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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

I hate DRM, I hate monopolies, I welcome competition, but if one builds a massive empire by just creating a bonafide good platform, single-handedly making open source desktop better, with good customer support and treating users with respect, they deserve the money honestly.

If one day I manage to build a billion dollar empire, my sole inspiration on how to conduct business is Gabe Newell. [1]

Which is exactly the thing Epic can't compete on. They can give away all the free games they want, but Steam and Valve have done much more than offering games on sale.

(I got a 13 year old account on Steam, more than 500 games bought, almost $10k spent on the platform. No Windows partition for the past 3 years)

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1: I honestly couldn't name anybody else that has kept their company private, grown it to such heights and stayed true to their founding principles, without selling out to shareholders and advertisers for an easy buck.

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With the xbox 360 marketplace shutting down next year, will Steam be the longest running digital marketplace? That longevity is what earns my trust.

Update: iTunes Store started in April 2003, Steam started selling third-party titles in late 2005 (around when the 360 launched).

Yeah, pretty much all my PC game purchases go to either Steam (for their work on Linux gaming) or GOG (for their DRM free stance). Luckily my financial position is such that it really doesn't matter what sale is on Epic or Uplay or Origin to change that.

I won't say that epic didn't delivered for the gamers. UE5 is honestly a technology marvel and bring so much values for players. I don't even talk about lumen/nanite but all the others tools made for developers to push the limits of what is doable in a game, at runtime. With UE5.3 we even get more productivity tools, which means we can deliver faster or bigger.

Don't get me wrong, many features are experimental since 4.26 but getting them production ready is the game changer.

I think OP meant the epic games store, not the epic engine.

JetBrains, while maybe not comparable in size, is still private.

JetBrains earns my respect by letting you actually purchase the application, and still download it 5 years later.

I have purchased updates to IntelliJ, but it is good to know that I don't have to, and my access won't be restricted.

Wait what? Holy maccaroni you're right!

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

So I don't HAVE TO pay the license every year! That's good to know if I ever have to reduce my bills.

I like Steam too but at the end of the day I'll buy games wherever they are cheapest. I don't care about multiple platforms like apparently some people do, GOG Galaxy solves that problem cleanly by making all my games from every platform show up in one interface. I also don't use features like achievements so I don't really care beyond just being able to play the game.

>Which is exactly the thing Epic can't compete on.

I mean, with these criteria is Epic really that far behind? They made desktop a better experience for devs, have decent enough customer support, and they don't exactly shit talk their users like other parts of the industry. The only arguable part is good platform, but it depends on what you need out of the platform. Does a platform have to offer a way to play windows games on linux to be "good"?

>I honestly couldn't name anybody else that has kept their company private, grown it to such heights and stayed true to their founding principles, without selling out to shareholders and advertisers for an easy buck.

hard to find platforms like that, but there are certainly creators that stayed small and humble despite growing huge in influence and pull.

When they buy out any game exclusivity (so the games are only sold on Epic store on pc), they would make the game drop linux support even when the games previously can run on linux natively (e.g. rocket league, payday 2, etc). That's a huge negative in my book, enough to make me never consider using Epic store.

> they don't exactly shit talk their users like other parts of the industry

Sweeney is legendary in doing this. Unfortunately with the Twitter debacle it's pretty much impossible to pull out all his comments.

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