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None of the basic improvements to the Epic Store slated for April were released [Update: June Updates missed as well]
- Thread starter AHA-Lambda
- Start date
You don't have to be so coy, you know. Not after [inflammatory phrasing removed] that went down in the Tetris Effect thread yesterday.
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Are you working off a list? Because dang, you checked all the boxes.
Honestly I think a lot of people would be fine with a store that just wanted to be a store - not a meeting hub, review aggregator, chat site, etc... They're not a very good store yet, but I'd be fine if they just sorted that shit out instead of adding 'community' features like screenshot sharing or whatever.
Of course they don't.
Hell. They don't even use EGS. They just want to waste everyone's time.
Do you mean Yakuza Games, Catherine, Dragon Ball FighterZ, SoulCalibur, Tekken, Dragon Quest XI, Dragon Quest Warriors, Souls games, One Piece WS, Ni no Kuni, Nier... that are on PC thanks to Steam platform and where just few years ago this kind of games would have been unthinkable over there?
It seems like all that money is going to buy exclusive rights to games instead of improving the store with basic features.
Lmfao the notion tht egs is bringing pc games that steam could not do is fucking ludicrous. I cant believe ppl think that way. Steam brought so many games to pc that you never thought possible without moneyhatting shit.
As far as borderlands 3 goes, its just six months. Will wait for steam without a doubt.
As far as borderlands 3 goes, its just six months. Will wait for steam without a doubt.
What's funny is that in a year, those games will be on Steam and EGS will still be dogshit.
Yes they will get cloud-saves and play-time tracking in *checks thread title* April. Oh wait.
It's only been 8 months since launch.
We should give them time, just like they give us the time to pay our bills 8 months late. Oh wait.
If I can put my conspiracy tinfoil hat on for a sec, I wonder if Valve's ambitious feautres are the *point* of publishers supporting EGS. Valve's focus on Linux opens the door to Valve being a legit 1st party "console" platform. Such a platform would put more pressure on Ubi/EA/Activision to re-commit to Steam which they don't want to do.
Maybe the big publishers would rather have PC as this fringey platform where enthusiasts get better graphics and publishers get nearly 100% of the revenue.
Sure Jan. The wealth will trickle down. There's absolutely no reason to think the cost of 12% will be passed onto customers nor that the 3rd party stores are in danger (spoiler alert: it's already proven to be the case with EGS).
Yeah, sorry that thing here is total bullshit. No console exclusive has been coming to PC thanks to EGS. It's already been confirmed. Journey is coming because of Annapurna. Quantic Dreams was porting their games already, as Steam mentions are still in the game files (including Steam Controller mentions). Tetris Effect was also coming, the same way Rez came.
WeGame, Tencent's client, launched this year with features in parity to Steam right now. So did Gamepass for Windows by Microsoft. Gamepass in fact has been adopted by a ton of PC players with little to no friction.
Epic literally has no excuse.
GFWL had the same problems the modern MS store does
When it worked, it worked quite well and as a fairly lightweight achievement tracker (and I think DLC unlocker for Dawn of War 2?)
When you got into a mess where a driver or something MS didn't install right conflicted it was a mess of console commands and manual updates.
But mostly it was just a different environment. Back then it was "Ugh, this thing fucking sucks. But I want to play Dawn of War 2 or Fallout 3". Now it is "Oh em gee, this is destroying everything we hold dear and is ruining all of gaming."
Somehow when we weren't looking Steam became a console. And we are now in the middle of a console war.
Yeah, 10 years of improvements to Steam happened, and Steam is incredibly useful. EGS's primitive feature set is the reason for the disparity in response. It's not that we're in the middle of a console war. It's that we have a "console", and some non-entity is making PC gaming worse for no material benefit. For all the ways it sucked, at least GWFL had achievements, a social overlay, and helped normalize/standardize gamepad support on PC games... in 2007.
To clarify any potential ambiguity, whatever "went down in the Tetris Effect thread" had nothing to do with me. I haven't even clicked on that thread.
That's nonsense.
I just recently posted that I remember GFW The Magazine and GFW Radio constantly tearing into (their namesake and sponsor) GFWL while Future does what appear to be advertorials for EGS.
Everyone hated GFWL and over the next decade it was like Christmas each time something was salvaged from its wreckage.
I think you're really downplaying how much people despised GFWL. Not only was it common for it to just not work, over time the service became more deprecated and less likely to work correctly. Luckily most GFWL games moved over to the far more stable Steam platform. I could imagine memory of this age when Microsoft (with their untold billions of wealth) still couldn't make a decently working client is a factor in people avoiding Epic until they make some kind of commitment to improve themselves. GFWL also started off on the horribly wrong foot by charging PC gamers a subscription fee to play games like Shadowrun online. Somewhat ironically, it's only with the inclusion of a subscription service that Microsoft's PC platform is taking off again. Regardless, during all of this there absolutely were people trying to convince others squirreling around with GFWL to get Street Fighter 4 working was better than any alternatives.
Utter nonsense, and I say that as a dev who had to deal with GFWL on both DoW and Company of Heroes.
I dunno about them trying to make PC a fringey platform (though many here would argue that not supporting valve in this instance is essentially the same thing I think), but they are definitely trying to address the valve elephant in the room and claim a piece of the pie for themselves.
As a user I never had any trouble with GFWL, until a couple of months ago when I tried to install Street Fighter X Tekken and the game would lock up in the title screen. I ended up installing the no-GFWL patch that also comes with the PS3 exclusive characters.
No. GFWL was absolute garbage. EGS is bad for very different reasons.
Why people keep rooting for EGS when as consumers we get nothing out of it and it the worst cases it just takes away from the gaming experience just baffles me.
there are PC game stores that are just stores, like greenmangaming. the thing is that modern games basically require platform features like cloud saves, multiplayer frameworks to handle matchmaking/friends/messaging, automatic management of updates, etc. so GMG and most stores like it mostly sell steam codes and valve handles everything else.
EGS clearly doesn't want to just be a store, they want a platform monopoly too. and they're severely lacking in both of those areas.
In general it's because of how a lot of the EGS detractors act out imo
In terms of consumers getting nothing out of it, they have been dishing out free games. For many that's irrelevant, but I mean they are literally giving out games.
my own usage of egs is like:
we have a server in our living room that we use to transfer files and etc., it also is connected to a tv screen where we watch youtube and shit while we smoke
because epic launcher is installed onto the server it will give us a pop-up announcing the next free game once in a while, and we'll check it out based on interest, we have been playing LIMBO together the past week.
steam on linux is just that, it's not a closed platform and if any third party publisher wanted to make their own linux versions of their store/games they could easily do so and anyone running steamOS could install that software too.
They already have time tracker for refunds. You just can't see it.
I remember GFWL as a slow, unreliable, and barebones service, and I didn't even use it to play online. I had to use it for Fallout 3, and one of the first mods I used was to disable it. The interface responded poorly to keyboard/mouse (but just fine with controllers, was clearly designed around them), would lag while syncing achievements, lose connection without warning, and again, was SLOW. And the storefront? It worked, but for all of its problems and missing features, EGS has a better one. At least it doesn't drop orders and have you finagling with the app to make sure the DLC finally unlocked properly.
That was the old, blue-colored GFWL app. I remember they released an updated grey app that was better, but by then I never had to use it. When GFWL titles made their way to other services, I never read anything about anyone missing it.
Does this 2008 trailer inspire confidence?
epic wants to replace steam, not become a valid and popular second-place PC platform. they want a store that developers have to be on if they want to sell PC games.
i see no world in which EGS gaining momentum doesn't lead to more aggressive hardball tactics from epic rather than less. and if things don't go their way i don't believe they would stick with the project.
i have plenty of gripes with steam but at the end of the day i have a measure of trust that valve will support the platform and abide by their commitments. epic doesn't get that by simply existing and since launch they haven't assuaged my doubts in the slightest.
It's true, but only Valve is seriously pursuing it. And they're doing it out of necessity because their ambitions have outgrown what they can achieve as a Windows application. Once Valve (not single-handedly, but significantly) does the hard work of making Linux viable for gaming, it would be more feasible for EPIC and others to move into that space (as Google is doing aggressively via Stadia). But nobody else would have initiated it. Valve's approach toward Linux has been very much in their corporate ethos.
but that doesn't make steamOS a first party "console" platform. now that we have mid-cycle hardware upgrades and everything is x86 the only thing that really defines a "console" is an entirely closed software marketplace where the platform holder micromanages every single thing that can run on their box. steamOS isn't that and never will be unless valve does a complete 180 and massively forks the OS which, besides being entirely against everything they've done in that space, is really just too much work.
Ah I dunno. The user experience of SteamOS is really Valve's show. It is effectively a closed platform. Linux is open, but any publisher who wanted a bigger presence in the SteamOS UI would have to go through Valve. Just being able to add "non-steam games" to the launcher doesn't make it "open" imo.
If we ever get to the point when most publishers are releasing Linux binaries, then maybe something like Kodi would be more viable as an open console interface.
um it's not just that you can add non-steam games, you can just switch to the gnome interface and install whatever you like. it's a linux desktop, there's no restrictions on what software you can load.
in fact from what i understand any debian-based distribution with the linux version of steam installed on top is functionally identical to steamOS, the only difference is the default shell.
e. if your contention is simply that EA, for example, could not get the icon for a theoretical linux version of the origin storefront/platform directly inside the default steamOS shell then i guess? it seems like kind of a narrow and useless point, and frankly i wouldn't be shocked if valve just said OK and helped them do it.
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SteamOS was a great idea when they were pushing Steam Machines and gunning for that hardware partnership money
It didn't pan out 100% perfect yet but they're still plugging away at Linux gaming which is smart, because if that takes off, they're the market leader/standard again, which pays off big time
It didn't pan out 100% perfect yet but they're still plugging away at Linux gaming which is smart, because if that takes off, they're the market leader/standard again, which pays off big time
The Gnome interface isn't close to a set-top/console UI though, it's more like a fall back for system-level customization. If you want an open front-end, Kodi is the best choice, and maybe Lutris will eventually get there.
And there are differences between SteamOS and Steam for Linux on a standard Linux distro. SteamOS ships a custom window manager which does a better job handling fullscreen scaling, and avoids issues with top-level window focus that you sometimes see in a regular desktop environment (including Windows). Also at this point the build of Steam that ships with SteamOS is way behind Steam for Linux. It doesn't even have Proton included. Presumably a major overhaul release is coming, but Valve hasn't said when.
Eh, I never found the Steam OS/Steam Machines initiative to be the right way to go about things. Maybe wine wasn't mature enough to invest on back then, but working on a compatibility layer wrapper instead of a whole OS is more a viable and beneficial goal for the Linux community imo.
The main problem of Steam OS was going out too soon for the work Valve was doing with Linux. Launching a platform were a majority of games was not going to work was not really a great idea, launching once Proton had been a project that is pretty good for most AAA games (and hopefully has better partnerships with anti cheat services to actually work through it in the future), it wouldnt have been as bad.
It would have also benefitted a lot of better Steam Link functionality (which was also announced at the same time), such as the one we have now..
Of course, it was necessary for both of those initiatives to take shape, and that there was no "better" time for them to launch that, but still, room to learn.
There was also the problem of it lacking a clearly unifying position and being quite pricey for what they were. It would be interesting to see if they do a SteamOS 2.0 and what are the main takes.
It would have also benefitted a lot of better Steam Link functionality (which was also announced at the same time), such as the one we have now..
Of course, it was necessary for both of those initiatives to take shape, and that there was no "better" time for them to launch that, but still, room to learn.
There was also the problem of it lacking a clearly unifying position and being quite pricey for what they were. It would be interesting to see if they do a SteamOS 2.0 and what are the main takes.
I don't either. I make fun about they missing deadlines but I don't want the average employee suffering from crushing. It is just Sweeney talking shit on the internet and their store missing features.
Games for Windows Live was so bad even for developers that pirates could take legitimate CD keys for one game and then re-use them on multiple games up to like 8 times and it was Years before this was fixed. Combine this with Sega fucking up shipments of The Club and then giving out a shitload of valid CDkeys to just about anyone who asked customer support and welp
It's been a lot more than that. Establishing Vulkan as a Khronos standard was extremely important, and was really a precondition for the improvements to Wine performance. Another major coup was getting open source drivers for AMD that perform as well or better than the proprietary ones. Valve have also done/commissioned important work on the dev side with profiling tools, shader compilers, and debuggers that make game development on Linux much more viable than it was 5 year ago.
I still think SteamOS/Steam Machines (and probably a Steam VR platform) is the right goal. But they were too aggressive/clumsy in messaging it as a console competitor in 2015 when it wasn't close to ready. When SteamOS 3.0 drops, the experience should be a lot more competitive.