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Comment by yvdriess | Hacker News Reader

Epic game store is paying a lot for exclusives to compete with steam. We should see a jump in games piracy.

Absolutely. Every major game forum I read appears to have an abundance of such sentiment.

Timed exclusives on a store that many people outright _hate_ is going to increase piracy, without a doubt.

I really don't understand the sentiment since having 2-3 game launchers has been the norm for digital games for years now. I can't buy any new Blizzard/Activision games or EA games through Steam that I know of, and these are some of the largest game companies and largest releases in the world.

Blizzard and Origin are reasonably good stores and launchers, and their exclusives are that of the publisher who runs the store.

Epic Store is... Not a quality experience and its exclusives are not solely from the publisher that runs the store.

Origin was also “not a quality experience” when it first came out, and it was also universally hated by fans of Steam.

So why do you think Epic can’t do the same thing?

Epic isn't doing the same thing. Origin's exclusives were EA games. Epic's exclusives are not all Epic games.

Does that make a difference? The end result is the same. Games that that you want to play are locked behind a particular launcher.

Of course it makes a difference. Epic isn't attempting to make their store succeed on its own merits, or on the merit of their own games; they are buying exclusivity in order to succeed.

That upsets people, and rightly so. Epic is using their cash to complete, and are trying to replace something people love with something worse.

> Epic is using their cash to complete, and are trying to replace something people love with something worse.

But this is the point: the fact that Epic is making "something worse" might be true now, but will change in the future. This is precisely what happened with Origin for example, at least in the perception of gamers.

So it's worse now. Why should I, as a consumer, silently accept that so a billion dollar corporation can get a foothold against another billion dollar corporation?

> or on the merit of their own games; they are buying exclusivity in order to succeed. [...] Epic is using their cash to complete, and are trying to replace something people love with something worse.

So? Guess how EA has so many "original" games to begin with? Sounds like people are disgusted because cash bribes sound icky.

It's true, many people have a dim view of those who accept bribes.

You seem to be very emotionally invested in this fight between two corporations. You make it sound that Steam succeed because of some heroic display of courage and selflessness while Epic would be a scheming thief set to destroy it out of spite. Poor Valve, let's start a GoFundMe to help them...

Steam popularized always-online DRM. They attempted to monetize mods. They wrote the book on in-game item trading with TF2 and CS:GO, even if it meant that a bunch of underage kids were effectively becoming gamblers. Steam is not your friend, Steam is a business selling videogames and offering online services.

Most importantly, Steam is more than perfectly capable of fighting back if they see EGS as a threat.

Steam is not our friend, correct. But they also had a quasi monopoly for a long time and didn't become outright evil. I give them a lot of credit for that. Hell they still allow Devs to sell on their own site but give steam keys (afaik for free). My biggest complaint against them is stagnation.

Epic's move worries me. They are spending a lot of cash for exclusives. How do you think they expect to earn it back? I doubt their plan will be in my interest.

That's a bizarre reading of my sentiments. Elsewhere in this thread I state that I prefer GoG.

If I'm going to suffer DRM, then at least the service should provide value adds that make it worthwhile to me. Reviews, cloud saves, good networking, mod management, et cetera.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19598465

When do you actually think that Steam introduced those features? Hint: not as long ago as you likely think.

And I’m not sure why you expect a new service to have all of Steam’s features from day one...

I'm an old man. I remember. I avoided Steam until cloud saves came along.

So it doesn't have Steam's features. I have no obligation to support a billion dollar corporation compete against another, at the expense of my own quality of experience.

Origin is still not a quality experience.

Steam itself was not very well received at first. Always online, resource hog, slow, buggy... They forced CS players to use it even though old versions worked without it. And then of course HL2 released and it was a Steam exclusive, which was a huge bummer for people like me who didn't have an internet connection at home at the time.

Gamers have a very short memory, although to be fair many are probably too young to remember Steam's launch. On the other hand they also seem to have very little impulse control so game and platform boycotts never seem to work. I expect that Epic's strategy is going to work perfectly.

Steam was building something new. Quite frankly it's harder to build a crappy platform since the space has already been pioneered. No one is hating on GOG Galaxy.

You have a fair point about many gamers having short memories. Many however do not have short memories. I suspect we're older though.

PC Gaming has really only accepted two major launchers: Steam and Blizzard. Blizzard's launcher is only majorly accepted in my group of friends as it's the only way for some of them to get their WoW fix.

Origin is actively avoided (to the point of avoiding EA's games completely), Ubisoft's Uplay will work with Steam, and Bethesda's launcher was immediately uninstalled after the debacle which was Fallout 76.

None of my friends (that will admit it, anyway) have the Epic launcher installed. They are all frustrated that games they're excited about ("The Outer Worlds" and "Borderlands 3") are timed exclusives on Epic's launcher.

Some of them are very hung up on the fact that Tencent owns a major stake in Epic Games (between 40%-50%). They have seen how China deals with games (WoW in China is the biggest one, game consoles not being legal in the county until recently) and the Internet (Great Firewall of China) and are in no way interested in allowing their software on the machine. Further, it has been observed that the Epic Launcher performs behaviors that behaviors they consider shady[1].

Personally, I won't play any games that are Epic Store exclusives. Not because I have any particular anger toward Epic (I've loved Unreal Tournament for a long time), but because I already have a large backlog of games on Steam, I'd like to keep everything in a single launcher, and by the time I have my backlog cleared, these games should be on Steam and a GOTY version will be out that has all of the DLC included, or if they're not, something else that I care about more will likely have come along.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/PhoenixPoint/comments/b0rxdq/epic_g...

> Further, it has been observed that the Epic Launcher performs behaviors that behaviors they consider shady[1].

you mean behaviors entirely consistent with a browser process? https://www.reddit.com/r/PhoenixPoint/comments/b0rxdq/epic_g...

As we all know, everyone loves browser tracking and nobody ever uses that data in a shady way.

I'm all against tracking, but the whole post was framed as "epic launcher is doing [scary techno-sounding stuff]", when really it's "epic game launcher is using a webview".

There's no need for them to use a webview - launching a game, purchasing a game, and installing a game do not inherently need a webview. See the last thirty years of gaming history for examples that show this.

Yes, it's a webview. Yes, it's also making requests that are not transparent to the user. Yes, it's a bad thing and it is an issue no matter how many times apologists try to downplay it.

>There's no need for them to use a webview

alll the major ones use some sort of a webview. uplay and origin are essentially electron apps (js + chromium wrapper). steam uses a webview for its community/store page.

All that the rabblerousing gamer anger amounts to is that you and your friends have not yet had the new store successfully marketed to you. The companies involved have fixed their PR before, they'll do it again. Give it a few years.

I'm another person completely different than the OP the only two installers I'll allow on my machine are Steam and GOG. Why? Because Origin was garbage and EA is a terrible company to support. Ubisoft will not compel new to install a game. Rockstar and their stupid ass community requirements even in single player games have made be never want to play another Rockstar game and wishing I could get a refund on games that backported this to. Steam and GOG worked hard for user trust and built it over years, not by what games they have not but how they've constantly tried to listen to users. You can tell that the people running these companies are games themselves and probably use the same launchers. I can promise you there are people at EA who have never played a video game intentionally in their lives. It's a shame too as there are some really good games in their stables.

This is not the same as Netflix and competitors. No one is stopping a steam user from buying from epic store since its an one off purchase , but to watch an amazon exclusive you need an additional subscription.

Except that the store itself is a deterrent, for a whole laundry list of reasons you can seek elsewhere.

For me, the deal breakers are:

1. No user reviews.

2. Refund system is allegedly horrible and unreliable.

3. No cloud saves.

4. No mod workshop.

5. No forums.

6. No store-provided, NAT-punching, low latency networking.

The last three have made for many of my best gaming experiences in recent years

For me, one issue is the forty-something percent stake tencent has. Both in that I don't trust their software and that I have serious ethical concerns about directly supporting china. I know it's essentially impossible to not buy anything from them, but I would say videogames are definitely something people can easily stop buying.

You also can't buy a game for a friend.

That's just a matter of competition catching up though. From a consumer perspective multiple stores should have a positive effect. On the other hand streaming services are not benefiting the consumer directly.

Those things cost money. It's where a good chunk of Valve's cut goes.

Store closes shop. Your "purchases" turn out to be for a game licence that only works if the shop servers are up.

I've been burnt by this, most commonly with multiplayer games that only work with bankrupt company's server.

The Epic Launcher was recently caught datamining everything from running processes to root certificates. I would never install it personally. It wouldn't make me pirate either, games are easy to boycott, I did the same with EA and Ubisoft when they went rotten, havent looked back, even convinced some friends not to buy from EA and Ubi :)

>The Epic Launcher was recently caught datamining everything from running processes to root certificates

seems to have originated from here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PhoenixPoint/comments/b0rxdq/epic_g...

and is alarmist at best. see: https://www.reddit.com/r/PhoenixPoint/comments/b0rxdq/epic_g...

Difference is that it doesn't cost you anything to use Steam, Epic game store, or Origin. You buy the game, you have the game. You can install 5 game stores on your computer and that's it.

For movies or TV series you need to have a subscription. That is the thing that costs money, even if you don't use it. People don't want to have 3 or 4 subscriptions, so that is why they pirate.

This is not a problem I see happening for games.

It's still annoying to deal with any distribution platform that isn't Steam. I understand why things are this way, but it doesn't make it any better from my point of view. I hate having to add my friends on another platform to play Ape Legs or the new Unreal. I don't want to deal with another login, another stupid launcher that wants to be on all the time with incessant updates.

I'm not going to end up pirating games because I mostly play F2P hat simulators, and the singleplayer games I care about are all available on GoG.

It still all feels quite user-hostile. I can't think of a solution though.

The solution is to support single-sign-on and to allow data importing/export. These are solved problems, but companies don't receive enough pressure to do them because they are more interested in building moats.

Game piracy still exists. There's subreddits dedicated to tracking when DRM schemes are broken. Also piracy of region locked and old, difficult to buy now, console games has never disappeared.

The games that are out of this are those that need online accounts to play.

FWIW, in terms of exclusivity, there have been games exclusive to EA's Origin. (e.g. the 2017 Battlefront II).

I'm not sure how significant "any added friction increases piracy" is in terms of numbers.

The difference is that people don't really hate exclusives on the publisher's own store unless the store is awful.

IMHO:

GFWL: awful and hated, dead now

UPlay: awful and hated

Steam: best in class and loved

GoG: second best in class and accepted

Origin: good and tolerated

Blizzard: good and tolerated

Epic: awful and hated

People hated Origin pretty bad, but EA stuck to their guns. IMO its a pretty awful experience. And to be honest Steam isn't exactly a great experience either. I noticed they're finally doing a face lift on their storefront soon, perhaps from the competition?

At least Origin didn't vacuum up exclusives from non-EA publishers. People who hated Origin probably already hated EA, too.

The Steam library update had been years in the making.

I'd personally put GoG ahead of Steam, and not just for "grr Steam" reasons. Steam has a habit of breaking in weird ways like telling me I can't view my own achievements because my profile is private or suddenly wanting to download 0 bytes for half the games in my library. GoG on the other hand has been totally rock-solid for me.

I prefer GoG, as well. I was attempting to express my understanding of the generally sentiment that I see from gamers

I have a cron job that backs up my library every two weeks via lgogdownloader

>UPlay: awful and hated

What's so bad about uplay?

It's not Steam. /s

In my experience, I'm unlikely to be able to play games due to issues with their auth servers.

* Reliability (both servers and client). Everytime I try to a play a uplay game I've had to screw around with getting a fresh installation of the uplay client.

* Client performance

* Similar to Origin, part of the motivation is so the games don't have to compete with the price of games on Steam, so end up being more expensive.

Battlefront 2 is a bad example, as it's a MP game which can't be effectively pirated.

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