I don’t need to thanks. I just buy my games on Steam and don’t have to deal with Epic’s shitty store. They have yet to offer a free game I have wanted that I didn’t own already.
?? - I’m seeing the same four Spellforce 3 titles available on both platforms: Reforced, Versus, Fallen God, and Soul Harvest.
If you buy the 3 main games on the same Platform, you can use the same launcher for all three games, because it loads up all three games.
It also gives you access to all 6 factions when you open up the game.
Currently, if I open the game on Steam, I get access to 5 of the 6 factions in MP and access to the base game and Soul Harvest.
If I open the game in Epic, I have access to 4 of the 6 factions in MP and access to the Fallen DLC.
It’s not the biggest deal, but it is a thing. It’s just annoying, because all three games are registered with the Publishers service.
At least it’s not GOG. They never got the system to work.
And at least it’s not Warhammer Total War. Once you buy one game, you pretty much are locked in.
Some of you really use only one digital store?? I feel like then you’re depriving yourself of lots of classic games on GOG and lots of indie games on itch. At that point, adding Epic (and Ubi and EA and Amazon and Humble) is just not that big of a deal. Yeah, it would be convenient to see things all in one place, but once you get over the hang-up, it’s fine. Opening up a different app is like traveling to a different neighborhood and seeing what restaurants (games) are in the area.
I’ve mostly only gotten free games off Steam. I’m frustrated because I bought Mechwarrior from Epic due to a coupon and even with the Heroic launcher and Mechwarrior having a Linux version, I can’t get it to run properly on the Deck. I don’t know how many Decks have sold/will sell, but owning one is pretty much the death knell for me buying anything that has the potential to run on the Deck from anyone except Valve because I hate having to hack things to work.
Steam has 18+ years of feature development behind it. Feature parity would likely have the development costs of a AAA game without anything approaching the potential return for the effort.
Look at how limited the Microsoft Store app is, and the resources that company has behind it. I worked alongside the teams building MS Store and the PC Xbox app my last couple of years at MS , and while I can’t say much due to NDAs, I can saw with confidence that I believe that any online retailer reaching feature parity with Steam ain’t likely to happen in the next decade. It’s not a reasonable expectation due to the amount of functionality Valve has built over nearly two decades.
Absolutely all the other stores could get better. But better means reliable and the most important core features – expecting Steam-level functionality isn’t realistic given the realities of the software development process.
Better performance is something I wouldn’t be averse to for Epic, but that really applies to Steam too (Edit: for me they are both mostly working, sometimes crashing, often updating, mainly launcher/installers by necessity). I will open up the individual stores to look at them, on rare occasions, but if I really want an overview of my collection I use the Playnite launcher. If I’m shopping, I mainly rely on a website like gg.deals since Steam sales these days are spread across tons of stores so just looking at the Steam store is reserved for when I’m feeling like splurging on things at full price (or more likely I just want to try something).
I’m not even sure I want things like discussion forums on Epic since that would just further fragment the places I have to look - it’s already annoying enough to have to check the Steam Discussions plus look for the developer discord when I’m looking for info.
I can’t even think of a feature I would like to have, whereas free games for The Undying Backlog Collection is always a solid win for my collecting metagame.
Also, for those of us interested in the freebies (edit or the game guessing game), next Thursday has a “Mystery Game” with wrapping paper so I’m pretty sure it’s the start of the holiday (daily?) giveaways. This one is yellowish/gold with blue candycanes, snowflakes, ornaments. There are balloons mixed in which are the only not really holiday themed picture - the wrapping paper was linked with the giveaway last year, but gold/blue/balloon doesn’t really ring a bell for me.
Edit: I’ve seen Bloons TD as a guess which makes sense for balloons…
I bought Old World on the Epic Store, and accidentally did so for Midnight Suns. The thing is there are some advantages to staying on steam - i can stream to my android box on the TV on steam. I can access the workshop for mods. I can be lazier. So if it’s the same price I have zero reasons to switch to Epic. At least GOG technically has some indy underdog vibe and anti-DRM ideals to justify supporting them.
Epic can afford it. Fortnite makes money like ten AAA games, every year. They would have to prioritize it, which they don’t. 4 years since launch, they barely added achievements and shopping cart.
As long as EGS stay as shit as it is, people will simply have no reason to buy non-exclusive games there unless they are subsidized by Epic.
I am definitely on the wagon that the Steam version is the “premier” version - I definitely prefer the Steam version, especially for games where I care about modding, etc, and having it on Steam is worth a (very small) premium. But for 99% of games where I’ll boot it up, tool around for a session and shelve, playing a slightly crippled Epic version (or Amazon version) is fine and functionally identical. I prefer bare-bones but healthy and workable, vs the abandoned stores like the Humble Android Apps or all the other PC stores of yesteryear.
Since we’re being liberal with opinions, I’ll say that achievements are a waste of time & effort and should be binned everywhere.
From my perspective (as a very much bargain bin gamer), the reason I rarely buy EGS is not because of missing features but because for all the free market and competition rhetoric, in practice it’s actually the store that seems to be very tightly controlling its game sales (probably so it can have full control over the prices). Steam has plenty of alternative storefronts to buy games like Fanatical, Green Man Gaming, Humble, whereas EGS very much wants you to only shop at the EGS for its games, and it is a very rare occurrence that the best price for a game is on EGS - except when it’s free where it’s the best ever price, so the EGS is hilariously both “I’ll almost never shop there” and “I’ll always shop there” haha. So maybe that’s why it averages out to be a regular store now in my head.
I agree, but shit ton of people don’t and really, really like achievements for some reason. Valhalla is getting negative reviews right now on Steam pretty much only due to missing steam achievements.
I just use them to see how many people finished a given game and information like that.
Crazy talk, achievements are fun. But I’m going to throw in my two cents with the folks who like free games, because I very much appreciate Epic for that. I don’t pay much attention to the apps or storefronts beyond their being video game delivery systems.
Achievements are awesome and force you to explore or play the game in ways you may not have thought of. At least when they’re good.
Epic is shit. I foolishly bought one game on Epic and kept having to go to the Steam page to see the developer updates and verify if I was even on the latest version because there sure as shit wasn’t any information on the Epic store.
There is one thing that does bug me about Epic/Steam, and it’s Multiplayer.
If Steam is providing Multiplayer, it doesn’t work on Epic Games
If Epic is providing Multiplayer, it does work on Steam Games, but you have to have an Epic Account.
Sadly, in the case of Spellforce 3, a large segment of the Steam community started review bombing the Game when the developers implemented Epic Multiplayer, so now steam players automatically join the Steam Multiplayer system and Epic Players automatically join the Epic Multiple System.
Now, Steam Players do have the option to join the Epic Multiplayer System (because it is a universal system open up to everyone), but unless they do, it becomes two distinct systems, which, because steam is the far bigger community, excludes Epic Players.
I think this even impacts players that bought the game on GOG, which I believe, uses the Steam backend for multiplayer.
Different PC launchers fuck things up for what was the native and natural hallmark of PC gaming.
Who knew?
I mean, in this case, the ‘problem’ was solved by Epic pretty handily.
The only problem they couldn’t solve was people’s tribalist response to the solution.
DLC remains the elephant in the room.
And I think Hitman 3 is patient zero.
I would never compromise my Hitman WoA (World of Assassination)
Where importing things and keeping everything was vitable. I had everything already on Steam. (Including DLC)
I am all for Agnostic DLCs.
Steam has a real advantage when it comes to DLCs, because after you buy a game on steam, multiple stores are happy to compete with each other to sell you the DLC.
It’s why Amazon giving away Total War Warhammer 1 and 2 is so effective. I am pretty much locked in buying the rest of the games on Epic now, because I saved at least 20 dollars in terms of the games/DLC that was given to me.