established customer base and goodwill to try and transition into being a proper AAA storefront. Totally viable business strategy /sEpic has fortnite and the FUCKING UNREAL ENGINE THAT REPLACED THE QUAKE 2 ENGINE FOR BEING USED IN EVERYTHING. I think they're on an even ground.
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Epic has fortnite and the FUCKING UNREAL ENGINE THAT REPLACED THE QUAKE 2 ENGINE FOR BEING USED IN EVERYTHING. I think they're on an even ground.If you're building a game, and you build it on Unreal engine, so it's handling literally all of the rendering, development tooling, animation engine, game logic engine, etc. etc. you'll pay Epic a smaller percentage than you'll pay Valve for hosting an exe file and some reviews.
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Maybe it's just me but I can't recall any occasion where Valve said "hey devs, here's a pile of money but you're not allowed to sell your game outside Steam", have any examples in mind?Had a gamedev from a respected studio tell me that same rumour about Steam pushing exclusivities. All it takes is a little digging to find out that's false. Some people were upset when Steam was installed with Valve's own games as a launcher, and later more and more devs launched their games on Steam as a store because they wanted to. The alternative, Games For Windows Live, was lame and unstable. It was just the a smart choice for those that didn't want to make their own launcher. Also, don't feed that other troll who's been posting nonsense everywhere.
And yeah, even if some good came from milking tons of cash from spoiled kids (I was glad for Oddworld Inhabitants to name one), as a consumer it's best to just delete your EGS account. If you got a game there for free that you wish to keep just copy its files elsewhere ASAP before deleting your account. Epic Games is known to have randomly deleted games from accounts because of server issues and their customer support will reject complaints about this by default, so getting attached to it's library is not a good idea.
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If you're building a game, and you build it on Unreal engine, so it's handling literally all of the rendering, development tooling, animation engine, game logic engine, etc. etc. you'll pay Epic a smaller percentage than you'll pay Valve for hosting an exe file and some reviews.Yeah, sure. Epic recieved 5% of basically 90% of games being released from about 2003 to fuck knows when.
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> Start selling games without DRM that only use the launcher to update and it’s better than steam. So... GOG?
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> Despite these inconveniences, Sweeney remains optimistic and predicts that, over time, his strategy will better connect players across different platforms, thus surpassing Steam in the long run. And what's that strategy? Bribe users to come to Epic and but exclusive rights to games to force users to come to Epic to play them? Really? How has that been working so far?Especially since Epic doesn't really have much to offer over Steam, other than its games and exclusives. It wasn't all that long that where Epic Games had the infamous issue with the store. Since their store didn't have a shopping cart, if you wanted to buy multiple games at once, you had to buy them all in separate transactions, but the store flagged that as suspicious purchases/fraud, so more often than not, if you found a bunch of games you liked, and bought them all, [your account would get locked](https://kotaku.com/epic-games-store-will-block-your-account-if-you-buy-too-1834905266).
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> Despite these inconveniences, Sweeney remains optimistic and predicts that, over time, his strategy will better connect players across different platforms, thus surpassing Steam in the long run. And what's that strategy? Bribe users to come to Epic and but exclusive rights to games to force users to come to Epic to play them? Really? How has that been working so far?Allow third party launchers and drm free games
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Bit barebones reporting. Here's an article that at least quotes portions of the interview: https://wccftech.com/epic-games-launcher-is-indeed-clunky-admits-epics-tim-sweeney/ I can only partially empathize with the argument that Steam is better because of 15 years of refinement. Yes, they have a big featureset, amazing APIs, developer kit, the workshop, the list goes on. There are a lot of technical challenges here. However, what cannot be excused with this argument is the Epic Launcher UX being this clunky, lmao. Yes, making a bunch of UI is nontrivial and takes work, but its also not rocket science. The layered and staggered loading of different UI elements and overal slowness of the whole thing cannot be explained by the lifespan of Epic Launcher. Steam was just as responsive on my old Windows XP back in the day as it is now. Throw something like Dear ImGui at a bunch of juniors and they could make something that is snappier than what the Epic Launcher is now. Google made a bunch of useful metrics called [Core Web Vitals](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/core-web-vitals) that represent responsiveness pretty well. I'm sure they would score awfully on all of them.There is no chance you can make a consumer-facing product using imgui. The closest to that I've seen is imhex, which admittedly is way better looking than I thought was possible with imgui. But it is a tool for mainly developers, not a consumer-facing product.
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This post did not contain any content.I know it’s popular to hate on Epic because of the whole exclusives thing and… well, that’s fair. But people don’t talk enough about how awful the whole package is. They need to burn it to the ground and start over. From scratch. Building the EGS software in UE was their first mistake. And it’s a big, ugly “using a hammer on screws” tier mistake. You want people to not hate you and use your stuff? First, make sure your stuff isn’t terrible. Make sure it’s good. Make sure it does valuable things your competitors don’t. Second, don’t be jerks and try to force people into your awful ecosystem using coercive strategies like exclusivity. Fix it, Sweeny. Until you fix it, nobody wants to hear what you have to say about it. We don’t want talk, we want results.
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Yeah, sure. Epic recieved 5% of basically 90% of games being released from about 2003 to fuck knows when.
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Because EGS is literally built in Unreal Engine. Instead of a normal desktop app, they built it in Unreal Engine. Yeah. Seriously.
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There is no chance you can make a consumer-facing product using imgui. The closest to that I've seen is imhex, which admittedly is way better looking than I thought was possible with imgui. But it is a tool for mainly developers, not a consumer-facing product.
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Yeah, for building most of those games. Valve has recieved 30% for doing fuck all. Why are you so adamantly defending them?> for building most of those games providing an engine does not build the game. >Valve has recieved 30% for doing fuck all. Why are you so adamantly defending them? I'm not defending valve, I'm attacking epic
