This is probably the most valid question of "what exactly are all those devs doing?"
Their payment system doesn't even support multiple cards saved at the same time, but having a checkout and using a CDN is ecommerce basics that any hobbyist can setup. That's a very low bar for UX.
The Epic Games store doesn't have libraries nor a 'locate' feature, so if you want to move a game you have to go to the existing game folder in Windows Explorer (no Mac or Linux by the way[0]), move it to a temporary directory, start the install in the new directory, 'cancel install', move your game files to the directory the launcher just created, and then 'resume' the install. Only then can you move and have the launcher recognize the new location without having to redownload the entire game.
0: https://trello.com/b/GXLc34hk/epic-games-store-roadmap (it's not even in 'future development' which includes other long-requested features like a shopping cart from 2019)
This is certainly not the common case. Look at other games, Doom Eternal, Hollow Knight, Arma 3, Divinity: Original Sins 2, ... They don't offer that.
Look at the automatic update settings. There is no option to not update a game at all such that you can keep playing the current version. At any setting it will still check for updates when you launch the game (for the first them since starting the Steam client).
apt update; apt dist-upgrade
Windows 10 is particularly annoying since I don't even know how to force the update now because it seems to be dead set on doing it magically in the background at the least opportune moment.
If all of the above is in place and it's still slow make sure you're not running into a single core throughput issue. The encryption and compression can be quite taxing. I can pretty easily hit 1 Gbps on a 5950X but some of my laptops can't due to their CPU.
The only difference between Windows 10 and say Ubuntu with auto updates is Windows 10 will prevent you from picking an infinite time out for updates that require a reboot. If you want to manually update it's the same, go to the update app and check for updates. If there are updates hit install. Upon install the update app will have a restart to install button and the restart/shutdown buttons in the Start menu also have install and restart/shutdown options.
So it gets to act much like apt.
While Windows 7 was still current, there was an update that refused to install, and reported a cryptic error code in the UI.
After digging into dense log files and online support I came to discover it was refusing to install because of an Incompatible version of the super-old Novell Netware client, that lived in C:\Old_Computer\hard-drive\installers\novell_installer-${someversion}.exe
Windows was scanning the entire hard drive @ install time to look for any software on it's list of incompatible software.
In my experience it does this again, and again, and again... every single time I launch some games!
You can say I'm doing it wrong for not going with the flow, but at the end of the day, in a world with ever increasing abstractive opaqueness, somebody has to carry forward a nuts n' bolts understanding of what all of this madness is built on.
I love declarative reproducible systems in theory and figure they'll hit the sweet spot 90 percent of the time, though I'm not 100 percent sure they'll fix all my issues, as I tend to do horrifying things like making one system's dynamic linker aware of another system's set of libraries (crossing distro boundaries is ill advised, but doable after forcing yourself to read up on how ld works), and other daft things like that. Was distro hopping for a bit, and have settled on something I like, just need to unite all the other things into a single overarching system image.
Obviously, this would require me going one-man package maintainer for doing this, and I'm reluctant to start, because I see the value of these package management techniques everyone settled upon, and I'm just trying to figure out the right way to store everything.
Basically, I'm nuts, I do horrible things with linkers in the name of "screw it, I can't break it any worse" and I have an update turnaround time worse than Slackware.
I figure give it a couple years and the stubbornness will be broken through.
That's a beautiful description of modern GUI development right there.
- What about a 150ms delay on-click for a smooth transition here?
- And that spinner looks too good to rush through, so make it pace evenly in case it finished too fast!
- Did you see that? There's a subtle but intuitive shade and color change depending on the result. So natural you hardly notice.
- Neat!
°
To be honest, while I may not appreciate this kind of design in every place all the time, I do wish I was skilled enough to make any beautiful GUI and web experiences at all.
Intricate design can be such a timesink doing even basic stuff if it's not one's strong area. Kudos to all the UI, UX people.
But the absolute worst thing about Epic Games Store is that it steals 5% of my CPU cycles whenever it's running. That's right, when I'm playing a game I purchased on Epic, the game runs 5% worse (assuming it's CPU bottlenecked) because Epic Games Store needs 5% of my CPU to do nothing, all the time.
So for example Valorant's anti-cheat leverages a hypervisor which is always-on, and then an additional client which runs when you launch the game.
The situation is similar with the ESEA counter-strike client.
I just refuse to play games with measures like that. Especially given the fact ESEA got caught deploying a bitcoin miner with their client.
These games always have cheaters anyway, so what am I giving up all that privacy and security for?
0: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-08-30-prominent-chea...
1: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160705/09363534897/check...
This is entirely unrelated to Epic Games Store wasting 5% of my CPU when it's running. I can just load my own driver before I launch the Epic Games Store.
My dream would be to do a gig of performance tuning for these companies on their store platforms, cuz they clearly need it.
Unfortunately, the critical mass problem is almost always the reason why nothing gets innovated anymore. We would have had an objective better experience for users and devs/publishers alike but the chances of success were next to nothing given the cost of migrating for both sides.
Really sucks.
And why is there an option "Hide Game Library" but there's no option "Hide Game Store"?
The Steam client has some nice features like Steam Link, which you can use to stream to a smart TV by installing the app.
https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/valve-belatedly-fixes-ste...
People who have left valve often report that the organization is extremely dysfunctional.
https://medium.com/dunia-media/the-nightmare-of-valves-self-...
From where I’m standing, Valve looks like a company cursed by success. They have the advantage of controlling the world’s biggest PC game distribution platform (an advantage that is self-sustaining due to network effects), and as such have a fountain of near infinite money. This allows them to run an extremely inefficient organization without suffering the consequences that most companies would.
The gaming market has grown incredibly competitive, and statistically speaking the steam store has the most garbage out of all the stores combined x100.
The most depressing thing about Valve Software is that they are a privately-held corporation and have far more agility than the likes of EA, ATVI, et. al. There aren't quarterly earnings calls or other confining economics that would spook away investors if an ambitious AAA project were to be announced this Monday.
That's basically a non-issue. Steam has had a ton of random shit in there for years and people still prefer it to all of the other stores.
It's in fact preferable to have too much than too little. GOG might have DRM-free games and a fancy launcher that combines ALL of your game libaries from different launchers (GOG Galaxy is pretty neat), but it doesn't really benefit me when Mass Effect Legendary Edition isn't on sale there.
It's not though. Windows is a pain in the ass to develop for, and the only thing keeping most developers from writing cross-platform titles is DirectX. Luckily, there's a DirectX-to-Vulkan translation layer that will run 80% of Steam's "legacy" Windows games, as well as any new exclusives. As the industry starts to shift to Vulkan, developers will have much less incentive to ship Windows exclusives.
The final nail in the coffin is probably sandboxing. Linux support for sandboxed applications is next-level, and projects like Flatpak and AppImage have made it possible to ship software that's more stable on Linux than it is on Windows. Valve's probably wants to combine this with their Proton project to create truly "immortal" Linux applications: imagine being able to download a file containing a compressed VM image with Diablo 2 perfectly configured like a Docker container.
> Maybe if there wasn't 100+ distros or whatever and people just focused on getting a couple at the level of XP, we could see a lot wider of adoption.
The only difference between distros is package management, and 99% of them will install Steam, Discord, Spotify, and any of your other "normal" apps the exact same way.
That said, I disagree with some of what you're saying, and I also think there might be some stuff that you aren't aware of.
For starters, and perhaps my comment didn't illustrate this, but from my perspective, Valve's strategy is not to popularize Linux desktop. They did have SteamOS which they obviously abandoned/consolidated into Big Picture Mode. There are rumors of a handheld console that will likely be running Linux underneath, but I'd be shocked if the user ever sees anything but a Steam interface. So I don't think from that perspective that Steam particularly cares about a Linux desktop experience. They don't (to my knowledge) fund KDE or Gnome. They seem to want everyone to interact with Linux through the Steam software itself.
Additionally, to address the fragmentation points you are bringing up (which are clearly valid), Steam has developed a unified Linux runtime that ships with Steam on Linux, and developers can target that runtime for their games. So again, this is a distribution agnostic, desktop agnostic solution for developers. They only have to support one thing: Steam runtime for Linux. And I think that nicely solves the Frankenstein issues.
Now obviously if Steam never turns into a full OS, people aren't going to switch to it just to play games, when Windows can also play all those games, and supports office and Adobe software. So what the plan is exactly, I'm not sure. Valve doesn't seem interested in solving those problems, at least not yet. Perhaps they are just keeping the scope narrow to what they're good at (games) and hoping that others will solve those problems.
Yeah they release stuff sporadically, and by all accounts the internal organization is chaos. But that somehow manages to produce some of the best games of all time.
Let's not forget also that Valve has pushed Linux gaming more than anyone else.
The menu and method for selecting weapons in Alyx is ripe for some really intuitive gestures for multi-level radial menus, I would love to explore that myself if I can get back into gamedev one of these days. Weapon selection in classic Half-Life is organized by category, so two-motion gestures for selections seem like a logical step. You're right about the things that Valve excels at, I'm excited to see what they do with VR. It can always use big players in its corner.
That's a good thing though. Steam greenlight was a really good idea, and now you have all kinds of games on Steam, which is really good. I haven't tried Epic but I remember Origin being dogshit compared to Steam. Maybe if all those stores are so terrible it's because it's actually a hard problem and not something trivial that anyone can do better?
Steam have most of the games, better practices than most people (no exclusives like Epic, which is a bad practice in my opinion), they've done many things for Linux gaming (automatically using Proton is really great and works well for most games), they also often have really good sales. Steam is here to stay.