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.
(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!)
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.
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.
>"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.
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...
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.
Petty reasons? Yeah, but they haven't offered anything worth changing my mind over yet.
Personal grudge of the week.
They offer no value to the end user other than the free games to bait people onto their store.
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”.
Competition is ultimately beneficial for the consumer, after all :)
On top of that, I don't like Epic's business and legal practices. Can't buy my soul with free games.
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.
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.