Second, I explicitly asked for evidence of any of the concerns, as many of the claims either didn't raise a specific concern (e.g. Tencent ownership) or didn't seem to be corroborated by evidence (e.g. Epic buying studios to pull their games off steam).
I'll ask you the same, can you provide examples of Epic buying games and removing support for systems? The only example I can find is Rocket League, and that decision was coupled to a desire to remove technical debt and unrelated to Epic's purchase of Psyonix.
> Epic is literally buying the companies behind long established games, removing game support for alternative OSes, and eventually only allowing access from "the epic store".
What are the examples where that happened?
They rarely buy game companies. With Psyonix they are making Rocket League free to play and won't be able to download it on Steam, but will still be on a bunch of platforms.
Some of those are very valid concerns, others don't really seem like fiascos.
Paragon: Epic returned all purchases and made all the assets free on their marketplace. That seems like a pretty consumer friendly way to shutter a product that wasn't doing well.
Exclusives: Paid exclusivity made games like Satisfactory possible, and I believe that all the exclusives are timed? Making games is expensive and unpredictable, exclusives ensure devs can take more risks without worrying about going bankrupt.
Security is a serious concern for sure.
Acquisitions: As far as I can tell, Psyonix is the only game studio they've bought, and they haven't pulled their game from Steam? Are there others?
Tencent ownership: What's the actual concern here? There's a lot of sinophobia in gaming circles these days. There's plenty to be concerned about with the CCP and Tencent, but what's the specific worry about them having a minority stake in Epic?
Linux support (Rocket League, Editor, etc.). These are data driven decisions. Rocket League, for instance, had 0.3% playership across Mac and Linux combined. They were updating their game, and fixing bugs for that small of a community just doesn't make financial sense. They issued 100% refunds, which seems pretty reasonable?
> Anybody who buys into the UE4 or UE5 ecosystem is probably going to regret it
As someone who worked in the industry for years (but never for Epic), I highly doubt this. I've worked with UE, Unity, and CryEngine/Lumberyard and there's a huge difference in support and tooling between them.
> Your response is yes but this other company would never fuck users over after an aggressive growth / dumping business model phase.
Well, Epic didn't do that when it went through it's aggressive growth and the last time it dumped it's business model. Instead, they changed their licensing to lower fees, and when you look at what they did across the board, made things better for customers and game developers.
What games are you talking about specifically here and when? Fortnite was also developed by Unreal by the way.
Also, Epic is not the first company to buy a game + its license and then only allow people to play it via their platform. Counter-Strike was a independent mod back in the days, before Valve bought it. Same goes for Day of Defeat and bunch of others games.
I'm sure we can find even earlier examples of this happening. For all I know, this happens with every digital medium, pretty early on, and it's not news that game companies are greedy (both Valve, Epic and every other AAA studio/company)
They bought the rights to a game that I previously purchased on Steam (Rocket League), then promptly dropped Linux and Mac support and moved everything to the Epic Games Store.
Sure, but you can't actually use an example from Google to deduce what's going on at Epic Games.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying there aren't problems at Epic Games (most companies have them). What I'm saying is, we're just speculating: how is that helpful? Either to them or to this discussion?
We're either casting vague and hand-wavy aspersions or citing more specific examples where we actually have no idea whether they have any relevance to Epic Games.
It's just noise because, as you've pointed out, we're not internal.
You're communicating with me as though I know what you're talking about and disagree with you. In reality I have no idea what you're talking about and am trying to understand. Just so we're crystal clear.
So it sounds as though Epic offered exclusive agreements to studios that reneged on other commitments to comply with Epic? Why isn't the anger at those studios? How is Epic at fault for other studios' behavior?
I'm still waiting for something to be done about Epic buying video games that support multi-platform like Rocket League then removing multi-platform support from those games. I bought Rocket League. I played Rocket League. Epic bought Rocket League and suddenly I couldn't play Rocket League. And I'm just left hanging with a useless "single player" rocket league that can no longer play the game.
Epic is as much of a monster or worse than Microsoft was in it's prime. It buys games then puts them behind it's paywall, ruining the games for people that bought them before. It uses it's Unreal game engine position to attack companies that make games in it's engine by releasing clones of them (ie, the Fortnite copy of PUBG). It sells games like Fortnite which I bought for $40+ back before it was popular, then it completely changes the game and makes it impossible for me to continue playing the game I bought.
I will never, ever, give any Epic software a place on any of my computers. Not buying, not "free", not anything. They still owe me $35 for stealing Rocket League and $44 for taking away Fortnite (the original game).
> They recently stopped developers promoting on steam, sale of their game on other platforms.
Hard to blame them for a stance of "you can't use our storefront to advertise other storefronts" though.
Epic is doing the things it is doing precisely because Steam is so ludicrously dominant. I'd argue that they haven't been successful at usurping that dominance yet. They are still very much playing catch-up.
That's not so simple with the hypocrite named Epic who preach about competition being better for all while buying exclusive distribution rights from devs/publishers on PC, sometimes even for games that had been long announced to be coming out on Steam and/or were crowdfunded on that and other premises.
Case in point: "Satisfactory". I was pretty excited about the game when it was first shown, then found later
* it would be removed from Steam,
* I'd have to get an account for another store,
* use a store made by some incompetents who couldn't implement basic functionality like a "shopping cart" even months after release (does it have one by now?)
* give part of my money through Epic to fucking Tencent and install a piece of Chinese spyware on my PC in order to run it. Also no implicit Linux support because no Proton and because Sweeney loves to bend over for Microsoft exclusively.
Some of the complaints are about Epic's lack of any interest in the minefields of Linux and macOS support. It's not a PC gaming store, it's emphatically a Windows gaming store. (Some of those complainants seem to overlook how long Steam was Windows-only or how much of the Steam catalog will likely remain Windows-only.)
Most of the rest of the arguments seem to revolve around Epic doing paid (timed) exclusive deals with an interesting cross-section of developers. (Using the weight of their Unreal engine licensing fees to sweeten the pot of what they could offer in some cases.) It's something common to console games, but some PC gamers seemed disturbed to see it on the PC. It also seems to betray a short-term memory with respect to Steam, as Steam also bootstrapped on exclusives such as Half-Life 2. (Half-Life 2 wasn't even a timed exclusive as most of Epic's have been, HL2 still requires Steam in 2020, whether or not you bought it or The Orange Box on a physical disc from a retail store back in the early oughts. Which leaves prevarication room for some Steam fans because Valve did allow multiple stores to sell the game even if it was a platform exclusive to play the game; but it still ignores the historic controversy when Steam did that in the first place and many gamers at the time called it a mistake and the death of PC gaming.)
(ETA: Also, Epic did do one sleazy/evil thing early in the EGS: it scraped private Steam files for friends lists, rather than using documented APIs, to try to bootstrap its social network.)
I'm not sure about that. If I had an axe to grind I'd probably write something like "Epic paid so far 1 billion USD to bribe, coerce, directly incite and enable game developers and publishers to abandon previous commitments and break existing contracts, in a concerted effort to make said games not available on certain platforms such as Steam for as long as possible"[0]
[0]:Metro Exodus was supposed to be an EGS exclusive for a year but they released it on Microsoft windows store in less than 6 months. We all KNEW what was this fuss really about.
>Which is exactly the thing Epic can't compete on.
I mean, with these criteria is Epic really that far behind? They made desktop a better experience for devs, have decent enough customer support, and they don't exactly shit talk their users like other parts of the industry. The only arguable part is good platform, but it depends on what you need out of the platform. Does a platform have to offer a way to play windows games on linux to be "good"?
>I honestly couldn't name anybody else that has kept their company private, grown it to such heights and stayed true to their founding principles, without selling out to shareholders and advertisers for an easy buck.
hard to find platforms like that, but there are certainly creators that stayed small and humble despite growing huge in influence and pull.
Epic game store is a weapon for attacking other game developers. It was never to make a profit. It's just to provide an sealed off area for Epic to buy competitors/etc and cut them out of more open competitor ecosystems. Like when they bought Psyonix, said they wouldn't change anything in Rocket League, then 6 months later unreleased(!) the game for multiple operating systems removing all online play (the only real game mode). They claimed this was because of Direct X transition problems. But they still support Playstation which uses the same old Direct X. It's all lies.
And lets not forget the innumberable times Epic has cloned games made by other companies in their engine and released them for "free" on "epic game store".
When they buy out any game exclusivity (so the games are only sold on Epic store on pc), they would make the game drop linux support even when the games previously can run on linux natively (e.g. rocket league, payday 2, etc). That's a huge negative in my book, enough to make me never consider using Epic store.
I’m just saying that Epic is using a legal strategy to attack markets with vertically integrated hardware and software distribution (phones, consoles). The owners of these platforms are not thrilled, and we should expect UE to be a casualty.
In several cases, they sought out games that were already coming out on Steam and even had preorders (or kickstarter backers) there, and then paid those developers to rip it out.
There is a seemingly minor but important distinction with what Epic does: they do not pay for exclusivity nor do most of their actions involve paying for a game to be made that otherwise would not have been. Either of those things are fine, even if begrudgingly.
What Epic actually does is pay to harm Steam specifically; the stipulation is always "don't put it on Steam", not "only put it on our platform". It is purposely targeted and antagonistic towards steam and steam users; "we have deprived you of a thing, now you have to come here if you want to get it" is how that comes across, when they should have aimed for "we are getting this new thing made for our platform, come over here to check it out!"
While they were doing this, their store was in a miserable state compared to its competitors, in terms of features and reliability (especially for the desktop app). So they were seen as prioritizing depriving another platform instead of prioritizing having a good platform and customer experience.
When all of the above is put together, it comes across as petty and malicious, rather than them trying to throw their fortnite dollars at bootstrapping their platform, and at making and having a quality platform for consumers.
If they had simply paid for a bunch of new exclusive games and IP to be made for their platform rather than seeking out existing, already advertised and in-development suitor games, it would have come across way differently. Or if so much more of the effort and money would have gone to making the store better and beyond feature parity with its main competitors (not that it necessarily reached even that), it would have been received quite differently.
I don't think the issue is Psyonix being acquired, it's Epic's intentions to remove the game from Steam and potentially stop supporting new features on Steam that people are worried about.
Psyonix has done a fantastic job and created an amazing game and I think most people are happy for them and hope this works out, but it's hard to see the bright side of this as an avid Rocket League fan.
Second, I explicitly asked for evidence of any of the concerns, as many of the claims either didn't raise a specific concern (e.g. Tencent ownership) or didn't seem to be corroborated by evidence (e.g. Epic buying studios to pull their games off steam).
I'll ask you the same, can you provide examples of Epic buying games and removing support for systems? The only example I can find is Rocket League, and that decision was coupled to a desire to remove technical debt and unrelated to Epic's purchase of Psyonix.
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