Is that the Epic that agreed to six-year $800 million partnership with Google recently?
Yep, time to wipe my Epic account.
(And also pretty much the only store that matters for non-exklusive titles Tim)
Isn’t Tim the guy that advocates for pedophelia through AI generation?
And Hitler was a vegetarian, but that tells us literally nothing about whether we should abuse animals in factory farms
Stop, stop, I already have so many reasons to hate him, I don’t need more.
Sure, but I think wanting to fuck children does kind of paint a vivid picture about your general moral character in a way your dietary preferences might not.
Hitler actually did both. Several of his “girlfriends” were 14 when they met.
He also managed to become the guardian of his 14 year old niece at one point.
I feel like this isn’t a reciprocal thing though. “Guy does good thing” /=/ “You shouldn’t question his judgement/his other ideas are also good. ” feels fair
However
“Guy does bad thing” = “You should question his judgement/his other ideas tend to also be bad” also feels fair
Reminder: Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has defended child pornography, saying that stopping it is “gatekeeping”.
Please link to a source when you say things like that.
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Tim… suing everyone else wont make epic store a great place to buy games
Look to GOG for inspiration…
He’s just salty because the only games people “purchase” are the weekly free ones.
Not even. I’ve bought games on Steam that I forgot I had in Epic because Epic is just that trash. Fuck Epic for trying to start their store by bribing developers for exclusivity on their platform. Bitch ass tactics to begin with and then crying and whining when their mob mentality strong arming didn’t work. Best believe if their shit had worked and they became popular those greedy assholes would be asking a higher percentage once everyone was locked in.
I don’t even bother with those anymore. I never play the free ones I have, because I’d have to use Epic’s software.
- Playnite, if you’re on Windows (though Linux might be over the horizon).
- Heroic Games Launcher if you’re on any platform.
Playnite is the better choice if you’re on Windows, but either way, don’t let Tim’s dumb store stop you from ruining his day by generating a bunch of metrics that show you’re only playing freebies!
Keep collecting them. Each one you get costs Epic money and helps counter some of that Fortnite cash that lets Epic keep paying for exclusive contracts. Keep bleeding them and eventually they won’t be able to keep buying exclusive releases.
Epic pays a flat rate to offer games for free, they don’t pay per download.
Downloading them just helps Epic inflate their “active users” number when talking to investors.
I even stopped with those.
Yea. Like one or two good ones and sandwiched with a bunch of trash games no one wants.
Thanks for the reminder.
It’s Definitely Not Fried Chicken.
He’s still right in this instance.
Exactly. The number of people on Lemmy who simp for Valve’s monopoly just because Epic (along with every game developer, big or small) stands to benefit is kind of shocking.
Because most of us aren’t retarded and know the difference between a forced monopoly and a natural monopoly. A natural monopoly is when you’re so good that people just naturally go to you, aka Valve. A forced monopoly is when you pay developers to lock their game to your platform so you can force people to use your platform, aka Epic.
It doesn’t have anything to do with Epic, it’s because Steam provides a great service with a ton of features nobody else offers, and Valve has demonstrated time and time again that they make policies that benefit consumers.
It would be great if Steam had some competition, but Epic ain’t it. What people want is another service of equal quality to Steam. Instead the best we have is GOG and that still falls well short of feature parity nevermind the anti-consumer cesspool of Epic.
Suing Valve isn’t going to do anything to improve the situation. Realistically what could Valve do to be “less of a monopoly”? Lower the percentage they take of sales? Consumers wouldn’t see any benefit from that only developers. Ironically it would also increase Valves monopoly because if they took a smaller cut there would be even less reason for companies to sell on Epic as Epics lower cut is literally the only reason developers (outside of Epic literally paying some of them mounds of cash by way of exclusivity contracts) pick Epic over Steam.
If Epic really wants to do something about Valves monopoly it’s simple, they just need to offer all the same features that Steam does. Things like family sharing, streaming support, a cross platform store and launcher, and an excellent review system so people can better understand the games they’re thinking about buying. Until that happens yes people will stick with Steam because it’s the objectively superior experience.
It isn’t a monopoly because they don’t require you to use their store. Epic has a monopoly of epic exclusive games.
Its an effective monopoly, that’s not really disputable. This lawsuit isn’t even about them having a monopoly, its about them allegedly abusing it.
And ecommerce sellers don’t “have to” sell on Amazon, so they don’t have any market power they can abuse to extract 40-50% fees from sellers, right?
Amazon requires price matching for most sellers, which is shit and makes this an apples to oranges comparison.
Could Steam back down on their 30% cut? Sure, but not a monopoly.
It’s not apples to oranges, because the network effects (and coercive pressures they create) are in fact incredibly similar: sellers have to go where most customers are, and most PC gamers begin and end their search for games on Steam, just like most online shoppers begin and end their searches on Amazon.
They don’t. My small business sells direct from our site instead of in Amazon, and we do okay.
Anecdotes are not data!
While that’s true, counterexamples are great ways to disprove overreaching implications like “companies must sell on Amazon to be successful”.
It is not a requirement. It might be the most profitable way to run an e-commerce business (in which case you’re obviously benefiting from the system Amazon created).
DRM free, launcher free games or fuck off.
is that Valve’s policies and position as the leading distribution service in PC gaming means publishers are effectively blocked from selling games and add-ons at lower prices on competing stores
I still don’t get this. As far as I can find, Steam doesn’t allow steam keys to be sold cheaper elsewhere, but they don’t bother with prices of games in other stores.
And doesn’t Epic have a bunch of games exclusive to their store?
I still don’t get this. As far as I can find, Steam doesn’t allow steam keys to be sold cheaper elsewhere, but they don’t bother with prices of games in other stores.
This is tricky. Officially Valve doesn’t have any rules about non-Steam game prices on other stores. Unofficially evidence has been put forward by way of emails between developers and Valve that seem to show that Valve unofficially requires price parity with other stores and will punish games that offer lower prices elsewhere.
The charitable interpretation is that their policies are worded confusingly and some of their agents are misinterpreting the rule requiring Steam key prices to be uniform as applying to non-Steam keys. The uncharitable interpretation is that Valve knows such a policy would get them in hot water with anti-monopoly laws and so they’re careful to make sure it stays an unofficial policy.
Is that true? I’ve seen devs list their games off steam for steamprice -30%. Often you can go to a devs website and buy the game $10 cheaper. However I still buy it via steam because i feel like i’ll forget about the game if its just a key in my email.
That’s… Weird, given I usually get games on sale from Humble if I’m getting them on steam. Might just be full price?
Steam, and Epic, both have exclusives. Steam is more incidental (some devs just don’t bother releasing elsewhere), while Epic had a deal going on for devs that released exclusively on Epic for the first 6 months of the game’s life. Don’t remember what the deal was, but it was a marketing thing to try and get people over to Epic. After the 6 months was up most devs also released to Steam.
Has epic games developed anything like Proton? Valve isn’t just a store.
They developed the Unreal engine. Not sure how “like Proton” you meant, but it’s used by lots of games and is quite a complex and well-regarded 3D engine.
Epic makes tons of money off licensing Unreal to developers and have since before their store was a thing.
Proton makes direct zero profit, though it does make Steam the best store for anyone on Linux.
What do you mean? Isn’t Kratos dancing orange justice innovative enough?
That Whataboutism is Not really relevant to the lawsuit.
Just because they made someone useful to expand their control over the games industry, that you happen to like, doesn’t mean them abusing their monopoly position isn’t still bad.
>Open source, publicly available tool to aid in Linux adoption
>“some[thing] to expand their control over the games industry”
Found the Sweeney fanboy. Just because Timmy-boy can’t install kernel-level malware on Linux doesn’t mean Gabe Newell is going to use it to conquer the Earth, bud.
Why are you acting like there aren’t steam games with additional drm?
Steam doesn’t require DRM to publish on their platform.
Again with the complete and utter lack of ability to understand that nuance exists, and both can be bad people doing self interested things, and one bad person saying something correct does not mean you agree with everything they stand for just because you agree with the one smart thing.
Like more than one of you are stuck in this moronic binary mindset. It’s pathetic.
Steam also places DRM and states in their EULA that you pay to license the title and not own it. Looks like you’re a Steam fanboy. We shouldn’t be fanboys of anything but simply notice the good and bad thaf companies do because either way they aren’t our friends
Developers place DRM, that’s not s requirement of Steam publishing. Also, 99% of digital stores state you’re only buying a license. That’s a problem with modern society, not Steam.
🤡
Wine?
I didn’t know epic games developed that.
Wine was never developed by Epic, as far as I know. Wikipedia showed nothing about Epic, not a word.
I never said epic made wine.
Wine is like 99% of proton. Historically it was mostly sposored by Collabora and I think they were doing it so they clould run some windows programs on mac (my memory is fuzzy, was a long time ago).
Valve came later. There were already out-of-tree patches speciffically for games. The wine team didn’t put those in because they are hacks while wines aim is 100% compatibility with windows.
As those patches grew, stuff like wine-staging emerged that would massage those patches into what the wine project would accept. And even later proton was born (i think from some guys repo, i think valve hired him).
If you want to attribute something to valve, then ACO is a better option. It’s amazing.
I’m just a bit annoyed that nobody praises wine while everybody speaks like it was all valve.
I never said epic made wine
You implied it by responding with “Wine?” to the question “Has epic developed anything similar to proton?” 🤦♂️
I think they misspelled “whine”.
That, or they’re saying Proton isn’t Valve’s work alone and that it’s heavily based on WINE. I’m not sure if that’s true, but it’s another way to read that comment.
Proton is a combination of technologies. The main ones are wine and dxvk
I was almost forgetting Tim’s whole deal seems to be antagonizing more successful companies than his.
He wants access to massive user bases for fortnite without having to pay anything to the platforms. That’s why he’s so intent on attacking Steam, Apple and Google. Steam would be a massive increase in revenue even with a 30% cut going to steam for epic, but mutual benefit isn’t in vogue at the moment.
But Epic is super successful. Its Unreal Engine has almost the entire gaming landscape in a stranglehold and is making big gains in film productions.
Fortnite is one of the most successful games on Earth and EGS exclusive Rocket League recently achieved one million concurrent players.
I mean Epic the storefront, not the umbrella company, as the “company” in my original quote. If we are to be pedantic, there is also Epic the game publisher.
Also Rocket League was bought by EGS and turned exclusive after it already had a following, so the numbers for it seem kinda artificial. Though that and Fortnite would also fall in the publisher branch from what I understand.
The storefront itself is seldom news-worth, except for the freebies and that time they added a shopping cart with a few years of delay. And their freebies strategy seems to not be working out as EGS has yet to see a profit from some recent news.
Then comes Tim, that if I had to guess, is trying to dig any resentments people have with Steam to try to bring its userbase to EGS.
Also Rocket League was bought by EGS and turned exclusive after it already had a following
Doesn’t change that the cited growth happened recently which is years after the takeover.
Ok, but as I tried to say right next, still that sounds like a tangent.
Being obviously self-interested doesn’t make him wrong about app store monopolies, whether Apple, Google, or Valve.
I would use other words, but I don’t think you are actually interested in understanding market power, coercion, or network effects. It is a little tricky, but if you’re not just shitposting in bad faith, Lina Khan has a great paper on digital platform monopolies and Matt Stoller has a good podcast on Valvle’s monopoly in particular. Or does Matt Stoller also not understand what a monopoly is, according to you?
Appeal to expertise is not an appeal to authority. Otherwise we could never cite scientists, epidemiologists, or other experts. You might be interested in the fallacy of equivocation.
I’m glad I stopped arguing with morons.
Good luck in life.
No instead epic charges 12%, and if you use unreal engine but don’t sell on egs they get a 5% royalty fee on all your sales. Sure those number are lower but egs isn’t out here “empowering” devs
Epic would charge Steam’s fees if they had Steam’s marketshare.
Everyone thinking they care about creators or customers is a fucking moron.
Are they close to feature parity with Steam yet? Like after a quick search of it looks like they added cloud saves but that took years.
Not even close. Plus, it’s not just about feature parity. It’s also about ease of use. EGS is still shit as of 2 months ago.
if you use unreal engine but don’t sell on egs they get a 5% royalty fee on all your sales.
Sounds like abusing market power.
100%. Valve needs to start suing Epic for their game engine monopoly. It’s not about Valve it’s about protecting gamers.
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More like Tim Weenie.
Shoddy article buries the lede: Epic isn’t suing Valve. UK residents are. Epic is just rooting for them because Epic makes a product (Epic Game Store) that competes with a product by Valve (Steam). Epic is not behind the lawsuit. They are just cheering for their competitor to be taken down a peg.
Literally nothing whatsoever stops Epic from releasing their Epic Game Store app on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android as these are open platforms that allow anybody to release an app (or app store) and offer it to their customers. However, Epic Game Store only actually exists on Windows, and it’s on iOS in the EU. Everywhere else, they’re keeping it from consumers out of pure spite in order to leverage the courts in their favour.
All of this started because Epic chose to defy Apple and the rules they agreed to in order to get Fortnite onto the iPhone’s App Store, in that they could not use an alternative payment provider to sell “V-bucks,” the in-game currency Fortnite uses. V-bucks cost Epic nothing to make as a virtual currency. Fortnite itself has expenses, but Fortnite is also a tech demo for the Unreal Engine. It exists, on a business level, to sell the capabilities of Epic’s in-house physics engine, the Unreal Engine. A bit hypocritically, Epic takes a cut of games sold that use the Unreal Engine. It is not free. Fortnite players use the V-bucks to buy skins and other cosmetic experiences in the game. And Epic, tired of giving Apple a 30% cut of something that costs them nothing to produce, thereby giving each company 100% profit, added an option to pay Epic directly, either less money to get the same amount of V-bucks, or the same amount of money to get more V-bucks (I don’t recall and it’s not what matters). Apple suspended the Fortnite game until Epic fixed it. Epic refused to, so the app was de-listed, and the developer account was banned.
Epic then pulled out of the Mac ecosystem as well, which had absolutely nothing to do with any of this. Macs do have an App Store that looks like the one on iPhone, but just like the Windows Store in Windows, it’s not required to install apps on a Mac. Most Mac users get their apps from the web, same as Windows users do. Like the Windows Store, the Mac App Store is just a convenience (both of them handle updates very well, for example). Not offering Fortnite and/or the Epic Game Store on the Mac has always been a choice Epic made, not any limitation imposed by Apple.
Epic is not just Fortnite, though. They made the Gears of War games for Xbox back in the day. Fortnite itself is actually a mashup of several games. The original Fortnite was a paid survival crafting game. I’m not sure it exists anymore, or if the freemium multiplayer Fortnite swallowed it up entirely. Like in Fortnite’s main mode, you could build, but you could build freely (safely) during the day, and mobs would attack at night. Fortnite also contains elements of Unreal Tournament, Epic’s prior multiplayer online shooter that last received a release in 2004; Rockband, the music game developed by Harmonix (which also created Guitar Hero), which is now called Fortnite Festival), and other acquisitions. Epic also made Unreal, a single-player game that Unreal Tournament was based on. They likely released a few other games I can’t recall. But since Unreal and Unreal Tournament, they’ve also licensed the Unreal Engine to other developers, and it’s been used in numerous games, including the original Deus Ex.
However, Epic Game Store only actually exists on Windows, and it’s on iOS in the EU.
Your information seems to be outdated. On the EGS download page I get an “Install on Windows” link with text below it “Also available on Mac OS, Android, iPhone (EU only) and iPad (EU only).”
While i agree with the sentiment v-bucks are not 100% profit. People buy v-bucks for skins, these skins have to be produced by people who typically don’t do that for free. And for ongoing sells of v-bucks fortnite has to get regular updates, one of the selling points of fortnite are the regular seasons and events, these are not free to produce. Obviously they do all of this to increase profit but 100% profit ratio is a strange take.
The commentor was saying that skins cost Apple nothing to produce, not Epic, which is why the Apple App Store profit margin is estimated to be around 78%. I think you misread the comment.
The lawsuit - filed at the Competition Appeal Tribunal in London - alleges Valve “forces” game publishers to sign up to conditions which prevents them from selling their titles earlier or for less on rival platforms.
It claims that as Valve requires users to buy all additional content through Steam, if they’ve bought the initial game through the platform it is essentially “locking in” users to continue making purchases there.
This, Ms Shotbolt argues, has enabled Steam to charge an “excessive commission of up to 30%”, making UK consumers pay too much for purchasing PC games and add-on content.
The case is what is known as a collective action claim, which means that one person goes to court on behalf of a much larger group of people.
In this instance, it has been brought on behalf of up to 14 million people in the United Kingdom who bought games or additional content through Steam or other platforms since 2018.
The claim is backed by legal firm Milberg London LLP, which brings group action cases against large companies.
A separate consumer action case, filed in August 2024, has been brought against Valve in the US.
From another article because this one has half the info and reads like it was commissioned by steam. The effects of a company go further than your enjoyment of their product. I’m seeing a lot of people lick the boot just because it tastes sweet.
The additional content thing is fucking stupid.
I can’t buy the base game on EGS and then buy DLC elsewhere, either. Otherwise I would have bought the DLC on sale off of Steam or GOG for base titles I claimed free on EGS.
Gamers hear that Valve has been overcharging them for years, and think Epic is the villain.
Everyone’s collective dick slobbering of Valve and billionaire Gabe is embarassing as fuck.
Valve doesn’t overcharge me.
They provide an excellent user experience. They have one of the few stores where you can actually get reliable user reviews. Their return policies are generous. I’ve never had any problems with fraud or scams. Their search and recommendation functions are pretty good.
To me, that’s a great deal and they’ve earned every penny of their markup.
And if their percentage was unreasonably high, their competitors would sell at lower prices. Strangely, they don’t. Which tells us that Tim’s complaints are nothing but bullshit.
They don’t because they are not allowed to. Valve makes game developers sign a contract that if they want their game on Valve, they cannot put it at a lower price on any other store.
How has valve been overcharging when devs and publishers set the prices on steam?
