I agree that the xenophobic anti-chinese parts of the conversation are nonsensical & absurd and only get brought up as another bulletpoint to rail against the EGS when Tencent has it's fingers in a ton of pies without anyone caring about it.

But there are still valid reasons to have doubts about a platform that wants to set itself apart as handcurated & where the games get great visibility compared to other platforms. The amount of games that get to be on the store will be limited. Especially when they're not actively developing tools to personalize who gets to see which games, instead relying on an one-size-fits-all approach by handcurating the store for millions of different customers. Which games will get the most visibility? The games & studios that already have a wide audience. Which games will be rejected first to retain visibility for the bigger fish? The smaller ones. Assault Android Cactus won't be the last well regarded game that falls by the wayside. Even some of the smaller games that are on the service right now already require more than 10+ scrolls to be visible (Gorogoa & Donut Country) while the big games are front & center. I get it, naturally you want to throw the big games in front of the eyeballs of the masses, but it's a far cry from Steam being able to figure out what kind of games i spend time in and recommending me smaller games like Reprisal Universe, Memoria, Risk of Rain 2 & Technobabylon through their queues and letting me keep track of these smaller games through my wishlist.

And that more curated ideal wouldn't be a huge issue if some of the ideas in the Epic store wouldn't potentially have industry-wide effects. A store that shines it's spotlight on the big studios is just as legit as a store that shines it's spotlight on older games (GoG). But suddenly we have this new mandatory creator cut to deal with. As an indiedev, before you used to be able to send some codes out to variety streamers and get some exposure that way. There's no direct financial tie between the game & the streamer so streamers get to purely choose the games based on their game preference & the quality of the game. In the future, these creators are able to make money on these games by using their EGS referral links. The existance of a direct financial tie means that the more lucrative games have a huge advantage. Suddenly it's not about highlighting games based on quality & preference. Just as the bigger streamers have exposed games like Rise of Kings & Conan Exiles on twitch during it's marketing period, but now on a greater scale where every creator out there is able to be part of these marketing moments for the games that offer the most lucrative deal in a constant manner. The streamingworld is so cutthroat, you can't blame them for doing what makes the most financial sense. People have to make a living. But this financial tie to gamesales will result in a situation where the cream has a harder time to rise to the top. Especially from smaller and up&coming studio's.

For devs, suddenly your pricing & marketing has to change to be an attractive value proposition to receive coverage. Spending your hours on a game with a paltry 5% revshare or a linear storybased game that only 5 viewers might buy, won't be an enticing product to spend time on. Creators would much rather lead their audience to buy the latest multiplayer or viral challenge game instead. The kind of games that people actually want to buy afterwards to play. Let's face it, games like Contradiction & Monkey Island are great games to watch, but a very small percentage would actually go out to buy these games through a referral link after watching a creator play through these linear games all the way. Certain games & studio's will get the short end of the stick, and the games that do potentially make financial sense to receive exposure, have to offer a creator cut that is high enough to steer creators away from the competition. Suddenly you're not just enjoying epic's lower cut,but an additional paywall is raised on the exposure side of things for everyone. Less exposure for up & coming studio's through store inclusion and through creators will make it a harder time to make your small game a success. That's what worries me. The 'EGS store = source of good because they have a lower cut' story feels shortsighted to me. To me, Epic says: We want to sell you the most popular games from the most popular studios, give streamers an incentive to market the games on our store, and want devs to share their revenue with these streamers. And if some games end up to be more lucrative to market than others, you could always raise the creator cut & battle for the eyeballs right? That's just the new market reality that you'll have to deal with.

They seem to be aware that this streamer cut could be a source of annoyance, given that they're spending the fortnite bucks temporarily to pay out the first 5% revshare out of their own pockets for the next 24 months. That won't be the case once the store is settled as a strong platform.

Once upon a time Valve decided to sell games and it was welcomed with torches and pitchforks the same way this store is. The real test will be how well Epic can innovate amongst the existing stores.

Temporary exclusivity is a smart move by Epic to get a foothold in the market. The devs and publishers are simply channeling customers through a better revenue stream and it cements some guaranteed funding for development of the storefront. However, they need to phase that practice out once the store client is updated with useful features. It is important they try to be a part of the competition and not try to stifle it with extended exclusivity.

That being said, any comparison to consoles or streaming services falls flat a bit because you literally have all the clients installed on one piece of hardware with no subscription model so there is no additional cost to access exclusive content (yet). I'm sure future game streaming services will be a different story.

i think there's an important distinction to be drawn in the specifics, though. if you take steam "exclusives" such as skyrim or civ 5- valve didn't pay those publishers to keep those titles off of other stores- those publishers chose steamworks as their pc platform (and in fact likely paid valve for the privilege as it's a bundle of services they sell). it might seem like an exclusive on the consumer end, but i think nature of the transaction is significantly different. there weren't any deals preventing either of those games from existing in other stores. publishers went with steam presumably because they wanted those services, and didn't want to shoulder the risk involved with direct-to-customer sales.

whereas if you look at epic- publishers and devs are going there presumably for the payday. which makes total sense if you're a business- but the benefits to the end user are largely hinging on blind faith at the moment.

@dudeglove: But Valve made Half-Life 2, they created from the ground up and owned it wholly, and over time Steam became central to how it and other Source engine games operated. Epic doesn't make most of their exclusive games, they just pay the publisher for exclusivity after the game's already been announced and advertised for Steam, and even on steam in many cases. They aren't comparable situations at all.

Also epic isn't competing with 2004 Valve, they're competing with modern Valve, who've made over a decade of improvements to their online storefront. The Epic store has to be held to modern standards. Nobody's going around calling Ride to Hell Retribution a great game just because it would have been really kickass back in 1987, nobody's calling the special effects of Mortal Kombat: Annihilation breathtaking just because they would have blown the hats off some flappers back in 1926.

Epic could have sunk a bit more time and a bit more of that money they're handing out left and right into making a storefront that actually had competitive features, they could have been funding and developing exclusive games from the ground up, but they didn't.

I guess Epics marketing works cause i bought it on steam :D.

As for the "Chinese" part of this conversation China is implementing al lot off scary shit these days such as a credit score tied to your "well behavior" go through a red light to many times and you can't get a loan or a job anymore and your basically doomed, so i wouldn't call it Xenophobia as it's more of a concern of Tencent a company with ties to the Communist worker party having a major sharehold in epic. As much as Epic says they won't share data we all know what happened with facebook and google so i totally see this as a valid concern for most costumers.

I had a pretty rough initial experience with the Epic Store. Someone had used my email address to create an account (apparently there was at some point a reward for creating an account and they weren't verifying emails) so it took a bunch of time to sort that out (actually I still haven't done so fully, but at least I got a real account set up).

The download speed for a game was also significantly worse than Steam. Which is probably the main thing I care about.

But overall I agree the reactions to store-exclusivity deals is generally way overblown (what isn't on the internet these days). It's definitely better to have competition for Steam, and the era when I was concerned about memory taken up by tray icons is decades past. I hope the Epic launcher improves and evolves in a way as to not become a clone of Steam. I also hope that proliferation of multiple storefronts will result in less reliance on those storefronts for "discovery", because I don't trust sellers to do that & definitely Steam has not done a good job at that by any measure.

@dudeglove: to be fair, everything i hear about HL2 on steam sounds like a shitshow so fair enough. but i think that's a different situation given it's a first-party game. i don't think anyone is raging that fortnite isn't available on steam. you're kinda always stuck with following first-party titles and going where you need to go to play them.

also like @brackstone mentioned- yes valve certainly has had more time to get-it-right- but for the same reason that people don't give nintendo a pass for the their online service compared to microsoft or sony, epic has jumped into a mature services market. right now their distinguishing feature is minimalism (for better and worse)- but i think most can agree something industry standard like cloud backup should have been ready from day 1.

@soulcake:I just don't see the throughline from China implementing a social score for it's citizens to them compelling Epic to let Tencent go ham on the data they track on it's global customers. I guess you could argue that they might eventually be able to up their 40% share in Epic to the point where Tencent does have that capability, but if you regard Tencent as a bottomless pit of money the same could happen to the other companies they already do business with. Big companies with their own databases like Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft, Supercell & Paradox Interactive. And whatever other business interests will pop up at a later date that extract customer data.

I do agree that people can be concerned about this involvement, but at the same time the reaction to Tencents involvement seems disproportional in a world where Fortnite, Pubg, Path of Exile & League of Legends have no issue attracting new players.Tencent's involvement seems to be a rather small footnote to the general audience. Well, apart from this one instance where people get warned to not use the Epic store because Tencent has a stake in Epic. And that's just Tencent & the gaming industry we're talking about. China is investing in foreign financial services, food production, health and biotech, energy companies, consumer products and services, and the automotive sector. The general audience mostly shrugs at it. And if you take these privacy concerns even wider, it's not just chinese involvement that could end up doing nefarious shit to your data. Either Intentional or unintentional via weak security. Combined with the personal information people spread themselves.. It's a whole can of worms, this digital world we live in.

Tencent are currently preparing the rollout of WeGame X , which is the global version of Tencent's own WeGame game platform.

I can't speak for anyone else, but the reason why I find it annoying is because the Epic Store just isn't feature complete and it sucks in comparison to even things like Origin. I'd feel less salty about the whole thing if it was at least finished before they started throwing their money around. I also don't like that whatever security they have in place is easily circumnavigated and people get their info and accounts stolen seemingly more than anywhere else Literally as soon as I created my Epic account someone was trying to get into it. but that can be attributed to the huge popularity of Fortnite I guess. I'm also slowly reaching my breaking point with how many launchers I have installed on my computer, and I don't like the idea of every company under the sun having their own platforms everyone has to keep track of, with multiple exclusives and what not. It's just a pain in the ass and as soon as Epic is done buying exclusives I'm done using their store.

Also the Chinese conspiracy theory thing has been discredited and isn't even worth addressing. Epic isn't selling your data to the Chinese government, and claiming as much is ridiculous.

@soulcake said:

This post is ridiculous. The Epic store has nothing to do with authoritarian policies being implemented in China. This is like saying that a foreign company which an American company has a stake in is supporting the domestic policies of the US because of that stake. Why would the Chinese government care at all about the gaming-related activity of non-Chinese users, even assuming Epic would share that information (which is a big assumption)? This post comes across as very paranoid.

I was going to write a whole thesis on why I don't like the epic store, but I think it all really boils down to this: I don't like the feeling of being manipulated into doing something that I would never do otherwise, and it feels like Epic is doing this by paying for all these games to be exclusive to their store. Yes, it's just another free storefront but I don't want another free storefront, I want to be able to have one set of credentials and not give my credit card and email info to yet another huge corporation. That's pretty much it I guess.

You are asking why a predominantly enthusiast community ( because let's be real here, "average" gamers aren't dropping $1k+, or learning enough to build at $800 ) is angry they are being forced to do something they don't want to?

Like I realize this is against the rules, so I'm speaking in hypothetical here, but most PC gamers know piracy intimately. We had to use it growing up to play games. Noone understands what it's like to get hyped up on a PC game that's a new release, only to never be able to find it anywhere because nobody physical carried it. Times 2-3 if you lived outside of the US.

Epic isn't feature complete and never will be. Sweeney has said he has no interest in sales or forums. It's up to devs if they want to post sales, Epic won't host them. How does this help the PC gaming community in the future?

Epic doesn't offer regional pricing. More then a few people are pointing out that Epic "regional" pricing is just $60 but in their currency. Not how Steam does it, which is checking regional physical sales and adjusting accordingly, making a lot of games $15 or so USD. When you average $200 USD a month from paychecks, $60 USD but in your currency isn't exactly "regional pricing.".

Epic isn't available still in large chunks of the world. China is a big one, and people are saying the Russian client is missing games.

Like right off the bat, huge chunks of the PC gaming community simply cannot use this launcher, and will never be able to. So saying it's "just a launcher" is an incredibly US centric view of things.

This isn't even getting into security issues. I made an account to fuck around with it a bit, but my email was one of the ones that already had an account attached to it. So I retook my account back over with the help of Epic Support ( which took far longer then it should have to boot ), then proceeded to wait. Exactly a week after I got my account back it taken back over by the person who made it, and Epic refused to assist me further. They had proof they were the original owner of the Account I didn't have. Thankfully I didn't buy any games on it, because it seems to have been booby trapped.

Or the current password scandal, where people using stuff like 1pass or keypass to gen new passwords and use a different password per site are mentioning their info got put into pastebins somehow. How'd that happen? It is a mystery.

Or how people are reporting that their 2FA'd accounts are being hacked somehow without their consent, because Epic holds 2FA keys for ???? long and it's basically a nonexistent thing.

People on PC are angry and bitching because they are being forced to use something that feels like college students first attempt at a platform. And uh, most aren't using it! Metro Exodus was the most pirated game since GTAV, and hit those numbers in a month compared to GTAV's multiple years. And that's a far bigger problem.

Like "it's just a launcher, jesus you babys god." is incredibly pedantic. It's not usable by huge chunks of the community due to them living in the wrong country, and those that can use it are going to be predominantly more enthusiast, and more willing to look up issues with it. And if your response to that is that you don't care because another launcher doesn't bother you, then more power to you.

Personally I stopped caring awhile back. I have more then enough to play this year, and losing 2-3 big games to Epic just gives me more time to spend on indies and other stuff. I have zero qualms with just waiting a year to pick stuff up for $15 or whatever once it goes on sale. But I'm also American and have a disposable income and can pick and choose. I can understand how angry I'd be if I was Russian, or Brazilian, or Chinese, or the other 40-50% of PC gaming space according to Steam who are basically either being told I can't play these games unless they pirate them, or have to drop 1/3rd of my paycheck to get them.

You say that competition is good and healthy, but Epic is competing in a way that benefits developers and not customers so why should customers be happy that a game they want to buy is only available exclusively on the epic store? The economics of developers in the biggest and most profitable medium in the entertainment industry isn't really my concern.

The historical context is irrelevant. The epic store is not competing in the market as it was in 2003.

To me it's rather simple. They are buying their way to the top and making a more divided market for consumers. It's not competition is simply buying your way into the market and forcing itself because of the exclusives and money they have. The store itself is the least of it's problems to me.

I wonder if OP has found his answer yet. There are certainly plenty of people with plenty of valid reasons to avoid the Epic Store.

Does the Epic store work in Hong Kong at all? Living and working in China for almost ten years now, will be in Hong Kong for a few days later this week, so if it's functional there maybe I'll give this thing a whirl.

People like outrage

I do have EGS installed, and i honestly don't see any issues with it so far. Sure it might not have all the bells and whistles that Steam has. But to be honest i never engage with any of the Steam stuff in the first place. I never use the overlay, i never chat over Steam. Steam for me is just a store front nothing more, i buy my game i play it. Thats about it.

I do the exact same with Uplay, Origin ect.

I do launch every thing through Galaxy 2.0 so i dont have to look at other clients and it nicely closes them after i quit a game.

But yeah as you wrote, GET PAID.

I decided to primarily play games on the PC for (mainly) two reasons.

1. I can with 99.9% reliability play older games when I upgrade or buy a new PC and therefore not be beholden to the whims of console manufacturers views on back compat.

2. (And this is the reason that affects my stance on the Epic store) I don't like the whole exclusives thing, on PC this whas not really a thing (unless something was Mac exclusive for some reason) until recently.

I can understand the reasoning behind studios putting the games they themselves make in their own store only, if they have their own store it's understandable, and if I want said game enough I'll buy it from there, it still works on my PC after all.

What I don't like is Epic going around and locking other studios games to their store. I worry it can lead to more walled gardens on the PC side, which I want as open as possible. That's why I decided to not support this kind of action, had Epic not decided to to this I would probably be using their store. As it is I have games on Steam, Battle.net, Origin, GOG and probably some other stores.

I'm happy developers are getting paid, there's a lot of games out there, too many for me to play really so I can wait until Epics timed exclusive runs out. And if they stop this exclusive nonsense I'll support their store.

The people who hate/threaten Epic or Developers who work with Epic are just shitty though.

There are 104 games in my epic library, 5 of which I have actually paid money for. That's just a bit silly.