Yes, of course that’s what they’re doing.
So showing increases in market share - rather than profits in earnings reports - is Timothy Sweeney’s quarterly concern.
It’s a privately held company. While they may set quarterly goals, they aren’t bound to the public reporting pressures of a public company.
i saw what you did there at least
Epic Greenlight! Next up, Epic PublishAnythingYouWant and parity with Steam!
I mean… yeah. The biggest complaint leveled against them (outside of business practices) is lacking feature parity with Steam.
By “feature parity” I generally imagine people mean things like user reviews, forums and achievements, not, like, one hundred terabytes of erotic visual novel shovelware.
Shovelware probably brings more dollars, though.
I was just making a joke because one of the thing that gets pushed as a big positive of EGS is that it’s a curated store and doesn’t have as much junk as Steam.
It’s somewhat comforting to know Epic is keeping the continuity of being about a decade behind Steam in progress or features. I look forward to some developers ten years from now whining about how the Epic Games Store has no curation to keep out riffraff competition, and how they aren’t doing enough to earn their 5% cut.
That’s assuming it’s still here ten years from now :)
My read of that, based on “submit your content for consideration” is that they’re testing tools that avoid you having to interact with Epic to release the game and push content, NOT that they’re going to stop curating. AFAIK there’s still a lot of interaction with them required to make changes to games on the store; it’s not like Steamworks where a human basically doesn’t look at it until the end and unless they have a problem you never talk to anyone.
Ahh, that makes sense. I didn’t realize that was a ‘perk’, but lacking forums and reviews as Kolbex mentioned… yeah…
I don’t think Epic can put reviews on the Site. With so much anger at just existing, any game that goes on Epic would be downvoted almost immediately. Maybe you could avoid this by only allowing people that bought the game to rate it, but I think it would still skew much lower simply because of the store front and not because of anything inherent to the game.
That’s how most storefronts work, I think? Not just for games (Steam) but others as well. I can’t leave a product review on Amazon unless I bought it. I don’t think the people buying on EGS would be the EGS hate brigade types.
You might be surprised there, particularly for exclusives. But I agree it makes sense to restrict reviews to people that spent money to purchase the product (not giveaways).
Yeah you’re right, I could see it happening for exclusives.
I don’t get much value out of Steam reviews individually but they are nice to have as an aggregate. More than the reviews, I’d like forums. They’re such a useful repository for technical workarounds and things like that, even long after developers have gone out of business or otherwise stopped working on a game. Someone in the Humankind thread bought it on EGS and couldn’t start the game. I was able to find the solution on the Steam forums.
It’d be nice if the Epic client weren’t dog-slow in addition to being a pile of crap WRT features. Even on the fastest flash storage running on an AMD 5900x w/ Nvidia 3080, the store can take nearly 10 seconds just to update a view from one page that contains local content (your game library) to another. It’s like swimming through molasses for what should be most basic & simplest thing and there’s no good reason!
That’s all on the server-side, nothing to do with the client. Of course as a user you don’t really care why it’s slow, just that it sucks.
On the Mac it’s an absolutely garbage app. It makes Steam on Mac almost seem good.
It works I guess, but it’s a very half-assed try.