Game “While true: learn()” for free in Epic Store | Hacker News Reader

Game “While true: learn()” for free in Epic Store

epicgames.com

51 pointsfreemint72 comments

Huhhh, I'm a huge epic games fan, I've used UE4 for years prior... but having to download another "steam" client for DRMs makes it a huge turn off.

I don't need another launcher agent on my computer for your auto-update telemetry loving nonsense, for trying out a game I might not even like!

https://www.gog.com/game/while_true_learn

it's like gamers WANT a monopoly. I do not understand capital-G Gamers, man. they're a very silly lot.

TBF, monopolies are convenient. It's simple & easy to get all your stuff on Amazon nice and quick, but then you get intense concentration of wealth and bad working conditions, for example. There's always this kind of contradiction between the convenience humans want, and the problems that come with any kind of monopoly.

Natural monopolies are fine; coercive monopolies are not. As long as Valve offers a better product/service at a cheaper cost than their competition and that's why they have a monopoly, then there is nothing wrong with that.

The people that you want to hear from are the developers of the games that Valve sells through Steam.

And you probably won't hear from them about their experience. And that might cause you to wonder why.

They said Steam and other stores taking 30% is too much. They had different complaints about reviews. They said positive things too. And they understood Steam gave customers more than other stores.

As a user, the Epic store is massively inferior to the Steam store on the merits. The UI is worse, the download and update speeds are worse, the interface is worse, the portability is worse, the social layer is worse, almost everything about it is worse. You're acting like they're remotely comparable in end-user experience, which they aren't. Gamers don't necessarily want a monopoly, they just don't want to be forced to use a shittier store to play certain games. If Epic actually put any effort into their store I think there would have been a lot less backlash.

Are you sure that doesn't just reflect a familiarity with Steam more than anything? Because imo Steam has a dog of a UI. Everything is tiny and doesn't scale well on high DPI, common options are buried in menus, or several hyperlinks deep (eg; installing a mod, joining your friend's active game), the video controls are fiddly, management of your friends list is painful.

Most long term Steam users know its quirks by now, but if both Steam and Epic games store were launched today, in their current state, Steam would struggle to get traction.

Nah epic game store has many huge and obvious flaws.

The reviews interface is just links to other websites with little aggregate data. The library does this thing where it greys out uninstalled games making it really hard to identify them. It crashes a lot. The social features aren't as well developed.

Steam's not perfect but it's surely superior. Though I would gladly pay for a game on epic over steam if only because epic has given me so much great shit

Enter the Gungeon, Control, Nioh, Alien Isolation, Darkest Dungeon, Europa, etc.

The Epic Game Store (at least, the program, I dunno about the web interface) doesn't even have _a shopping cart_, you have to buy things individually. No amount of years of Steam ecosystem buy-in are making me say this out of favoritism or familiarity.

they're veracious consumers.

Nothing much more than that really.

I don't want a monopoly. The thing I REALLY don't want though is exclusivity in games. The only possible outcome I see without Steam being the monopoly is other stores trying to win over users via exclusives. We already see this with the Epic Games Store. And since Valve has pretty much shown they are the good guys over the decades I am willing to accept Steam as a monopoly to ensure we don't get a Netflix, Disney+, HBO, Prime, Apple TV+ situation with PC gaming.

Is this game good? I've resisted installing Epic Store so far, but this looks pretty neat. Does it feel Zachtronics-y? If so, I'll probably pull the trigger.

If you're going to go this route, just pirate it. The game is good, definitely deserves the price.

Looks like it's available via steam paid, maybe I'll just buy it.

It goes on sale for $5 pretty frequently as well.

Why are you resisting installing steams first real competition which gives devs a bigger cut and regularly throws free games at you?

Because competing with steam through exclusive deals and free games is not competing, it's racing to the bottom. I don't see any actual improvements or innovations in the Epic Games Store, it looks like a pure money grab.

sure, paying for games that you get to keep is a money grab...

someone wanna explain this logic to me?

Do you want to explain where "paying for games that you get to keep" entered this conversation?

The logic the GP was using was that exclusivity deals and "the first hit is free" tactics are not ultimately in the customer's interest.

that's arguable, but those tactics are good for getting people to use your store. this is what ALL coupons and advertising is actually manipulating you to do, and EGS isn't doing anything different, there.

the thing EGS IS doing differently, however, is being much more fair to creators of these games, and basing their fees on the actual costs they must incur, instead of just taking as much as they can, which is very much in the consumer's best interest. it's in everyone's best interest, because more profit for most game devs means more games from those devs, and more games are what consumers want.

Steam has a massive head start and Epic has huge barriers to entry. You can make a super nice launcher and it's not going make many inroads among those who already have all their games and friends on Steam. Epic is throwing money at the problem, but they have few other real options. Where is the money grab (especially in free games)?

How is Epic the bad guy here when Steam is in a monopoly position? Epic should be commended for taking them on (and Apple and Google).

The epic game store is vastly inferior to steam. But it frequently has high quality games available for free. And epic is pretty good to the indie game dev community. I see no reason not to go for it.

Appeals to quality don't seem particularly meaningful when the price of both is 0.

GOG isn't real competition?

Because the competition is being done by throwing money at it... and not in the let's build a fantastic, quick and nice launcher with a world class user experience and amazing tools for developers...

But in the same way VC funding artificially lowers the costs/prices to the consumer until they've captured a market and then bam, time to pump them for all they've got.

I use it to just grab a game if it's free... and every time I realise they still haven't added dark mode to checkout to match the rest of the app, and get my retinas burnt by the sudden contrast flip.

you should learn more about Tim Sweeney. he is all about store openness. read his rants about the windows 8 and windows 10 store(s) for example.

Having not read them I would be shocked if they differed dramatically from the points Gabe Newell makes about those same stores. At the end of the day both companies are trying to avoid getting squeezed out by a platform-pack-in monopoly.

well with a thick fuzzy qualifier like "differed dramatically" I can't say which side of that you'd end up on, but I can say that his views differ.

they were different and compelling enough to get Microsoft to adopt most (maybe all, by now) of what he insisted upon.

We are all about happiness and openness until sufficient market share, then the music changes. Steam is a long player, egs seems to be a fast one, that’s it. You have a point, but don’t humanize corps too much.

While I have no love for Apple or any of the other billion dollar techbro places, Sweeney was the one running the corp. (Epic Games) that deliberately violated a contract (let's leave the discussion of is 30% ethical/justifable for a app store on the table for the moment), and then used a pre-planned ad campaign to galvanise an under-18 fanbase to try and control the narrative, right?

Seems pretty unreasonable to forbid acknowledging the ethical motivations of an action in a debate.

Seems pretty unreasonable to say I forbid it, when I said to just table that discussion for now, rather than letting that debate derail the talking point I wanted to discuss/highlight.

There are no saints, and acting like Epic has the moral high ground because they fight for the little guy ( no, they fight for themselves) with what they did to do that is disingenuous at best.

It's disingenuous to say epic is "acting" like it has the moral high ground by just handwaving away discussion of the fact that they do, in fact, have the moral high ground.

All Steam-like clients are useless middlemen. More of them is not a good thing. Every desktop OS on the planet already has ways to install and manage programs, and they don't demand a cut.

Because Tim is against gaming on Linux.

> Does it feel Zachtronics-y?

Nope.

What is with people and not wanting to install EGS on their pcs? Is it just the hip thing to do, they've seen it plastered all over reddit so they've decided to jump on board? It's another game store... they have 1-2 free games every single week, and they're not junk games. Get the free games on the website and when you come around to installing it someday you'll have a huge library. There was backlash against Steam when it first came out too, look now.

Yea it's a bit odd although I understand it. People want all their games in one place. That being said, as much as I love Valve, Steam and what they're doing for the gaming community, I definitely want more competition in the PC game market.

Competition is ultimately beneficial for the consumer, after all :)

GOG's client can be connected to Steam and Epic accounts, so you have all games in one place.

O, I didn't know this. Thanks for the tip!

But it only runs on Windows, unfortunately.

macOS too.

I use a PC as gaming console for my 4k TV. The EGS windows app is unusable on a 4k TV. Steam, GOG, and Ubisoft Connect all work fine on the same TV.

On top of that, I don't like Epic's business and legal practices. Can't buy my soul with free games.

what practices are those? paying publishers for temporary exclusivity? not sure how that would buy a soul, but ok.

It's a crap client that isn't up to the standards of modern game clients. I still can't move my game downloads to a backup in instances where I reformat my machine (or move to a new machine) and expect them to work when moved back. Meanwhile that kind of thing has worked in steam for a decade, and games I install via GoG don't care anyway because they don't need a client to work. IIRC Epic still doesn't have a working cloud save feature either. I get really tired of having to download 400GB of games just because the free games from Epic don't like being moved around.

They offer no value to the end user other than the free games to bait people onto their store.

For me it’s just because I don’t want another piece of software on my machine that adds essentially no value on its own running in the background that I also have to manage to ensure that it’s not running in the background when I don’t want it to.

I’m resistant (and I think this is the case with others as well) to the idea that games must exist inside of their creator’s special portal; it’s a level of abstraction that I wish did not exist. Every modern desktop OS has some way of directly installing applications and many of them also provide their own stores (Mac App Store, Windows Store, etc.). The only thing “game store competition” is doing is creating a “now you have [x] standards” problem where the pitch of “all your games are located in one place” ends up becoming “all your games are in a bunch of places which you’ll be able to access after you’ve installed several different applications”.

Because it's Epic. They bought up my favorite game, ended Linux support for it, pulled it from Steam, turned it into another cosmetic money-grab, and continue to make it worse every update. The latest changes excited the community a bit but I'm positive they're part of a plan that the community is going to be absolutely furious about and then, to kick a dead horse, they'll add EAC, even though it's impossible to cheat.

Petty reasons? Yeah, but they haven't offered anything worth changing my mind over yet.

Tangentially related, but they killed party match-making with rank disparity requirements. Not sure if this was to prevent smurfing, but I can't play with friends who are over one rank higher.

Personal grudge of the week.

Because it's a terrible client with virtually no features, yet their business tactics strongarm players into using it. Nobody likes to be forced to use a certain product. EGS doesn't even offer a fraction of what Steam can do. Here's what I can come up with off the top of my head; I'm sure others can chime in with more.

Steam has a robust marketplace, with user reviews and a slew of sorting and shopping cart features.

Steam has friends, chat, voice chat, and group chat.

Steam has built-in, turnkey stream broadcasting of games.

Steam allows friends to drop in and play a game cooperatively with you, even if they don't own the game too.

Steam has remote play with friends.

Steam has remote streaming to devices around your home, and big screen mode so you can plop on the couch and enjoy an optimized UI and a gamepad.

Steam has robust gamepad support and configuration.

Steam has industry-leading Linux support.

Steam has VR mode, with custom spaces, interfaces, and a market of useful tools and mods to enhance the experience.

Steam has a music player and a built-in web browser.

Steam lets you add non-steam games to your library for convenient access.

Steam has customizable user profiles and fun social features, like card trading.

Steam has experimental mods and features via Steam Labs.

Now, ask yourself, how does it feel when EGS coerces players into using their inferior storefront through strongarm business practices.

(Not the person you're replying to) These are all reasonable complaints! I, personally, barely care about _any_ of them (in particular, I don't think I've ever read a review on Steam, I almost-never play multiplayer or modded games, and I would hate to stream my games), so, for me, Epic is exactly as fully-featured as Steam is - but these are reasonable reasons why other people might feel a gap.

(EDIT: in particular, I always find the complaint that Epic lacks a shopping cart to be hilarious, because I hadn't even noticed that Steam _has_ a cart until that was pointed out. I can't imagine ever wanting to buy more than one game at once!)

That's all well and good, and if you like EGS, that's your prerogative. My response is to a question of why people don't like EGS. The point is not even that Steam is better (it is); instead the point is that nobody likes to be forced to use a platform they don't prefer, and this is made especially onerous when the forced platform is so very, very inferior.

> My response is to a question of why people _don't_ like EGS

Yep, and you communicated that very well, and I appreciate it - thank you! Apologies for giving the impression that I was disagreeing with you - I was giving another perspective, while recognizing that I'm in the minority and that your points are valid.

No, my apologies if I came off defensive or aggressive. I just wanted to clarify. Thanks for your comment.

EGS still doesn't have a cart?!

IMO it speaks to a disturbing implication of priorities on the part of EGS. The concept of a cart isn't exactly groundbreaking in ecommerce, and its absence suggests to me that the store's primary purpose isn't to easily allow humans to purchase games.

Exactly right. This is it right here. It's openly hostile to users, especially considering the broader context of Weeny's pejorative comments about his customers.

I respectfully disagree. I'd bet a large amount of money that an overwhelming amount of video-game purchases on Steam etc. are single-item purchases - that is, in the vast majority of cases, adding a cart doesn't help the user experience (and, without the presence of a one-click-add-and-checkout button, actually slightly harms it by adding another step in the purchase flow). So, for most users/use-cases, a cart is much lower priority than many other features.

There may be many other gaps that indicate a nefarious or incompetent direction to EGS' development (and, indeed, vaer-k listed many) - but "The absence of a cart implies that EGS are not prioritizing making it easy to purchase games" does not hold.

I don't see why. You haven't provided any reason for this other than your insistent assumptions about the needlessness of carts in digital purchases -- but all other digital games stores have them, as well as almost all other ecommerce platforms. If literally all your competition are doing something, and you're not, that's probably meaningful.

>"The absence of a cart implies that EGS are not prioritizing making it easy to purchase games"

Despite your use of quotes, I didn't write that. I said "its absence suggests to me that the store's primary purpose isn't to easily allow humans to purchase games", which is entirely different. Don't put words into others' mouths, or don't feign respect.

I was using quotes to indicate a sentence that I was referring to[1] as an example of a particular position, not to attempt to indicate that you'd said those exact words. I apologize that that was unclear - and I'm particularly sensitive to being misquoted, so I also apologize for giving the impression that that was what I'd done.

That said, I still don't see the functional distinction between the example position I described, and your statement. Are you saying that there is an effective difference between those two, or simply calling out (correctly) that what I wrote was not a direct quotation of what you wrote? What is a situation that would be described by one but not by the other?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinctio...

Can you imagine wanting to buy a game and its expansions together?

That's a great example, thanks! I don't think I've ever done so (usually I'm buying games late-enough that they're being sold as a single bundle), hence why I didn't think of it - but that totally makes sense, thank you!

Well, Steam also started by strongarming players into it if you want to play Half Life 2. Also Steam is still strongarming players by Steamworks integration. Half of AAA games use Steamworks, and if you don't want to use Steam, you can't play the game, even if you buy a boxed copy.

Asking genuinely, what are these AAA games that require Steamworks? None of the big publishers require use of Steam (EA / Ubisoft / Activision), most of them have their own launchers that get launched anyway when you open their games via Steam.

A hugely important addendum: Steam is owned by Valve, which is not a publicly traded company. GabeN's private hat empire can do whatever it wants.

This feels like a positive, to me. After watching so much quarterly profit chasing races to the bottom across so many aspects of the economy.

Oh, absolutely! It's fantastic; Valve and Steam regularly do things that The Shareholders would never allow.

I mean, I remember back when people were outraged that they had to install steam. Relax and take the free stuff.

I really really hate what Epic does.

No one wants to use their store, so they pay for games to appear exclusively. I hate this so much for certain games I'll just buy it on console.

Console manufacturers do the same thing...

People don't like when they do it either.

I understand people having ideological issues about not wanting to deal with Epic, but don't let dogma stand in the way of experiencing some real innovation.

What I mean is that besides the free games, one big reason to install Epic is to play around with Unreal 4/5 game engine. There's some very impressive innovation going on in the game engine space, and whatever you may think of Epic the company, Epic the engineering organization is knocking it out of the park here.

From zero experience you can build a photorealistic open world game environment in about a week of watching Youtube tutorials and downloading free assets from the Unreal marketplace. Anybody who hangs out on HN should be able to pick it up very quickly. Frankly it's pretty amazing what you can do with Unreal in very little time. Unreal 5 (still early access) looks even more impressive in its capabilities - watch some Youtube videos about it.

I firmly believe that entertainment is heading in the direction of anybody being able to create their own worlds to play in, with multiplayer to host their friends no less. Unreal (and Unity) are the adult version of the tools kids are already using on Roblox and Minecraft and both engines are improving by leaps and bounds. Think of using those tools as the gateway to the non-Meta metaverse, where anybody can create and run their own huge, quirky, and amazing virtual world.

Never seen it before, looks interesting. I'd rather spend $12 than install the Epic launcher, it's on GOG and Steam too.

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