this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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I'm guessing it was the goal but it didn't work as well as they'd hoped. I've got a couple of the freebies but I've stuck mostly with Valve because most of my games are already on Steam and they haven't seriously fucked up yet.
They made enticing incentives for developers and publishers, but what incentive would I have as a customer to buy a game from EGS rather than Steam or GOG or even Humble?
I'm guessing here because I don't sit on Epic's board of directors, but I would imagine their angle for consumers was mostly to grab new markets with the appeal of free games, which would also establish a library that would be a pain point if they ever wanted to move away, coupled with some of those one-year exclusives that would peel people away from Valve if they wanted to play them day-of.
But there are so many features built in to Steam that if even one or two of them are important to you, there's less of a reason to ever default to someone else doing the same thing but less so. Like with GOG, they don't match Steam feature for feature, but DRM-free and easy preservation of previous versions of games are good selling points that matter to people.
Epic would need to have a “import your games and achievements and saves from Steam” feature AND THEN ALSO have a much better performing app than they currently do, for me to convert. But years later and EGS is still a pretty awful user experience compared to Steam. There’s just no way.
For me, it'd also need a Linux compatibility layer on par with (or exceeding that of) Steam. On paper, I'm not a fan of Valve's exclusive hold on that market, but in practice nothing has come close for me so far (that I know of, at least).
I tried Lutris and Wine, but I had difficulties getting stuff to run, and the fixes required patience and some level of technical understanding (of Wine, specifically, not just Linux in general). They just don't have the same (comparatively simple) convenience of "check ProtonDB before you buy it, download game, run it, and usually it'll work fine".
The more advanced fixes usually involve nothing more than a few well-documented steps like copy/pasting a launch command, selecting something in a dropdown or downloading and extracting a file into some directory. It's not a universal "It Just Works", but I feel like it's been getting better and better, and that's just a headstart any competitor would have to work really hard to catch up with.