Nothing more disappointing to me than seeing a game I might enjoy… and then it’s only available on PC on Epic Games store. Why can’t it be available on Epic, Xbox game store and Steam? It’s so annoying, like you have no choice but to use Epic… which I would literally do ANYTHING not to use.
Honestly we should probably have more places to buy games not just steam. Because remember when gabe newell dies there’s no guarantee that steam will still be “good” they are still a corporation. So if epic needs exclusives to keep going we should support that. Competition between corporations is a good thing.
If the list on PCGamingWiki is up to date, there aren’t many Epic exclusives anymore (only 26 currently): https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_games_exclusive_to_Epic_Games_Store
And, earlier this year, Tim Sweeney said that many of exclusivity deals weren’t a good investment while the free games have been “magical.”
So, it seems like a problem that is solving itself over time. Epic will probably still have exclusives going forward, but I would expect them to target a few high-value exclusives like they got with Alan Wake 2. Or, maybe they will just do more acquisitions of games to self-publish, like they did with Rocket League and Fall Guys.
Gee maybe you should sue epic and make them carry other stores apps and not lock in their payment system and allow downloading steam from their store for giga karma.
Exclusivity is stupid for everything but sex partners.
An exclusive on Epic Games may as well just not even exist, as far as I’m concerned. Didn’t play Anno 1800 until it was finally released on Steam. Nice discount too.
So they still got your money eventually. That’s a double win, in their eyes.
They lose day 1 hype, tho. Sure, the game eventually comes to steam, but that’s after it’s already been overplayed on twitch and YouTube’d to death.
In what way does that matter outside of driving sales? Which people like op happily still gave them?
It’s not “new”. There is no FOMO. Early adopters for games are a large chunk of sales.
If that was actually a concern, why would companies do it at all?
Why do companies do exclusive launches? Presumably they think the money they get from Epic is more than the money they’ll lose in sales. Whether or not they’re right is another question.
Basicaly they do not think their game is any good. So if someone takes the deal. I instantly loose interest. I mean if even the developer think it is no fun…
Presumably they think the money they get from Epic is more than the money they’ll lose in sales
Congrats on getting the point.
In what way is that a “double win”?
In what way is it not? They get Epic’s money for exclusivity and know they’ll still get sales after it ends from people that “boycott” them for doing that.
Buying the game later doesn’t hurt them, it just reinforces the same behavior later.
Getting Epic’s money isn’t a slam dunk for profit. You’re hedging your bets taking guaranteed Epic money for lower potential sales vs non-guaranteed Steam money for higher potential sales. Having a bad exclusivity deal on Epic and then selling your game at a loss (90% discount) on steam isn’t profiting both ways, and sometimes isn’t profiting either way.
I also disagree with the sentiment that you’re reinforcing bad behavior. If anything, you’re signalling to them that you won’t support exclusivity deals, and are happy to wait for a deep discount on Steam. Ultimately, that’s a win for consumers.
That said, fuck exclusivity deals, and I’m much in the same boat where I’m hard pressed to support developers that take them.
Unless they’re actively losing money in their deal, they’re not gonna care if the sale comes immediately or years later. If Epic exclusive + late “hold outs” = $$$, they’re just gonna do that until the equation changes.
It’s less money in their pockets and more money in ours. That’s not going to be a double win in their books.
Nobody ever hurt a company or made them reconsider their decisions by giving them money, no matter how little it was.
Economists cannot predict the future, as much as some people might wish they could.
Whatever break even point the devs of Anno 1800 considered when making the decision between releasing only on Epic and releasing to all platforms may have seemed reasonable at the time the devs were gearing up to release the game, but performance of said game is never guaranteed. Sure you may have statistics to influence things one way or another, but it’s still a gamble.
We don’t know if Epic exclusive + late discounts > full game purchases on all platforms specifically for Anno 1800, and it appears that you’re claiming which way that equation points with no evidence. Do you work for Epic? For Ubisoft? For Blue Byte? Are there public sources pointing to game sales? What research are you pulling from that considers game futures?
I will respect that you’re right about predicting devs’ decisions based on which way that equation points. Everyone is downvoting you though because you’re making it seem like you know the answer when clearly there’s more to this game, and financial gaming decisions like this.
You’re not an expert. You’re a chatter. Unless you can prove otherwise.
That’s not what a boycott is. If I don’t buy a game because it’s exclusively on Epic, it’s not because I’m taking a moral stance. It’s because it’s invisible to me.
A boycott is when I don’t play Epic/EA/Unisoft/Blizzard-Activism games for the company’s historic shitty behavior.
I’m aware of what an actual boycott is.
It would be except I forgot it existed while it was in purgatory on Epic
if it was discounted then they didn’t get as much money.
And? It’s still profit. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be listed.
and… instead of getting $60 immediately, they are getting $30 or whatever later. clearly one is better than the other, no?
Profit matters on a quarterly basis.
If a company gets the full profit of their game as they predicted they might in 1 quarter, then that’s basically the best case scenario.
If instead that full profit is spread of multiple years, then quater-to-quarter the game might look like it is underperforming, or severely so.
The timing of profit matters just as much as how much profit there is. Time value of money is a pretty useful concept in the financial world.
When I see sales of Playstation games on PC the numbers are very underwhelming compared to other big third party titles. In contrast helldivers 2 got insane numbers when it launched simultaneously.
I don’t think launch hype sales can be overlooked and how much may potentially be lost. If people are willing to wait then by the time game is available hype is less and it’s more likely for people to move on or wait for even steeper sales.
I’m not sure why you’re trying to convince me about it. I’m not the one deciding to sell out to Epic.
You need a better definition of „they“. Because I don’t buy from Epic for one particular reason, so they (Epic) don’t get my money. If the game is good and I want to play it I will do so later and at that point the developer still deserves my money.
If I like the game then good for them. Epic didn’t get any of my money and they’re the one I have an issue with.
Well they decide to lose customers, up to them.
Yep. I loved Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, and was excielted to hear they made a sequel. Then I learned it’s an EGS exclusive. They can go get bent, not buying from them anymore
TIL, they made a soasr sequel. Was it good?
No idea, I refuse to buy it. The first one was good.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1575940/Sins_of_a_Solar_Empire_II/
It’s on steam now
I am aware. They’re still not getting my money
If you refuse to buy on Epic, you send the message that you don’t like to buy from Epic.
If you refuse to buy after it hits steam, then you’re just 1 of several billion who didn’t buy the game.
Why would you continue to not buy?
If you refuse to buy after it hits steam, then you’re just 1 of several billion who didn’t buy the game.
No, you have it backwards. If people buy the game when it goes on Steam, that tells the developer they can double dip buy going Epic exclusive then releasing at full price on Steam a year later with no repurcussions.
The only way to make the publisher learn to not go Epic exclusive is to not buy those games at all, even after they are brought onto other marketplaces
If it’s on epic it just isn’t on PC in my eyes. Not a real game
Yeah, the point of a PC is to be independent of any company.
If it’s not a real game, should we call it an unreal game? I will see myself out…
Epic joke.
It’s always available on the high seas.
Yeah, but frankly the high seas usually provide less than Steam does even with money in the equation. And that’s probably the only case when high seas is worse, with all the other services in my experience the high seas provide better service(spotify was close). So the point is if a game doesn’t release on Steam it’s release date just moves to the moment it releases on Steam. Not the best scenario, but Steam really has little competition and Epic surely isn’t trying to be one.
I have no problem with Steam. I was mainly talking about games that only (don’t) come out on Epic Store, but maybe I wasn’t clear enough.
I haven’t kept up, what does it do worse than steam?
Pretty much everything really. It’s basically a store and that’s it, no cool features that Steam has. They may have achievements now but not positive. Think it took two years just for them to add a shopping cart. They dump money on developers to release exclusively on Epic instead of spending it making a good experience for customers. No reviews, no forums, no workshop etc.
I grab the free games they offer every couple weeks and use Heroic to play them, not touching their launcher.
not to mention steam’s:
screenshot manager
community card trading
friends & chat
easy to join small muliplayer (friends can just send you a button that launches the game and joins them instantly)
highly customisable profiles
tools & soundtracks
achievemnts
and so much more that can be simply small little fun
SteamVR is great also, provides a native VR system that Epic doesn’t have
Don’t forget: Ability to see your library on the website
They do have achievements, yeah. Not much else though.
Copying my reply to someone else:
Epic is anti-customer: https://medium.com/@unfoldgames/why-i-turned-down-exclusivity-deal-from-the-epic-store-developer-of-darq-7ee834ed0ac7
Tldr: Kickstarter Game with a lot of interest while in development announces a release date on Steam. After the date announcement they get contacted by Epic saying “we’d love to host your game” for an exclusivity deal.
Dev responds that they would be happy to have their game on Epic but promises were made during crowd funding that it would be available on Steam.
Epic replies that they aren’t interested if it’s not exclusive.This tells me that
- Epic is full of shit. "We’d love to have your game, but only if it’s exclusive.
- Epic doesn’t care about being a better service for its customers. Having the game available on Epic as well is strictly better for Epic’s customers and they easily could have done that. They chose not to.
- Epic is not interested in actually having to compete with other companies. This would require them to provide a better service in some fashion. They are only interested if they can force people “if you want to purchase this game you have to buy it through us” which is anti-consumer.
You can add that their client was actually a malware at some time.
Epic pays for exclusivity sometimes. It’s funny, I keep picking up the free epic games but I don’t think I have ever once played a single game on there.
I claim but I don’t even have the launcher installed. If it wasn’t for the giveaways I’d completely forget about the place.
I don’t even get the free games…they aren’t worth my time. I’ll pay to get them elsewhere instead even if it’s free there when I’m looking
I’m claiming them for the day when Epic games store shuts down and they give out keys for redeemed games on steam. I’m playing the long game. :D
Bethesda did that after shutting down their launcher.
I just download the games that are drm free (which is actually quite a lot) and put a zip archive on my backup drive(s)
I just use the heroic/legendary alternative launcher for any single player games I actually want to play from egs. It’s open source and gives epic less footprint on my machine.
Unfortunately if you want to do anything multiplayer then you need the real client.
I’ve been picking them up religiously after I found out I missed Frostpunk. The only ones I’ve played were the big names like Control, Death Standing, and the old Fallout games. For everything else, the client doesn’t give you enough information to decide if it’s worth your time or not. I keep having to go back and forth between Epic and Steam to read reviews and the “similar to other games you’ve played” thing. It’s not worth the effort.
like you have no choice but to use Epic… which I would literally do ANYTHING not to use.
Literally anything besides not getting that game?
I recently discovered that I can buy, download, and launch games from my Epic Games library without having the Epic Games Bloatware even installed.
Heroic Games Launcher serves as a storefront, installer, and launcher for Epic Games, GOG, and Amazon.
If a game is only released on Epic, it hasn’t been released yet. Its just in some weird alpha state until it has broader release.
I say this every time Epic comes up but it remains the same.
Steam is the pro-consumer storefront. Epic is the pro-developer storefront. What Epic seems to fail to understand is that by being so staunchly pro-developer, they effectively become anti-consumer. And as a consumer, I’m just not going to spend money on an anti-consumer marketplace.
When Epic considers adding necessary pro-consumer measures like actual user reviews so I can hear how a game actual performs from real end users, then and only then will I consider Epic a real storefront viable for consumers.
Epic is the pro-developer storefront.
I think their historically-bad UE5 documentation and laser focus on adding features optimized for Fortnite but terrible for other uses beg to differ.
They’re the pro-shareholder storefront. Nothing more, nothing less.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. Epic’s main selling point was it’s lower storefront fee (15% vs 30%, if I recall). It didn’t offer any other benefits for consumers and I think Epic realised rather quickly that the people who are actually supposed to be paying money for all of this are the buyers and not the sellers, and thus they’ve resorted to strategies like making games “exclusive” or trying to bribe players with free games.
Pro-developer never needs to be anti-consumer. They are staunchly both right now.
I agree they don’t have to be anti-consumer to be pro-developer, but my point is that that is how they are approaching being pro-developer - by limiting pro-consumer features at the behest of developers. Or perhaps I should be saying more actively publishers, to be fair.
I understand that they are pro-developers, like, they only tale 15% of the sales etc. But why are they anti-consumers?
I use Heroic Games Launcher on Nobara Linux and my experience is more seamless than buying and installing games from Steam. I don’t have to bother with Epic Games Launcher, I just download a game and run via proton or wine.
The fact that you can’t use the Epic games launcher on Linux should be telling you what you need to know.
How is their 12 foot interface these days?
How is their position on running things via wine? Tim the bellend has generally been telling Linux users to use wine, but at the same time been generally hostile to it.
And it used to work better on Linux, until the Steam Deck got announced.
Yep. Fucking hypocrite tells people to use something he is hostile towards.
Fuck Epic, they are destroying PC gaming which means they are not developer friendly.
They are actively trying to shrink the market that developers can target.
“Fucking hypocrite” and “Epic Games”. Never have any other set of 4 words fit together so perfectly.
I gave what I see as a significant example in my original comment. Not being able to see comments or reviews from those who have purchased games through the storefront is a problem for me. If a game has a bug or problem, especially if it is one that could potentially be tied to or unique to the EGS version, I would like to know about it. That EGS currently doesn’t provide readily available user feedback when it frankly has been the standard as defined by steam, just doesn’t for me.
So you have to ask yourself why they wouldn’t include such a simple a rudimentary feature - the only result I can come up with is to appease developers who want to prevent being negatively impacted by bad reviews. Thus what we have is prioritizing the wants of developers at the expense of features which benefit consumers.
Every time someone takes the epic deal it just makes it easier to choose which game to ignore forever
I’m annoyed when a game isn’t on GOG. Epic’s issue is that I use it the least and so I’m less likely to boot up a game on it unless I’m actively seeking it out.
One of the annoying thing about epic exclusives is that the focus is on steam, but GOG is affected too and loses out on games too until the deal expires.
Steam is their scapegoat, they want a Monopoly without having to say they have a Monopoly.
Wait, who want a monopoly? Epic? The Epic store is like a tenth of Steam’s size, and most of that is down to Fortnite alone. Hard to have a monopoly when you’re struggling to break double digit share.
… right, which is why I said they want a monopoly, not that they have a monopoly.
Well, yeah, presumably they all do. I’m sure the kebab place next door would love to have a monopoly, it just doesn’t look like it’s in the cards, you know?
Yes, and if the kebab store pitched a fit every time someone provided a better product than them, calling that competition a monopolist, I’d have the same criticism of that kebab shop.
If they’re just doing their best to provide a quality product… I wouldn’t like that they have a monopoly, but if they’re not in any way abusing it… that sounds like they’ve earned their place. The problem lies in the people not putting forth enough effort (despite have the resources to do so) to match.
Kebab store if they were epic like in their strategy would not be throwing a fit, but making exclusivity deals with suppliers so that their competitors in the area lose access to them. So trying to increase consumers having to go to their kebab store to get specific meals due to inability of other stores to offer it or not retain the same quality anymore. Also look into regulations to try and prevent potential competitors from opening up next to them or at least delay when they can open.
No, that’s not how that works at all. Monopolies are bad (and indeed unlawful) even if people think you got them by being super cool.
Google didn’t get a monopoly on advertising and search by sucking at it. They had the best search engine and design in a crowded market and that’s why you don’t say you “Altavista’d” something. But that’s still a bad thing and they still should get broken up into manageable chunks, as current regulators are trying to do. Ditto for Apple and all these other oligopolistic online companies.
And… you know, Valve. Maybe. At some point. Not quite there yet. But that’s bad even if you like Steam or if they have the better feature set. Which they do. Especially if they have the better feature set, in fact, because like all these other oligopolistic companies, the more time they have to establish dominance and get people to sink further into their ecosystem the harder it is to break it up later. That’s true of kebabs AND software platforms.
People who hate on Steam alternatives want a monopoly
No, people who back monopolistic, anti-consumer companies like EGS want a monopoly.
If you actually look, nobody ever complains about GOG or Itch.io. That’s because they don’t pull anticompetitive bullshit like the paid exclusives that EGS relies on
You think Steam isn’t a monopoly?
Read my comment again
The company providing an actual alternative to steam’s real monopoly is not the one to be complaining about
Are they providing an actual alternative, or just creating a pseudo alternative then bitching about how someone else gets more attention?
It is, in fact, an alternative to steam. What a stupid thing to say
Epic is nowhere near as good as steam. Steam I can open, leave open and ignore. Epic force refreshes pages like the fucking library and then my internet cracks a fit at the sudden large data draw.
Shop wise both are equal, epic now has reviews on the bottom of games so you don’t buy some 1 star trash without warning, but they are both more than just a shop.
I’m not sure what you’re responding to, but it wasn’t anyone I said
Anyone believing Steam isn’t a monopoly is seriously uninformed on the topic or letting their enjoy enjoyment of the platform cloud their view of reality.
While it sucks to have games get exclusivity agreements with EGS when EGS sucks compared to Steam, it doesn’t suddenly mean that Steam isn’t a monopoly.
Except they’re trying to strongarm people into using it by using huge amounts of money to buy exclusivity rights.
People don’t want monopolies because companies can abuse their position to hurt consumers. But steam provides a very user friendly experience with lots of benefits and features like mod hosting, remote play together, etc. Epic provides a store that people hate using, and people only put up with because epic abused fortnite’s success to buy exclusivity deals*. Despite being the much smaller storefront, Epic already feels like the abusive monopoly in the PC gaming space.
*Many people also play on Epic because of free games, which is a valid and pro-consumer way to attract users. I’m 100% cool with this strategy, although giving away merchandise at a loss is also a common monopoly strategy.
With regards to
People don’t want monopolies because companies can abuse their position to hurt consumers.
It’s important to remember that it’s not only buyers, but developers that use Steam. Steam is currently involved in a lawsuit with developers.
The “commission” would be Valve’s cut on sales made through Steam, which starts at 30% and drops to 20% as sales increase. Valve defended the percentage as “industry standard” when Wolfire’s lawsuit was first filed, but that’s no longer the case: The Epic Games Store and Microsoft both take just 12% of sales made through their stores.
Also relevant, from 2021 but the same lawsuit,
The Wolfire lawsuit estimates that Valve controls “approximately 75 percent” of the $30 billion market for PC game sales, a number that lines up with other public estimates of Steam’s dominance.
I like Steam, I’m not hating on Steam, but rushing to defend it from people saying it’s a monopoly (or calling Epic Games Store a monopoly) is very much denying reality.
Epic is running a loss leader at this point so it’s not an business model to point to, since it’s subsidized by unreal and fortnite.
Microsoft on Xbox is taking a 30% cut so it wouldn’t be farfetched to assume cut is more a strategy to try to expand market share and are willing to increase down the line if they got market share. And Microsoft is Microsoft so has lot of other profitable divisions to be able to run things at a loss.
One actually better to point to might be GOG which is also taking 30%, but in 2021 had a 1 million dollar loss. https://www.pcgamer.com/gog-looks-like-its-in-a-much-healthier-spot-after-a-hairy-2021/
Which raises the question. What is actually sustainable? Especially the lower cut offered have other much more profitable divisions that are covering potential losses and not being the main source of revenue.
All retail establishments utilize loss leaders. It’s not some underhanded duplicitous tactic, it’s just a common business strategy
That 30% is standard for most storefronts. Just look at Google Play and Apple’s App Store.
If you’re that put off by 30% cuts then don’t look into retail stores because their markups make that look like chump change.
It’s important to remember that it’s not only buyers, but developers that use Steam. Steam is currently involved in a lawsuit with developers.
Actually, it’s generally publishers, not developers that end up paying the 30% cut. For most games the developer gets paid upfront by the publisher, and the publisher pockets the difference between development costs and sales. I’d also like to point out that prices between EGS and Steam are generally the same, so instead of getting lower priced games as promised, the publishers are just pocketing the larger profits.
Repeat Tim Swiney’s fake talking points all you want, the fact of the matter is that Valve isn’t behaving like a monopoly, even if they command a huge portion of the market. The reason they’re so big in the first place is specifically because they’re very pro-consumer
It’s important to remember that it’s not only buyers, but developers that use Steam. Steam is currently involved in a lawsuit with developers.
Actually, it’s generally publishers, not developers that end up paying the 30% cut.
I’m keeping the model simple by equating publisher with developer. Basically, you’ve got the consumer, the store, and the supplier. That some (most) developer studios go through a publisher for funding is a business practice that’s actually unrelated to Steam. Especially because they allow indie content.
30% as industry standard
That’s the same as app stores/etc, and is still a common cut to take. I’m not convinced the cuts that Epic is taking are actually sustainable for offering downloads/updates/etc for a game indefinitely, but it’s hard to tell since the Epic store is already bleeding money.
I’ll also mention that Audible (which has a monopoly in the audiobook space) reportably takes a 60-75% cut of audiobooks sold on their platform (they take only 60% if you agree to sell exclusively on audible, but they take the full 75% if you want to sell the book somewhere else as well). Monopolies abusing their position is really common, but I haven’t seen anything similar from Steam that makes me think they’re abusing their position. I suspect PC gaming would be in a far worse state if another company controlled the popular storefront.
Would you do your job and maybe receive an income but only years later, based on results and how happy you made your boss?
The devs and publishers who sign those deals are the ones you should be angry at, Epic is offering them guaranteed income in exchange for timed exclusivity, Valve is offering them access to a bigger player base in exchange for a gamble.
Being a small game dev has a lot of uncertainty and risk. I wouldn’t blame any small dev for taking a guaranteed paycheck from Epic. Larger studios with safe prospects should be blamed though imo. Gearbox with Borderlands 3 for example.
Doesn’t matter the size of the studio, in the end they have people to pay and Steam is asking them to take a gamble in the hope that they’ll make enough to compensate the money they spent. We’ve seen but studios crash and burn, hell Sony wasted home many millions on that game that was online for a couple of days? I’m sure they would have been happy to have gotten a cheque instead of nothing!
The devs and publishers who sign those deals are the ones you should be angry at
And that’s why I don’t buy games from those devs and publishers
GOG is called Good Old Games for a reason. They aren’t losing out by having to wait. I always buy games there first, then Epic (if it’s an exclusive), then Steam.
Nothing beats GOG for preservation and gamers rights to actually own their games.
On July 27th (Saturday) I uploaded a new trailer announcing the Steam launch date. On July 30th (Tuesday) I was contacted by the Epic Store, proposing that I enter into an exclusivity agreement with them instead of releasing DARQ on Steam. They made it clear that releasing DARQ non-exclusively is not an option. I rejected their offer before we had a chance to talk about money.
…
It was important to me to give players what they wanted: options. A lot of people requested that DARQ be made available on GOG. I was happy to work with GOG to bring the game to their platform. I wish the Epic Store would allow indie games to be sold there non-exclusively, as they do with larger, still unreleased games (Cyberpunk 2077), so players can enjoy what they want: a choice.
What’s the point of your comment? It doesn’t change the fact that, at the end of the exclusivity period, those games will show up on GOG, which doesn’t care if they’re “old” games that don’t sell much.
Nobody is paying more than a couple dollars at most for Fallout 1 & 2, but do you see GOG throwing a fit about that? How do you suppose Epic exclusives are going to change that?
Well, yeah, but if I was going to get pissed about that, then Epic would be way low in my list of priorities. It’s Steam sucking up all the oxygen in that particular room. I own every Yakuza game they made available on GOG and they’ve stopped doing that. That wasn’t Epic.
Sounds like that was Sega.
Oh, it was Sega. That’s the thing about having an entrenched dominant position, you don’t need to invest money to get exclusives, even when you are paying out a smaller share.
Gaben may be a libertarian, but I’m not. If you set up systemic reasons why I’m getting boned it’s still your fault.
So the systemic reason of… providing a quality storefront? Are you demanding that they just make things shittier so that other people have a chance?
This has got to be the most twisted criticism of Steam I’ve ever heard…
I… wait, what?
So are you okay with exclusives but only when the developer is not getting paid for it? Or only when it’s on Steam because you just happen to like Steam?
That’s such a weird take. It owns the inconsistency so thoroughly I have trouble navigating it.
Since apparently I have to explain this for some reason, I don’t particularly like exclusives in general and prefer platform-agnostic games so I can pick where to get them. but if you’re only going to support a store, I’m perfectly fine with developers getting paid by Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Valve, Epic or whever else. You do you and keep your workers employed any way you see fit.
And when I get a choice I tend to pick GOG because… well, they don’t need a little reminder that you’re not buying the game you’re buying in the payment page, so I get to back up my installers and keep them forever.
Now, THAT is a criticsm of Steam that I’m actually making here.
I generally am less bothered by exclusives that are a result of a company deciding to not release at a certain storefront as opposed to being bribed and contractually prevented from releasing elsewhere after signing. Those at least have a chance of being released somewhere else if they change their mind.
Like Yakuza was a console exclusive for a long time but not because Sony forced them to. So when they decided PC games was worth venturing into they ended up doing so as opposed to being contractually prevented. Same goes for Persona.
That’s the difference from contract based exclusives.
That’s called the cost of running a DRM free storefront.
Yakuza collection didn’t release until 2023. Companies usually do delayed releases when sales are on a downward trend if they end up releasing on GOG. And that’s a big if because of no DRM requirements.
Unless you are a recent user of GOG, delayed releases shouldn’t be anything new and has more to do with DRM. If you want DRM free you have to be willing to accept delayed releasing or convince GOG to give up on DRM requirements if you just want games on GOG available right away.
Stuff like denuvo exists because companies are very protective of their assets and are really reluctant to offer DRM free. That’s the main obstacles for GOG. DRM.
Yeah. Because Steam has DRM. Steam IS DRM. That’s the problem it originally solved, back when Amazon was still a bookstore.
So screw Steam and other overprotective corporations, I want my PC games DRM-free, since physical copies aren’t an option (which is my console solution, thank you very much). They can come meet my requirements or I will continue to prioritize GOG where I can and be annoyed at the lack of a GOG release otherwise. I don’t want GOG to give up on the DRM requirement, I want them to get so popular that publishers have to comply with it whether they like it or not.
So from that perspective, if Epic and Steam want to have a pissing contest, I’m in full “let them fight” mode. Who cares.
Sorry but companies were trying DRM even before them using stuff like rotating paper wheels before DRM tech improved. Sony even installed root kits for music CDs. Denuvo was created because it was believed DRM options weren’t strong enough and some companies use additional DRM on top of denuvo.
Zero DRM isn’t the only reason games aren’t published on GOG right away, and that may not even be the main reason for the countless games that release day one without Denuvo.
GOG also doesn’t have the best infrastructure for pushing updates. Stories abound of it being a slow process, whether physically uploading the files or authentication taking a while. Invariably, game updates will show up later on GOG than they will on Steam. GOG also has a very consumer-friendly return policy. All that, combined with it being simply a smaller marketplace, doesn’t place it well in cost-benefit analysis.
The fact that gog.com let me forego launchers all together as well as letting me download the game installers and put them on my NAS means a lot to me. I don’t remember the last time I had GOG Galaxy installed, I just download, install and play the games and then call it a day.
You can go that way. I’d rather have a front-end to manage it, but having the option means you can do it manually, rely on Galaxy or use a third party front-end pretty interchangeably.
If you use GOG Galaxy it has Epic store intergration to launch games, and then closes the app when you quit too. Never have to see the Epic launcher.
Yeah, there are a bunch of third party launchers with integrations. Launchbox will do most PC storefronts.
I wish Galaxy was a bit lighter, though, because once I plug in everything it supports we start getting into five digit counts and the whole thing slows to a crawl. It’s a bit better now, but it was borderline unusable at some points.
Yeah it’s a bit of a slog with too many but I find it’s perfect for Epic and Microsoft games.
IMO if it’s exclusive to one store, sailing the seas is morally just.
