Fuck epic but honestly good. Closed app stores suck
Epic really hasn’t done anything bad. If their worse thing is exclusive deals that make indie studios lots of money, that’s not them being bad. The worst thing you can really pin against epic is Sweeney doesn’t like Linux. Which it’s not really an os for everyone.
My biggest concern with Epic is their insistence on kernel level anti-cheat which is just ridiculous overkill and probably being used as spyware let’s be honest. They have many ties to China’s Tencent which has a 40% stake in the company and is known to basically just be an extension of the Chinese government.
There’s also the very odd fact that just having the Epic Games Store open in the background will deplete your laptops battery life by up to 20%. Is it just horribly optimized and uses all that battery even when idling, or is it doing something nefarious in the background? We don’t know.
As for exclusives, they have bought exclusives that were mostly crowd funded from the start which is quite the kick in the teeth to the early investors that helped get the project off the ground. And there were even some exclusives that were already listed for pre-order through Steam, forcing everyone to need to get a refund.
Plus, any good will that they’ve purchased so far is just in service of making a good name for themselves. They’ve been losing around $400 million per year since 2019 just to bring in new users. They’re going to suddenly turn around and start being cut-throat as soon as they think they can.
They are not consumer friendly, they want to dictate trends in gaming. Valve is already the king of that throne and they’re fairly benevolent and have pushed trends that are good for gaming and consumers overall. I have serious doubt that Epic would be anywhere near as good for gaming as Valve has been if they should actually become profitable, and an industry leader. Especially when it’s projected that they won’t be profitable until 2027, which means they’ll need to recoup their investment of nearly $3.2 billion since 2019.
Epic really hasn’t done anything bad.
You don’t consider bribing game publishers to only release on their platform instead of actually competing bad?
I don’t mind if they fund development and then release only on their platform. I do mind of they snatch up games that could have seen a broader release, if they weren’t so lazy and actually developed a store worth using.
Yeah sure, exclusive deals excluding even those who pre-ordered games on other platforms are “not bad”.
Taking games (looking at you, Fall Guys) which were available on other platforms for years off those platforms to make them exclusive after the fact is “not bad”.
Adding restrictive anti cheat measures to games which worked perfectly on Linux before is “not bad”.
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Epic, creator of the popular online multiplayer game Fortnite, first filed its lawsuit against Google in 2020 alleging that the tech giant’s app store practices violated federal and California state antitrust laws.
The lawsuit against Google was just one piece of Epic’s flashy effort to rally app developers large and small against mobile software’s entrenched gatekeepers.
Epic argues that both tech giants violate antitrust laws by forcing app users to make payments through their own systems and taking a significant cut of in-app revenues in the process.
In their defense, Apple and Google generally point to concerns around security to justify their shared desire to steer app users toward a central software authority.
“It proves that Google’s app store practices are illegal and they abuse their monopoly to extract exorbitant fees, stifle competition and reduce innovation.”
The court’s decision mostly favored Apple, though did require the iPhone maker to open up its software market by allowing developers to direct customers to alternative payment options.
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