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Comment by zaptrem | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, the Epic Games Store downloads faster, installs more efficiently, and launches games faster than Steam. The social features I actually use (i.e., add a friend, join them in a game) work fine. I'm not aware of any features Steam has that EGS lacks that I actually use frequently (Valve's VR, streaming tech, and Proton are great, but I don't use those frequently). It's not just me, many indie game developers are also big fans of EGS (most recent example that comes to mind are Jeff Kaplan's remarks during his 10 hour stream a week or two ago). Gamers' vehement defense of what is effectively a monopoly continues to confuse me.

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Nearly every time I add the free EGS games to my cart the checkout fails. I frequently have to restart the EGS client for checkout to work (and even then it fails often).

I launched EGS just now to time some comparisons and it's a black rectangle on my screen with no GUI (probably self-updating). I had to kill the process and restart it.

The Look and Feel for the EGS client just feels slow. Not that Steam is always amazing in this regard either but it's way better than EGS. Go to your EGS library and click between "favorites" and "all games". Switching from favorites to all games takes me ~4 seconds, every time (if you have any meaningful number of games).

The search/sort is slow. Steam's feels instant.

The library list has a ton of wasted space. In terms of vertical space, the Steam library lists three games for every game EGS lists.

The EGS social features compared to Steam are downright anemic (and Steam is pretty bad compared to something like Discord). You can't even set an avatar in EGS. Even EA's Store app (whatever they call Origin now) lets you do that.

I'll stop there. I could rant for much longer.

One thing that steam does better than any other place is create an incredible store experience to sell games on. I don't think any other game distributor has an algorithm as good as theirs, and all the integrations and hookups that come with it. For example, Nintendo's shop page for each game is sparse in detail and lacks so much information buyers have access to in that game's Steam page counterpart. The store search and other store views display games far more efficiently than nintendo's search and store views, making it much easier to find what you're looking for in fewer clicks and fewer minutes.

if you have the time, try to find a game on nintendo vs on steam. Don't google for the pages, go to their base shop page and start from there. Try to avoid directly searching the title, instead search for keywords as if you're a gamer trying to recall a game suggestion you heard from a friend like 2 weeks ago. You'll notice the plethora of differences that combined puts steam on a whole other level of sales and content distribution if you go about it like that

EGS doesn't even have a Linux version.

Steam is always going to be my first choice because Linux support is better. If I buy on Steam I know it's going to work.

They could at the very least just package it up to run with Wine, but Sweeney is stubbornly set in his linux hating ways. I could use their store through the Heroic launcher, as I do with GoG, but I won't because fuck you Tim.

If we're being realistic from a business standpoint: Linux is at best, 3% market share. A very passionate 3%, but 3%. Using resources to support such a niche sector is a hard sell.

This argument would be a great one in 2016.

Now though, proton/wine works more or less for everything, and the storefront is a web based one anyway.

I'd hope this community of all places would understand that "just integrate X with Y" is never as simple as "just". It's still something a team needs to do, and the gain is minimal unless Epic is also going to try and make their own console-esque device. That's the incentive for Steam.

Valve started this to have a path towards independence from Windows, just in case Microsoft had locked things down. Not for making devices.

The same rationale exists for Epic, and they have spent an enormous amount of resources fighting Google and Apple over this.

I think it's an ideological decision rather than a technical one.

Yes, and no.

Yes, it's not the most optimal business decision as a software company to invest in hardware. The clear move is to either grease Microsoft's palms, or let then outright acquire Steam (or Valve as a whole). Valve not doing that is either in part ideological, or part very long term thinking on the best financial path later, instead of now.

But at the same time: while the ends was "be independent from Microsoft", their means at first was very Microsoft esque. Partner up with hardware vendors, make some Pcs with Steam built in, and brand it as such. Didn't work. Their goal had to be to roll their own hardware because that's what was needed to get the ball rolling (as well as a form factor that accompanied a desktop instead of competed against).

Going by the Steam hardware survey, 3/4 of Linux users were not using Steam Decks when they got polled. So I’m not sure if a console-esque device is actually required. A large part of the reason why Linux usage is growing, is probably that it mostly just works these days

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

The problem for an also-ran app store is that you need every user you can find.

Linux support may not be a huge deal in the overall market (although it's growing due to the steam os devices) but it's just one more element to Steam's moat.

3% of millions of people is a massive number of people. Given how easy recent work on wine has made porting from windows, it's really hard to defend not having a linux version, from a business standpoint.

It's a glorified wrapper around curl, wine and a webview, a few interns could knock this out in a few months. For "3% market share" (growing every day, thanks to Valve) its a no brainer, but Sweeney has no brain.

That glorified wrapper is made on Unreal Engine.

What's the problem? Wine can handle that fine. Heroic launcher showed that you can easily make an Epic store wrapper and launcher work on Linux.

How is steam a monopoly? People would be excited for EGS just like they are for GoG, except EGS has a track record of anticonsumer behavior.

I fear for valve in a post gaben world, and they certainly aren't blameless. They also aren't a monopoly. Hell, steamOS is the opposite of a locked ecosystem.

>How is steam a monopoly

It has 90% marketshare and has been shown to use its monopoly uncompetitively to force price parity on devs. Textbook definition.

>People would be excited for EGS just like they are for GoG,

People "like" GOG. I woildnt say they are "excited for it". The revenue of GOG these years don't reflect the supposed enthusiasm.

>EGS has a track record of anticonsumer behavior.

Anticonsumer isn't anti competitive. Especially not as a new player in the game. They can't brute force this stuff with money like a trillion dollar company could.

> Hell, steamOS is the opposite of a locked ecosystem.

I'll believe that when they release a full distro with all the feature the Steam Deck enjoys.

> Gamers' vehement defense of what is effectively a monopoly continues to confuse me.

It is a monopoly but that can be a good thing sometimes. Steam is really good! Is it 30% cut good? Maybe not but I do think Valve has managed to keep Steam good for a very long time and if they lose their monopoly they're going to have a strong incentive to fuck things up.

Another example is WhatsApp. Sure, sucks for Google and Apple that WhatsApp have a watertight monopoly in most of Europe (and probably much of the rest of the world; I haven't checked). But it's pretty great for actually users. We've had at least a decade of totally free messaging that everyone has with no ads and e2e encryption.

Meta are just about starting to fuck it up but it's been a pretty great run.

Why would Apple care if WhatsApp has a monopoly? They don’t make money from iMessage

Network effects on iMessage mean people buy iPhones

That must be why they're so happy to open up iMessage to Android in the US!

iMessage works fine with SMS and RCS. How would “opening iMessage” benefit Android users?

> iMessage works fine with ... RCS

...because europe forced it to be...

Actually it was China…

https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/02/19/apples-new-rcs-st...

People are generally okay with monopolies as long as they feel they're benefiting from the monopoly instead of being taken advantage of.

Epic garnered a lot of ill will with all the early exclusives. If I have part 1 and part 2 of some franchise on Steam, and then part 3 comes out as an Epic exclusive, it's going to irritate me.

In my experience, the Epic downloader would frequently lead to degraded performance and/or system instability when I'd leave it running; I've never noticed such problems at all with the Steam client.

For about two months Epic Games Store kept switching me to a different language and currency.

None of those languages were familiar to me, and there was no VPN/proxy/etc involved.

If this were true than Epic would have eaten Steam's lunch.

or network effects are keeping people on a worse platform?

That's a weird way of saying "lack of competition". As others have mentioned, why should Epic Games bother supporting Linux?

Considering that I'm gaming on Linux, the number of competitors is pretty small and close to zero, I'm not sure why I should be forced to switch operating systems to support the "better platform".

I say this as someone who's been running Vortex/Skyrim modding on Linux years before there was official support for it and I'm kind of shocked honestly to hear that people are cheering for something I did so long ago (5 years to be precise) I hardly remember the time doing it.

I try out the Launcher every couple years to see if it's improved. I just installed and logged in for the first time since 2023.

Looks like they have finally fixed lag and freeze jank that occured on every action, blocked scrolling, and etc.

Unfortunately just clicking on the "Featured Discounts" items on the store home page.. 3-4+(more like 4-5+ on further testing) FULL seconds of blank until the game details load. An ecommerce site where the items take 3-4 seconds to display!? I flipped over to Steam and everything in the store loads "instantly".

Sigh, I'll check back in 2028.

Edit: It boggles the mind and defies reason that they can't get a handle on table-stakes UX after all this time, energy, and hundreds of millions of dollars sunk into it. Nepotism; gotta be, yeah?

The major feature that EGS lacks and which makes it appealing to indies and repulsive to gamers is user reviews. User reviews are a major influence on consumer choice; and Steam even shows recent vs long term, which signals if a recent change was received well or not.

User reviews, guides, discussions, workshop and shared screenshots and videos: bold social features that are an incredible source of agony for mediocre and bad indie games.

Gamers complain about layoffs, but the largest invisible cause behind them is Steam’s 30% cut, which nobody acknowledges.

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